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.

Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England

Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England
Author: Hannah August
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2022-04-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000563111

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama’s most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.

Reading History in Early Modern England

Reading History in Early Modern England
Author: D. R. Woolf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521780469

A study of writing, publishing and marketing history books in the early modern period.

Reading Material in Early Modern England

Reading Material in Early Modern England
Author: Heidi Brayman Hackel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2005-02-17
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780521842518

Reading Material in Early Modern England rediscovers the practices and representations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English readers. By telling their stories and insisting upon their variety, Brayman Hackel displaces both the singular 'ideal' reader of literacy theory and the elite male reader of literacy history.

Early Modern England 1485-1714

Early Modern England 1485-1714
Author: Robert Bucholz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2013-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1118697251

The second edition of this bestselling narrative history has been revised and expanded to reflect recent scholarship. The book traces the transformation of England during the Tudor-Stuart period, from feudal European state to a constitutional monarchy and the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth. Written by two leading scholars and experienced teachers of the subject, assuming no prior knowledge of British history Provides student aids such as maps, illustrations, genealogies, and glossary This edition reflects recent scholarship on Henry VIII and the Civil War Extends coverage of the Reformations, the Rump and Barebone's Parliament, Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, and the European, Scottish, and Irish contexts of the Restoration and Revolution of 1688-9 Includes a new section on women’s roles and the historiography of women and gender Click here for more discussion and debate on the authors’ blogspot: http://earlymodernengland.blogspot.com/ [Wiley disclaims all responsibility and liability for the content of any third-party websites that can be linked to from this website. Users assume sole responsibility for accessing third-party websites and the use of any content appearing on such websites. Any views expressed in such websites are the views of the authors of the content appearing on those websites and not the views of Wiley or its affiliates, nor do they in any way represent an endorsement by Wiley or its affiliates.]

Memory's Library

Memory's Library
Author: Jennifer Summit
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226781720

In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.

Used Books

Used Books
Author: William Howard Sherman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812220846

Based on a survey of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics.

Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain

Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain
Author: Leah Knight
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472131095

Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women’s reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women’s Bookscapesin Early Modern Britain brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women’s figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women’s readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women’s libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume’s three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence—lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example—as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise, this collection’s fresh, revisionary approaches represent substantial contributions to scholarship in early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women’s literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally.

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England

Romance for Sale in Early Modern England
Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780754654698

Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier.