Bringing together a broad range of case studies written by a team of international scholars, this Concise Companion establishes how manuscripts and printed books met the needs of two different approaches to literacy in the early modern period.

• Features essays illustrating the particular ways a manuscript and a printed book reflect the different emphases of an elite, private and an egalitarian, public culture, both of which account for the literary achievements of the Renaissance
• Includes wide-ranging essays, from printing the Gospels in Arabic to a contemporary...