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History of the Book

Humanities

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Origin from 1958

The study of how a text's material form, scroll, manuscript, printed book, shaped who produced, read and altered it, given its modern method by Febvre and Martin in 1958. Traces how a scripture's own transmission history introduced or removed textual variation.

Facts
Method
Method
tracing of a text's transmission through the successive material forms, scroll, codex, print, that carried it, treating each format change as historically consequential 2
Subject
Subject
how a text's material form, scroll, manuscript codex, printed book, shaped who could read it, how it was read and how faithfully it was copied 2
Identity
Field Category
Humanities 1
Parent Field
History 1
Origins
Emerged As Named Discipline
from 1958 2
Learn More
Febvre and Martin Ask What Printing Actually Changed

The history of the book studies how a text's material carrier, papyrus scroll, parchment or paper codex, movable type printing, shaped who could produce, own, read and alter it, treating the shift between formats as a historical event with real consequences rather than a neutral change of container. The discipline took its modern form with Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'Apparition du livre, published in 1958, which studied the spread of printing in Europe after Gutenberg as a social and economic transformation, tracing how the printed book changed literacy, standardized texts that manuscript copying had let drift, and reorganized who controlled the production of religious and scholarly writing.

Every scripture the atlas describes has a material history of its own, oral transmission giving way to manuscript, manuscript to print, print eventually to digital text, and each transition changed who could produce an authoritative copy and how uniform that copy was. The history of the book supplies the dates and mechanisms of those transitions for a given tradition's scripture, letting the atlas distinguish a genuinely ancient textual variant from one introduced by a documented later printing history.

Scholarly Disciplines of History of the Book

Analytical Bibliography

Humanities
4 links

Codicology

Humanities
29 links
Cross-Tradition Connections

Branch Of

History, Scholarly Disciplines
Source Frascati Manual 2015: Guidelines for Collecting and Reporting Data on Research and Experimental DevelopmentOECD

Open Questions Needing This

Where does the Theban sign for A come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for B come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for C come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for D come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for E come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for F come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for G come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for H come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for I come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for J come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for K come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for L come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for M come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for N come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for O come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for P come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for Q come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for R come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for S come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for T come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for U come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for V come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for W come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for X come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for Y come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Where does the Theban sign for Z come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Who first printed a Theban sign for J distinct from the sign for I, and where did that form come from?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Who first printed a Theban sign for U distinct from the sign for V, and where did that form come from?, Open Questions
Source Theban alphabet (reference article)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Frascati Manual 2015: Guidelines for Collecting and Reporting Data on Research and Experimental Development
OECD, OECD Publishing, 2015View the Source
2. The Oxford Companion to the Book
Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (editors), Oxford University Press, 2010
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