The Book in Britain

A Historical Introduction

Daniel Allington, David A. Brewer, Stephen Colclough, Sian Echard, Daniel Allington, David A. Brewer, Stephen Colclough, Sian Echard, Zachary Lesser

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780470654934
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119565420
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Introduces readers to the history of books in Britain—their significance, influence, and current and future status 

Presented as a comprehensive, up-to-date narrative, The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction explores the impact of books, manuscripts, and other kinds of material texts on the cultures and societies of the British Isles. The text clearly explains the technicalities of printing and publishing and discusses the formal elements of books and manuscripts, which are necessary to facilitate an understanding of that impact. This collaboratively authored narrative history combines the knowledge and expertise of five scholars who seek to answer questions such as: How does the material form of a text affect its meaning? How do books shape political and religious movements? How have the economics of the book trade and copyright shaped the literary canon? Who has been included in and excluded from the world of books, and why?

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction will appeal to all scholars, students, and historians interested in the written word and its continued production and presentation.

Part I
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Siân Echard

1
Early Beginnings to the Norman Conquest of 1066

1.1 Prequel I: Medieval Remediation

Sometime around 731, the venerable Bede, an Anglo‐Saxon monk and scholar, finished his Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People]. The book is an account of the early history of England with special attention to the spread of Christianity. While the work would eventually be translated into Old English, Bede wrote it originally in Latin, as was the custom for learned men of his day. In the fourth book of his history, Bede recounts the story of an Anglo‐Saxon cowherd named Caedmon who, in a dream, saw a figure who told him to sing of the creation of all things. The illiterate man protested that he could not sing, but at the figure's urging, found that he could. The song he produced is recorded by Bede in Latin translation as part of the story. Figure 1.1 is an early eleventh‐century Latin copy of Bede's text. The text frames Caedmon's song – now commonly called Caedmon's Hymn – by saying, “This is the sense, but not the exact arrangement, of the words that he sang.” Bede's Latin translation of the song precedes this remark, and explanation and translation are presented continuously in the text block. But in this particular copy, the Latin text has been bracketed in the right margin, and in the bottom margin a somewhat later hand has written the song in Old English, with points marking the breaks between the lines of the verse.

Figure 1.1 An eleventh‐century copy of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, in Latin, with Caedmon's Hymn added in Old English in the bottom margin.

Source: Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Bodleian Hatton MS 43, folio 129r.

This page dramatizes several crucial aspects of the early history of “books” in Britain. First, while today Caedmon's Hymn often appears as one of the first entries in anthologies of English literature – in big books that suggest an orderly sequence of literary history – its first bookish appearance is very much post hoc, according to Bede's account. Bede's remarks about conveying the “sense” of the song reflect that he is writing down something which was not originally written at all, nor ever intended for a book. For many medieval works this gap between a non‐written creation and an eventual bookish transmission is an important fact.

Second, Bede is not the only mediator between this work and its audience. This manuscript page materializes a textual history – the fact that someone added an Old English version at some later date – and dramatizes a linguistic fact. Bede translated the song from oral to written, and from Old English to Latin. The manuscript page arranges those facts in a particular way, effecting another kind of translation, a material and visual one that has the potential to affect meaning.

Third, this particular presentation of Caedmon's Hymn is only one of several different arrangements, each likely to affect a reader differently. Not all Latin copies mark out the Hymn as the copy in Figure 1.1 does. What is more, the Historia ecclesiastica was translated from Latin into Old English, and in the manuscripts of that translation, the Old English poem is simply written as part of the Old English text. The importance of the poem to Bede's text – whether it is understood to be marginal or integral, both linguistically and spatially – would appear very different depending on which manuscript a reader saw.

Fourth and finally, the manuscript in Figure 1.1 dates from the early eleventh century; that is, it is removed from Bede's original writing by several centuries of transmission. There are eighth‐century copies of Bede's work, and the normal scholarly editorial practice is to seek to establish a best text based on the earliest and most reliable witnesses. If we are thinking about how a medieval reader might have experienced Bede, however, then the variety of manuscripts (and there are many Latin manuscripts of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, as well as the handful of Old English ones) is at least as important as the reconstruction of an original text. We do not know where the manuscript featured in Figure 1.1 was produced, but we do know that manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History could be found across Britain. We also know that most reading situations would be local; that is, a typical reader would be likely to encounter very few copies of any given text. This kind of local, limited access means that the presentation of a text in a particular material manifestation is integral to how it might have been understood. At the same time, we also know that individual books (and scribes) traveled, and so a particular presentation could in some cases have an influence outside its original production context. Variety and singularity exist in a productive tension in medieval manuscript culture, determining the practices of both producers and readers alike.

Remediation – “the representation of one medium in another” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, p. 45) – is a term originally coined by new media theorists to explore how digital technologies related to earlier technologies. It is also, however, an important element in the early history of the book in Britain. The period covered in this section of our study – from the early Middle Ages to 1640 – sees several major technological shifts, as works move from oral to written form, and then from manuscript to print. Each shift involves a two‐way and often messy process of social and cultural transformation and adaptation. Linguistic change, again as highlighted in the treatment of Caedmon's Hymn, also enacts a kind of remediation, as both forms and expectations from one linguistic context adapt to (or cause adaptation in) new contexts. In the past, histories of the book have sometimes suggested a clean, teleological narrative of ever‐increasing technological and cultural sophistication, telling a supersessionist story in which a new technology wipes out its predecessor. Our book, by contrast, will often tack between technologies, crossing and recrossing various kinds of boundaries, as we attempt to show some of the complexity of the webs in which texts can be embedded. It will also move back and forth between individual objects, like the manuscript in Figure 1.1, and object‐traditions, like the various forms in which a text like Caedmon's Hymn appears. Much book history is rooted in the careful examination of individual physical objects, whose materiality seems to offer a reassuring certainty: we may not know how everyone in the Middle Ages understood Caedmon's Hymn, but we can perhaps know how the readers of the manuscript in Figure 1.1 might have received it. At the same time, book history may also concern itself with multiple objects – aggregates that offer useful information about broader cultural, social, and historical trends. Some critics have been suspicious of the generalizations and elisions that can result from such overviews (Dane 2003, 2013), but we believe that the combination of individual realizations with larger traditions will allow readers to see both forest and trees.

1.2 Prequel II: Orality, Aurality, and Aureates

Caedmon's Hymn highlights the importance of the oral transmission of many medieval British works. Bede's history is bookish from the start – written in Latin, and imagined as categorically different from the oral hymn that Bede relates by “sense” but not “exact arrangement.” Bede represents one kind of literacy, organized around the ability to read and write in Latin, the language of the Church: this is what litteratus meant to Bede and his contemporaries. This form of literacy was associated in Britain with the spread of Christianity, particularly the Roman form of Christianity, especially after Pope Gregory I sent missionaries to Britain in 597 to convert the Anglo‐Saxons (the story Bede tells in his Ecclesiastical History). As we will see, both the Roman and Celtic strands of Christianity had a central place for books, and thus for those who could read and write those books in Latin. Both monks and nuns, in the monasteries of Anglo‐Saxon England, might be charged with writing books, reading them, or both. Not everyone who could read could write, and people who could write did not always do so: many people of means or importance made use of secretaries to do their writing for them. Further down the social scale, too, people might have important relationships to the written word without necessarily being able to produce or read it themselves. As Michael T. Clanchy points out in his seminal study of literacy in medieval Britain, being “prejudiced in favour of literacy” (Clanchy 2013, p. 7) can over‐determine how we interact with the surviving evidence of medieval people's relationship to the written word. Throughout the Middle Ages, “textual communities” (Stock 1983, p. 88) could organize themselves around the centrality of a book like the Bible, and even though the vast majority of people in those communities could not read, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, their lives could be profoundly influenced by books. While it is generally true that in the early Middle Ages in Britain literacy as we understand ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Editor's Note
• A Note on Money
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
• Part II: The Interregnum and the Long Eighteenth Century
• Part III: From the Nineteenth Century to the Modern Age
• Part IV: The Twentieth and Twenty‐First Centuries
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement