"Books and Collectors brings together the most recent research of twenty-three distinguished scholars, focusing on four major themes in the history of the book over five centuries - monastic books and medieval learning, humanism and incunabula, the dispersal of monastic libraries, and post-monastic collectors. The essays - written in honour of the work of Professor Andrew Watson, one of the pioneers in this field - draw on evidence offered by library catalogues and lists (some of which are printed here for the first time), the work of individual monastic houses and monks, book bindings and illuminations, book dealers and collectors and the close study of scripts and manuscript annotations."--BOOK JACKET.