History of the Book (6)

• European Studies: Italian Studies
• History of the Book
• Music

Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books

• Tim Shephard
• Oliver Doyle
• Ciara O’Flaherty
• Annabelle Page
• Laura Ştefănescu

This volume explores how everyday texts in Renaissance Italy engaged with music, sound, and hearing. Of the 358 known editions printed in 1501, only a few contained formal music notation or specialist theory. Yet a surprising wealth of musical knowledge emerges from religious texts, classical commentaries, lifestyle guides, poetry, and more. These sources—rarely penned by professional musicians—reflect the broader cultural presence of music in early 16th-century life, touching on themes like music’s moral influence, its role in education, and its scientific understanding.

• History of the Book

Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts: Volume 2: Social Encounters with the Book

• Kathryn M. Rudy

In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.

• History
• History of the Book
• Literature

Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

• David Atkinson
• Steve Roud

This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature.

• History of the Book

Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts: Volume 1: Officials and Their Books

• Kathryn M. Rudy

The Medieval book, both religious and secular, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of its use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.

• History of the Book

Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print

• Kathryn M. Rudy

In this ingenious study, Kathryn Rudy takes the reader on a journey to trace the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500. Image, Knife, and Gluepot painstakingly reconstructs the process by which this manuscript was created and discusses its significance as a text at the forefront of fifteenth-century book production, when the invention of mechanically-produced images led to the creation of new multimedia objects.

• History of the Book

Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized their Manuscripts

• Kathryn M. Rudy

Medieval manuscripts resisted obsolescence. Made by highly specialised craftspeople (scribes, illuminators, book binders) with labour-intensive processes using exclusive and sometimes exotic materials (parchment made from dozens or hundreds of skins, inks and paints made from prized minerals, animals and plants), books were expensive and built to last. They usually outlived their owners. Rather than discard them when they were superseded, book owners found ways to update, amend and upcycle books or book parts. Rudy considers ways in which book owners adjusted the contents of their books from the simplest (add a marginal note, sew in a curtain) to the most complex (take the book apart, embellish the components with painted decoration, add more quires of parchment). By making sometimes extreme adjustments, book owners kept their books fashionable and emotionally relevant.