The History of the Book and a History of Two Books: How Print Culture Can Inform Literary Study (original) (raw)

Recent publications in the history of the book show both the variety and sophistication of studies in this emerging discipline; even so, skeptics find little literary value in print culture studies. In response, this demonstrates how literary strategies in two early modern texts-Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609)-respond to divergent conditions in print culture in Venice and London. The history of the book has emerged in the last few decades if not as a 'discipline' at least as an important category of scholarly inquiry especially in studies of early modern history, culture, and society, here because those years to which we have given the name early modern encompass the emergence of printing in Europe. The practitioners of this historybibliographers, librarians, historians, textual critics, literary theorists and critics-cross familiar disciplinary boundaries into the uncharted and indeed sometimes elusive place known as 'the book', in all its material particularity. 'The history of the book', which may be inferred from The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vol. 4, 2002) to be a properly historical account of an 'evolution' from manuscript to printed book, instead serves as a categorical umbrella that embraces studies of authorship; manuscript publication; printing house practices and trade relations; all categories of printed texts (religious, political, dramatic, pamphlet, periodical, 'literature' canonical and non-canonical); the materiality of books; book distribution, circulation, and reception, including censorship; reading practices, book purchasing and collecting, and libraries. A brief list of titles of books recently printed or forthcoming suggests the richness of this endeavor: