Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe 1350-1550: Packaging, Presentation and Consumption, ed. Emma Cayley and Susan Powell

Abstract

This book is, in many ways, much more than the sum of its parts. It is divided into three sections tacking Packaging and Presentation, Consumers, Producers, Owners and Readers, and Writing Consumption. Some of the essays in the first section sometimes feel like rather a dry read when tackled alone but read as part of the volume they show how attention to aspects of book culture often overlooked, such as bindings, rulings, or text order, can add to our understanding of the way in which manuscripts not only functioned, but came to exist in particular formats. In fact, the idea of the book as 'material artefact', as the editors note (p. xiii), is at the heart of new research into the lives and afterlives of medieval and early modern books. Thus Anne Marie Lane's article 'How can we Recognise 'Contemporary' Bookbindings of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries?' takes as its starting point Mirjam Foot's observation that 'the history of bookbinding actually intersects with many different areas of study: religion, art, patronage, collecting, market forces, readership, book production and the booktrade' (p. 3). Using this framework she brings a curator's approach to the problems of analysing and identifying bookbindings. The article draws on a project at the Toppan Library at the University of Wyoming to identify original fifteenth-and sixteenthcentury bindings in pre-1550 books. Using these examples, the author tackles a series Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe 1350-1550: Packaging, Presentation an... Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes , Comptes-rendus