This book offers an introduction to medieval English book-history through a sequence of exemplary analyses of commonplace book-historical problems. Rather than focus on bibliographical particulars, the volume considers a variety of ways in which scholars use manuscripts to discuss book culture, and it provides a wide-ranging introductory bibliography to aid in the study. All the essays try to suggest how the study of surviving medieval books might be useful in considering medieval literary culture more generally. Subjects covered include authorship, genre, discontinuous production, scribal individuality and community, the history of libraries and the history of book provenance.

Reviews'Scholarship in this work is superb. Quotations, translations, bibliography are spot on. Professor Hanna’s lifetime of intelligent work in the field glows at all points of discussion.'
MS referee
'This is a first-rate book from a scholar at the forefront of palaeographical and bibliographical study; it will have a wide readership. It will be an excellent partner for the recent Owen-Crocker volume 'Working with Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts.'
Series Editors
'This handsome volume teaches far more than the facts of book history, manuscript culture, and Middle English Literature. It is a model of how to sleuth, how to think critically, how to enter into a detective mindset 'in which every implicit assumption of knowledge [is] teased out, queried and productively qualified.'
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Ralph Hanna is Professor of Palaeography (Emeritus) and Emeritus Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, former Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute (Harvard University), and winner of the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize for English Language 2015. His many books with Liverpool University Press include John Ridewall, Fulgentius metaforalis (2023), Looking at Medieval Books: Learning to See (2023), Robert Holcot, exegete (2021) and Malachy the Irishman, On Poison (2020).