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English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution shows how the advent of paper as a cheap and lasting medium of writing helped to create a new type of scribal culture--one distinct from its Medieval counterpart--in Renaissance England.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations and Frequently Cited Works
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1: The Transition to a Hybrid Scribal Culture
- 2: Amateur Handwriting and Document Formats
- 3: Personal Notebooks
- 4: The Circulation of Texts: Coteries and the National Network
- 5: Loss Rates and the Skewed Patterns of Survival
- 6: The Network in Action: Classifying Poetic Manuscripts
- 7: Notebook Origins: Tracking the Triad
- Conclusion
- Manuscripts Cited
- Texts Cited
- Index
About the author
Steven W. May graduated B.A. from Rockford College, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He taught for 35 years at Georgetown College in Georgetown, KY. During retirement he has served as Adjunct Professor of English at Emory University and as Senior Research Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. From 2009-2013 he served as Principal Investigator on "Early Modern Manuscript Poetry: Recovering our Scribal Heritage," funded through the University of Sheffield by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Summary
English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution shows how the advent of paper as a cheap and lasting medium of writing helped to create a new type of scribal culture--one distinct from its Medieval counterpart--in Renaissance England.
Additional text
May (adjunct, Emory Univ.) writes in the introduction to this volume that his aim is "to establish how the introduction of the new paper technology in late medieval Europe made possible what became the hybrid Renaissance scribal tradition as distinct from its parchment-based predecessor." May's emphasis is on paper, "parchment, handwriting, and other physical aspects of textile production" with a focus on manuscript poetry. The first of seven chapters offers an account "of how writing technologies governed the development of literate culture in the West."... this is a pioneering study on the importance of paper and ink and the kinds of writing and communication that paper made possible...Highly recommended.
