Bringing together a broad range of case studies written by a team of international scholars, this Concise Companion establishes how manuscripts and printed books met the needs of two different approaches to literacy in the early modern period.

• Features essays illustrating the particular ways a manuscript and a printed book reflect the different emphases of an elite, private and an egalitarian, public culture, both of which account for the literary achievements of the Renaissance


• Includes wide-ranging essays, from printing the Gospels in Arabic to a contemporary reconceptualization of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus


• Increases accessibility through a rubric organized around archival and manuscript studies; the provenance of texts and the authority of editions; and studies of genre, religion and literary history


• Announces the recovery of archival documents, which in some instances are over four hundred years old


• Places translations of Milton's Latin, Greek, and Italian alongside the original texts to increase accessibility for a wide audience of students and scholars


• Provides an invaluable platform for highlighting on-going attention to the history of the book and its corollary subjects of reading and writing practices in the 1500s and 1600s