Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Many changes have taken place since the Middle Ages in the forms in which texts were produced and the processes by which they were communicated to audiences. While much concerning these changes remains irrecoverable for modern readers and scholars, we can none the less attempt some understanding of their possible significance. This chapter will attempt to reconstruct what can be known about the circumstances of textual production and reception in England in the late Middle Ages in order to pinpoint some of these significant changes, and it will ask what implications such circumstances may have for the ways in which later Middle English texts were and are experienced and understood.Until the mid-fifteenth century England, like the rest of the Western world, was a manuscript culture: one in which the written word was committed by hand onto a writing surface (the Latin manuscriptum derives from manu, by hand, and scriptum, written). The technology of printing with movable type was not introduced into Europe until the second half of the fifteenth century, and not established in England until 1476 (Hellinga 1982). Before then each book was a unique product, copied by one or more scribes, and unlikely to be replicated in significant numbers. Book production in these circumstances was labour-intensive and costly, even before processes of decoration and binding. Parchment or paper had to ... log in or subscribe to read full text