Erik Kwakkel’s Books before Print is a well-designed and readable introduction to western medieval manuscripts, their materiality, historical context, research value, and enduring legacy. The author surveys paleography, codicology, and other aspects of the medieval book in thirty-two multi-part chapters, each with its own introduction beginning with a full-page illustration. The chapters are arranged in five broad sections: [1] “Filling the Page: Script, Writing and Page Design” (29–70); [2] “Enhancing the Manuscript: Design and Decoration (71–117); [3] “Reading in Context: Annotations, Bookmarks, and Libraries” (119–151); [4] “The Margins of Manuscript Culture” (153–203); and [5] “Contextualizing the Medieval Manuscript” (207–248). The book also includes a General Introduction (1–27), Epilogue (249–251), and Bibliography (257–270). There are 129 color illustrations, including many excellent close-up photographs by Kwakkel himself, supplemented by a selection of the ever-growing treasury of digital images available online. For those unfamiliar with the publisher, Arc Humanities Press was launched in 2018 to publish new research on medieval and other global pre-modern history, with distribution by Amsterdam University Press. The publisher’s goal is broader public understanding of the past, somewhat in the spirit of Humanities for All, a 2018 program of the National Humanities Alliances “to document and promote publicly engaged humanities research, teaching, preservation, and programming in US higher education.”
As Kwakkel explains in his preface, the book “is intended for those who want to learn about medieval manuscripts and are new to the topic, or perhaps have some prior knowledge.” His primary audience is undergraduates in History, English, Medieval Studies, and Book History. But he also feels the book will have value for graduate students and general readers. Readers familiar with Kwakkel’s blogs MedievalFragments(2012–14) and MedievalBooks (2014–present) will recognize much of the subject matter in the present book. Kwakkel explains in MedievalBooks how he wrote Books before Print by reusing “the first fifty or so posts to create [the present] book about medieval manuscripts for students and non-experts.” He also reuses to his own published research in scholarly books and articles. His knowledge is the product of considerable learning, wide reading, and hands-on experience with medieval manuscripts at the Leiden Universiteitsbibliotheek and other libraries internationally. He makes every effort to present contents in an engaging, conversational, and non-technical way. For example, he often uses colloquialisms instead of standard established technical terminology for chapter and section titles. This is done to help students and non-specialists, lacking appropriate subject knowledge, appreciate the relevance of medieval manuscripts to the modern mixed informational economy of printed books and digital communications. We see this popularizing approach in chapter titles like “Medieval Name Tags,” “Dressing up the Manuscript,” “Smart Bookmarks,” “Medieval Book Apps,” “Desktops,” “Speech Bubbles,” “Hugging a Manuscript,” and “The Skinny on Bad Parchment.” This continues through the book, as when rag-based slurry in papermaking is called “cloth mush”; the biting of letters in Proto-Gothic (Pre-Gothic) script becomes “kissing”; and hornbooks are examined in a chapter titled “Books on a Stick.”
Yet Kwakkel’s popularizing approach belies his two decades of scholarly contributions to the study of medieval manuscripts, beginning with his doctoral dissertation at the University of Leiden, published as Die Dietsche Boeke Die Ons Toebehoeren: De Kartuizers Van Herne En De Productie Van Middelnederlandse Handschriften in De Regio Brussel (1350-1400) (Leuven: Peeters, 2002); continuing in insightful articles in academic journals; and more recently, co-editorship with Stephen Partridge of Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), and with Rodney Thomson of The European Book in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). As a result, Kwakkel’s overall interpretation and presentation of factual information is generally quite reliable, with minor exceptions. For example, in explaining the value of watermark evidence, Kwakkel notes, “the watermarks from a single mill vary slightly over time. Today’s databases of these unique watermarks, identifying which logos belonged to which paper mills at specific dates, makes them a handy tool for dating medieval paper manuscripts” (10). But it would be more accurate to say that the two main compendia of medieval watermarks (C.-M. Briquet, Les filigranes; and Gerhard Piccard, Wasserzeichen), whether their many published volumes or online versions, chiefly date and localize particular watermarks on the basis of dated archival documents on paper, whose use has been recorded for particular places and years, even when the mill itself cannot be determined, as is so often the case.
Among Kwakkel’s principal premises in the present book is his unquestionable assertion that medieval manuscripts were not random creations, but rather purposeful. As such, they offer a wealth of internal evidence about their materiality, including design, production, intended use, and physical modification and use over time. This evidence helps us read text and see images in their proper cultural context, and shape our understanding of book history before printing. As he explains, “their features reflect how the original reader wanted his or her text ‘packaged’ materially. To put it differently, material features are ‘cultural residue,’ tangible traces of the rationale behind the manuscript’s intended use...Thus, material traits not only speak to the appearance of books before print, they also act as the conduit to medieval reading culture, more broadly to communication before the coming of print” (3). Most of the book is focused on observing and interpreting the myriad details of physical evidence in connection with scribal culture, design and production, the codex and other book formats, illustration and decoration, binding and labeling, libraries, private book ownership, book trade, readers and reader practices, marginal annotation, textual emendation, and countless other subjects. Kwakkel’s Epilogue opens with the rhetorical question, “What can reveal more about the culture of a milieu or of an epoch than the style of its books?”
In conclusion, Kwakkel’s Books before Print effectively introduces the world of medieval manuscripts, especially text manuscripts, though not ignoring illumination and illustration. For undergraduate courses and the general reader, the book would nicely complement Christopher De Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators (1992); and Barbara A. Shailor, The Medieval Book (1991). It can also take its place with older surveys of books before the age of printing, such as David Diringer, The Book before Printing: Ancient, Medieval, and Oriental (1982); and Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2010). It should be noted that all of these titles are in-print and available in paperback. For graduate study, Kwakkel’s book is best for its focus on the importance of physical evidence for scholarly research.