Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

One of the distinctive dimensions of a manuscript culture is the possibility of more direct relationships between manuscripts and readers than can obtain in a developed print culture. Readers were necessarily in closer contact with those who supplied the works they read and hence had the opportunity to shape both the form and the content of those works. Moreover, the reader generally formed one component in a larger entrepreneurial nexus that included stationers, scribes and decorators who each had their own potential to affect the final form that constituted the manuscript book.To say that every manuscript is by definition unique is to take refuge in the banal. But it is clear that medieval readers often saw the potential to individualize the manuscripts they owned. This individualization could take various forms. It might be restricted to the addition of a mark of ownership — for example, a name, or a shield bearing the owner's arms, usually added in the upper or lower margins of the first page. Those who prepared manuscripts speculatively, not at the behest of a specific commissioner, would sometimes leave blank shields in the design of the manuscript to be filled in later to accommodate this form of self-representation. For such gestures of visible identification were perhaps more than simple marks of ownership; they provided an explicit connection between the book and the social ... log in or subscribe to read full text