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This chapter posits Leon Modena's writing practices within the context of early modern Venice, capital of Hebrew printing and center of manuscript production. The circumstances of Modena's life as well as the cultural world of early modern Venice offer some context for why Ari Nohem (The Roaring Lion, 1840) did not appear in print in the seventeenth century. As a work of criticism, Ari Nohem reflected upon the transmission of Jewish tradition, particularly the transmission of esoteric information and the principles of Jewish law. Modena argued that the printing of legal and kabbalistic books had effected a radical change in the transmission of Jewish tradition, a change that he decried in no uncertain terms at several points. Ari Nohem polemicized against one medium, print, in the form of another, manuscript.

This chapter considers how Arabo-Islamic scholarship operated in the centuries before the adoption of print in the early nineteenth century, when books still had to be written and copied by hand. It is tempting to divide the history of Arabo-Islamic book culture into two simple stages, manuscript and print, each stage marked by distinct, uniform characteristics. But the chapter asserts that a range of factors, including economic and institutional constraints, scholarly trends, and basic assumptions about the nature of knowledge, modulate book culture in decisive ways. To understand why printing caught on in the Arabic-speaking world precisely when it did, and why it took the forms and had the consequences that it did, the chapter takes a look at the unique features of Islamic intellectual culture before the printing revolution, in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The first and most basic feature of this culture relates to the availability, or lack thereof, of books.

The first chapter introduces early modern English verse collectors, their manuscript verse miscellanies, and the methods that they used to produce these anthologies. After surveying a range of their favorite texts, it discusses a few of the earliest manuscripts of anti-courtly love poems by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the anonymous author of an enormously popular female monologue spoken during intercourse and beginning, “Nay, phew nay pish? nay faith and will ye, fie.” Finally, the introductory chapter turns to the poetic libels with which collectors recontextualized these and other anti-courtly love poems.

This chapter discusses the following: response to the coming of the Anglo-Normans; manuscripts of imported style; Seoán Ó Dubhágain, the families of Ó Cianáin, Mac Aodhagáin, and Mac Fir Bhisigh; the great manuscripts of the later middle ages; and the survival of manuscript production in the age of printing.

Chapter four stresses the importance of institutions in enabling the reproduction of large numbers of Buddhist texts. It surveys the types of institutions that existed in ancient Japan and argues for the close connection between bureaucracy and ritual practice. It begins with an overview of the process of sutra copying. It then turns to continental precedent before looking at some of the earliest sutra copying projects in Japan and the institutions that sponsored them. It provides a detailed institutional history of a scriptorium at Tōdaiji closely connected to Queen Consort Kōmyōshi but also uncovers numerous other scriptoria managed by a variety of individuals in the capital and provinces, some of relatively small scale. It also addresses projects known as “private copying” in documents at the Tōdaiji scriptorium to show how individuals could use personal connections to utilize state institutions for their own purposes.

The second chapter brings to life the short Old English Riddle 26, which is traditionally regarded as an animated textual revelation of the process of producing an early medieval manuscript. In this case, the Riddle is solved as ‘Gospel-book’, an object designed to offer salvation for its readers and users. Through a close and detailed reading of the poem, including analysis of poetic techniques, it is clear that the poet had an expert knowledge of the methods and sensory effects of book manufacture and a keen perception of what a book could mean to those who enjoyed it. The Riddle suggests not only how readers might benefit from appreciating their reading as spiritual nourishment, but also provides evidence for thinking metaphorically of the book as an ‘edifice of letters’. Old English vocabulary for books reinforces the sense of the materiality of the object.