This collection, part of Ashgate’s Material Readings in Early Modern Culture series, focuses not only on the materiality of the book, but on a related field of inquiry, the concept of authority. The essays in this volume begin with the shared premise that to be meaningful, the concept of authority must be extended beyond the author as traditionally conceived to all the hands that produce both the book and its claims on us: the scribe, publisher, editor, compositor, distributor, bookseller, patron, glossator, and reader, to name only some of the most important. As one contributor puts it, the approach favored here is to follow “texts throughout their life-cycle” (16), to articulate the meaning of authority through all the stages of the production and dissemination of the book. The book is a written object, but also an edited, rewritten, printed, and read object, and, from the perspective of this collection, each of these functions become part of what constitutes a book’s authority. Authority thus becomes a kind of hermeneutic key word, a thread for tracing a book’s history and its meaning.

According to the editor, earlier scholarly work on authority has failed to grasp the full significance of book culture because it has been insufficiently conversant with the intricate and historically fluid details of the material production of the book and therefore overly preoccupied with the writer. “It is not difficult to see why scholars have sometimes preferred to view authority as an enduring value that has the same presumed sources, agency and effects in the pre-modern period as in the twenty-first century,” Bromilow writes, “as to attempt to redefine it in a more historicized way requires an almost forensic reconstruction of all the different elements at play” (2). The essays in this volume go about this painstaking work of reconstruction, each dedicated to the forensics of reading a highly local instance of the interplay of agencies that produce authority.

Although the volume announces itself as constituting a break with earlier studies of authority, one important set of data would seem to exert a constant pull on both materialist and earlier scholarship, namely, the paratext. Paratexual matter — frontispieces, dedications, prefaces, addresses to the reader, illustrations — form the membrane between the writer’s desk and the world, the place of negotiation and collaboration in the establishment of literary authority. All the essays in the volume make heavy use of this material, and one, Brian Richardson’s “Manuscript, Print, Orality and the Authority of Texts in Renaissance Italy,” takes “the accretion of paratexts” (17) (together with revision, inscription, and transmission) as one of the chief ways texts accrue authority.

The essays included treat both manuscript and print books (although with much more emphasis on the latter) from across early modern Europe. Although there is some variation in methodologies employed here, readers should not look to this collection for theoretical speculation about authority and authorship or broadly applicable dicta concerning the early modern book. Nor does the collection treat many authors or books central to the literary canon — Erasmus Stella and Erasmus Alber receive extended treatments, but not Erasmus of Rotterdam. In keeping with its approach, the book’s emphasis is on scenes of the social production of authority rather than on the significance of the books themselves. The strength of this collection is in its impressively careful and fine-grained scholarship; this strength is consistent through all of the essays. This volume will have little appeal to a general scholarly audience, but it will be very valuable for historians or historicist literary scholars of the period who study book culture or material culture more generally.