This course introduces students to the varied ways in which medieval writers thought about books as physical objects. In the Middle Ages, books were repositories of information, but also sacred objects to be venerated, and even totemic items to be slept with, caressed, and hugged, or alternatively to be slashed, dismembered, and discarded. Students will learn about the many responses authors had to books and libraries, from the learned villa-dwellers of late antique Gaul and Italy to the manuscript-hunters of the early Renaissance. Authors and topics to be studied may include Cassiodorus, Lupus of Ferrières, Alcuin, Photius, Dhuoda, Richard de Bury, Petrarch; and Christine de Pizan.