Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

15 results

  • 9 - Illuminating the Scriptoria: Monastic Book Production at the Medieval Monastery of St Michael

  • from II. - Production and Consumption of Food and Material Goods
  • Edited by Louise Blanke, University of Edinburgh, Jennifer Cromwell, Manchester Metropolitan University
  • Book:
    Monastic Economies in Late Antique Egypt and Palestine
    Published online:
    14 April 2023
    Print publication:
    20 April 2023, pp 233-268

  • Summary

    The St Michael Collection (dating from 823 to 914) from the Fayum Oasis is the earliest extant group of painted Coptic manuscripts and is impressive because it has remained together as a cohesive whole. The manuscripts reveal aspects of monastic book production ranging from acquisition of materials to the practices of scribes and painters, as well as aspects of book culture, from the dedication of books to sharing them across a regional network of monasteries. The study of this unique collection allows the cost of these manuscripts to be estimated, using inferences about the materials, time, and effort required to produce them. The results of this analysis enhance our understanding of the relationships among patrons, books, monasteries, and scribes in the ninth and tenth centuries in the Fayum Oasis. Ultimately, this chapter argues that, within the context of the Egyptian monastic economy, the production of these books was not expensive. Yet, the cost of books in the medieval period was still perceived to be high.

The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture
  • Monika Amsler
  • Published online:
    30 March 2023
    Print publication:
    06 April 2023
  • In this book, Monika Amsler explores the historical contexts in which the Babylonian Talmud was formed in an effort to determine whether it was the result of oral transmission. Scholars have posited that the rulings and stories we find in the Talmud were passed on from one generation to the next, each generation adding their opinions and interpretations of a given subject. Yet, such an oral formation process is unheard of in late antiquity. Moreover, the model exoticizes the Talmud and disregards the intellectual world of Sassanid Persia. Rather than taking the Talmud's discursive structure as a sign for orality, Amsler interrogates the intellectual and material prerequisites of composers of such complex works, and their education and methods of large-scale data management. She also traces and highlights the marks that their working methods inevitably left in the text. Detailing how intellectual innovation was generated, Amsler's book also sheds new light on the content of the Talmud. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  • Chapter 2 - Living and Working in a Twelfth-Century Women’s Monastic Community

  • from Part I - Life and Monastic Context
  • Edited by Jennifer Bain, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen
    Published online:
    28 October 2021
    Print publication:
    04 November 2021, pp 37-51

  • Summary

    This chapter imagines an ordinary day in the life of a female monastic community in twelfth-century Germany. The chapter, like the monastic day, is organized around the celebration of the monastic liturgy of the hours. Between the liturgical hours in the oratory, the nuns attend to their daily business in the cloister, chapter house, lavatory, refectory, and workshops. The flow and activities of this monastic day are based primarily on the Rule of St. Benedict, the customary of Hirsau, and Hildegard of Bingen’s own commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, as well as on archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence that reflects medieval monastic lifeways.

  • 15 - Between the Palace, the School and the Forum

  • from Section IV - Cities, Courts and Carolingians
  • Edited by Clemens Gantner, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, Walter Pohl, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien
  • Book:
    After Charlemagne
    Published online:
    03 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020, pp 250-274

  • Summary

    The role played by Lombard intellectuals in the early production of Charlemagne’s court is well known: the grammarian Peter of Pisa, the theologian Paulinus of Aquileia and the historian Paul the Deacon found favour with the Frankish king thanks to their literary talents. These men were the paragons of a Lombard palace culture and education rooted in the study of the Roman and late antique poets and in the mastery of the arts of speech. The analysis of the poems produced by Lombard scholars attending the Carolingian court and the examination of school miscellanies produced in late eighth- and ninth-century Italy highlight the distinctiveness of a culture in which epideictic literature and Ciceronian rhetoric featured prominently. This unveils the survival of an advanced education, the origins of which can be traced back to late antiquity and, more importantly, such a study brings out continuities in the literary culture of early medieval Italy. Here, a rhetorically elaborated and politically engaged production – written and oral – continued to be favoured in the centres and among the elites more closely connected to the court, thus showing that no cultural break was brought about by Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombard kingdom.

  • 5 - Was There a Carolingian Italy?

  • from Section I - Was There a Carolingian Italy?
  • Edited by Clemens Gantner, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, Walter Pohl, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien
  • Book:
    After Charlemagne
    Published online:
    03 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020, pp 54-82

  • Summary

    That the kingdom of Italy was ‘Carolingian’ was obvious to everyone in the ninth century. Political integration was achieved. By the 810s, one generation after the conquest, the ruling counts were Franks, Alemans, Bavarians. With Louis II, Italy had a king physically present from 840, and from 850 an emperor totally devoted to the kingdom. Legislation, justice, ecclesiastical reforms were going in the same direction on both sides of the Alps. By contrast, the area of culture illustrates the limits of integration. Of the 7,650 manuscripts attributed to the ninth century and summarily catalogued by Bernhard Bischoff, not even one in ten was copied in the peninsula. Was the need for books less urgent here than in the north? The type of intellectual production was also different. The genres considered as ‘typically’ Carolingian – the exegetical commentaries, the mirrors of princes, the theological and doctrinal treatises – these are decidedly not the work of Italy, or of Italians. Not only was Italy not producing much, but it was not very receptive to what was going on elsewhere. It seems to be because the culture of the kingdom of Italy had a strong secular stamp, which distinguished it from that of the others.

  • 7 - The technologies of printing

  • from PART III - THE TECHNOLOGIES AND AESTHETICS OF BOOK PRODUCTION
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 161-199

  • Summary

    The technique of printing and its ancillary processes is more certainly known for the eighteenth century than for any previous period. Changes in the technology of printing were driven by an increase in the scale of production, which was the fruit of the rapid increase in the population and its urbanization during the course of the nineteenth century, and of the improvement in networks for the distribution of products. Copperplate engraving and printing was a technique that differed radically from that of letterpress printing, and the two trades were generally carried on separately. Some major printing houses may have had several copperplate presses if an important part of their work included the printing of maps and charts. The introduction of industrial techniques to printing seems at first halting and partial if one compares it with contemporary changes in other industries.

  • 44 - Law books

  • from III - SPECIALIST BOOKS AND MARKETS
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 791-806

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the vocational literature produced mainly for and by common lawyers, together with books on or about the law marketed to a lay audience. Criminal biography and accounts of criminal trials almost certainly constituted the largest body of law-related literature circulating in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Law books were mostly written by lawyers, whose title page identification as such helped establish the authority and credibility of their books. Legal authorship, especially law reporting and treatise writing, was a recognized career option for younger barristers by the end of our period. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw massive increases in the volume of parliamentary transactions committed to print and major changes in the organization of that printing. While English law was increasingly shaped by parliamentary statute during the same period, the chapter presents a brief sketch of these complex developments.

  • 8 - The industrialization of the paper trade

  • from PART III - THE TECHNOLOGIES AND AESTHETICS OF BOOK PRODUCTION
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 200-217

  • Summary

    Paper remained one of the most expensive ingredients of book production during the eighteenth century, which ends when they were just beginning to recoup their investment in industrialization and when their customers in the book trade were just beginning to notice its effects. To give credit where it is due, the paper manufacturers' accomplishments should be viewed not so much as triumphs of technology, but as daring speculations, requiring financial acumen and managerial skills as well as mechanical ingenuity. Like the friends of Henry Fourdrinier, this chapter traces the development of the papermaking machine. It concentrates on the business conditions that made this invention possible, especially the robust growth and rising profitability of the paper trade during the eighteenth century. The Victorians would later lose their faith in the Industrial Revolution, but in 1837 they were enthralled with inventions like the Fourdrinier, which was finally producing significant savings in the book trade, after consuming an enormous investment in the paper trade.

  • 3 - The serial revolution

  • Edited by David McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 144-171

  • Summary

    This chapter concerns changing patterns of serial publication, a term which covers two related practices: the publishing of periodicals with miscellaneous contents, including both magazines and newspapers, and the issuing of unified texts at intervals in independent fascicles or parts. Piecemeal publication blurred generic distinctions between news and fiction, but also between new print, revised print and reprint editions, and between serialisation, book, sequel and series. Publication of original novels in fascicles lost ground in the face of the new wave of literary miscellanies, whether monthly or weekly, which sold at lower prices once knowledge taxes were abolished and mechanical improvements cheapened book production and distribution. Primary developments in serialisation included both the expansion of the mass periodical and newspaper market and the segmentation of the market into diversely identified readerships. The chapter discusses the long-anticipated demise of the multi-volume first edition in the mid-1890s and the regulation of price discounting through the Net Book Agreement established in January 1900.

  • 18 - Second-hand and old books

  • Edited by David McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 635-673

  • Summary

    The world of old books ranged from the waste paper of the dung heap to the wariness and snobberies of private collectors. This chapter concerns with new books, their manufacture, sale, reception and use. The market in new books was affected by those that were available second-hand. The increase in numbers of books in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the increase in sales from long-established private libraries, fuelled the book trade. Besides bookshops, there were innumerable less formal ways of selling books, and particularly on stalls of all sizes, from semi-permanent structures to street barrows. In 1830, the major London dealers in old books and manuscripts were headed by Thomas Thorpe in Bedford Street, Thomas Rodd in Great Newport Street at the foot of Long Acre, and the Quaker brothers John and Arthur Arch in the City. The major auction houses were concentrated in London, and the major second-hand and antiquarian booksellers were mostly there as well.

  • 20 - Following up The reading nation

  • Edited by David McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 704-735

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the study of reading in the early nineteenth century Anglophone world, The reading nation in the Romantic period that has been the subject of many reviews, seminars, interrogations, blogs and personal communications. The titles of works, variations on 'history of the British book trade', often disavow any ambition to discuss the consumer interest. The chapter approaches the conceive of texts, books, reading and consequences not only as a chronological parade of book producers but as a complex literary system within a wider cultural system. An analysis of the historic book industry seen this way sets out to retrieve the changing governing structures within which books were produced in the form that they were and not in others, including state textual controls, the legal framework, and business practices. In order to understand the economic relationships between prices, production and timing of access, we need to retrieve the intellectual property regime within which book publishing occurred.

  • 9 - Mass markets: education

  • Edited by David McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 359-381

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the technology of book production, which was transformed in the course of the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on one key sector, the markets created by the rise of formal schooling, its associated phenomenon, and the rise of public examinations. Schemes to develop formal schooling for the growing population, elementary education as it was defined, proved much more contested and raised altogether more complex issues. Schools affiliated to the denominational societies in England and Wales could still apply for the book grant and the first specialised collection of books on education, including textbooks, was formed in the aftermath of the 1851 Exhibition. The reading books developed in response to the Revised Code, and dominating the elementary school class-room for the second half of the nineteenth century, had their staunch defenders. The market for secondary textbooks begins to look like a mass market on a scale similar to the already-existing market for elementary textbooks.

  • 26 - Printing and publishing 1557–1700: constraints on the London book trades

  • from THE BUSINESS OF PRINT AND THE SPACE OF READING
  • Edited by John Barnard, University of Leeds, D. F. McKenzie, University of Oxford
  • With Maureen Bell, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002, pp 553-567

  • Summary

    In London by the middle of the sixteenth century, the structure of labour in the book trades already had a long history. There is good evidence that in one form or another a mystery of stationers responsible for the commercial production of manuscripts had been formally constituted as a brotherhood by 1403. It is worth stressing that the labour records of the printing and bookselling trades from the mid-sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century probably represent the fullest account by far of any workforce in early modern England. A book printed for the author might run to 100 copies, probably the minimum for which it was worth going to a printer as distinct from a scribe. The effects of the Licensing Acts are only partly reflected in the imprimaturs and entries in the Stationersʾ Register. Only fifty-two books bear some form of licence.

  • 13 - Manuscripts and Books

  • from PART III - SPIRITUAL, CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC LIFE
  • Edited by Christopher Allmand, University of Liverpool
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 June 1998, pp 278-286

  • Summary

    The production of books and manuscripts in the fifteenth century saw the culmination of tendencies which had begun during the latter part of the thirteenth century. It is important to distinguish between 'mere books' and illuminated manuscripts, produced on the finest sheepskin or goatskin parchment. The use of paper in book production was evident from the late fourteenth century onwards. Parchment provided a better medium for manuscript painters, and was far better suited to the production of de luxe editions for affluent patrons and clients. The fifteenth century also saw an unprecedented demand for illustrated books at social levels. The manufacture and sale of books was only loosely controlled by guilds and corporations. The tendency towards the establishment of publishing houses, was especially marked in the Low Countries and at Florence. The important development in the style and format of illuminated books stemmed from the emergence of a closer relationship between manuscript painting and the art of the panel painter.

  • 29 - Book production in the Carolingian empire and the spread of Caroline minuscule

  • from PART IV - CULTURE AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENTS
  • Edited by Rosamond McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 September 1995, pp 786-808

  • Summary

    The choice of scripts, and the extent and nature of book production in Spain, Britain and southern Italy, serve as a reminder of what might have happened without the resources of Carolingian faith and Carolingian power. The evidence for the manuscripts which could be used by Carolingian readers is twofold: manuscripts which have survived in whole or in part, and the few Carolingian catalogues of libraries. Book production throughout the empire on a scale required an increase in the number of scribes, and the formalisation of their training. Carolingian scriptoria developed a uniform script, Caroline minuscule, which could be used to copy texts in Greek, Latin, Old Irish, Old Saxon, and what one regards as the different dialects of German and Romance. Carolingian scribes used enlarged letters to indicate the start of a new section, and punctuation marks to guide the reader in different kinds of graded pause and in recognising questions. The Carolingians secured their classical and patristic heritage.