Review

“…magnificent…provides an unparalleled access to the history of books and the book trade between 1557 to 1695. Apart from its knowledgable analyses – often aided or illustrated by charts and diagrams – the volume offers an authoritative source of knowledge and data not widely known or readily available elsewhere.”

— Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

“A volume and a series that every interdisciplinary research collection requires. Essential.”

— Choice

“We now have a truly impressive means of surveying this field, taking stock of its current strengths and weaknesses, and perceiving new and needed avenues of investigation.”

— Renaissance Quarterly

“This rich, polyphonic volume is a timely contribution to the ‘history of the book.'”

— Seventeenth-Century News

“There is plenty here to savor and whet the appetite for further research. And it is perhaps a healthy sign of a rapidly evolving field that even 800 pages offer only a taste of its full scope.”

— H-Albion

“This book has, I think, brought the study of legal history into the mainstream of Tudor historiography and its ongoing debate over the formation of the state. Through archival virtuosity rarely matched, Kesselring has forced us to acknowledge that the state was not without its own extremely effective techniques in the negotiations over power that have recently dominated the field. This book should, I believe, become as crucial a statement of the linkage between social and political history for the next decade as Cynthia Herrup’s classic The Common Peace was for the last.”

— H-ALBION

“This is a most valuable collection. It admirably records the extrordinary impact of the trade in printed and manuscript books that, as John Barnard observes in the introduction, ‘was out of all proportion to its economic significance.’ I recommend volume 4 very highly to all scholars in the variety of different fields that impinge upon the history of the book in early modern Britain.”

— Sixteenth Century Journal

“The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. 4:1557-1695, is an extraordinary resource, with thirty-eight highly informative, accessible essays, grouped into well-conceived sections, following a substantial introduction by Barnard. All the essays are superb. The entire book is fascinating-an education in the Renaissance.”

— SEL Studies in English Literature, Achsah Guibbory, Recent Studies in the English Renaissance

“This latest volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is an outstanding scholarly achievement.”

— Journal of Modern History