Material Readings in Early Modern Culture: Material Readings in Early Modern Culture
About the Book Series
This series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms of texts as part of an investigation into early modern English culture. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary nature, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research with an attention to the theoretical models that might illuminate the reading, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take innovative approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms the kinds of primary materials under investigation, and in terms of methodologies. What are the questions that have yet to be asked about writing in its various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of materiality that are critically neglected? How does form mediate and negotiate content? In what ways do the physical features of texts inform how they are read, interpreted and situated? Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. The range of topics covered in this series includes, but is not limited to:
-History of the book, publishing, the book trade, printing, typography (layout, type, typeface, blank/white space, paratextual apparatus)
-Technologies of the written word: ink, paper, watermarks, pens, presses
-Surprising or neglected material forms of writing
-Print culture
-Bookbinding
-Manuscript studies
-Social space, context, location of writing
-Social signs, cues, codes imbued within the material forms of texts
-Ownership and the social practices of reading: marginalia, libraries, environments of reading and reception
-Codicology, palaeography and critical bibliography
-Production, transmission, distribution and circulation
-Archiving and the archaeology of knowledge
-Orality and oral culture
-The material text as object or thing
The Early Seventeenth Century Verse Miscellany: Directions and Re-Directions
1st Edition
By Cedric C. Brown
July 17, 2025
A deeply researched study of the social transmission and adaptation of poetry texts originating in pre-Civil War England, traced through the seventeenth century and sometimes beyond. Both manuscript and printed miscellanies are used, as well as other forms of publication, and case studies ...
Commonplace Reading and Writing in Early Modern England and Beyond
1st Edition
By Hao Tianhu
May 06, 2025
Approaching from bibliographical, literary, cultural, and intercultural perspectives, this book establishes the importance of Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden, a largely unexplored manuscript commonplace book to early modern English literature and culture in general. Hesperides, or the Muses’ ...
Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England
1st Edition
Edited
By Callan Davies, Hannah Lilley, Catherine Richardson
August 26, 2024
This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ...
Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Hannah August
September 25, 2023
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 ...
Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture
1st Edition
By Elizabeth R. Williamson
May 31, 2023
A new account of Elizabethan diplomacy with an original archival foundation, this book examines the world of letters underlying diplomacy and political administration by exploring a material text never before studied in its own right: the diplomatic letter-book. Author Elizabeth R. Williamson ...
Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe: Studies in the Production, Collection, and Use of Mathematical Books
1st Edition
Edited
By Philip Beeley, Yelda Nasifoglu, Benjamin Wardhaugh
May 31, 2023
Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers’ marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for ...
The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Arthur F. Marotti
May 31, 2023
This study examines the transmission and compilation of poetic texts through manuscripts from the late-Elizabethan era through the mid-seventeenth century, paying attention to the distinctive material, social, and literary features of these documents. The study has two main focuses: the first, ...
Early Modern English Marginalia
1st Edition
Edited
By Katherine Acheson
December 13, 2021
Marginalia in early modern and medieval texts – printed, handwrit- ten, drawn, scratched, colored, and pasted in – offer a glimpse of how people, as individuals and in groups, interacted with books and manu- scripts over often lengthy periods of time. The chapters in this volume build on earlier ...
Instructional Writing in English, 1350-1650: Materiality and Meaning
1st Edition
By Carrie Griffin
June 30, 2021
Exploring the nature of utilitarian texts in English transmitted from the later Middle Ages to c. 1650, this volume considers textual and material strategies for the presentation and organisation of written knowledge and information during the period. In particular, it investigates the ...
The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature
1st Edition
By Rachel Stenner
March 31, 2021
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 ...
Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama
1st Edition
By Harry Newman
December 18, 2020
Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare’s relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays’ engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms ...
A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts
1st Edition
By Claire Loffman, Harriet Phillips
September 30, 2020
A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts provides a series of answers written by more than forty editors of diverse texts addressing the 'how-to's' of completing an excellent scholarly edition. The Handbook is primarily a practical guide rather than a theoretical forum; it airs common problems and ...