What is it about?
This is an in-depth study of eight fifteenth-century manuscripts and their layered histories. These eight medieval books belonged to two generations of Tudor readers who read and annotated them during a long century, 1470–1585, from the reign of Edward IV to Elizabeth I.
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Why is it important?
This book shows that people living through the enormous social and religious changes imposed by the English Reformation still relied on pre-Reformation sources of reading. It argues that continuities in reading between the periods that scholars characterise as 'medieval' and 'Renaissance' need to be more widely recognised, and that manuscripts remained important long after the invention of the printed book.
Perspectives
Writing this study of medieval manuscripts also allowed me to get to know some of the people who read them. I enjoyed tracing the history of two generations of the Roberts family of Willesden, Middlesex, and discovering what happened to Thomas Roberts (the father) and Edmund Roberts (his son) as they lived through the English Reformation.
Professor Margaret Connolly
University of St Andrews
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books, January 2019, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/9781108652421.
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