Fifteenth-Century Books in Print & Manuscript

Course Description

The use of a wide variety of evidence—paper, parchment, type, script, rubrication and illumination, bindings, ownership marks, and annotations—can shed light both on questions of analytical bibliography and on wider questions of book distribution, provenance, and use. There will be a fairly detailed discussion and analysis of both good and bad features in existing reference works on manuscripts and early printing.

This course is intended to serve as a general introduction to bibliographical analysis. Its examples and methods are primarily derived from fifteenth-century manuscripts and printed books at Princeton University, as this is a period commonly overlooked or only summarily treated by the standard guides. Note that this course is not a general historical introduction to manuscripts or incunabula; the primary purpose of the course is to encourage a way of bibliographical thinking that should prove useful in the analysis of all books, early or modern.

Students should have some familiarity with principles of bibliographical description, and with the Latin language, in which many of the books are written and printed. In their personal statement, applicants should indicate the extent of their proficiency with descriptive bibliography and with Latin.

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Advance Reading List

Articles

On the Materials and Methods of Gothic Manuscript Production:

Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Raymond Clemens & Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Cornell University Press, 2007).

Jonathan Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work (Yale University Press, 1992).

Chrisopher De Hamel, Making Medieval Manuscripts (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2018).

On the Materials and Methods of 15th-Century European Printing:

Needham, Paul. “ISTC as a Tool for Analytical Bibliography,” in Bibliography and the Study of 15th-Century Civilization, edited by Lotte Hellinga & John Goldfinch, (London, 1987), 39–54.

Needham, Paul. The Bradshaw Method: Henry Bradshaw’s Contribution to Bibliography. The Seventh Hanes Lecture (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Needham, Paul. “Prints in the Early Printing Shops,” in The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter Parshall (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 39–91.

Needham, Paul. “Copy Specifics in the Printing Shop,” in Early Printed Books as Material Objects: Proceedings of the conference organized by the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Munich, 19-21 August 2009, edited by Bettina Wagner & Marcia Reed (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Saur, 2010), 9–20.

Needham, Paul. “Book Production on Vellum and Paper in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Papier im mittelalterlichen Europa: Herstellung und Gebrauch, edited by Carla Meyer, Sandra Schultz, and Bernd Schneidmüller. (Munich: De Gruyter, 2015), 247–74.

On the Dissemination, Use and Survival of Early European Printing:

White, Eric. “Binding Waste as Book History: Patterns of Survival Among the Early Mainz Donatus Editions,” in Printing R-Evolution and Society 1450-1500. Fifty Years that Changed Europe, ed. Cristina Dondi (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2020), 253–277.

 

 

 

 

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Course Evaluations

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Course History