Engages with the materiality of medieval manuscripts to illustrate the importance of the study of physical texts to literary appreciation, and studies marginal annotation, the physical characteristics of manuscripts and books, and miniature illustrations to show how the book was encountered and understood by medieval producers and readers.

Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Robert K. Packard University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is a medieval literature and manuscript specialist, with expertise in the long history of human communication and archival studies. She has published over thirty books and sixty articles, mostly focused on Old and Middle English texts in their manuscript contexts, and also on the digital aspect of early textuality. She is interested in the record of human experience: how it is transmitted, who is remembered, and how the past is memorialised.

• 1: 'A Profit to People': Introduction


• 2: 'Fingers folded me': Making the Book


• 3: 'Covered me with tracks': Writing the Book


• 4: 'People will use me': Book as Archive


• 5: 'My name is famous': Presence in the Book


• 6: 'In spirit the wiser': Invisible Things in the Book


• 7: 'Covered with protecting boards': Representing the Book


• 8: 'Cut by the edge of the knife': Libricide and the Modern Book Trade


• 9: 'More true and better': Digital Fragmentation and Frameworks of Understanding


• 10: Bookending þa wuldorgesteald, 'the wondrous edifice'


• Bibliography