New essays reappraising the history of the book, manuscripts, and texts. The dynamic fields of the history of the book and the sociology of the text are the areas this volume investigates, bringing together ten specially commissioned essays that between them demonstrate a range of critical and materialapproaches to medieval, early modern, and digital books and texts. They scrutinize individual medieval manuscripts to illustrate how careful re-reading of evidence permits a more nuanced apprehension of production, and receptionacross time; analyse metaphor for our understanding of the Byzantine book; examine the materiality of textuality from Beowulf to Pepys and the digital work in the twenty-first century; place manuscripts back into specific historical context; and re-appraise scholarly interpretation of significant periods of manuscript and print production in the later medieval and early modern periods. All of these essays call for a new assessment of the ways in which we read books and texts, making a major contribution to book history, and illustrating how detailed focus on individual cases can yield important new findings. Contributors: Elaine Treharne, Erika Corradini, Julia Crick, Orietta Da Rold, A.S.G. Edwards, Martin K. Foys, Whitney Anne Trettien, David L. Gants, Ralph Hanna, Robert Romanchuk, Margaret M. Smith, Liberty Stanavage.

Gaffe/Stutter is a dead letter to Deleuze's Logic of Sense. It began as a series of diagrams, two-dimensional memory palaces that sketch the vectors of each chapter's paradox; it became an elaborate plan for a web-based diagrammatic (r)e(n)dition of Logic of Sense, built on zoomable, annotatable high-resolution scans of these diagrams. Conceived as an anti-book - a visual reading schematic - this project eschews the line of text in favor of regimented grids, the ink-soaked grain of the remediated pen over the laser-burned face of print; playful reaction rather than academic protraction. This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would write in A Thousand Plateaus, but a composition of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency: a plan(e), a program, or rather a diagram, a problem, a question-machine. It ended as a directory of inert jQuery demos and digital scans: an image of Trafalgar Square at dusk, annotated with the words "Flag," "Small people on the steps," "A Statue," and "National Gallery Dome"; an empty html file titled 'delete.html'. The visitor who may happen to wander onto the website where these project demos are stashed would find herself stuck on Deleuze's definition of a paradox as initially that which destroys good sense as the only direction of becoming, but also that which destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities. From a series of diagrams to a dead-end digital directory, Gaffe/Stutter re-interprets a book that itself resists scholarly annotation. As with sense, it subsists in language; but it happens to things.