Manuscript Studies
Medieval and Early Modern

I.iii. Topics in the Social History of Texts

The social issues raised in this type of study will include (but by no means be confined to) the following:

• the form which records or documents or texts will usually take in a given culture;

• the functions served by records or documents or texts; their utility; their legal and social roles;

• orality vs. literacy;

• artistic vs. non-artistic "texts"; recreational vs. non-recreational "texts";

• devotional and religious purposes;

• class differentiation reflected in practices of authorship, readership, production;

• gender differentiation reflected in practices of authorship, readership, production;

• the effect that the particular methods of preservation and transmission in a culture have on what types of texts are preserved and transmitted;

• using and "reading" texts; the history of reading;

• "ownership" of texts; who has the right to change a text?; responsibility for preservation;

• "ownership" of books: Chaucer's Scholar of Oxenford, already badly in debt to his family and friends, still had a great desire to own twenty volumes of Aristotle, bound in black and red covers (an expensive desire--and why would he have wanted such a thing at that time and in that culture?);

• collecting texts: private and public repositories;

• survival of manuscript culture after the invention of the printing press; printed books as "cheap imitations" of "real" books; works distributed in manuscript copies to primary audience, made available in printed copies to others (Frances Bacon); coterie distribution in manuscript (John Donne);

• the revaluation and eventually devaluation of manuscripts after the invention of printing; the Dissolution of the monasteries and the dispersal or destruction of libraries (and Henry VIII's creation of the "Royal Collection" by selecting choice items from the monastic libraries); academic libraries discarding manuscript books, sometimes (not always) waiting until printed copies of the same works become available; rise of antiquarianism (in part because linguistic changes were making them unreadable without special training); the re-affirmation of the value (affirmation of a new kind of value) of medieval manuscripts as a result of (and contributing to) the growth of antiquarian interest; Robert Harley's agents rescuing medieval manuscripts from the hoards of waste paper used for the wrapping of goods by fish mongers and bread sellers; with renewed value also comes demand for replicas: legitimate and illegitimate replication (facsimiles; reverent and artistic imitations: I have seen a "medieval" hand-copied and illustrated Modern English story of Jonah for sale in a bookstore; the "Spanish forger" and others producing "fake" medieval manuscripts and selling them as genuine).