Belligerent Literacy, Bookplates and Graffiti: Dorothy Helbarton’s Book

Abstract

For those of us who study the books of times long past — in my case, from England, from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries — we are accustomed to thinking of our sources as the remnant of destruction. The books we study have been used by generations of readers, abused by iconoclasts, reformers and censors, and mistreated by the ebb and flow of esteem and literary fashions. Changing technologies of writing and language caused texts to become out-dated, curious, incomprehensible, rebound or abandoned; the survival rate of medieval English books is estimated to be around 2 to 5 per cent, although a book, if destroyed efficiently, leaves no traces and so this is guesswork.