Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature

Abstract

Abstract This book is an inquiry into blank or empty spaces in primarily English printed books in the period c.1500–c.1700, as well as in Renaissance culture more generally. The book explores the oscillation between print and space in early modern books, as well as the function of empty space in Renaissance culture more generally. In printed books, these spaces are also considered as “gaps” (where text or images are constructed as missing, lost, withheld, or perhaps never devised in the first place). The topics discussed include: space and silence; emptiness and absence; the vacuum; “race” and racial identity; blackness and whiteness together with lightness, darkness, and sightlessness; cartography and emptiness; the effect of typography on reading practices; the social spaces of the page; gendered surfaces; hierarchies of information; books of memory; pages constructed as “waste” or “vacant;” blank forms and bureaucracy; political and devotional spaces; censorship; endings; fragments; terminations; and mortality. The book pays close attention to the writings of many of the familiar figures in English Renaissance literary culture, including (for example) Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton, and also Aphra Behn, Ann Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Jane Grey, Lucy Hutchinson, Emilia Lanier, Arabella Stuart, Isabella Whitney, and Lady Mary Wroth.