From Print versus Manuscript to Sociable Authorship and Mixed Media: A Review of Trends in the Scholarship of Early Modern Publication

Abstract

AbstractThis review essay outlines current scholarship in literary sociability and social authorship, tracing the development of these trends from earlier scholarly treatments of print culture and manuscript culture during the early modern period. To contextualize this development, it surveys recent scholarship in manuscript studies and the history of the book that takes up the hypothesis that early modern print culture displaced the medieval oral and manuscript culture that preceded it. This hypothesis has been both explored and challenged by such scholars as Elizabeth Eisenstein, Peter Beal, D. F. McKenzie, Arthur Marotti, Harold Love, Margaret Ezell, and David McKitterick. Newer scholarship on early modern sociability by such historians as Peter Clarke, Anna Bryson, and Susan Whyman has been instrumental in shifting literary historical discussion away from the print versus manuscript culture hypothesis to one where print and manuscript represent only two of several media choices available to early modern authors. Following this shift from a focus on media to social conditions of authorship and reading, recent scholarship has explored the role culture plays in shaping media and genre choice in the early modern period.