Foreword

Summary

References in the Introduction to the present volume make it clear that it is viewed to some extent as a successor to an earlier collection of essays on the same subject, Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, edited by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall. This book had its inception in a series of conferences in York in 1981, 1983 and 1985. The first was called ‘Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study’, the conference papers being published under that title in 1983; the second was set up to discuss and prepare for the forthcoming book on book production; the third was on the editing of fifteenth-century texts, and the volume that followed was called Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature (1987). The inspiration for the first conference was the presence at York of an outstanding group of graduate students working under my supervision on topics to do with later medieval manuscripts. For many of them, the impulse to work on manuscripts came from Elizabeth Salter, who died in 1980 but whose work in later years was much directed towards manuscript studies and whose example was irresistible.