Manuscript and Print, 1500–1700

This chapter discusses the uses to which manuscripts and printed books were put in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the changing histories and critical traditions that have accounted for them, beginning with the place of Caxton, Pynson, and de Worde in the early English printing trade and the developing copyright law and discourse of authorship at the start of the eighteenth century. It then discusses the ways in which textual editors have accounted for the interaction between manuscript and print and the new authors and texts that have gained critical attention (with renewed scholarly attention to female authors and the social contexts of writing). It ends with a consideration of the ways in which print and manuscript coexisted and of the ways in which attention to annotations and the history of reading might be leading toward the history of books, rather than the history of the book.