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
A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy
1st Edition
Edited
By Katherine Ellison, Susan Kim
September 30, 2020
The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies, cognitive studies, disability studies, and other ...
Print Letters in Seventeenth‐Century England: Politics, Religion, and News Culture
1st Edition
By Gary Schneider
September 30, 2020
Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England investigates how and why letters were printed in the interrelated spheres of political contestation, religious controversy, and news culture—those published as pamphlets, as broadsides, and in newsbooks in the interests of ideological disputes and as ...
Reading Drama in Tudor England
1st Edition
By Tamara Atkin
September 30, 2020
Reading Drama in Tudor England is about the print invention of drama as a category of text designed for readerly consumption. Arguing that plays were made legible by the printed paratexts that accompanied them, it shows that by the middle of the sixteenth century it was possible to market a play ...
Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England
1st Edition
By Jenni Hyde
September 30, 2020
Singing the News is the first study to concentrate on sixteenth-century ballads, when there was no regular and reliable alternative means of finding out news and information. It is a highly readable and accessible account of the important role played by ballads in spreading news during a period ...
Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words
1st Edition
By Jason Scott-Warren, Andrew Elder Zurcher
September 30, 2020
In early modern culture, eating and reading were entangled acts. Our dead metaphors (swallowed stories, overcooked narratives, digested information) are all that now remains of a rich interplay between text and food, in which every element of dining, from preparation to purgation, had its ...
Epistolary Community in Print, 1580�1664
1st Edition
By Diana G. Barnes
December 12, 2019
Epistolary Community in Print contends that the printed letter is an inherently sociable genre ideally suited to the theorisation of community in early modern England. In manual, prose or poetic form, printed letter collections make private matters public, and in so doing reveal, first how tenuous ...
Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Joshua Eckhardt, Daniel Starza Smith
December 12, 2019
Perhaps more than any other kind of book, manuscript miscellanies require a complex and ’material’ reading strategy. This collection of essays engages the renewed and expanding interest in early modern English miscellanies, anthologies, and other compilations. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early ...
Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book: Metamorphosing Classical Heroines in Late Medieval and Renaissance England
1st Edition
By Lindsay Ann Reid
December 12, 2019
Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book examines the historical and the fictionalized reception of Ovid’s poetry in the literature and books of Tudor England. It does so through the study of a particular set of Ovidian narratives-namely, those concerning the protean heroines of the Heroides and ...
The Age of Thomas Nashe: Text, Bodies and Trespasses of Authorship in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Stephen Guy-Bray, Joan Pong Linton
December 12, 2019
Traditional literary criticism once treated Thomas Nashe as an Elizabethan oddity, difficult to understand or value. He was described as an unrestrained stylist, venomous polemicist, unreliable source, and closet pornographer. But today this flamboyant writer sits at the center of many trends in ...
The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Emma Smith, Andy Kesson
December 12, 2019
Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores ’popularity’ in early modern English writings. Is ’popular’ best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern ...
Tottel's Songes and Sonettes in Context
1st Edition
Edited
By Stephen Hamrick
December 12, 2019
Though printer Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes (1557) remains the most influential poetic collection printed in the sixteenth century, the compiliation has long been ignored or misundertood by scholars of early modern English culture. Embracing a broad range of critical and historical ...
Margaret Fell, Letters, and the Making of Quakerism
1st Edition
By Marjon Ames
May 21, 2019
Intensely persecuted during the English Interregnum, early Quakers left a detailed record of the suffering they endured for their faith. Margaret Fell, Letters, and the Making of Quakerism is the first book to connect the suffering experience with the communication network that drew the ...