The seventeenth century shaped Dai Viet in major ways. Like their counterpart in Cochinchina, the Le-Trinh regime directly involved in the silk for sliver trade. Eight tons of silver flew into Tongking bringing the wealth of the nation to a new level. Commerce changed culture in many ways, from the introduction of Christianity to the emergence of Lieu Hanh, a new religious figure connected to women traders. It modernised Tongking’s firearms and financed the seven campaigns against Cochinchina. It stimulated the import of Chinese books and prints, which had become more accessible and affordable to the literati class. Add to this new wealth in circulation more broadly, a construction boom, and increased participation of women. Like the thirteenth century, the Red River delta saw another political integration, this time between the military group from Thanh Hoa and the literati from the Red River delta. It may not be a coincidence that both eras s saw the extensive and intensive maritime commerce both in the country and with overseas. The synergy brought in by the maritime wealth however created a more systematically Confucianist institution from the village up. The autonomous village now became the fixed image of Vietnam.

This chapter demonstrates how and why the little Herball became such an amazing commercial success, and it raises the possibility that the audience for English herbals did not rise and fall with the expensive texts preferred by elite scholarly readers or gentry. The publishing history of the little Herball reveals that the purchasing preferences of Tudor London’s middling readers, as well as the regulatory constraints upon bookmaking and bookselling, created the economic conditions that later enabled the large, illustrated folio herbals of Turner, Gerard, and Parkinson to come into being. In other words, these large books with named authors on their title pages were a secondary development in the tradition of the printed English herbal, suggesting that the “author-function” that governed a text’s authoritative value was initially irrelevant to English readers. The association between herbals and particular botanical authorities did not result from readers’ perceptions of their accuracy but can be traced to commercial concerns: their publishers’ desire to sell an old and profitable text in innovative new ways.

Chapter 3 tabulates the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) entries for extant Bibles held in libraries around the world today and discuss what the ESTC data can and cannot tell us about the eighteenth-century Bible trade. An overview of the history of the trade, particularly of the career of John Baskett, royal printer in London from 1710 to 1742, described by an early historian of the Bible trade as “one of the greatest monopolists of Bibles who ever lived” (Lee 179) shows that the number of ESTC catalogue entries do not correlate to changes in the popularity of the Bible. However, the ESTC data does tell us about shifts in the competitiveness or relative openness of the English Bible trade and the book trade more generally. The Bible becomes a nongovernmental book after the 1730s, and the geographical centers of English Bible production shift from Amsterdam and Oxford in the 1680s to London in the early 1700s to Cambridge and Edinburgh in the 1760s. This chapter also describes a variety of cultural associations that the English Bible accrues through its commodification in the period: a charity gift, an overseas book, and a luxury item.

On the trade in and commodification of medieval books and fragments, both in the Middle Ages and through to the present day.

The eighty-four surviving manuscripts containing all or part of the Canterbury Tales present something of a headache for modern editors of the work, who must select from among these competing authorities in order to present the work in a single form. But this large number of diverse copies, and the nine extant fragments that probably attest to once-complete MSS, can tell us much about the way Chaucer’s work was read and repackaged in the century following his death. When we look beyond the famous Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, early and authoritative witnesses to Chaucer’s text, we discover that just as valuable are the so-called “bad texts,” with their abundance of scribal readings, linking passages, and rearrangements of the tales; copies like these have much to tell us about scribal attitudes to Chaucer’s work and its reception and about the development and professionalization of the London book trade.