Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Paper was the connective tissue of early modern England. While medieval manuscript culture was confined to centers of wealth by low literacy rates and the high cost of animal skin (vellum or parchment), Tudor England was awash in handwritten documents written on paper, a surface made of old rags boiled to a pulp. Countless amateur scribes and writers in Tudor England contributed to the emerging manuscript genres made possible by the increasing availability of paper, the rise in literacy rates, and perhaps surprisingly, the advent of a new medium of discourse: print. Writing and printing were complementary technologies, each defined on its own terms as well as by the limitations of the other. Beginning in the mid – fifteenth century, printing joined the medieval (professional) and Renaissance (amateur) manuscript traditions as a related and significant means for both ephemeral transactions and permanent information storage. Paper was so much cheaper than parchment that writing finally became practical for classes of English society, as for European society in general, that had been largely excluded from it since the fall of Rome and the virtual disappearance of papyrus from Europe after the fifth century (Diringer 1982: 165; Martin 1994: 223; Burns 1996: 417–19).Paper was first used in England in 1309; the word itself is recorded for the first time in 1340 – 1 (Hunter 1943: 320; ... log in or subscribe to read full text