Ralph Hanna is Professor Emeritus of Palaeography at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Riverside. He has published on Langland, literary culture and medieval manuscripts, including The English MS of Richard Rolle (University of Exeter Press, 2010 [now published by Liverpool University Press]).

"This is a first-rate book from a scholar at the forefront of palaeographical and bibliographical study; it will have a wide readership. It will be an excellent partner for the recent Owen-Crocker volume 'Working with Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts'."--Series Editors

"Scholarship in this work is superb. Quotations, translations, bibliography are spot on. Professor Hanna's lifetime of intelligent work in the field glows at all points of discussion."--MS Referee

"... this volume is testament to Hanna's erudition and knowledge as a book-history scholar, and careful, repeated reading will repay the reader with numerous insights into the key questions of book history and how to 'do' it."--Library

"This handsome volume teaches far more than the facts of book history, manuscript culture, and Middle English Literature. It is a model of how to sleuth, how to think critically, how to enter into a detective mindset 'in which every implicit assumption of knowledge [is] teased out, queried and productively qualified' (p. xi)." --Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen