syllabus
Please note that this syllabus is subject to change. Dates of visiting faculty have not been added, nor have 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 11: Orientation
January 18: 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
Jessica Brantley, “The Prehistory of the Book,” PMLA 124:2 (2009): 632-39. Download
Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Economic History 69 (2009): 409-45. Download
Robert Darnton, “‘What Is the History of Books’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History 4.3 (2007): 495-508. Download
{Monday, January 21: Folger closed: MLK Day}
January 25: Volume I: Books as objects
In-class exercise: describing a book
Monday, January 28, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s description
February 1: Volume I: Books as objects: casting off, format, printing
♦ Ian Gadd’s work-in-progress introduction to bibliography
animation of a printing press from The Atlas of Early Printing
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 8: Volume I: Books as objects: illustrations
Guest faculty: Dr Erin Blake, Curator of Art and Special Collections, Folger Shakespeare Library
Making a quarto exercise due
♦ Roger Gaskell, “Printing House and Engraving Shop,” The Book Collector 53 (2004): 213-51. 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
Blair Hedges, “A Method for Dating Early Books and Prints Using Image Analysis,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 462 (2006): 3555-73.
February 11, 11:00 pm: notify me by email of your book selection for your semester’s project
UPDATE: revised from this point on
February 22: Volume II: Books and culture: Stationers’ Company
Note: this is the same set of readings that you prepared for 2/15; if you hadn’t read the Clegg for last week, read it for this week
♦ Peter W. M. Blayney, excerpt of “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), 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
♦ 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
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
Helen Smith, “‘A free Stationers wife of this companye’: Women and the Stationers” in ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 87-134. Download
March 1: Volume II: Books and early modern culture: stationers and authors
♦ 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
Friday, March 1, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s stationers
Note: I’ve split the makers and the users assignments each into two parts; detailed instructions will be shared closer to their deadlines. I did not want to push the deadline of this assignment into Spring Break, but if you feel you need an extension until Monday or so, I am happy to grant that; just let me know in advance.)
{March 8: NO CLASS: Spring break}
March 15: Volume II: Books and early modern culture: readers and users
♦ 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
♦ 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
Franklin B. Williams, Jr. “Commendatory Verses: The Rise of the Art of Puffing,” Studies in Bibliography 19 (1966): 1-14. Download
Sixteenth-century Annotated Books: A Collection of 30 editions in 18 volumes (Warboys, Cambs.: Roger Gaskell Rare Books, n.d.). [this is a catalog for a collection that is now owned by Houghton Library; skim for images and read in-depth as your fancy strikes]
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 15, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s authors
March 22: 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
♦ Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Fast Bind, Fast Find: The History of the Book and the Modern Collection,” Criticism 51 (2009): 79-104. 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
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
Louis B. Wright, “The Harmsworth Collection and the Folger Library,” The Book Collector (1957): 123-28. Download [primarily useful for those of you working with books that were once owned by Harmsworth]
Monday, March 25, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s early users
{March 29: NO CLASS: Easter break}
April 5: Case Study: Bibles
♦ Paul Saenger, “The Impact of the Early Printed Page on the Reading of the Bible” in The Bible as Book: The First Printed Editions, eds Kimberly Van Kampen and Paul Saenger (New Castle, DE and London: Oak Knoll P and British Library, 1999), 31-45. Download
♦ Evelyn B. Tribble, “Authority, Control, Community: The English Printed Bible Page from Tyndale to the Authorized Version” in Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 11-56. Download
Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, eds Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2002), 42-79. Download
April 8, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s provenance
April 11, noon—April 12, noon: Reading Rooms closed
April 12: 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 19: Volume III: Books as vehicles for texts: annotating a text
Exercise due in class: Editing your text
♦ 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 26: Case studies: Your presentations!
Friday, May 3, 11:00 pm: Assignment due: Your book’s biography