The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700

by Edited by Julia Crick , Alexandra Walsham

• ISBN13: 9780521172707
• ISBN10: 0521172705
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This 2003 volume builds upon the widening interest in the connections between culture and communication in medieval and early modern Europe. Focusing on England, it takes a critical look at the scholarly paradigm of the shift from script to print, exploring the possibilities and limitations of these media as vehicles of information and meaning. The essays examine how pen and the press were used in the spheres of religion, law, scholarship, and politics. They assess scribal activity both before and after the advent of printing, illuminating its role in recording and transmitting polemical, literary, antiquarian and utilitarian texts. They also investigate script and print in relation to the spoken word, emphasising the constant interaction and symbiosis of these three media. In sum, this collection helped to refine the boundaries between cultures of speech, manuscript and print, and to reconsider the historical fissures which they have come to represent.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Script, print and history

Script, Print and Late Medieval Religion

Publication before print: the case of Julian of

Printing, mass communication and religious reformation: the Middle Ages and after

Print and pre-Reformation religion: the Benedictines and the press in early Tudor England

Script, Print and Textual Tradition

Law and text: legal authority and judicial accessibility in the late Middle Ages

The art of the unprinted: transcription and English antiquity in the age of print

The authority of the word: manuscript, print and the text of the Bible in seventeenth-century England

Script, Print and Speech

The functions of script in the speech community of a late medieval town, c.1300-1550

The sound of print in early modern England: the broadside ballad as song

Communicating with authority: the uses of script, print and speech in Bristol 1640-1714

Script, Print and Persecution

Preaching without speaking: script, print and religious dissent

Publish and perish: the scribal culture of the

Print, persecution and polemic: Thomas Edwards' Gangraena (1646) and Civil War sectarianism

Epilogue

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