Reformations

This volume discusses the key shift from manuscript to print culture in the history of books, taking The Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Piers Plowman as models of the way in which a medieval text's unique tradition influenced its transition from manuscript to print. This study follows the texts from their circulation in manuscript to their presentation in print, in order to track how each of them survived the metamorphosis of the relationship between writers and readers as the new technology was introduced. Taken together, the three case studies demonstrate to scholars of any medieval literature the variety of possible impacts made when texts composed in manuscript culture were prepared for printing.