Pub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.2
B. Cummings
The book is difficult to define, caught between a physical object, usually rectangular, made by tying together a stack of pages so that one side is bound and fixed, and the other free and loose; and an intellectual object, one that delimits a project that is self-sufficient and of reasonably substantial (though indeterminate) length. Clearly these physical and non-physical definitions are intimately related, yet they also involve considerable philosophical indeterminacy. A book is both finite and indefinite, open and restricted. This chapter considers both dimensions of the book, arguing that object and idea are inseparable. It discusses the 5,000 year history of the book from cuneiform to the Kindle, and theories of the book from Augustine to Petrarch, or from Freud to Heidegger. It is divided into five sections: the Book as Object; Contents; Metaphor; Technology; and Machine.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830801.013.16
A. Bale
This chapter explores reading and writing on the move, through the transnational medium of pilgrims’ books. It considers literary writing about pilgrimage by the likes of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer; a printed indulgence sold to pilgrims the shrine of St Cornelius in St Margaret’s Church at Westminster; and the routes taken, books read, and texts produced by particular medieval pilgrims, including Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV of England. The chapter examines the ways in which pilgrimage was a stimulus to writing as well as to reading, and was a process that put the material facets of textual production into a variety of dynamic and often surprising relations with communities of readers and writers.
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