Orietta Da Rold provides a detailed analysis of the coming of paper to medieval England, and its influence on the literary and non-literary culture of the period. Looking beyond book production, Da Rold maps out the uses of paper and explains the success of this technology in medieval culture, considering how people interacted with it and how it affected their lives. Offering a nuanced understanding of how affordance influenced societal choices, Paper in Medieval England draws on a multilingual array of sources to investigate how paper circulated, was written upon, and was deployed by people across medieval society, from kings to merchants, to bishops, to clerks and to poets, contributing to an understanding of how medieval paper changed communication and shaped modernity.
Author(s): Orietta Da Rold
Series: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 280
City: Cambridge
Cover
Half-title
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Contents
List of
Illustrations
List of
Figures
List of
Tables
A Preface with Thanks
Abbreviations and Conventions
Paper and Culture in Medieval England: An Introduction
Paper in Culture
Culture in Paper
The Book
Chapter 1 Paper Stories
A New Transnational Technology
Early Interactions
A Familiar Object
A Web of Paper
Paper: Another Story
Chapter 2 The Economics of Paper
Close Reading of an Account
The Particulars of Paper
A Paper Merchant's Register
The Quality of Paper
Sizes of Paper
The Finishing of Paper
Paper Routes to England
The Importation of Paper to England
Inland Trade
The Cost and Value of Paper
On Nuance
Chapter 3 Writing on Paper: Tradition and Innovation
Title Eighty, De instrumentis conficiendis
Normalizing Change
The Need to Write
The Need to Write Quickly
Writing on Paper and the Matter of Scribal Training
Mapping Hands on Paper
Cursivity and Paper
Chapter 4 The Character of Paper and Its Use in Medieval Books
Sources and the Character of Paper
Technological Knowledge
Paper with a Purpose
Books and the Character of Paper
Paper Chronology: Some Observations
Combining Technologies
On the Question of Pre-made Quires
The Shape of Paper
Folding Paper
Diverse Characters
Chapter 5 Paper in the Medieval Literary Imagination
Chromaticity
Plasticity
Porosity and Tensility
Literary Affordances
Chapter 6 Epilogue: The Age of Paper
Appendix Paper Manuscripts in Cambridge University Library of English Provenance, datable up to s. xvex
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Catalogues, Indices and Dictionaries
Secondary Sources
Digital Resources
Index of Manuscripts
General Index
