The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern English Scribal Culture gathers together groundbreaking scholarship on anglophone scribes, scribal culture, and manuscript production in the early modern period, with a particular focus on the collaborative and networked nature of English manuscript culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It showcases both traditional and emerging conceptual and methodological tools that can be used to identify the different actors involved in a manuscript’s production. It surveys current thinking about how to assess the nature and scope of the various social, cultural, formal, institutional, literary, rhetorical, linguistic, material, and archival influences that shaped the composition and circulation of manuscripts, c. 1500-1700. It also proposes new intersectional and interdisciplinary avenues for future work on early modern scribes and scribal culture, synthesizing insights from leading experts across a wide range of fields that include cultural heritage, digital humanities, gender studies, histories of labour, literary studies, legal history, material culture, palaeography, religious history, and translation studies.

The volume as a whole comprises thirty-two chapters and is divided into four sections. The first of these (‘Materiality’) examines the material contexts of early modern English scribal culture, from the use of a particular ink, script, seal, letter-fold, parchment or paper, to consideration of the effect of archiving practices, past and present. The following three sections each focus on the scribes, sites, languages, documents, and cultures of a different genre of the manuscript industry, namely ‘Epistolary’, ‘Literary’, and ‘Legal’.

Key questions and topics for the volume include:

• the role, function, and influence of early modern scribes, and how these intersect with other roles in textual production (e.g., author, compiler, translator)

• the nature and forms of collaboration that exist in early modern English manuscripts, and the ways in which these are shaped by gender, race, and/or status 

• the extent to which collaborations and/or scribal interventions challenge inherited notions of early modern ‘authorship’

• the possibilities afforded by new approaches, such as digital tools, to archives and manuscripts, including the potential to recover hitherto marginalised voices.

Taken as a whole, the volume addresses a need for an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the conditions under which manuscripts – the beating heart of early modern English culture – were produced in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and the wider anglophone world. It also offers a much-needed assemblage of the state-of-the-art on early modern English scribal culture from across a variety of disciplines. It will be essential reading for students, educators, and researchers alike.