Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies

Jennifer Andersen, Elizabeth Sauer

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 - History - 305 pages

Books and Readers in Early Modern England examines readers, reading, and publication practices from the Renaissance to the Restoration. The essays draw on an array of documentary evidence—from library catalogs, prefaces, title pages and dedications, marginalia, commonplace books, and letters to ink, paper, and bindings—to explore individual reading habits and experiences in a period of religious dissent, political instability, and cultural transformation.

Chapters in the volume cover oral, scribal, and print cultures, examining the emergence of the "public spheres" of reading practices. Contributors, who include Christopher Grose, Ann Hughes, David Scott Kastan, Kathleen Lynch, William Sherman, and Peter Stallybrass, investigate interactions among publishers, texts, authors, and audience. They discuss the continuity of the written word and habits of mind in the world of print, the formation and differentiation of readerships, and the increasing influence of public opinion. The work demonstrates that early modern publications appeared in a wide variety of forms—from periodical literature to polemical pamphlets—and reflected the radical transformations occurring at the time in the dissemination of knowledge through the written word. These forms were far more ephemeral, and far more widely available, than modern stereotypes of writing from this period suggest.

Contents

• Plays into Print Shakespeare to His Earliest Readers: 23
• Books and Scrolls Navigating the Bible: 42
• Theatrum Libri Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy and the Failure of Encyclopedic Form: 73
• Approaches to Presbyterian Print Culture Thomas Edwardss Gangraena as Source and Text: 90
• Traces of Reading Margins Libraries Prefaces and Bindings: 110
• What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?: 112
• The Countess of Bridgewaters London Library: 131
• Lego Ego Reading SeventeenthCentury Books of Epigrams: 153
• Devotion Bound A Social History of The Temple: 170
• Print Publishing and Public Opinion: 192
• Preserving the Ephemeral Reading Collecting and the Pamphlet Culture of SeventeenthCentury England: 194
• Licensing Readers Licensing Authorities in SeventeenthCentury England: 210
• Licensing Metaphor Parker Marvell and the Debate over Conscience: 236
• John Drydens Angry Readers: 254
• Records of Culture: 275
• Contributors: 284
• Index: 288

Popular passages

Page 1 - Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and licence it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks.

About the author

Jennifer Andersen teaches English at California State University, San Bernardino. Elizabeth Sauer is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies; Book collections on Project MUSE; Material Texts
• Editors: Jennifer Andersen, Elizabeth Sauer
• Contributor: Stephen Orgel
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002
• ISBN: 0812217942, 9780812217940
• Length: 305 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / Renaissance; Literary Criticism / Books & Reading; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh