Review

"The essays are truly ground-breaking.... All serious libraries will buy it; all students in the field will consult it regularly. Hellinga and Trapp and their collaborators have produced a volume which gets the Cambridge History off to a very fine start and certainly whets the appetite for more.... On the basis of this volume we can look forward to a national history which will fulfill its mandate well and complement both the existing and forthcoming accounts of the book elsewhere in Europe and in the English-speaking world." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada

"The first to appear of a projected seven-volume Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, VolumeIII firmliy grounds the entire project in the pivotal age of transition from the manuscript to the printed book, and in doing so provides its own milestone in the relatively recent but now thriving historical subdiscipline of book history." Albion

"a landmark contribution to our understanding of late-medieval and early-modern British cultural, intellectual, and social history. It is a tremendous achievement and is highly recommended." Speculum

"The individual essays are admirable in their ability to cover their subjects in general and to demonstrate and elaborate in specific examples...The introduction to this volume is also well worth reading and re-reading. It is a masterful account of what the editors describe as 'continuity in change' and is a survey against which all the other essays in the volume are meant to be, and should be, read." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

Book Description

A collection of essays which presents an overview of the century-and-a-half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557. In this time of change the manuscript culture of Chaucer's day was replaced by an ambience in which printed books would become the norm. This volume traces the transition and discerns patterns of where, why and how books were written, printed, bound, acquired, read and passed from hand to hand with particular emphasis on imports and links with the Continent.