Early Modern Book Research Articles

Unpaid Debts to London Booksellers: John Harrison the Elder’s Lawsuit against Two Chapmen in 1585

Abstract This article presents a transcript of a recently discovered booklist from a 1585 lawsuit at the Court of Common Pleas. This list describes a large book sale made on 3 May 1584 to two chapmen named John Herne and Thomas Jackson. It throws light on the Elizabethan book trade and the litigation practices of London booksellers, and it contains rare evidence on the trade prices of early modern books. It also records the earliest known purchase of Edmund Spenser’s celebrated Shepheardes calender (first published in 1579).

Advertising grammars and dictionaries in the Venetian printing market: A linguistic analysis of title pages

AbstractTitle‐pages represent an interesting and under‐researched type of paratextual material in the context of the Italian early modern book market. Drawing on pragma‐linguistic approaches not yet applied in the Italian context, this paper offers an analysis of title‐pages of vernacular grammars and lexicographic works that were printed in Venice in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century (31 works).In Venice, which was the hub of vernacular codification, this new genre saw increasing attempts at popularization as more and more readers demanded straightforward tools that would help them learn literary Tuscan. My analysis focuses on the marketing strategies employed by publishers, printers, and authors – viewed together as a community of practice – on the title‐pages of these works. Focus is placed on the genre labels employed in primary titles, the presentation of the author's credentials, intended readership, printer and publisher, and dedication, as well as on the modifications applied by Venetian publishers when it came to re‐print and popularize non‐Venetian works. By exploring strategies used to guide and attract target audiences, this article aims to show that linguistic approaches are useful in the study of Italian paratexts and confirms the importance of including paratextual features in studies of historical sociolinguistics.

Locating Devotion: Sermon Title Pages and the Early Modern Book Market, 1620–1642

Abstract This article considers the place that sermons held in the early modern book market through a quantitative survey of the title pages of sermon-books published in English between 1620 and 1642. Working from an EEBO dataset, this research examines four features of title pages: (a) dating referents, (b) location referents, (c) references to the living or status of the preacher, and (d) whether the books were collections. This research demonstrates that the vast majority of sermon-books declared their place of preaching (74%) and the occasion of their preaching (67%). This article explores how the book-buying public’s interest in novelty and the initial performance of the sermon shaped the use of paratextual material. It proposes that the printed sermon makes the page into a privately accessible space to connect with the publicly experienced communal time of the performed sermon, counteracting the desacralizing effect of the press.

Antiquarianism, philology, and translatio studii in the epistolary translations of Sir John Hobart and Nicholas Bacon

ABSTRACT This article examines the collaborative verse translations undertaken by the learned amateurs Nicholas Bacon and John Hobart in their 1664–65 correspondence. The letters reveal the pair’s critical attitudes as translators, and also include their substantial discussion about secondary textual and antiquarian resources. This article argues that Hobart and Bacon have three distinct methods of dealing with difficult passages of their texts – conjecture, the collation of different editions and commentaries, and the use of antiquarian resources – which each enables them to think critically about a given crux whilst avoiding the finality of a definitive resolution. In these three methods, the pair invoke humanist antecedents as well as distinctively modern seventeenth-century resources such as reference books. In the latter case, the men also provide a notable case study in the practical use of a particular type of early modern book which is usually difficult to trace in the historical record.

The Eleventh-Century ‘N’ Psalter from England: New Pieces of the Puzzle

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of two recently found fragments of a Latin psalter with a continuous Old English gloss. The fragments were used as endleaf guards in an early modern book from the collection of Samuel Meienreis, currently held at the C. Norwid Library in Elbląg. We argue that the newly found parchment pieces match four other membra disiecta from the same eleventh-century codex produced in England. Since the formerly identified fragments were removed from the bindings of unknown books, their provenance and the origin of the manuscript from which they were removed have not been established, so far. The new findings partially fill this gap. In this paper we explore palaeographical and linguistic evidence, and the historical context of the manuscript waste found in Elbląg in an attempt to reconstruct the history of the so-called N Psalter to which all the extant pieces once belonged.

The Early Modern Book Trade Project: Premises, Objectives, Methodologies and Resources

The Early Modern Book Trade Project: Premises, Objectives, Methodologies and Resources

A Closer Look at the Sixteenth-century Ambraser Heldenbuch

Abstract This study concerns a late medieval manuscript, the Ambraser Heldenbuch, created by Hans Ried for Emperor Maximilian I between 1504 and 1516. The recent facsimile edition makes it much easier to probe the critical question why this volume was not printed and what makes it stand out so much in the context of the early modern book market. The inclusion of the anonymous verse narrative Mauritius von Craûn (ca. 1220–1240) allows for more trenchant analyses concerning the patron and his interest in these literary works. The study takes into view the emperor’s strong concern with his afterlife, the paradoxical aspects determining that novella, and the contrast of this text copied here, very oddly, for the first time with the more popular literary works offered on the early modern book market. At a time when the printing press was increasingly conquering the book business, luxury bibliophile items continued to be produced as manuscripts. It might well be that the current book market finds a parallel in this phenomenon, with the electronic book pushing traditionally printed books aside. In fact, until today, we still resort to the manuscript in special cases, such as deeds, wills, licenses, and other documents.

Lusty Sack Possets, Nuptial Affections and the Material Communities of Early Modern Weddings

Abstract This article argues that 'sack posset', a treasured beverage that was the culinary pinnacle of seventeenth-century wedding celebrations, was vital to the rituals and emotions of early modern marriage; its consumption sealed a marriage's contractual formation and it was essential in forging lusty nuptial affections and the procreative fortunes of newlywed couples. Drawing on early modern recipe books, dietetic and medical knowledge, and agricultural practices, sack posset's 'foodway' is reconstructed for the first time, from grazing pastures to the marriage bed. In so doing it reveals an extended and multispecies material community of plants, animals and culinary expertise that was essential to a wedding day's success, and to its affective power. By uncovering the embodied co-dependencies of early modern bodies and their environments, the article calls for a reappraisal of anthropocentric models of 'emotional communities' and offers a new framework for recognising their material and multispecies complexity.

Reading in the mist: high-quality optical character recognition based on freely available early modern digitized books

Abstract In this paper, we present a workflow for reworking digitized versions of early modern books, freely available in the public domain, in such a way that they will be capable of yielding high-quality optical character recognition (OCR) results suitable for computational text mining. Testing our method, we observed that anything above 90% OCR accuracy is sufficient for semantic analysis. In addition,the overall homogeneity in the OCR accuracy across the corpus proved to be more important than having perhaps only a few works with higher accuracy and the rest available in a lower quality. In terms of the OCR process, this paper illustrates how it was possible to reduce the processing time at maximum quality of a single book of average length (ca. 500 pages) from a minimum of 20 hrs to an average of about 3 hrs (though theoretically nearly infinitely reducible). This was achieved by replacing a step-by-step OCR process with a fully automated pipeline system run on an arbitrary number of servers, breaking up the full process of OCRing one book into minimal tasks that can be handled simultaneously by multiple servers.

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Postscript: The Open Street

This article serves as a postscript for the ‘London as Theatrical Space’ special issue of The London Journal. It reads the early modern English jest book archive for its illustrations of common sense attitudes towards individual street performances by pedestrians. The variety of topics the article considers includes feathers, gallants, disabled bodies, and the generality of display in public urban space.

The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. By Joshua Calhoun

The preface to this provocative book takes its epigraph from As You Like It: Duke Senior, unfolding to his companions the benefits of their banishment, describes how they will find ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones’ (2.1.16‐17). It makes a suitable motto for The Nature of the Page, in which Joshua Calhoun finds the literary written through the natural world. This is a monograph that mines the metaphorical resources of paper and its constituent materials—flax seeds, linen, ‘gelatinized animal parts’ (p. 15)—and restlessly investigates how these resources have been exploited by writers over the last four centuries. This ecocritical approach yields conclusions that are frequently stimulating, often surprising and sometimes genuinely enlightening. The Nature of the Page is organized into five chapters, each addressing a different interaction—or ‘mode of negotiation’ (p. 16)—with paper. The first chapter discusses its manufacture, focused mostly on a study of the late‐eighteenth‐century Pomeranian paper‐maker Matthias Koops. The second shows how paper’s pre‐life as linen rags was imagined poetically in early modern England, influenced in particular by Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book’. The third chapter addresses the different ways in which errors were removed from early modern books—scraped from parchment or blotted out of paper—and their differing poetic resonances. The fourth chapter examines how a sized page, unlike its unsized equivalent, could hold annotations, exploring both the opportunities this enabled for metaphor and the consequences it caused for book survival rates. And the fifth stays on this conservationist theme, showing how modern and early modern expectations of bibliographical survival differ and musing on how this affects critical interpretation.

Festive Friars: Embodied Performance and Audience Affect

This essay models a method for unearthing performance traces in texts that seem on the surface to be strictly literary. Centering on Thomas Dekker's The Raven's Almanac, a compilation of stories akin to those in early modern jest books, it analyzes a bawdy tale about a friar and an abbess that reveals deep connections to May games. Festivity constituted a mode of embodied knowledge, a somatic and kinesthetic process that conditioned playgoer responses. This essay demonstrates how examining nondramatic performance, including quotidian, ceremonial, and ritual practices, allows the recovery of ephemeral audience affect. Studying spectators’ emotions is notoriously challenging but can productively complicate concepts such as character and narrative. Moreover, it was through amorphous feelings and sensations that theater actively produced cultural understandings. Expanding the methodological toolkit for investigating performance offers a useful blueprint for researching other ineffable but consequential historical experiences that exceed, by definition, the documentary evidence.

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Memorializing the Everyday: The Evidence of the Final Decade of Frances Wolfreston’s Life

ABSTRACT In 2010, the Oxford bookseller Christopher Edwards discovered a bound volume containing eleven annotated almanacs of the early modern woman reader and book owner Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677). Her annotated almanacs chronicle important events in her life and provide a fuller understanding of her as a person and a book-collector. While informal, they are the only surviving self-writing by this remarkable figure and reveal a careful process of selection and attention to accuracy. Wolfreston almost certainly intended the almanacs to be read by her children after her death and may have even used them as a temporary repository of material for another manuscript she was writing. A member of the minor landed gentry living near the market town of Tamworth for most of her life, she has been characterized as provincial, but her almanacs reveal an active, innovative, and self-sufficient widow who maintained relationships with prominent individuals in her community, helped managed her son’s estate, and lent money to men and women alike. They are a valuable glimpse into the life of a widow and bibliophile in the English Midlands in the 1660s and 1670s.

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Seeing at a Glance

Abstract During the 17th century, the debate over the true world system (sistema mundi) was essentially between the heliocentric and geo-heliocentric models. Comparisons were made between tables that recorded more and more celestial observations in various printed astronomical works. Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s Almagestum novum (1651) provides an excellent example of how tables were used. Riccioli wanted to find the best hypothesis (hypothesis absoluta) with the help of a rigorous database from which he could proceed to make mathematical deductions. Tables in early modern astronomical books were important because they showed the results of observations. Presented in a clear way they became persuasive visual arguments.

Imaginative Networks: Tracing Connec­tions Among Early Modern Book Dedi­cations

This essay uses network metrics (centrality, density, clustering coefficients) to account for shifts in dedicatory practice resulting from political crises, religious turmoil, and changes in book production practices. It constructs a network from the names that appear in dedications of EEBO-TCP texts; names are detected using the linguistic markup from the EarlyPrint project. The essay argues that we learn more about early modern book history by constructing networks of all the names that appear in dedications, not just those of authors, printers, and patrons. The network includes a mixture of religious and political figures, literary personalities, fictional characters, and bookmaking professionals, because this is the full range of names that dedicatory practice covers in the period. By proceeding in this way, network metrics can account for a range of dedicatory phenomena, including Queen Elizabeth’s popularity on both sides of the political aisle long after her death and, especially, consolidation around non-contemporary names in dedicatory practice as a result of both the Civil War and the Restoration. The imaginative networks revealed by early modern dedications are organized mainly around untimely figures from the recent and distant past, but despite this the networks are sensitive to historical change, especially at moments of political and social crisis.

Digital extraction of knowledge from early-modern books

As information and communications technology has advanced, there is increased interest in digitally archiving books and other materials that previously have never been archived in such a way. This is beneficial to researchers, teachers, students and the general public, enabling them to easily access useful historical information. The digital archiving of old newspapers is a work in progress but there are obstacles to this as scanning fonts from 1850, for example, using optical character recognition (OCR), which is the main method used to convert materials to text, is challenging and it's not currently possible to perform a full text search. Professor Kazuki Joe, Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Nara Women's University, Japan, leads a team of researchers that are working to make it possible to perform full text searches for early-modern books, magazines and newspapers. This is an especially difficult task as the team is working with Japanese texts and the early-modern writing style in Japan is different from that of today. As such, the researchers first focused on the automatic conversion of letterpress book images into text and then realised the need for automatic translation of early-modern literary texts into present colloquialisms.

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