Survival of manuscript

The obituary of the book has often been written. Since the early 2000s, at least, its demise has been confidently foretold and its replacement by e-readers and digital texts prophesied. But the book lives on in rude good health and shows no sign of dying anytime soon. It is true that Kindles and iPads have changed how we read, but they seem, so far, to have supplemented books rather than replaced them.

The relationship between how printed book and electronic text are read gives us a fascinating parallel to that between manuscript and print. In the sixteenth century, as in the twenty-first, a long established medium of communication was challenged by an exciting new technology. And the outcome of that struggle was neither so quick or so simple as historians have long believed. Until relatively recently, many historians believed that print had broken into sixteenth century Europe like a technological tsunami, sweeping an older manuscript reading culture irresistibly out of its way.

Only more recently have historians begun to appreciate that the success of print was much slower and much less inevitable than it seemed, and that manuscript and print publication both had a role to play in the circulation of knowledge at that time.

Indeed, as we have seen in week 1, early printing was more concerned with mimicking manuscripts, rather than replacing them. In the same way as early websites were modelled closely on the structure of printed books, the first printed books aimed to look as like manuscripts as possible. It would take some time – and many difficult lessons in supply and demand – until printers were able to confidently produce books that took advantages of all the potential of the new medium.

But the emergence of a stable print market did not spell the end for the older way of reading. This is illustrated by a letter written in April 1619 by the English poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631). With the letter, Donne sent his friend Sir Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram (c. 1578–1654) a manuscript copy of Biathanatos, an odd exercise on the topic of suicide, which Donne acknowledged to be ‘a misinterpretable subject.’ The volume came with strict instructions for Kerr:

‘Reserve it for me if I live, and if I die I only forbid it the press and the fire; publish it not, but yet burn it not, and between those do what you will with it.’

^{Fig 1. John Donne Biathanatos (London, 1644), title page. © Wikimedia commons}

^{Fig 2. TCD MS 877, fol. 1r, showing the first page of the ‘Table of Contents’. © The Board of Trinity College Dublin.}

^{Fig 3. TCD MS 877, fol. 258v, showing John Carew’s ‘On the Death of a Great Tobacconist’. © The Board of Trinity College Dublin.}

^{Fig 4. TCD MS 877, fol. 260r, showing ‘A Lover’s Embassie by the God of Love’. © The Board of Trinity College Dublin.}

• Can you think of any modern examples of coterie publication’?

Dr Mark Sweetnam, School of English, Trinity College Dublin