Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 3 - Oral and scribal texts in early modern England

  • from ORAL TRADITIONS AND SCRIBAL CULTURE
  • Edited by John Barnard, University of Leeds, D. F. McKenzie, University of Oxford
  • With Maureen Bell, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002, pp 97-121

  • Summary

    In early modern England, the experience of the oral text was rarely free from some sense of its involvement with the other media. From time to time, scribal transcriptions of printed materials are encountered, which may even record the publication details of the exemplar or attempt a facsimile of the title page. Much of the poetry of the period was composed as scripts for recitation rather than for silent reading. Intermediate between the oral and the printed text lies the domain of the handwritten text. This chapter indicates that in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new composition might be circulated in any one of oral, written or printed form, or in any two or all three of these. The most characteristic forms of the manuscript book: the personal miscellany, the scribal anthology and the collection of materials, were a uniting of smaller units. Even within the medium of script there were varying decorums and varying levels of freedom.