media transitions

This is a post I put together as part of an ongoing conversation with a group of folks who aren’t early modernists but are interested in media. I thought I’d look back at some examples of early print that disrupt our sense of what was typical. In the back of my head I was thinking about Matt Kirschenbaum’s work in Mechanisms and the sorts of tensions between how we perceive media and how it manifests itself—I’ve written about some of those ideas here, too, in my continuing curiosity about the distance between how we imagine early print and how it was experienced. But I’ve not added to that writing here, and have instead just collected some pictures of things that struck me (well, I did include captions). So let your imagination run wild in exploring what we might see or not see in these things. Use the slideshow to navigate through the images; click on any individual picture to expand it. All images are from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and full details for each image can be found in this group in their digital collection. Feel free to leave comments with your thoughts or links to more images.

Enjoy!

updated 18 November 2015 to switch gallery display