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
Bess of Hardwick’s Letters: Language, Materiality, and Early Modern Epistolary Culture
1st Edition
By Alison Wiggins
January 17, 2019
Bess of Hardwick's Letters is the first book-length study of the c. 250 letters to and from the remarkable Elizabethan dynast, matriarch and builder of houses Bess of Hardwick (c. 1527–1608). By surveying the complete correspondence, author Alison Wiggins uncovers the wide range of uses to which ...
Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature
1st Edition
By Katherine Acheson
November 28, 2016
Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what Elizabeth Eisenstein called brainwork related ...
The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation
1st Edition
Edited
By Andrew Gordon, Thomas Rist
November 17, 2016
The early modern period inherited a deeply-ingrained culture of Christian remembrance that proved a platform for creativity in a remarkable variety of forms. From the literature of church ritual to the construction of monuments; from portraiture to the arrangement of domestic interiors; from the ...
Authority in European Book Culture 1400-1600
1st Edition
By Pollie Bromilow
November 10, 2016
Through its many and varied manifestations, authority has frequently played a role in the communication process in both manuscript and print. This volume explores how authority, whether religious, intellectual, political or social, has enforced the circulation of certain texts and text versions, or...
Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617: The Anti-Poetics of Theater and Print
1st Edition
By Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast
October 17, 2016
Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author ...
Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture
1st Edition
By Kate Narveson
September 08, 2016
Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England studies how immersion in the Bible among layfolk gave rise to a non-professional writing culture, one of the first instances of ordinary people taking up the pen as part of their daily lives. Kate Narveson examines the development of the ...