Publication Before Printing

Abstract

When the student of medieval literature busies himself, as he must so often do, with the chronological sequence of an author's works, he finds himself saying that a given writing was ‘published’ in a given year. What does the word ‘published’ mean? Obviously it must mean something different from the modern process of printer's proofs, advance notices, public sale, and book-reviews. When the textual critic strives to wrest from the existing manuscripts of a medieval work the evidence which shall enable him to reconstruct the author's original autograph, he finds himself speaking of copies made directly from this autograph. Under what conditions were these earliest copies ordinarily made? To both literary historian and textual critic it should be of service to make as clear as may be just what was involved in the act of publication before the discovery of printing introduced the sort of publication with which we are now familiar, and to determine under what conditions an author's work might circulate during his lifetime.