for papers. Together with Orietta DaRold and Philip Shaw at Leicester, we will be running a small conference in Bergen in early June entitled Writing Europe before 1450. It builds on the successes of two ‘Writing England’ conferences held in … Continue reading
Ælfric Bata, about whom little is known other than he was a student of Ælfric of Eynsham and that he wrote Latin scholastic colloquies, offers a nice picture of monastic book sales presumably from around the first part of the … Continue reading
I recently started the lucid, engaging, careful and exciting Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire by William Johnson (Oxford UP, 2010). While the body chapters will be of most interest to those specifically engaged with particular authors, … Continue reading
As you can see, I am trying to note medieval book prices as I come across them after Gneuss’s psalter colophon piqued my interest (and so I thought to give categorize the notes). For the Gutenberg Bible, customers paid around … Continue reading
A little later than the note reported by Helmut Gneuss is a notice found in the pastedown of a manuscript in Pembroke College, Cambridge (dated ?1170).* It states:** Pentatuchus. Iob. duodecim prophete. Math. et luc. cum pergameno salterii et epistolorum … Continue reading
References to the price and labour involved in producing early medieval books in Western Europe are hard to come by. However, thanks to Helmut Gneuss’s reconstruction of a scribal comment (aka colophon) now lost (but transcribed by a modern cataloguer … Continue reading
A wonderfully fun book! I read this last winter for a break from the medieval and was well rewarded. I admit that the title initially made me think that it might be a lament for print or an encomium for … Continue reading
rom the always stunning I Love Typography, a short overview on early printing, but more importantly a plan to chart the development of typography from the incunable on with images from special collections from the University of Amsterdam. Not to … Continue reading
University of Chicago Press’s free e-book this month is Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book. Of course, because all things free require an extra download, you’ll have to install Adobe’s Digital Editions (and provide your e-mail address, but think … Continue reading
I smile when I think of the following being written in the 50’s (okay, the English appeared in 1976, but I don’t have the original, so imagine it in French as published in 1958): As usual there is an important … Continue reading