Bischof draws from the fertile records of book donation mainly to the two new universities at Oxford and Cambridge and to various religious communities and churches, to explore shifts in
emphasis and value attributed to the written word as literacy levels and cultural circumstances changed. She considers only manuscripts, because the advent of print brought factors that would
change the nature and scope of the study. Her topics are the theoretical background of gifts and values, donations and testaments--the records of book gifts, indicators of value: the semantic
fields describing books in gift records, and context-independent and context-dependent indicators of value. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
