syllabus
Please note that this syllabus is subject to change. Dates of visiting faculty have not been added, nor has dates for working with our printing press. I will announce any changes in class and by email, and will update this page. If you’d like a pdf of the syllabus, you can download one here; it will not, however, be updated as regularly as this page.
Readings marked on the syllabus with a diamond (♦) are the primary readings for that day; other readings listed should be read as your time and interest allows. Links to all the readings on this syllabus may be found here (note: readings are accessible only by current students in the seminar). Each item is followed by a download button that will download that single article.
You will notice that the readings specified on the syllabus below consist nearly entirely of modern books about early modern books and book history. We will be working with early modern books in class and outside of class, and you will be provided with a bibliography of the books we have consulted in class. Students are always welcome to bring into the classroom particular books that they are interested in and would like to discuss; should you wish to bring rare material into the seminar room, you must notify Dr Werner by Monday of that week’s class meeting. Students should also avail themselves of the resources in the Folger, both of our collections of rare materials, but also of our range of experts in the field. The library’s curators and staff will help you find your way through our collection.
January 13: Orientation
{Monday, January 16: Folger closed for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day}
January 20: Preface: What is book history?
♦ Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York & London: Norton, 1990), 107-35. [Originally published in Daedalus 111:3 (1982): 65-83.] Download
♦ D.F. McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form” in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 9-30. [Originally given as a Panizzi lecture at the British Library in 1985.] Download
♦ Roger Chartier, “Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader,” Diacritics 22:2 (Summer 1992): 49-61. Download
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “Some Features of Print Culture” in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 46-101. [Originally published in 1983 as an abridged, one-volume version of her two-volume The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979).] Download
Alexandra Gillespie, “Analytical Survey: The History of the Book,” New Medieval Literatures 9 (2007): 245-86. Download
Robert Darnton, “‘What Is the History of Books’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History 4.3 (2007): 495-508. Download
Monday, January 23, 7:00 am: Exercise due: Catalog wishlist
January 27: Introduction: Incunabula
♦ Andrew Pettegree, Chapter 1: “The Book Before Print,” Download Chapter 2: “The Invention of Printing,” Download and Chapter 3: “Renaissance Encounters: The Crisis of Print” Download in The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010), 3-62.
John L. Flood, “‘Volentes sibi comparare infrascriptos libros impressos …’: Printed Books as a Commercial Commodity in the Fifteenth Century” in Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Kristian Jensen (London: British Library, 2003), 139-52. Download
February 3: Volume I: Books as objects: Making books
♦ Ian Gadd’s work-in-progress introduction to early modern bibliography Note: You will notice as you’re reading it that there are cross-references to things like “Chapter XXX” and occasional notes indicating that something is to be filled in later. All of these are signs that this is a book that is still in the process of being made. Dr Gadd has graciously allowed us to test-drive his work in our class, but these files are not to be shared outside of the seminar or to be made public without his explicit, advance permission. I am sure he would welcome your feedback: i.gadd@bathspa.ac.uk.
There are some useful videos illustrating aspects of printing, punchcutting, typecasting, and understanding format; these can be watched at the Folger, but are not required viewing:
—The Making of a Renaissance Book. Dir. Dana Atchely, prod. American Friends of the Plantin-Moretus Museum (Antwerp). 16 mm film, 22 min., 1969. Re-released by Book Arts Press, VHS, 2000.
—From Punch to Printing Type: The Art and Craft of Hand Punchcutting and Typecasting, dir. Peter Herdrich, prod. Book Arts Press, 1985. VHS, 45 min.
—The Anatomy of a Book, I: Format in the Hand-Press Period, dir. Peter Herdrich, written by Terry Belanger, prod. Viking Productions, distrib. Book Arts Press, 1991. VHS, 30 min.
—How to Operate a Book, dir. Peter Herdrich, written by Terry Belanger and Gary Frost, prod. Book Arts Press, 1986. VHS 30 min.
February 10: Volume I: Books as objects: Illustration
Making a quarto exercise due
♦ Roger Gaskell, “Printing House and Engraving Shop,” The Book Collector 53 (2004): 213-51. Download
♦ Stephen Orgel, “Textual Icons: Reading Early Modern Illustrations” in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, eds Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (London: Routledge, 2000), 59-94. Download
James A. Knapp, “The Bastard Art: Woodcut Illustration in Sixteenth-Century England” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005), 151-72. Download
Monday, February 13, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s description
February 17: Volume II: Books and culture: the book trade, part 1
♦ Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks” in A New History of Early English Drama, eds John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 383-422 (primarily 389-415). Download
♦ Zachary Lesser, “Speculation in the book trade” in Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 26-51. Download
Peter Stallybrass, “‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, eds Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 2007), 315-341. Download
Cyndia Susan Clegg, “The Stationers’ Company of London” in The British Literary Book Trade, 1475-1700, eds James K. Bracken and Joel Silver, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 170 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 275-291. Download
February 17, 11:00: notify me by email of your book selection for your semester’s project
{Monday, February 20: Folger closed for Presidents Day}
February 24: Volume II: Books and early modern culture: Authors
working with the model printing press, part 1
♦ Alexandra Gillespie, “Introduction: The Author and the Book” in Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books, 1473-1557 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 1-24. Download
♦ Roger Chartier, “Figures of the Author” in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 1994), 25-60. Download
♦ Marcy L. North, “Ignoto and the Book Industry” in The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago and London: U Chicago P, 2003), 56-88. Download
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979), 141-60. Download
Adrian Johns, “The Invention of Piracy” in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2010), 17-40. Download
Monday, February 27, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s makers
March 2: Case Study: John Milton’s Paradise Lost
working with the model printing press, part 2
[no readings this week]
March 9—NO CLASS—Spring Break
March 16: Volume II: Books and early modern culture: Readers
Guest faculty: Professor William H. Sherman, University of York
♦ Robert Darnton, “First Steps Toward a History of Reading” in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York and London: Norton, 1990), 154-87. [Originally published in Australian Journal of French Studies 23 (1986): 5-30.] Download
♦ William H. Sherman, “Toward a History of the Manicule” in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2008), 25-52. Download
♦ John Jowett, “For Many of Your Companies: Middleton’s Early Readers” in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to The Collected Works, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagino (Oxford: Clarendon P, 2007), 286-327. main text: Download and appendices: Download
Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 11-28. Download
Keith Thomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1986), 98-131. Download
March 23: Volume II: Books and culture: Libraries and collectors
♦ Andrew Pettegree, “Building a Library” in The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010), 319-32. Download
♦ Heidi Brayman Hackel, “Consuming Readers: Ladies, Lapdogs, and Libraries” in Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 196-255. Download
♦ William H. Sherman, “Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers’ Marks” in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2008), 151-82. Download
Clare Sargent, “The Physical Setting: The Early Modern Library (to c. 1640)” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume 1 to 1640, eds Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 51-65. Download
Anthony Grafton and Jeffrey Hamburger, “Save the Warburg Library!” The New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/save-warburg-library/)
Louis B. Wright, “The Harmsworth Collection and the Folger Library,” The Book Collector (1957): 123-28. Download
Monday, March 26, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s users
March 30: Case study: Shakespeare
♦ Thomas L. Berger and Jesse M. Lander, “Shakespeare in Print, 1593-1640” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 395-413. Download
♦ John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), Chapter 4: “The First Folio,” 69-92. Download
♦ David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), Chapter 3: “From Contemporary to Classic; Or, Textual Healing,” 79-110. Download
Thomas L. Berger, “‘Opening Titles Miscreate’: Some Observations on the Titling of Shakespeare’s ‘Works’” in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1997), 155-72. Download
Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991), Chapter 1: “The 1623 Folio and the Modern Standard Edition,” 14-48. Download
April 6—NO CLASS—Easter Break
April 13: Volume III: Books as vehicles for texts: Editing a text
♦ Erick Keleman, “Textual Criticism and Kinds of Editions” in Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction (New York: Norton, 2009), 73-120. Download
{April 18th, noon, through April 19th, noon: Reading Rooms closed for Gala}
April 20: Volume III: Books as vehicles for texts: Annotating a text
Editing your text exercise due in class
♦ Robert D. Hume, “The Aims and Uses of ‘Textual Studies’” PBSA 99:2 (2005): 197-230. Download
♦ Gerard Genette, “Introduction” in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 1-15. [Originally published as Seuils (Paris, 1987).] Download
April 27: Class presentations
Friday, May 11, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s biography