Aus unseren Neuerwerbungen – Anglistik 2025.4

Libraries and books in medieval Eng­land: the role of libraries in a chang­ing book econ­o­my
A his­to­ry of books in medieval Eng­land, includ­ing libraries, pri­vate own­er­ship, and the birth of the book trade.
Medieval Eng­land was full of books, but when the country’s monas­ter­ies were sup­pressed by King Hen­ry VIII their libraries were scat­tered and lost. Twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry his­to­ri­ans have long worked to dis­cov­er what those libraries once held. This vol­ume, by the country’s lead­ing expert in the field, paints a new pic­ture of the his­to­ry of books and libraries in medieval Eng­land from an impres­sive array of avail­able evi­dence.
To recon­struct the trans­mis­sion of cul­ture in the Mid­dle Ages, schol­ars need to under­stand and employ with care the evi­dence of both sur­viv­ing books and medieval library cat­a­logs. Libraries and Books in Medieval Eng­land seeks to move away from the mod­ern con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of the monas­tic library as the only venue for medieval book pro­vi­sion, broad­en­ing aware­ness of the wider book econ­o­my, includ­ing pri­vate own­er­ship and the birth of the book trade. The result, based on author Richard Sharpe’s Lyell Lec­tures at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, is a work that offers an unpar­al­leled view of the field.
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Vic­to­ri­an love let­ters in lit­er­a­ture and art
In Vic­to­ri­an times, when postal reforms and tech­no­log­i­cal progress rev­o­lu­tion­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tion, let­ter writ­ing became more wide­spread than ever. Love let­ters, in par­tic­u­lar, con­tin­ued to be cen­tral in the courtship rit­u­al. How­ev­er, as new ideas about love and mar­riage came along, they no longer exclu­sive­ly rep­re­sent­ed the quin­tes­sen­tial roman­tic form in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion.
Through a close analy­sis of a broad cor­pus of Vic­to­ri­an cor­re­spon­dences, nov­els and paint­ings, this book demon­strates that nov­el­ists and painters who dealt with the ever-recur­ring themes of love and mar­riage could not refrain from incor­po­rat­ing an epis­to­lary ele­ment into their works. Let­ters still inspired artists of all kinds, and advances in com­mu­ni­ca­tions, rather than dis­plac­ing them, made peo­ple more aware of the essence and poten­tial­i­ty of this medi­um.
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