Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects

Chapter 1. Introduction: Evanghelia Stead.- Part I : Manuscripts as Cultural Objects.- Chapter 2. From Devotional Aids to Antiquarian Objects: The Prayer Books of Medingen - Henrike Lähnemann.- Chapter 3. How to Read the "Andachtsbüchlein aus der Sammlung Bouhier" (Montpellier, BU Médecine, H 396)? On Cultural Techniques Related to a 14th-century Devotional Manuscript- Henrike Manuwald.- Chapter 4. "Otium et negotium". Reading Processes in Early Italian and German Humanism - Michael Stolz.- Part II: Prints in Europe .- Chapter 5. The Fluidity of Images or the Compression of Media Diversity in Books: "Galeriewerke" and "Histoire Métallique" - Christina Posselt-Kuhli.- Chapter 6. Change of Use, Change of Public, Change of Meaning. Printed Images Travelling through Europe - Alberto Milano (+).- Part III: Printed Books: Media, Objects, Uses.- Chapter 7. The Promotion of the Heroic Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Gift Book - Barbara Korte.- Chapter 8. "Pinocchio": an Adventure Illustrated over More than a Century (1883-2004) - Giorgio Bacci.- Chapter 9. Illustration and the Book as Cultural Object: Arthur Schnitzler's Works in German and English Editions - Norbert Bachleitner.- Chapter 10. Two Peas in a Pod: Book Sales Clubs and Book Ownership in the Twentieth Century - Corinna Norrick-Rühl.- Epilogue.- Chapter 11. E-Readers and Polytextual Critique: On some Emerging Material Conditions in the Early Age of Digital Reading -Stephan Packard.

Evanghelia Stead is Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France and Comparative Literature Professor at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin (UVSQ), France. She runs the TIGRE seminar at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. She has published extensively on print culture, iconography, reception, myth, the fin-de-siècle, and the 'Thousand and Second Night' literary tradition.

"This fascinating collection will be of interest to many VPR readers for its emphasis on the methodologies of studying text and image in the broad context of print (and manuscript) culture. It provokes those of us working in the orbit of nineteenth-century periodicals to think more comparatively about our approaches to the media we research." (Mark W. Turner, Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 53 (1), 2020)

"Evanghelia Stead's Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects will be welcomed by Book Studies scholars for its modeling of a material approach to reading that crosses chronologies, geographies, and media. A truly interdisciplinary collection, there is much here to provoke, challenge, and inspire future studies." (Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Quaerendo, Vol. 49, 2019)

"It offers a stimulating interdisciplinary perspective on the function of books and prints, spanning a broad period from medieval manuscript to digital work. ... Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects is a very rich and insightful interdisciplinary approach." (Fabienne Gaspari, Interfaces, Vol. 42, 2019)