English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution

English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution traces the development of a new type of scribal culture in England that emerged early in the fourteenth century.The main medieval writing surfaces of parchment and wax tablets were augmented by a writing medium that was both lasting and cheap enough to be expendable.Writing was transformed from a near monopoly of professional scribes employed by the upper class to a practice ordinary citizens could afford.Personal correspondence, business records, notebooks on all sorts of subjects, creative writing, and much more flourished at social levels where they had previously been excluded by the high cost of parchment.Steven W. May places literary manuscripts and in particular poetic anthologies in this larger scribal context, showing how its innovative features affected both authorship and readership. As this amateur scribal culture developed, the medieval professional culture expanded as well.Classes of documents formerly restricte