Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Javier del Barco -- 1 Commissioned and Owner-Produced Manuscripts in the Sephardi Zone and Italy in the Thirteenth–Fifteenth Centuries / Malachi Beit-Arié -- 2 Immigrant Scribes’ Handwriting in Northern Italy from the Late Thirteenth to the Mid-Sixteenth Century: Sephardi and Ashkenazi Attitudes toward the Italian Script / Edna Engel -- 3 Studia of Philosophy as Scribal Centers in Fifteenth-Century Iberia / Colette Sirat -- 4 Jewish Book Owners and Their Libraries in the Iberian Peninsula, Fourteenth–Fifteenth Centuries / Joseph R. Hacker -- 5 Inscribing Piety in Late-Thirteenth-Century Perpignan / Eva Frojmovic -- 6 The Scholarly Interests of a Scribe and Mapmaker in Fourteenth-Century Majorca: Elisha ben Abraham Bevenisti Cresques’s Bookcase / Katrin Kogman-Appel -- 7 Le‘azim in David Kimhi’s Sefer ha-shorashim: Scribes and Printers through Space and Time / Judith Kogel -- 8 Fifteenth-Century Castilian Translations from Hebrew Literature / Sonia Fellous -- 9 The Artist of the Barcelona Haggadah / Evelyn M. Cohen -- 10 Quotations, Translations, and Uses of Jewish Texts in Ramon Martí’s Pugio fidei / Philippe Bobichon -- 11 Unknown Sephardi Incunabula / Shimon M. Iakerson -- 12 What Do We Know about Hebrew Printing in Guadalajara, Híjar, and Zamora? / Adri K. Offenberg -- 13 Techne and Culture: Printers and Readers in Fifteenth-Century Hispano-Jewish Communities / Eleazar Gutwirth -- General Index -- Index of Manuscripts and Incunabula.

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This collection takes the Hebrew book as a focal point for exploring the production, circulation, transmission, and consumption of Hebrew texts in the cultural context of the late medieval western Mediterranean. The authors elaborate in particular on questions concerning private vs. public book production and collection; the religious and cultural components of manuscript patronage; collaboration between Christian and Jewish scribes, artists, and printers; and the impact of printing on Iberian Jewish communities. Unlike other approaches that take context into consideration merely to explain certain variations in the history of the Hebrew book from antiquity to the present, the premise of these essays is that context constitutes the basis for understanding practices and processes in late medieval Jewish book culture.