"This is the first book to demonstrate how mnemotechnical cultural commonplaces can be used to account for the look, style, and authorized content of some of the most influential books produced in early modern Britain. In his hybrid role as stationer, publisher, entrepreneur, and author, John Day, master printer of England's Reformation, produced the premier navigation handbook, state-approved catechism and metrical psalms, Book of Martyrs, England's first printed emblem book, and Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book. By virtue of finely honed book trade skills, dogged commitment to evangelical nation-building, and astute business acumen (including going after those who infringed his privileges), Day mobilized the typographical imaginary to establish what amounts to-and still remains-a potent and viable Protestant Memory Art"--
This is the first book to demonstrate how mnemotechnic cultural commonplaces can be used to account for the look, style, and authorized content of some of the most influential books produced in early modern Britain. In his hybrid role as stationer, publisher, entrepreneur, and author, John Day, master printer of England’s Reformation, produced the premier navigation handbook, state-approved catechism and metrical psalms, Book of Martyrs, England’s first printed emblem book, and Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book. By virtue of finely honed book trade skills, dogged commitment to evangelical nation-building, and astute business acumen (including going after those who infringed his privileges), Day mobilized the typographical imaginary to establish what amounts to—and still remains—a potent and viable Protestant Memory Art.
The volume collects original studies highlighting contemporary trends in historical sociolinguistics, as well as current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. Distinctive features of the book, which make it appealing to a wider audience, are the interdisciplinary nature of the chapters and the range of languages addressed.
Despite the fact that, if only by number, small and peripheral cities played an important role in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European print culture, book history has mainly been dominated by monographs on individual big book centres. Through a number of specific case studies, which deploy a variety of methods and a wide range of sources, this volume seeks to enhance our understanding of printing and the book trade in small and peripheral European cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to emphasize the necessity of new research for the study of print culture in such cities.
Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality--from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)--intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for 'plays' to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, 'If a play is a book, it is not a play.' Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England shows that 'play' and 'book' were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.
The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.
This collection of specially commissioned articles aims to shed light on the Early Modern printer's mark, a very productive Early Modern word-image so far only occasionally noted outside the domain of book history. This collection of 17 specially commissioned articles aims to shed light on the European printer’s mark, a very productive Early Modern word-image genre so far only occasionally noted outside the domain of book history. It does so from the perspectives of book history, literary history, especially emblem scholarship, and art history. The various contributions to the volume address issues such as those of the adoption of printer's devices in the place of the older heraldic printer's marks as a symptom of the changing self-image of the representatives of the Early Modern printing profession, of the mutual influence of emblems and printer's marks, of the place of Classical learning in the design of Humanist printer's marks, of the economic factors involved in the evolution of Early Modern printer's marks, the pictorial topics of the Early Modern printer's mark, and the printer's mark as a result of the 'Verbürgerlichung' of the device of Early Modern nobility. Special care was taken to account for the similarities and differences of the printer's marks produced and used in different regional and cultural contexts. The printer’s mark thus becomes visible as a European phenomenon that invites studying some of the most significant shared aspects of Early Modern culture. Preface/ Beginnings and Provenances: A. Wolkenhauer: Sisters, or Mother and Daughter? The Relationship between Printer’s Marks and Emblems during the First Hundred Years/ A. Bässler: Ekphrasis and Printer’s Signets/ L. Houwen: Beastly Devices: Early Printers’ Marks and Their Medieval Origins/ H. Meeus: From Nameplate to Emblem. The Evolution of the Printer’s Device in the Southern Low Countries up to 1600/ Regions and Places: K. Sp. Staikos: Heraldic and Symbolic Printer’s Devices of Greek Printers in Italy (15th-16th century)/ A. Jakimyszyn-Gadocha: Jewish Printers’ Marks from Poland (16th-17th centuries)/ J. A. Tomicka: Fama typographica. In Search of the Emblem Form of Printer’s Devices. The Iconography and Emblem Form of Printer’s Devices in 16th- and 17th-Century Poland/ P. Hoftijzer: Pallas Nostra Salus. Early-Modern Printer’s Marks in Leiden as Expressions of Professional and Personal Identity/ D. Peil: Early Modern Munich Printer’s Marks (and Related Issues)/ K. Lundblad: The Printer’s Mark in Early Modern Sweden/ S. Hufnagel: Iceland’s Lack of Printer’s Devices: Filling a Functional and Spatial Void in Printed Books during the Sixteenth Century/ Concepts, Historical and Systematic: B.F. Scholz: The Truth of Printer’s Marks: Andrea Alciato On ‘Aldo’s Anchor’, ‘Froben’s Dove’ and ‘Calvo’s Elephant’. A Closer Look at Alciato’s Concept of the Printer’s Mark./ V. Hayaert: The Legal Significance and Humanist Ethos of Printers’ Insignia/ J. Kiliańczyk-Zięba: The Transition of the Printer’s Device from a Sign of Identification to a Symbol of Aspirations and Beliefs/ Judit Vizkelety-Ecsedy: Mottos in Printers’ Devices – Thoughts about the Hungarian Usage/ M. Simon: European Printers’ and Publishers’ Marks in the 18th Century. The Three C’s: Conformity, Continuity and Change/ B.F. Scholz: In Place of an Afterword: Notes on Ordering the Corpus of the Early Modern Printer’s Mark/ Research Bibliography: The Early Modern Printer’s Mark in its Cultural Contexts/ Index (Names, Places, Motti).
"Explores the evolution of the idea that the rise of print culture was a threat to the royal government of eighteenth-century France. Argues that French printers did much to foster this view as they negotiated a place in the expanding bureaucratic apparatus of the state"--Provided by publisher.
Buying and Selling explores the many facets of the business of books across and beyond Europe, adopting the viewpoints of printers, publishers, booksellers, and readers. Essays by twenty-five scholars from a range of disciplines seek to reconstruct the dynamics of the trade through a variety of sources. Through the combined investigation of printed output, documentary evidence, provenance research, and epistolary networks, this volume trails the evolving relationship between readers and the book trade. In the resulting picture of failure and success, balanced precariously between debt-economies, sale strategies and uncertain profit, customers stand out as the real winners.
