ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book brings into focus a remarkably important and complex phase of this long history. One thing seems certain: after 1450, when as Lucien Febvre puts it, 'some rather unusual "manuscripts" made their appearance in the northern regions of Western Europe', two very distinct discourses - of kin and ink, of prince and prints, of parenting and printing - began to merge. It was the parchment codex's physical capacity to endure rather than to multiply that initially got extolled after the invention of the printing press because, of course, no scribe could possibly compete with a printer in terms of reproductivity. In a 1987 study, Marjorie Garber observes that, 'the undecidability of paternity, articulated again and again in the plays by putative fathers like Lear, Leontes, Leonato, and Prospero, is analogous to, and evocative of, the undecidability of authorship'.
