Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance France: From Manuscript to Printed Book

摘要

The history of the book has a long tradition of segregate approaches to its subjects. Fault lines have become deeper in the last generation as the academic discipline has grown, as disciplines do, by expansion and cell division. The period of c. 1450 to c. 1550 qualifies as a distinct section in any approach because those are the years that saw printing developing from experiment to a technology with immeasurable impact on society. In almost all the studies regarding book production during those hundred years we can see, in a worrying development, the ever sharper divisions between those trained in manuscript studies and those primarily working with printed books, between those approaching books (whether manuscript or print) out of interest in textual transmission, and those who focus on their production, whether in a scriptorium or a printing house. These divisions are criss-crossed by national traditions in scholarship, for example the inclination to theoretical abstraction in the francophone world as opposed to Anglo-Saxon pragmatism.