New reading histories, print culture and the identification of change: The case of eighteenth‐century England1 (original) (raw)
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The History of the Book and a History of Two Books: How Print Culture Can Inform Literary Study
Literature Compass, 2004
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:
2018
Scholarship is often a collaborative practice masquerading as solitary achievement. The worlds of making knowledge always rely, both formally and informally, on webs of collaboration. This was as true in the past as it is today. Before a printed book could emerge from the press, it required the labor of writers and editors, typesetters and correctors, patrons and financiers, censors and privilege-bearers-often people who were divided across boundaries of religion, gender, space, and class. The transit of books after their production was similarly complicated: printed leaves traveled from printer's shop to bindery, onward to markets, fairs, and peddler's carts, where they were purchased by scholars and lay-readers, returned to circulation as gifts and bequests, and eventually incorporated into new libraries and private collections. 1 The story of even a single individual book copy often makes manifest an extensive network of relationships that facilitated its production, dissemination, reception, and preservation. In the last few decades, the history of the book has emerged as a form of analysis for the study of cultural, political, and social change. Historians recognize that the technology of printing was never solely determinative of the spread of culture or habits of reading, and that users encounter books and their content in different ways-realizations that call for careful 1 For a limited selection of works on the transit of books as indices of social and cultural relations, see: [1À4].
Modern Philology, 2016
There is a saying among scholar-librarians that goes something like this: all manuscripts are copies, and all printed books are unique. 1 In the past, such bibliographical witticism served to keep newcomers to the field of rare books and manuscripts on their toes. Today, such truths may not be selfevident. Manuscripts seem to promise greater research value because of their apparent uniqueness, and they continue to command high sale prices in the marketplace, even while the cost of many antiquarian books continues to fall. Curators of special collections, meanwhile, are increasingly asked to justify purchases of printed materials that may seem unnecessary, redundant, or even burdensome when electronic surrogates are readily available via digital libraries such as Google Books. Some commentators treat the discarding of physical books as a fait accompli: "What are we going to do with all that space that was once devoted to storage in the form of stacks?" 2 It is here that David McKitterick has much to teach us. Written as a companion to his Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (2003), Old Books, New Technologies explores what McKitterick calls the "myth of the uniformity of print" (42). We learn about the vexed historical role that printed books play as unique, physical artifacts that, more frequently than not, are presented as identical copies. Yet it is only by analyzing multiple wit-For permission to reuse, please contact
Review of Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720
Renaissance Quarterly, 65.4 (Winter 2012), 1334-35.
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Vast digital archives offer for the first time in human history the possibility of conducting comprehensive surveys of millions of books, newspapers, and periodicals. This paper introduces a new quantitative-statistical method accompanied by a digital tool that enables researchers to analyze the evolution, distribution, and frequency of concepts or phenomena in three digital press archives: the Burney Collection of the British Library, Nineteenth-century British Library Newspapers, and British Periodicals Online. The research tool may be used to explore long-term patterns in historical, literary, linguistic, and cultural processes, as well as to test old assumptions and interpretations in British studies. The paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of this research tool by providing a case study of how the representations of freemasonry in the eighteenth-century London press can be investigated. It concludes with some general reflections on the challenges of the use of digital research tools in the humanities