Michael Johnston is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Purdue University, Indiana and specializes in the circulation of literary manuscripts in fifteenth-century England. He is the author of Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (2014) and the co-editor, with Susanna Fein, of Robert Thornton and his Books: New Essays on the Lincoln and London Manuscripts (2014). Michael Van Dussen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at McGill University, Montréal and specializes in communication before print in the Latin West, with emphasis on England's relations with Central Europe. He is the author of From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2012) and the co-editor, with Pavel Soukup, of Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378-1536: Textual Transmission and Networks of Readership (2013).

'The editors and Cambridge University Press have made an excellent start by including this book in the high-profile Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, a series devoted to illuminating literature in relation to medieval culture and bodies of learning. It is to be hoped that the present volume will engage a new generation of literary scholars and cultural historians in discovering manuscript culture and investigating its meanings.' Review of English Studies

• 1. Introduction: manuscripts and cultural history Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen; 2. Bibliographical theory and the textuality of the codex: towards a history of the pre-modern book Seth Lerer; 3. What is a manuscript culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix Stephen G. Nichols; 4. Decoding the material book: cultural residue in medieval manuscripts Erik Kwakkel; 5. Organizing manuscript and print: from Compilatio to compilation Jeffrey Todd Knight; 6. Containing the book: the institutional afterlives of medieval manuscripts Siân Echard; 7. Medieval manuscripts: media archaeology and the digital incunable Martin K. Foys; 8. The circulation of texts in manuscript culture Pascale Bourgain; 9. Multilingualism and late medieval manuscript culture Lucie Doležalová; 10. Miscellaneity and variance in the medieval book Arthur Bahr; 11. Vernacular authorship and the control of manuscript production Andrew Taylor; 12. Medieval French and Italian literature: towards a manuscript history Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz; 13. Afterword: social history of the book and beyond Kathryn Kerby-Fulton; Bibliography.