Chapter 5 assesses the patronage and use of books in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The following case studies are discussed: two earlier Anglo-Saxon prayerbooks (the Book of Cerne and Book of Nunnaminster) to which new material was added, a new volume of Latin hagiographies (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 5574), and a Carolingian manuscript to which several additions were made by English-trained scribes (London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, fols. 170–224). Engagement with these books took place in diverse settings, some of which were more informal than one might expect. The motivations for such activity are assessed too. These case studies pave the way for a holistic assessment of the contemporary manuscript corpus. Physical qualities, texts and languages are considered, as are the possible settings in which books were produced and used. Attention is drawn to the evidence for female book use, and to the importance of international networks. Continuities with earlier decades are acknowledged, as are new developments, including a more pronounced association between books and bishops. The chapter closes with a call to remain open-minded about this book culture’s range of social contexts and participants.

The conclusion brings together the findings of the previous chapters. It reiterates the importance of the mid-ninth century, since the written word was used more extensively than in prior decades to uphold and confirm social, political and economic transactions. This provides an important context for understanding the extraordinary literary endeavours of Alfred’s later reign: in the generation before Alfred, both lay and ecclesiastic people were already experimenting with – and thinking about – the social values of literary culture. It must be stressed, however, that developments were not uniform across Kent, Mercia and Wessex. Literary culture was not limited to a single agency or context, and competing visions and practices existed throughout the ninth and early tenth centuries. One of the most striking aspects to this is that, in some contexts, resources and Latin literacy levels appear to have been limited, yet documentary production continued. If anything, such limited resources intensified the value of the written word as a commodity. The Conclusion also considers what follows in the mid- and late tenth century. Several strands of continuity are identified, though social and institutional changes need to be borne in mind.

Chapter 1 assesses the evidence beyond the charter corpus for literary activity in Kent, Mercia and Wessex in the mid-ninth century. This evidence comprises five categories: surviving manuscripts with contemporary English provenances, letters, inscribed objects, the events of the 850s, and Asser’s account of King Alfred’s childhood engagement with books. The importance of understanding survival patterns and the nature of the evidence is stressed, particularly because attempts were rarely made to preserve letters for posterity, and because different ways of engaging with books and inscribed objects generated varyingly large fingerprints for twenty-first-century eyes. Asser’s famous account, furthermore, needs to be approached with caution, though it does in several ways align with the impression of literary activity that one gets from mid-ninth-century sources. A good deal remains unknown about many of the contexts in which literary activity took place, but it is nonetheless clear that the written word was conspicuous in many mid-ninth-century social settings, despite the likelihood that in some contexts resources for new literary productions were limited. Much of this literary culture was fundamentally social, and it was often inspired by international exchange.

Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the ways religious scholars, government administrators and litterateurs transmitted communal knowledge. The chapter focuses in particular on ideas about oral and written transmission of knowledge, the production of books and understandings of authorship in the early Islamic world. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the complicated ways in which some surviving early Islamic local histories were transmitted to their extant versions.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

Irish romantic literature was made from a fluid relationship between orality, manuscript and print. Exploring this relationship via the writings of Thomas Dermody, Charlotte Brooke, Mary Tighe and James Orr while also using the better known cases of Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson and Thomas Moore as signposts, the chapter argues for a bookish romanticism shaped by scarcity.

Given that we know little about deviations from ritual norms in most cities of Greece, I limit myself to Athens and concentrate on the later fifth century so that we can acquire an idea of the possibilities but also of the religious Handlungsspielraum within a given chronotope. I begin with the individual responsible for the cave of Vari who was clearly an anomaly in terms of the intensity of his religious worship. I then proceed with some private cults and practices that were frowned upon, continue with individuals who were seen, rightly or wrongly, as actually transgressing civic norms, and end with some final considerations, in which I return to the problem of the relationship between personal religion and polis religion. I conclude that it seems that personal religion was still very much part of polis religion at large.

Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.

The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

The author describes his parents’ upbringing and move to New York around the time of the Great Depression. The young Weinberg is encouraged to read widely and later takes inspiration from Norse myths from the Poetic Edda.

Despite its familiarity, the fourfold canonical gospel presents a challenge for interpreters, captured in the famous symbols of the evangelists. Mark’s Jesus embodies the paradox of the crucified king of Israel. Matthew adds to this a portrait of Jesus the Prophet-like-Moses and Davidic shepherd who renews Israel’s covenant. Luke presents Jesus as Lord and prophet who brings redemption and distinctively champions the poor. John’s Jesus is the Word from the beginning and glorified Son of the Father. These subsequently canonized gospels stand out as authoritative amidst proliferating Jesus books. An approach that respects the fourfold gospel’s catholicity as well as its holding together of tensions in the historical impact of Jesus of Nazareth on his followers may be a fruitful path toward perceiving the one Jesus in the canonical Four.

Although woodblock printing of books has an earlier origin in China, Korea and Japan, the invention of printing with movable metal type that began in Europe in the middle of the 15th century was truly revolutionary. The innovation of printed books spread rapidly and stimulated the process to democratise knowledge as the medieval world transformed into the early modern, with new genres and audiences for books established in just a few decades.

What is the stuff of dictionaries? And why does thinking about that stuff matter?  These are the paramount questions of this chapter. The physical print dictionary is a specter that looms large in media and the popular imagination, but dictionaries aren’t just or only big books. Accordingly, this chapter begins by drawing attention to the wide array of material incarnations dictionaries have taken – the tablets and scrolls that preceded books, the websites and apps that have superseded them. Next, it considers the materialities necessary to making and using those various forms: the evolving variety of tools available to amateur and professional lexicographers; the implements of interaction deployed by dictionary readers; the traces of production, circulation, and reception that exist in private collections and informal or institutional archives. Finally, I’ll describe some non-textual uses of dictionaries; just as dictionaries aren’t only books, they aren’t only consulted for their content but rather mobilized to a range of physical, aesthetic, symbolic ends.