Manuscripts after Print c.1450-1550 (MaP): Producing and Reading Books during Technological Change

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The way we read is in flux. We are in the midst of the 'digital revolution' which challenges the way in which books are available to their readers and how they are produced, sold, and read. Yet printed books and handwriting continue to flourish, with printed books in the UK last year increasing in sales to their highest level since 2012 while eBook sales dropped (The Publishers Association Press Release, 2017) and pleas made for handwriting's continuing educational and social value (Professor Dominic Wise, UCL, Guardian, March 2018). This Early Career Leadership Fellow project takes advantage of the current, crucial moment in the history of book technology to ask: what happens to the production and the readership of old books when new book technology is invented? The introduction of print in Europe in the fifteenth century had a marked effect on the perception of manuscripts, the handwritten book trade, and changed reading practices. Johannes Trithemius, a German Benedictine abbot who lived through this technological change, lamented the introduction of print, famously stating, 'He who ceases from zeal of writing because of printing is no true lover of the scriptures' (De Laude Scriptorium, 1492-4). What Trithemius feared was the fall of the handwritten book - the manuscripts that, after print, could have seemed old technology. But the reality was not a linear transition from manuscript to print but something far messier. Manuscripts produced after print start to exhibit features of print technology and hybrid print-manuscript books are produced. The limited critical engagement with this important question so far has rejected the earlier notion that the rise of 'print culture' meant the decline of 'scribal culture'; yet the terms 'scribal culture' and 'print culture' are still used in binary opposition. These terms reduce the nuanced development of book technology into ordered, chronological categories, meaning that the complex interactions between manuscript and print are lost. In analysing the first hundred years after print in Europe, c.1450-1550, this project challenges the supersession model of book production, that manuscripts were supplanted by print, and goes beyond the more recent claims that manuscript and print simply coexisted, to demonstrate how manuscript production adapted and changed after print and how handwriting revived and flourished as a result. It examines the lasting significance of handwriting and so analyses the non-linear development of book production that continues into the digital age. In doing so, the project has excellent potential to reach book producers and readers beyond academia. At this critical moment in the history of the book, the growth of the digital book, it is vital to examine how readers access texts, how books are marketed, bought and sold, and why old book technology is of continuing importance. In particular, it is crucial to examine the impact of digital books on print and on handwriting.The findings of this project will both indicate the impact of technological change on reading practice and have the potential to inform the way in which book technology might develop in the future. Engaging with artists, creative practitioners, and the wider reading public, the open access digital outputs of this project, especially the Hands-on Reading app which combines handwriting with digital books, are innovative ways of examining how we read now and the way in which we may wish to read in the future.