Required and Recommended Printed Texts
Required:
Drogin, Marc. Medieval Calligraphy, Its History and Technique. N.Y.: Dover, 1980. (List in 2007, $16.95--available discounted and used.)
Silvey, Deborah, Evelyn B. Tribble, and Anne Trubek, eds. Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. N.Y.: Longman, 2003. (List in 2007, $66--available used.)
Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbott. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. 4th ed. N.Y.: Modern Language Assocation, 2009. (List,$19.75--only available used in earlier editions, of which the 3rd would be the best substitute.)
Recommended:
Brown, Michelle. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum & British Library, 1994.
Drogin provides a good, well-illustrated introduction to the production of Medieval manuscript texts. Students interested in further work in Medieval manuscripts will find that his generalizations sometimes obscure important technical differences that professional manuscript scholars believe are important. More advanced readings are available for this delightful and vast field of study. This text is a bargain, especially if you can get it discounted or lightly used.
Tribble and Trubek's anthology was assigned mainly to provide properly copyright-cleared access to some important articles about the print vs. digital transformation of text production. As is the case with most anthologies, the majority of its readings are not assigned. Nevertheless, the astute browser will find that many of them will provide very accessible and stimulating discussions of print-to-digital aspect of the course discussion. Because the anthology was designed as a freshman composition anthology configured for a (very challenging!) course based on the "writing studies" movement, T and T have selected and edited readings to be accessible for advanced freshmen. You may observe that the library's print collection also contains a copy of this text. This anthology is extremely expensive, due in part to the large number of copyright-protected excerpts and whole articles they have paid to republish.
Williams and Abbott also are a compromise between assigning one of the "Bibles" of bibliographic description (e.g., Fredson Bowers or Philip Gaskell) or limiting our discussion of book description technology to a very simplified level. Both Bowers and Gaskell are available in the library collection, and students interested in print text production will find them extremely valuable for solving problems W & A do not address. Gaskell's diagrams of "imposition schemes" (the way printers set up type for printing multiple pages at once) present the best available tool for determining the printing format of printed books. Together with the DVD from the Rare Book School (see the Syllabus), Gaskell and Bowers constitute the core of the Rare Book School's Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography and Advanced Bibliography courses. If you think you might want to attend RBS some day, Those two authors are your best guides for preparation. For what W & A provide, this text seems appropriately priced.
Brown will be important for students who want to work with medieval manuscripts, which can lead to internships at the Walters Art Museum, the Folger, or the Library of Congress. The library has one large illuminated manuscript book, an "antiphonary" containing the music and lyrics for the Missa pro defunctis (Mass for the Dead). We also have sixteen illuminated manuscript leaves from another manuscript, and I have a collection of illuminated manuscript fragments, whole leaves, and one gathering, all of which are available for final projects. Brown does a nice job of explaining the arcane terms used to describe the color and form of medieval manuscript illumination, literally the "adding of light" to the MSS by using colored inks, gold and silver leaf, and various precious stones in powdered form. Because early printed books sought to imitate the style of manuscript books, the better to please the manuscript-trained readers, students interested in Early Modern printed books also may find Brown a useful "back-sight" to use when understanding the logic of early printed book construction.
Additional readings are available online via hyperlinks from the Syllabus for the days when they are assigned. Please take time at the beginning of the semester to work through all the primary assignment links from the Syllabus to make sure your computer can access them properly. Also, some readings are stored on the English 241 public folder. Access those readings via your Outlook or browser-based Goucher email account. The "Public Folders" tab on the left frame, below "Inbox" and "Sent Mail," etc., must be fully expanded before you can see the English 241 folder. Please practice this before the first folder-based reading is due so that we can solve any access problems you may have.