IN THE RECENT 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom – a qualitative audit and analysis of all academics’ publications and research – the English Subject Panel made its report on the state of the discipline and potential future directions. In the detailed description, the panel noted the major strengths in scholarship in a number of fields, including manuscript-based studies and ‘history of the book and the sociology of texts’. The buoyancy of this area of research is evinced, too, by the creation of new groups, centres, degree programmes and book series all focused on the history of the book in the broadest sense – an area of investigation that properly understood should extend from the emergence of sustained literacy in early cultures to contemporary digital technologies. While this volume cannot claim to have attended to every major facet of textual history along this extensive chronology, the range of material covered here does cover a good deal of ground from the Byzantine period to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods into the high Middle Ages; and then hurtling through the early modern period, via Pepys, to the publication of electronic forms of bibliographic study.

The aim of this volume was never to be comprehensive in coverage, but rather to publish the work of scholars whose approaches to books, words and texts are engaging, innovative and always rigorous. Readers will find the contributors’ investigations into the materiality of the book within its varied physical, metaphorical, historical, intellectual and social ambients to be diverse but inspiring, manifesting a concern to exploit the multiple interpretative possibilities yielded by the text in context. This concern is apparent whether the writer is treating one author (like Whitney Trettien's focus on Samuel Pepys); one manuscript (like the Ellesmere Chaucer, scrutinised by A. S. G. Edwards; or Bodley 647, the subject of Ralph Hanna's essay; or Erika Corradini's thorough treatment of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 421; or Exeter Cathedral Library 3514, the focus of Julia Crick's discussion; or Liberty Stanavage's excellent analysis of the York Register); a whole group of manuscripts (such as those examined by Orietta Da Rold and Robert Romanchuk); printed incunabula (as in Margaret Smith's nuanced account of red); or virtual materials (considered by David L. Gants and Martin K. Foys).