Commencing with the Welsh Peredur and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal, this chapter traces the material dissemination of Grail romances across Northern Europe from the late twelfth century through to c.1550. Comparing and contrasting print and manuscript traditions from a book historical perspective, the geographical coverage includes France, England, Wales, Germany and the Low Countries, as well as Northern European territories into which Grail literature appears not to have entered, such as Sweden and Norway. In addition to setting out a clear chronology of Grail text dissemination and publication, the study shows how the proliferation (or not) of Grail book production over time offers insights into the cultural and sociopolitical contexts in which the literary motif of the Grail could be employed to greatest effect.

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.

This article examines the relationship between the late antique and medieval Dyothelete Chalcedonian community of the Middle East–commonly referred to as the Melkites or Rum–and surveys the evidence for the use of Syriac by these communities. Because Melkites have more commonly been associated with the use of Greek and Arabic, an argument is made that a number of factors–among them the Monothelete/Dyothelete split in the Middle Eastern Dyothelete church, liturgical Byzantinization, and the destruction of manuscripts–have distorted more recent understandings of the relationship of this church with the Syriac language and obscured the reality that a number of medieval Melkites used Syriac for Christian purposes.

This chapter examines the ontological questions raised by the encounter with poems in archives, whether in the form of drafts, post-publication revisions, or unique or multiple versions circulating in manuscript alone. Most poems in most archives prompt the same question – what is this? – and they thereby challenge expectations of what a poem will be. When are two related texts versions of the same poem, for instance, and when are they instead two different poems? What about poems that were never finished or were never originally conceived of as “poems”? And how are poems in archives framed by surrounding materials, be those materials other poems or other kinds of writing altogether? Through a close study of Thomas Gray's commonplace book, this chapter focuses on the interpretative challenges prompted by such ontological questions. Using Gray's methods as its example, the chapter experiments with what it means to read manuscript poems synchronically within the archival documents in which they are found, rather than diachronically in search of sources or variants.

This chapter charts the historical development of a series of technologies for transmitting handwritten literary texts. It focuses on writing surfaces such as clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper; book formats such as scrolls and codices; scribal practices such as the introduction of spaces between words; and the social organizations through which manuscript texts were produced and circulated, such as the medieval scriptorium. Mak argues that the human hand in particular “supports the production and circulation of ideas in manuscript, printed, digital, and other forms.” It is, she argues, central to all textual transmission, “whether it be slave scribes who took dictation in antiquity, stonecutters who fashioned the inkstones to the world of scholarship and art in China, or the legions of students and overseas workers who manually transcribe and encode literary, medical, and other texts in service of their digital use.”

This chapter examines how Byron draws attention to the material forms in which his works are mediated, beginning with Beppo, which ends because ‘My pen is at the bottom of a page’. It suggests that, in the artistic process of composition, Byron pondered questions that have concerned later critics and theorists from Walter Greg and F. W. Bateson to René Wellek and Nelson Goodman. By attending to the ways in which Byron marked his manuscript page, the chapter suggests that he thought of the literary work as having a distinctive, layered ontology. It situates his implied understanding of the nature of the literary work in relation to that of recent textual scholars such as John Bryant, Peter Shillingsburg, Jack Stillinger, and Paul Eggert. Byron wrote with a keen attention to the materiality of pens, ink, and paper, but he was also well aware that his poems could become mass-produced printed commodities. He was therefore concerned with how remediation changed the effect of a poem, and even its meaning, as effects specific to manuscript did not translate into print. Beppo provides a case in point, as it imagines itself as script, print, and voice by turns, or sometimes all at once.

The essay sketches the development of W.G. Sebald’s poetry from its beginnings in the mid-1960s through the unpublished writings of the 1970s, the 1980s long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and the poems written for the volumes For Years Now and Unerzählt (Unrecounted) shortly before his death. The first section introduces Sebald the poet with several general remarks, touching on a poem from the 1960s, passages from Nach der Natur (After Nature) and two poems from the 1990s. This is followed by sections illustrating effects of the non-simultaneous reception of After Nature in German and English and considering the influence of Southern German, Austrian and Swiss prose on the language of Sebald’s poetry. The final section visits the poet’s ‘lyrical workshop’, in other words the development of his poetry in manuscript form between the 1960s and mid-1980s, and the integration of a significant part of the manuscript ‘Across the Land and the Water’ into the final two sections of After Nature. The essay concludes that Sebald wrote poems throughout his life, and that it is likely he would have published further volumes of poetry had he lived longer.

“Print” analyzes the transition from manuscript to print culture and the formal conventions of modern Persianate writing. I trace the emergence and standardization of standard typography, orthography, and punctuation. Questioning the assumption that these aspects of print culture arose organically from the material conditions of modernization, I argue that they were fetishized as a kind of modernizing technology in and of themselves, and understood as productive of -- rather than products of -- modernization. In other words, Iranian and Indian literary scholars sought to modernize their prose by abandoning certain formal conventions of the Persianate manuscript tradition and adopting the conventions of European print: type rather than calligraphy, standardized spelling, and a new set of punctuation marks. The transition from manuscripts to a standardized print culture is typically presented as pragmatic, but it was shaped by various networks of affective attachments.

Chapter 1 treats the War of the Morea as a major media event that sheds new light on the relationship between communication and power in seventeenth-century Venice. Challenging the exceptionalist assumption that secrecy was the guiding principle of official policy, wartime culture reveals an active willingness to deploy publicity to boost government reputation and bolster the Republic’s declining ruling class. In considering different information modalities – oral, manuscript, print, ritual – the chapter approaches news as a form of discourse that integrates facts, emotions, and interpretations. As Walter Benjamin noted, news reporting always comes with explanation, a ‘psychological connection’ that is ‘forced on the reader’. Rather than limit the scope of analysis to the mechanics of communication, the chapter critically examines how war news integrated fact and value to justify military action abroad and encourage popular engagement with empire at home.

Chapter 4, ‘Writing It Down: Innovation, Secrecy, and Print’ explains how mining, and subterranean geometry, evolved during the troubled time of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). It brings together issues related to book history as well as the history of training and teaching practices. Balthasar Rösler (1605–1673) introduced numerous innovations, and his teaching was disseminated by his students among mining regions, in a series of beautifully illustrated and hitherto unstudied manuscripts. The birth of this technical genre is presented in detail, with its evolution and uses within the training system of mining regions. In 1686, Nicolaus Voigtel then published the first practical textbook on the topic. Surprisingly, the craftsmen’s manuscripts weathered the rise of the printed press. I argue that authoring and publishing books failed to supersede the authority of practitioners precisely because their know-how was embedded in a specific technical and cultural setting. Subterranean geometry would stay an underground knowledge for another century, as most innovations arose within this handwritten tradition.

The eighth and final chapter examines the larger effects of textualization and vernacularization. The combination of the new technology of writing with the social choice of the vernacular permitted ideas about custom to circulate beyond their traditional local community ambit. Previously rooted laws and customs grew legs, and customary legal ideas could be transmitted though the circulation of texts and shared outside their local setting. In fact, this is when we start seeing the term ‘common law’ appear in French texts, a term scholars associate in this period with either royal law in England or with Roman and canon law as law that was common to Europe. This French ‘common law’ has been hotly debated. This chapter contributes to this debate by using the coutumiers to show how a French ‘common law,’ in the sense of a pool of common customary legal knowledge, was developing in France. This, in turn, implies more similarity between the legal cultures of France and England in this period than previously thought.

The thirteenth-century coutumiers capture a moment of intellectual ebullience. They were part of the formative moments of the lay courts and the theorization of ‘law in practice’ and in this sense the coutumiers were the linchpin of French legal thinking until the Revolution – and beyond in some French colonies. They created something powerful in the French legal imagination, so powerful that their use only increased with time and eventually became official law when the kings demanded coutumiers to be written for all the regions of France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was all due to the ingenuity and intellectual creativity of the thirteenth-century lay jurists who borrowed, constructed, and effectively created a field of knowledge known as ‘customary law’.

This chapter explores how writing affected the nature of custom itself. The writing of custom did not fix or petrify custom and end its malleability or creativity, as scholars have assumed. Drawing on the work of literary scholars on the nature of medieval vernacular text and manuscript culture, I argue instead that each manuscript provided one authoritative version of custom and constituted one voice in a conversation over custom that continued with written text. This conversation can be seen where differences between manuscripts show diverging opinions about proper custom. This, in turn, meant that custom remained creative and dynamic even in written form. The purpose of the coutumiers was not to copy practised custom and faithfully record it with perfect accuracy in text. Rather, the coutumiers were meant to change the patterns of thought of ‘those who would hear or read the text’ and show them how to think in a legal manner, like a lawyer, judge, or sophisticated litigant. Teaching modes of thought rather than rules permitted those who did not spend years in university to understand the framework and rhetoric of lay courts, and enabled them to navigate these through changing rules, time, and circumstance.

This chapter traces three stages in the formation of a French literary tradition that take place in the early Middle Ages. The first is the awareness that a vernacular language distinct from spoken Latin exists (which would of course pertain to all Romance languages); the second, the appearance of this language in written form; the third, the establishment of a solidified written tradition of literary works, both devotional and secular, translations of Latin works as well as transcriptions of hitherto orally transmitted poetic works. The first stage occurs early in the ninth century with the first documented acknowledgments of a Romance vernacular distinct from Latin in Gaul. A mere handful of written texts of modest size in the vernacular have survived from the following three centuries, predominantly in the margins of Latin manuscripts. Autonomous secular texts in Old French start appearing in the early twelfth century, most notably in England, within a couple of generations of the Norman Conquest. The balance of the chapter deals with the insular social dynamic of the twelfth century in England that differentiated its interests from those on the Continent, where innovations in courtly love literature thrived, whereas they were ultimately sidelined in England.

Chapter 1 introduces the overall argument of the book: that the scribes of manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century were interested in their own craft conventions, in abstract conventions of page design and in the text as an abstract verbal artefact, and were less concerned to exploit the material features of the manuscript. It sets out the implications of the argument for the study of material texts and material agency, and advocates the value of craft theory for bringing to life the scribes’ work. It ends by noting the methods of the book, which combine codicology and textual criticism, quantitative methods and literary critical interpretation.