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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Cited by 16
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1999
Online ISBN:
9781139053648
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521573467
Subjects:
Literature, Printing and Publishing History, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature
Series:
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

This volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain presents an overview of the century-and-a-half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557. The profound changes during that time in social, political and religious conditions are reflected in the dissemination and reception of the written word. The manuscript culture of Chaucer's day was replaced by an ambience in which printed books would become the norm. The emphasis in this collection of essays is on the demand and use of books. Patterns of ownership are identified as well as patterns of where, why and how books were written, printed, bound, acquired, read and passed from hand to hand. The book trade receives special attention, with emphasis on the large part played by imports and on links with printers in other countries, which were decisive for the development of printing and publishing in Britain.

Reviews

‘This volume and its successors should have a place in any library concerned with British history, for it convincingly demonstrates the contribution of books at a critical time.'

Peter Hoare - Library Association

‘… undoubtedly the definitive book on the subject.'

Source: Journal of Documentation

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 23 - Practical books for the gentleman
    pp 470-494
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In 1486, the Schoolmaster Printer of St Albans produced the first folio edition of The book of hawking, hunting, and blasing of arms. Wynkyn de Worde reprinted this compilation of hunting, hawking, and heraldic treatises in folio in 1496, adding to it a treatise on angling. Hence, it can be reasonably assumed that such rapid reprinting of the work attests to an audience eager for access to works of practical writings. John Whittocksmead had access to the variety of texts preserved in his miscellany, and, given the nature of his activities, it is not surprising that many of the works should be technical manuals, practical books for a gentleman, in both Latin and English. Two major spiritual works in the Beinecke manuscript also resemble practical books: De spiritu Guidonis, a Latin work roughly contemporary with the Modus tenendi parliamentum, narrates a Dominican prior's interrogation of the soul of a southern French burgher.
  • 24 - Devotional literature
    pp 495-525
  • View abstract

    Summary

    To a substantial extent, devotional reading was everyone's reading. The predominance of religious literature among the books that we know to have been owned by Margaret of York, for instance, may be an indication that she was genuinely very devout, but it may also have caused her piety to be over-emphasized by modern writers. The libraries of many fifteenth-century lay people show a similar preponderance of spiritual books. The history of the book of hours in England represents only a comparatively small corner of the book's larger history. The great centres of manuscript production were France and later Flanders, and the story of the book of hours in England is at least as much about foreign books' importation and subsequent ownership as it is about the local production of books. In 1495, five new Parisian books of hours provided competition for Wynkyn de Worde's horae, while at England Pynson had brought out two.
  • 25 - Gentlewomen’s reading
    pp 526-540
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Most fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century books which explicitly recommend themselves to women are directed to those who claim or aspire to gentility. Some of the books itemized in the will of Anne Andrew of Suffolk, England, are her best massbook and second massbook, which she left, respectively, to the altar of St Blaise in Wetherden church, and to her son, Andrew, respectively. Although she had access to various potential sources of books, Beatrice Lynne's single personal record is left, entirely typically, in a devotional manuscript which was to be passed by another woman to a community of female religious. Within the precinct at Aldgate, books on secular subjects seem to have been available. A manuscript copy of William Caxton's editions of The Game of the Chesse and The Cordyall, made in 1484 by Dominus Grace, came into the possession of Dame Margaret Woodward.
  • 26 - Music
    pp 541-554
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Professional instrumentalists appear to have learnt their repertoires largely by rote. Only with the rise of amateur music-making during the second half of the sixteenth century did notated instrumental music become at all common. During the later Middle Ages, male singers attached to cathedrals, abbey churches, certain parish churches, colleges and private household chapels were the principal makers and users of music books. In sixteenth-century Britain, choirbook format was supplemented (and eventually replaced) by partbook format, in which individual voice-parts were copied into separate volumes; four-voice music, for example, would require a four-partbook set. Many of the books of polyphony used by church, chapel or collegiate choirs were institutionally owned, and were listed as chapel goods alongside the books of plainchant that were also required during church services. During the various stages of Tudor reform, printing played a role in the dissemination of newly authorized liturgical music. Three editions of Cranmer's litany of 1544 included music.
  • 27 - Literary texts
    pp 555-575
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The period from around 1400 saw the swift emergence of Middle English as a broadly based literary vernacular. Prior to the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the literary potential of the language had been largely expressed in local, provincial forms of verse. New forms of vernacular compilation emerged, often with a significant poetic component, such as anthologies or miscellanies. Seemingly random compilations representing the whims of individual taste, or determined by unrecoverable peculiarities in the availability of exemplars, might perhaps be regarded as distinctive products of a manuscript culture. Provincial families anxious about the reading matter of children and household members, Londoners with civic and mercantile as well as literary interests, and coteries experimenting with the cultivation of polite social verse have been convincingly associated with certain surviving collections. The development of secular literature in the vernacular produced both pronounced continuities and equally pronounced disjunctions after the introduction of printing into England.
  • 28 - Press, politics and religion
    pp 576-607
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Politics and organized religion are each branches of the persuasive arts. With the invention of the press, the printed word was immediately seized upon by the Church as a rapid and effective means of disseminating doctrine, and seeking support and money. The first monarch to make regular use of printed propaganda, was Henry VII. The papal dispensation allowing his marriage to Elizabeth of York on 18 March 1486 was printed in an English translation by William de Machlinia. The Ordenaunces of warre, printed in May 1492, is the first extant printed document to bear the royal arms. The political agenda during 1512-13 effectively made the press an extremely useful and controllable mechanism of government. Probably at the end of 1512, the impressor regius printed a charter of a bull of Julius II which announced the formation of the Holy League, declared Louis XII an enemy of the Church, and absolved his subjects from allegiance to their monarch.

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