Aspects of Book Culture in Early Modern England

Aspects of Book Culture in Early Modern England
Author: T.A. Birrell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 1040245307

Thomas Anthony Birrell (1924-2011) was a man of many parts. For most of his working life he was Professor of English Literature in the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he was famous for his lively, humoristic and thought-provoking lectures. He was the author of some very popular literary surveys in Dutch, one of which - a history of English literature - has had seven editions so far. However, first and foremost he was a bibliographer and a book historian. The present collection contains fifteen of his book-historical articles, two reviews and one published version of a lecture for the illustrious ’Association Internationale de Bibliophilie’. The lecture - with a wealth of illustrations - about the British Library as the ’Custodian of the Unique’ gives one a sense of Birrell’s ability to present an audience with a complicated topic in comprehensible, but not simplified, terms. The reviews serve as a statement of principle of how to tackle the subject of ’English readers and books’ and the standards that ought to apply. The articles demonstrate Tom Birrell’s in-depth knowledge, dedication and scholarship. He once said that he felt that he could have talked to the 17th-century London booksellers on an equal footing and his work convinces one that they would have enjoyed these conversations. Aspects of Book Culture was edited by Birrell’s former pupil, colleague, friend and fellow-bibliographer Jos Blom.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England
Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317042077

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700
Author: Ingo Berensmeyer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 311069137X

This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.

Religion and the Book in Early Modern England

Religion and the Book in Early Modern England
Author: Elizabeth Evenden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2011-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521833493

Explores the production of John Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs', a milestone in the history of the English book.

Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England

Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England
Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351922009

1978 witnessed the publication of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Now in its third edition this remarkable book has for thirty years set the benchmark for cultural historians with its wide ranging and imaginative exploration of early modern European popular culture. In order to celebrate this achievement, and to explore the ways in which perceptions of popular culture have changed in the intervening years a group of leading scholars are brought together in this new volume to examine Burke's thesis in relation to England. Adopting an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, the collection offers an unprecedented survey of the field of popular culture in early modern England as it currently stands, bringing together scholars at the forefront of developments in an expanding area. Taking as its starting point Burke's argument that popular culture was everyone's culture, distinguishing it from high culture, which only a restricted social group could access, it explores an intriguing variety of sources to discover whether this was in fact the case in early modern England. It further explores the meaning and significance of the term 'popular culture' when applied to the early modern period: how did people distinguish between high and low culture - could they in fact do so? Concluded by an Afterword by Peter Burke, the volume provides a vivid sense of the range and significance of early modern popular culture and the difficulties involved in defining and studying it.

The Secularization of Early Modern England

The Secularization of Early Modern England
Author: Charles John Sommerville
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 238
Release: 1992
Genre: England
ISBN: 0195074270

This study overcomes the ambiguity and daunting scale of the subject of secularization by using the insights of anthropology and sociology, and by examining an earlier period than usually considered. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, this study shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar had to precede that loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700. Only when definitions of space and time changed and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world-view be sustained. As aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith, a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. Sommerville shows that this process was more political and theological than economic or social.

Boxes and Books in Early Modern England

Boxes and Books in Early Modern England
Author: Lucy Razzall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2021-08-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108831338

Uses the idea of the box in early modern England to develop a new direction in book history and material culture.

Books and Readers in Early Modern England

Books and Readers in Early Modern England
Author: Jennifer Andersen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2012-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812204719

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.