This dissertation entitled “Pulp” Fiction: A Bibliographical and Material Analysis of Vernacular Literature on Paper” centers on the material history of vernacular texts copied on paper, namely the Roman de la Rose and the translations of Laurent de Premierfait. Both the Roman de la Rose and Laurent de Premierfait’s Cent Nouvelles, as well as its original version in the Italian vernacular, Boccaccio’s Decameron, were primarily produced for and consumed by those in the upper echelons of society during the late Medieval and Early Modern periods, c. 1440-1500. The large corpus of surviving manuscript copies of these vernacular texts attests to their desirability in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This project reassesses the role of paper in the book production process on the cusp of modernity, arguing that paper is more than a support; rather, it is an apparatus that serves to change how a text is laid out on the page, which in turn, changes how the book is read, and thus who might have been reading it. By analyzing the material evidence present in these manuscripts and early printed books, I assemble a case concerning readership and engagement, particularly on the cusp of the early modern period with the advent of the printed book, probing the overlap of the manufacture of both manuscript and printed materials.Additionally, by examining the watermarks of the paper of these books and manuscripts, I uncover the network of their transmission, and even their connections to one another, tracing them to various regions of France and perhaps even elsewhere in Europe. Each book examined in this dissertation demonstrates that the readership of these texts did not so much vary from one economic stratum to another, but rather, in the different levels at which literate people would have engaged with them. The greatest determinant in readerly engagement is the nature of the texts themselves above any other material factor.