“to the Illustrious Queen”: Katherine of Aragon and Early Modern Book Dedications

Abstract

In 1979, Elizabeth Eisenstein challenged early modern historians to reassess the period immediately after the invention of the printing press as a time of communication revolution—one that stimulated renaissance and reformation and instituted a break with the past.1 It was no longer enough to simply understand the importance of early texts in terms of content or the processes of production; it was now time to consider the roles of those texts in cultural and ideological formations. Since then, the printing press and the revolutions of which it was a part have been scrutinized from many angles, including the process of printing, book readers and literacy rates, and the ways in which books were used. The history of the book has become a recognized field of study. Yet this field has overlooked a crucial part of early modern texts: book dedications. Following the title, book dedications were the first words in an early modern printed book, but only a few modern studies exist that are devoted entirely to dedications. When modern scholarship does address dedications, authors still favor the body of the text as having more literary importance. These underutilized sources illuminate patronage relationships and, particularly, the importance of women to the first generations of printed texts in England.