How did the earliest printers go about their work? What factors accounted for economic success or failure? How did artists collaborate with printers? Who made up the audience for new books? Were printed books read differently from manuscript books? This collection addresses such key questions relating to the development of the book in the West during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Sandra Hindman brings together ten new essays representing a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including art, history, literature, history, theater, and analytic bibliography. Individual essays consider various aspects of the social and historical contexts of the early printed book in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and England. Rather than focusing on either the uneasy continuity or the fundamental discontinuity between scribal culture and print culture, as previous scholarship has tended to do, Printing the Written Word sheds light on the social function of the early printed book while presenting a detailed picture of its production and reception. -- Book cover.