Title Catalogue Research Articles

Novels and the NSTC: A Quantitative Study of Legal Deposit

ABSTRACTThe Nineteenth‐Century Short Title Catalog (NSTC) attempts to provide comprehensive coverage of the print record in the English‐speaking world from 1801 to 1918 based primarily on the catalog records of Britain's five legal deposit libraries during the 19th century. Previous studies have used the NSTC to quantitatively study broad trends in Victorian‐era British publishing, but they have not sufficiently acknowledged the NSTC's limitations. This study works within the NSTC's limitations by using it to quantitatively study the phenomena of legal deposit. Analysis of two, 90‐volume random samples of first edition English novels reveals the impact of changing library acquisition practices and legal deposit legislation on the comprehensiveness of Britain's legal deposit libraries, as well as the NSTC's comprehensiveness and how it can be utilized for quantitative book history despite its deficiencies.

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

PROVENANCE RESEARCH AND THE CONSORTIUM OF EUROPEAN RESEARCH LIBRARIES

The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) is a membership organization which started in 1994 after the initiative of research libraries in many European countries. It is formed primarily by Library and Information professionals, which work to provide relevant data and offer meaning and context from their distributed collections. The focus of CERL is on manuscripts and printed books produced before the middle of the 19th century; it is committed on curating data sustainably, creating connections where possible and providing convenient access to data. Among its main resources are The Heritage of the Printed Book Database, the CERL Thesaurus, the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, Material Evidence in Incunabula, the CERL Provenance Digital Archive, and much more. CERL creates digital resources of its own and offers a structured framework within which member institutions can deliver digital services, which they may not be able to deliver or sustain themselves. All these digital databases provide methods which can help the provenance research flourish, by bringing together collections, institutions, and other trivial information concerning early printed books and documents. Throughout this shared experience and collaboration, CERL can establish how collections reflect an illustration on how European history is inextricably interconnected intellectually, commercially, and politically.

Distinguishing Discourses

A key feature of the Enlightenment is the development of a discourse on commerce and economy entangled in larger discussions around politics, morality, and progress. Importantly, this debate was not formalised in the way it may be seen today. Instead, it was an emerging subject incorporating diverse and contested ideas. The objective of this case study, then, is to use various methods to identify the boundaries of these emerging economic, political, and moral disquisitions in a data-driven way, using a unified version of the metadata (e.g. publisher, publication year, format of the print product) of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and full texts of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). We approach the task iteratively, first making a separation between broadly defined economic documents and other eighteenth century documents by modeling the features which separate samples from two collections of historical economic texts from the wider ECCO data. Then, based on the previous step, we distinguish works similar to Hume’s Political Discourses (a text at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment) from other branches of commercial and economic discourse, and analyse this set of works in more detail. We also experiment on how a purely unsupervised approach – a contextualized topic model using BERT encodings – groups our set of economic texts. Previous historical scholarship has taken the perspective that we ought to identify language use from large corpora of text. The aim has been to contextually understand language from the perspective of a particular group of historical actors or, as is the case with conceptual historians, detect contested and changing concepts. Our approach is different in that we closely link language use to the material and historical circumstances of the individual texts within which these uses can be found. Essentially, we combine computation and social network analysis with the study of changing concepts and word uses over time, taking individual editions rather than language abstracted from them as the basic object of study. This approach allows us to identify additional contextually relevant works by both their linguistic features, and the material and network history of their production. Jointly, the combination of iterative data-driven discourse detection and the focus on manifested editions allows us not only to extract a significant proportion of the debates forming the Scottish Enlightenment in a data-driven manner, but to link them to the social networks and commercial context in which they were produced and in which they evolved. Thus, this approach allows us to evaluate the existence, scope, and contexts of historical discourses (in this case, economic discourse) in the eighteenth century in a way which is both computationally state-of-the-art and relevant to historical practices and interests. It also demonstrates how data-driven analysis and the traditional hermeneutic approach can be combined to study meanings and their changes over time.

The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass

Reviewed by: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace by Sean Grass David Vincent (bio) The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass; pp. xi + 279. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, £75.00, $99.99, $29.99 paper, $24.00 ebook. Sean Grass's The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace has an unusual structure. Following an introduction setting out the nature of the enterprise, the first chapter—which comprises more than a quarter of the book—is essentially a bibliographical exercise seeking to demonstrate that, from 1820 onward, the genre of autobiography was a major driver in the growth of Victorian publishing and reached a peak in the 1850s and 1860s. Making rigorous use of the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue and other bibliographical collections, along with a range of publishers' archives, Grass provides the most thorough statistical survey of the field. The analysis, which centers on graphs that show "Increases of 'autobiography' titles, 1841–1860," (24) "Autobiographical titles by year 1841–1869," (26) and "Titles [autobiographical and all] published by decade 1800–1860," (27) will comprise an essential point of reference for all future work on published nonfiction memoirs in the period as well as the broader dynamics of Victorian book history. This first chapter supplies fascinating detail on the range of autobiographies published in this period. However, the focus is not on the texts themselves but rather on the commercial enterprise of publishing. The basic point is that an increasing range of firms commissioned autobiographies because there was a growing market for them. They sought out narrative accounts of unfolding lives in order to make money. By this means, identity became a commodity, supported by the Victorian publishing industry and contingent developments in mass literacy, retail outlets, circulating libraries, and copyright law. These changes are linked to parallel developments in the bureaucratization of identity through the creation of the General Record Office in 1836, and other transitions from community to official constructions of personal identity. [End Page 474] At this juncture, the analysis moves away from nonfiction autobiography and its particular claims to truth. The remainder of the book focuses on the commodification of identity through separate chapters on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) together with Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863), and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). The final chapter revisits the drama of The Tichborne Claimant, which Grass describes as "a stunning parable of modern subjectivity" (213). Only the first of the texts takes the form of a fictional autobiography. The remainder move further away from the literary form which is examined at the outset, focusing instead on the convergence of textuality and commodity in the construction of identity, and the anxieties that this generated. There is a price to be paid for this change of focus. It would have been instructive for Grass to turn back to the classic Victorian autobiographies, armed with his new understanding of the dynamics of the genre. Likewise, the insistence on the interface between identity and the market could have been interrogated by an examination of the many memoirs in this period which were published in noncommercial outlets such as newspapers, or in journals connected to organizations and interests, or which remained in manuscript form, intended only as a private record for the author and perhaps his or her family. Those issues must be saved for another book, however. The conclusion of the opening chapter is that the 1860s represented a watershed in literary representations of the nature of identity, thus enabling Grass to make powerful connections between a set of novels which appeared in these years. The discussion of each in turn both draws from and interrogates a wide range of scholarship on a set of texts which, with the possible exception of Reade's Hard Cash, have already received substantial critical attention. In each case Grass is at pains to deconstruct any sense of the novels reaching a conclusion that satisfactorily reconstitutes...

A Nordic Press

Printing emerged more slowly in the Nordic lands than in most parts of Europe. The first active printing press in modern Latvia appeared in 1588; Estonia, Finland and Norway would wait until the 1630s and 1640s respectively. It was also in the seventeenth century that a provincial print trade of any significance would develop in Denmark and Sweden, the two main political powers of the region. While our knowledge of the evolution of printing in the Scandinavian region has long been well established, the print culture of the Nordic lands is often still approached from national perspectives. In this article, we propose to consider the print output of the entire Nordic region – Denmark, the Scandinavian Peninsula, Iceland, Estonia and Latvia – as a single corpus. Using the resources of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project, we will consider what elements unite the history of printing in the region, as well as how distinct Nordic print culture is from that of the rest of Europe. We will consider especially the role of institutions (the church, crown, universities and colleges), foreign agents and linguistic traditions in shaping the print output of the Nordic region before 1700. What emerges from this study is a clear portrayal of the extent to which the Scandinavian book world takes inspiration and diverges from broader European norms. This article will make the case strongly for the importance of studying print culture in a comparative international perspective, and offers broader conclusions on the crucial interactions between print, power and peripheries in early modern Europe.

The common cosmopolitan reading culture of eighteenth-century Europe and North America: new digital perspectives

This article uses a range of digital historical bibliometric resources to explore how far it is possible to speak of a common reading culture across Western Europe and North America in the later eighteenth century. It looks at the holdings and borrowing records of British and North American libraries and edition count data drawn from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and the English Short Title Catalogue and compares them with French and Swiss evidence drawn from the publishing records of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, Parisian stock sale and confiscation records, and records of print runs and provincial legalisations of counterfeit stock. From this preliminary survey, the article suggests that there was a strong enough overlap between elite reading of novels, travel literature, and history to suggest that Britain and English-speaking North America shared a common reading culture with much of Western Europe. Further research in coming years is expected to flesh out and clarify this picture.

‘More Product, Less Process’ (MPLP): An early printed book project

This article addresses the challenge to make printed hidden collections known quickly without sacrificing ultimate quality. It takes as its starting point the archival mantra ‘More product, less process’ and explores its application to printed books, mindful of projects in the United States to catalogue 19th- and 20th-century printed books quickly and cheaply with the help of OCLC. A problem is lack of time or managerial inclination ever to return to ‘quick and dirty’ imports. This article is a case study concerning a collection of 18th-century English imprints, the Graveley Parish Library, at Senate House Library, University of London. Faced with the need to provide metadata as quickly as possible for digitisation purposes, Senate House Library decided, in contrast to its normal treatment of early printed books, to download records from the English Short Title Catalogue and amend them only very minimally before releasing them for public view, and to do this work from catalogue cards rather than the books themselves. The article describes the Graveley Parish collection, the project method’s rationale, and the advantages and disadvantages of sourcing the English Short Title Catalogue for metadata. It discusses the drawbacks of retrospective conversion (cataloguing from cards, not books): insufficient detail in some cases to identify the relevant book, and ignorance of the copy-specific elements of books which can constitute the main research interest. The method is compared against cataloguing similar books from photocopies of title pages, and retrospective conversion using English Short Title Catalogue is compared against retrospective conversion of early printed Continental books from cards using Library Hub Discover or OCLC. The control groups show our method’s effectiveness. The project succeeded by producing records fast that fulfilled their immediate purpose and simultaneously would obviously require revisiting. The uniform nature of the collection enabled the saving of time through global changes.

Science Fiction by Sherryl Vint

604 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) dimensional alien” (63). Moving beyond the work of Lovecraft, Steadman persists in using problematic language when describing “mentally-challenged person[s]” (124, 209) in Asimov’s “… That Thou Art Mindful of Him” (1974) and Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive respectively. He goes on to describe Asimov’s Late Solarians as hermaphrodites and “alien monstrosities” who have taken “their obsessive fears of human contact and sexuality to extreme levels” (153). And finally, in a most perplexing instance, Steadman dedicates an entire paragraph to what he frames as a prescient parallel between the Solarian civilization and “the situation of our millenials in the twenty-first century” (153). Connecting the extreme isolation and technological dependency of these advanced Spacers to the modern-day use of smart phones and other electronic devices, he writes, “Although the millenials have not yet reached the levels of isolation and solipsistic self-absorption that the Solarians have obtained, nevertheless, they seem to be well on their way towards achieving this end” (153). While warning, as Steadman does, against a future with “no room in it for alien love” (245), the lack of critical and self-reflective analysis in this book ultimately falls short of what our current moment most requires. These recurring instances of alienation diminish the value of a text otherwise worthy of praise.—E. Mariah Spencer, University of Iowa Thinking with Science Fiction. Sherryl Vint. Science Fiction. MIT, 2021. 207 pp. $15.95 pbk. Sherryl Vint’s well-conceived, informative, and concise new introduction to science fiction is one of a dozen 2021 entries in MIT Press’s ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE series, dedicated, as the series statement says, to offering accessible, expert overviews of “topics of current interest.” This is especially worth noting because Science Fiction is the only volume in the entire series (not just among the 2021 entries) dedicated to a narrative genre. The most closely related topics are volumes on Critical Thinking, Deconstruction, and Hate Speech; otherwise the topics skew toward technical matters such as Algorithms, Biofabrication, Ketamine, and AI Assistants or to social issues such as Gender(s) or Death and Dying. The inclusion of science fiction as a topic in the series is striking evidence in support of Vint’s main thesis, that science fiction is an increasingly important cultural vernacular “for thinking about and intervening in the world” (1-2). Therefore, she explains, “This book is about what science fiction can do, not a catalogue of important authors and titles” (2). This is not in the least a promise to unveil science fiction’s formal essence, something Vint does not think it has. She stresses instead the diversification and globalization of science fiction in recent decades, emphasizing that the genre is “embraced by many communities of practice, often to significantly divergent ends and with correspondingly different aesthetic and formal strategies” (14). The genre’s internal discord, the “tension between scientific extrapolation and social change [that] lies at [its] heart,” is the keynote of Vint’s exposition of its history and contemporary shape (10). She sets out as her main goal to explain how science fiction complements conversations about 605 BOOKS IN REVIEW “visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (17, quoting science studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff) by doing something “more urgently needed—namely, it critically interrogates who is part of the collective creating those ‘shared understandings.’ Social as well as technological change is at stake in sf, which helps us think through whether ‘advances in science and technology’ are also always advances in civic and social life” (17). She concludes her introductory chapter with a claim that the book fully lives up to: “If we are living in a science-fictional world, this book aims to help us articulate more precisely what that means and to prompt us to think about actively managing—rather than passively awaiting—this future” (18). Vint fleshes out her exposition of what science fiction can do in seven thematically organized chapters. Some of the chapters tackle familiar, wellestablished contexts and motifs of sf: the utopian tradition; the colonial imagination; robots...

Courtship, Slander, and Treason: Studies of Mary Queen of Scots, the Fourth Duke of Norfolk, and a Few of Their Contemporaries, 1568–1587 by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman

Reviewed by: Courtship, Slander, and Treason: Studies of Mary Queen of Scots, the Fourth Duke of Norfolk, and a Few of Their Contemporaries, 1568–1587 by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman Thomas M. Mccoog S.J. Courtship, Slander, and Treason: Studies of Mary Queen of Scots, the Fourth Duke of Norfolk, and a Few of Their Contemporaries, 1568–1587. By Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. (London: Distributed by Maggs Bros Ltd. 2019. Pp. ix, 401. £35.00. ISBN 978-0-993376-22-1.) Two distinct but complementary sections comprise this work: "Mary Queen of Scots and the Fourth Duke of Norfolk: The Literature of the 'Forbidden Match,' 1568–73" by Arthur Freeman; and "The Trial and Death of Mary Queen of Scots in Contemporary Report: A Codicological Study" by Janet Ing Freeman. The studies are not, as the authors explain in the Prefatory Note, "retellings or reinterpretations … but essentially surveys of contemporary literature—narrative, argumentative, judgemental, propagandistic, and libellous—devoted thereto" (p. vii). Both sections begin with a clear, concise presentation of the historical background; indeed, a very helpful time line from 1509 to 1603 concludes the book. Each text is examined for style, locution, date of composition, authorship, printed and manuscript editions, circulation and influence. Particularly in the exposition of authorship, Arthur Freeman delineates and often refutes attributions proposed by other scholars and canonized by the Revised Short Title Catalogue. Alas, in a short review, I must restrict my comments to a few texts. Mary, Queen of Scots, arrived in England in May 1568. Four years earlier as Mary was looking for a suitor, Queen Elizabeth recommended Robert Dudley, soon to be Earl of Leicester, and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Mary preferred Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and Norfolk was not interested. After the events of the intervening four years, the possibility was revived. A Discourse touching the pretended match published around the same time as the Northern Rising (1569–70) and Regnans in excelsis, Pope [End Page 630] Pius V's excommunication of Queen Elizabeth (1570), attacked the proposed marriage. Freeman rejects the attribution of this work to Thomas Norton: "Anonymous A Discourse emerged from the press; anonymous, in my view, it remains" (p. 50). "An Answer to a slanderous booke," the full text of which is printed here for the first time, rebuts the accusations and defends Mary and Norfolk. Here too the author remains unknown. A Treatise of treasons (1572), arguably the best known of the texts analyzed, defended the honor of Mary and, equally important, denounced the Elizabethan establishment as constructed by "new men" William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon. The author of this important treatise remains unknown despite various efforts at identification. We must, according to Freeman, console "ourselves, if at all, by at least one significant exclusion: the [John Leslie] Bishop of Ross" (p. 165). It is surprising that Freeman fails to mention that Cecil's friends dissuaded him from refuting the treatise: instead the government retaliated with a proclamation against seditious works, especially attacks on Bacon and Cecil. The bishop of Ross did, however, author "A Discourse conteyning a perfect accompt," and "A Brief discourse of the friendly and honest part," another text printed here for the first time. Leslie's frequent appearance again highlights the lack of a monograph on his role and significance in his advocacy of Mary's cause, in the proposal of an "Association," joint sovereignty, for Mary and her son James VI, and in the formation of alliances aimed at her liberation. Recent works by Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes on marital negotiations and the succession would have benefitted Freeman. The late Regius Professor Patrick Collinson once commented on the different terms used by literary critics and historians to describe the documents of their trade. The latter speak of sources, archival and published, from which data are extracted; the former speak of texts scrutinized from different perspectives with measured judgments. Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman are literary critics whose analysis has revealed much to this historian who has strip-mined some of these documents for information. [End Page 631] Thomas M. Mccoog S.J. Loyola University Maryland Copyright © 2021 The Catholic University of America Press

From Methods to Conclusions: The Limits of the Knowable in Digital Book History

This article asks the same question of four different types of sources: traditional literary histories, the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), contemporary newspaper advertisements, and contemporary records of reading. By examining how these sources represent what was in print in Britain in the year 1728 differently, this article argues that close attention to the methods of digital book history and the origins, assumptions, and limitations of different archives is needed. While digital databases are more comprehensive than previous sources were, they too have limitations—but when used in combination, they can provide new answers to old questions and allow for new avenues of research.

Las metamorfosis de la Colección Tezontle. El primer catálogo literario del Fondo de Cultura Económica

En este ensayo se analiza la conformación del catálogo literario de la Colección Tezontle del Fondo de Cultura Económica. Para ello se estudia el origen de las publicaciones literarias en el desarrollo del proyecto fundador de la editorial, y se atienden las peculiaridades de la colección entre 1940 y 1965. En este periodo de la historia del Fondo, que corresponde a las dos primeras direcciones de Daniel Cosío Villegas y Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, se observa la aparición de las primeras ediciones literarias con el sello Ediciones Tezontle y Tezontle que hasta 1954 el Fondo distribuyó y comercializó “desinteresadamente”. A partir del Catálogo general de 1955, la serie Tezontle aparece como una colección más de la empresa editora, sumando su catálogo al resto de las publicaciones. Esta transición de sello independiente a colección exigió una metodología propia para el estudio de su naturaleza pragmática, la cual se relaciona con las políticas culturales de los editores del Fondo y su práctica editorial.

Thomas Fisher Library's Initiative to Report Holdings to the English Short- Title Catalogue Online Database

Thomas Fisher Library's Initiative to Report Holdings to the English Short- Title Catalogue Online Database

Forum Introduction: The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Forum Introduction:The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland Rebecca Anne Barr (bio) In the decade following Ian McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009), the study of what was once "Ascendancy" Ireland has been diversified, expanded, and revitalized. McBride's ambitious work was in many ways the product of two decades of historical revisionism, acting to concretize objections to the ideological restrictions of the New History of Ireland school.1 His work has helped dislodge orthodox and restrictive narratives about Ireland in the 1700s, replacing the image of Protestant hegemony with a vivid sense of the flux, tension, and incipient instability of this island of co-existing and competing cultures, creeds, and languages. As history "from the outside in" McBride's work evaded the ideological pitfalls of Irish Studies as a relatively immature field and one that had somewhat uncritically adopted the ideology of postcolonialism in the service of nationalist politics.2 As Sarah McKibben has noted, eighteenth-century Irish literature displays the pains and the profits of a "mutual transformation of socio-cultural forms," even as that transformation was marked by violence, subjugation, and resistance.3 Due to such historical complexity and complicities, eighteenth-century scholarship has been somewhat marginalized by the state apparatuses (both North and South). Both jurisdictions are currently marking their twentieth-century foundations in the so-called decade of centenaries, providing a funding bonanza for historians and academics. By contrast, both the 1798 rebellion and the rich [End Page 331] Georgian built heritage in Ireland is comparatively neglected, partly due to the ideological dissonance of Protestant republicanism and persistent ambivalence about the national status of the so-called Anglo-Irish (a term coined in the 1920s to distinguish between the supposedly "genuine" Catholic, Irish-speaking Irish, and the Protestant, sometimes-Unionist gentry).4 Academic research thrives, then, against a backdrop of relative disregard.5 Yet, in the context of Brexit's dramatic reshaping of political and intellectual boundaries, eighteenth-century Ireland offers a provocative case study for reassessing the interconnections of nations, literature, and political history. The constitutional flux of the period offers salutary analogues for our own time. As governments increasingly insist on the imperviousness of their borders and value the homogeneity of their citizenry, it behoves academics to recall the contested origins of permeable states. These conceptual and political borders are still shifting, still uneasy. This forum on the new eighteenth-century Ireland at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2018 sought to examine how recent work on eighteenth-century Ireland reshapes our understanding of the period and place and to reflect upon how new research offers to transform our sense of the cultural and political landscape of the time. Over the past decade, scholarship has re-examined Ireland's canon. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is a signal example, bringing together bibliographers, intellectual historians, and literary critics to illuminate a multifaceted Irish author attuned to both English and Irish readerships and whose Dublin editions attest to a sophisticated audience with a taste for controversy, typographic inventiveness, and wit. Such revisionary projects are not confined to the behemoths of Irish literature but extend to once-unfashionable figures such as Oliver Goldsmith. Beyond the familiar figures, however, Irish literature of the period is too often overlooked by scholars outside the island as a kind of special interest category with little perceived relevance to those interested in broader trends in eighteenth-century studies. Indeed, despite English Short Title Catalogue listings, Dublin editions are frequently overlooked by scholars, presuming them to be mere reprints, though many make substantive editorial alterations and revisions. Work is underway to change this situation. Series such as Early Irish Fiction, c. 1680–1820 and The Literature of Early Modern Ireland have made rich and innovative Irish works available to readers in outstanding critical editions. Ian Campbell Ross's edition of History of Jack Connor (1752), by Irish-Huguenot author William Chaigneau, for instance, presents this novel in a revised and accessible form.6 Jack Connor's generic playfulness, self-conscious handling of picaresque, and thoroughly engaging narrative make it an ideal text for undergraduate studies of prose fiction in [End Page 332] English, not...

Ancient Histories of Rome in Sixteenth-Century England: A Reconsideration of Their Printing and Circulation

This essay addresses the printing and circulation of ancient histories in England before 1600. A detailed case study in the context of wider European printing trends, it focuses on the significance of historians of Rome in particular, drawing on a new statistical analysis of the printing of ancient historians across Europe derived from the Universal Short Title Catalogue. Demonstrating new patterns of print popularity, the essay provides a nuanced understanding of the role histories of Rome played in early modern political culture and aims to facilitate more precise studies of the importance and popularity of individual historians, such as Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus—both in England and in Europe.

Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 by Leah Orr

Reviewed by: Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 by Leah Orr Emily C. Friedman Leah Orr, Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730. Charlottesville: Virginia, 2017. Pp. viii + 336. $45. I will be deeply disappointed if Orr's work does not inspire imitators. She begins with the premise that, when confronted with the "complex and messy" collection of fiction in the early eighteenth century, rather than choose to eliminate chaos by selecting a handful of texts and forcing a progressive and linear "rise," we should instead approach the corpus of fictions "without predetermined conclusions" because "their values may baffle us, but that does not make them less valid." Of course, it is worth noting that assessing what counts as fiction in a period of generic slipperiness is easier said than done, as Orr herself notes: "How do we study fiction in a world that seldom distinguished fact from fiction, new from old, original from translation?" Her corpus, which consists of "nearly five hundred separate works of fiction printed in England between 1690 and 1730" is, as she notes, a task only truly achievable in a time when the bibliographies of fiction and the English Short Title Catalogue can be brought to bear on the digital corpora of Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Orr adds to that sum a valuable appendix of over two dozen works of fiction not included in McBurney's Checklist of English Prose Fiction, 1700–1739. She considers both printed works newly published in the period and reprints, providing a rich sense of the works available in the marketplace. Published fiction, she argues, was so disconnected from the notion of "serious" literature that it provides [End Page 192] "greater insight into the business side of the literary production than other forms of writing do." It is worth noting that these parameters cannot wholly account for earlier texts encountered in private collections or via manuscript circulation, which was still a viable mode for text transmission. And while an easy answer would be that such forms of circulation were too exclusive to be considered alongside the prose fiction corpus in print, Orr's own findings about the nature of the fiction marketplace reject such a simplification. These correctives about "common knowledge" are one of the most important contributions of this monograph. She also provides useful correctives and compelling arguments for claims that the fiction marketplace was much smaller than previously assumed, that chapbook readers "would have to have reading skills at least as good as a reader of a simple amorous tale," that "many works of fiction were anonymous because readers were not concerned with who wrote them, and authors were not trying to make a reputation for themselves by writing fiction." Her description of her focus as on "texts, booksellers, and readers" belies her primary engagement with textual apparatus—in many cases the primary resource for evidence about the latter two categories. Orr notes that the barriers to accessing texts are "no longer a problem" which is largely true, though it is a claim that deserves (at least) two caveats: (1) the majority of the digital surrogates used to fuel this work are held by proprietary databases; and (2) the category of "surviving texts" is an incredibly important qualifier. These of course do not undercut in any way the contribution of Orr's work here: it is as comprehensive as possible, and I look forward to her data being fruitfully joined to complementary work in the future. Because so much of Orr's work seems ripe for extension by scholars working on other genres or other periods, I find myself wishing there were a way truly to see her method and her data—admittedly an impossibility within the constraints of the monograph form. Her thirteen tables are a tantalizing snapshot of the hard-won, and largely invisible, labor of building controlled vocabularies and imposing taxonomies on a wildly variable corpus. What Orr does with this substantial corpus is nevertheless useful: analyzing and enumerating genre term strategy in title pages and advertisements and rethinking our existing categories and taxonomies. Her observations on her novel...

Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC): The International Database of 15th-century European Printing. Database

This is a review of the Database of Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC): The International Database of 15th-century European Printing

The British Library, with contributions from institutions worldwide. Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC): The International Database of 15th-century European Printing. Database.

The British Library, with contributions from institutions worldwide. Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC): The International Database of 15th-century European Printing. Database.

Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 by Leah Orr

MLR, .,   Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, –. By L O. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. . viii+ pp. $. ISBN ––––. In the last decade or so, there has been renewed and growing interest in the early modern book trade, and in what readers read and how they read. Already seminal texts such as Stephen Colclough’s Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities , – (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), which examines the diffuse genres of this period, how libraries and subscriptions impacted upon the types of books that were read, and the different reading communities that emerged during the long eighteenth century and into the Victorian period, have done much to reorient discussions from twentieth-century concerns with ‘the rise of the novel’ and canonicity. Other texts, such as Emma Depledge’s Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), have shown how the book trade played a part in shaping and forming the literary canon. Helen Smith’s Grossly Material ings: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) is an impressive example of how close examination of the Stationers’ Register and other documents uncovers the roles women had as patrons, writers, makers, printers, readers, and users of early modern books. Such studies force us to reassess the importance of the material book itself and the wealth of genres that circulated in the early modern period. Major projects such as the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EEBA) continue to reveal how readers, writers, printers, and performers engaged with cheap print in the nascent public sphere. Much of this scholarship has been underpinned by an understanding of the vitality of the material text and the material practices of print-making and dissemination. Running parallel with these concerns, Leah Orr examines print culture in the long eighteenth century to challenge the way in which canonical authors continue to dominate scholarship. By focusing upon the rise of the novel, Orr contends, we fail to see how ‘the economics of producing and selling books played a central role in what was published’ (p. ). Prior to the emergence of Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and the English Short Title Catalogue, access to early books was limited, leading to a distorted view of what people were reading in the long eighteenth century. Recognizing that these resources also have their limitations, Orr contends that they, along with an examination of the Stationers’ Register, are valuable starting points for considering what was read in the eighteenth century . What emerges is that printers continued to print Elizabethan and medieval texts into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, texts translated primarily from French sources, and that the works of fiction valued by later critics tend to be the exception rather than the norm. e book is divided into two parts. Part , ‘Fiction in the Print Culture World’, seeks first to define the novel through exploring eighteenth-century concepts of fiction, and then examines fiction and the book trade before moving on to discuss authorship and anonymous publication. Part , ‘Fiction in England, –’,  Reviews develops insights gained in the first part to focus upon the English book trade, speci fically reprints of older texts, texts translated into English from other vernacular languages, and fiction that was published for a purpose or for entertainment. ese terms, as Orr acknowledges, pose their own conceptual difficulties, and I would have liked to see a more theorized approach to both questions of genre and the differences between ‘fiction for purpose’ and ‘fiction for entertainment’. Nevertheless, this is an ambitious book that adds to the expanding wealth of scholarship on the book trade that systematically dismantles ‘the rise of the novel’ narratives of fiction production. L J M U R W Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: e Letters of Edmund Spencer (–). Ed. by D F and A H. Cambridge: Legenda. . xiv+  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Property, or the lack thereof, seems to have defined those who aspired to be considered ‘gentry’ in Georgian Ireland, where Catholics made up % of the population but owned only % of the land. Suggestively, it is not entirely clear from these letters if Edmund Spencer belongs to the Protestant ascendancy or is...