Books before Print. By Erik Kwakkel

Abstract

‘This beautifully illustrated book’, the blurb on the cover states, ‘provides an accessible introduction to the medieval manuscript and what it can tell us about the world in which it was made and used.’ The material is presented in thirty-two chapters with catchy titles such as ‘The Empty Part of the Page’, ‘Hugging a Manuscript’, ‘Judging a Book by its Cover’, ‘Speech Bubbles’, ‘Getting Personal in the Margin’, ‘Books on a Diet’, and ‘Destroying Medieval Books (and Why that's Useful)’. Everything here is ‘bite-size’, as the author (who makes a point of writing colloquially) would say. The chapters are very short (typically six to eight pages, of which at least two will be devoted to illustrations), and are often subdivided further (reflecting the origins of the material as a series of blog posts); they invariably leave the reader wanting to know more—and that is doubtless the point. Nonetheless, collectively they introduce various elements of codicology—with attention paid to exceptions as well as norms—along with a range of evidence for the ways in which medieval books were used (and abused). There is nothing, however, on pricking and ruling: Chapter 10, ‘Mary had a Little Book’, which discusses depictions of the Annunciation in which the Virgin holds a book, could usefully have been sacrificed to make space for such.