Early Modern Print Research Articles

Visual Acuity and the Physiognomer's Art of Observation

A printed portrait sounds like an oxymoron: black and white and bereft of the illusionism that painted portraits used to trick the eye, did printed portraits actually have any stakes in the game of establishing identity, or were they hamstrung by their medium? Although there certainly were prints that doggedly aimed to identify the sitter, many early modern printed portraits did not make rigorous claims to positive identification but floated in the space between prototype and identity. From the confluence of new materials and new audiences brought about by print emerged new faces and new uses for them: character heads in genres such as physiognomies and cosmographies began to reflect the results of observation. Mid-sixteenth-century physiognomies, books that coached viewers how to read the profiles of their friends and neighbours, aspired to present empirical knowledge to their readers. Despite the tightrope they tread between mimesis and idealisation and their heavy reliance on convention, early modern prints were confident about their ability to cue observations and calibrate sightings, and their organisational aptitude should not be overlooked. Game changers in shaping disciplinary activity related to empirical experience, generic portraits, as this essay will argue, developed skills like visual acuity.

Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco

This collection of essays brings together new research on various aspects of sexuality in Italian Renaissance culture, including some fascinating, unexpected (and sometimes very funny) primary source material. The book is divided into two sections—the first relates particularly to visual material, and the second to sociability and eroticism. After a brief introduction by Guido Ruggiero, an essay by the editor, Sara Matthews-Grieco opens the first section. She considers the culture of erotic prints, and in doing so introduces a theme that is repeated throughout—the problem of finding evidence about erotic cultures, particular those of the non-elites. Matthews-Grieco points out that our opinion about ‘popular’ erotic culture is inevitably skewed, as sexual imagery was often destroyed unless it was associated with a particular cultural (and thus financial) value, such as being by a renowned artist. She argues that early modern prints were deliberately marketed to two audiences—with ‘mythological’ pornography aimed at a higher class of client than those with people in contemporary dress; the lack of surviving prints makes any firm conclusions difficult, however. All the more fortuitous then, is Guido Guerzoni’s chance discovery of the erotic doodlings of a Modenese clerk, which he stumbled upon among the financial ledgers of the Este family and which he discusses in the next essay. Guerzoni places these drawings in a broader context of erotic imagery produced by and for non-elites. Attempting to get to grips with the mentalité of popular eroticism is also a concern of the next essay. Allen Grieco’s fascinating chapter reveals the ubiquity of connecting birds with sexual organs and lusty behaviour in an abundance of ways from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Not only were various types of bird used as a metaphor for penis, words such as ‘nest’ and ‘cage’ referenced the female genitalia. Grieco shows how these metaphors were closely linked to how the eating of birds was understood as potentially leading to lustful behaviour, Bernardino of Siena darkly warning widows that eating fowl could lead to ‘hot blood’. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim closes this section with an essay that convincingly argues that the dichotomy sometimes made by scholars between ‘illicit’ imagery (associated, for example with courtesans) and ‘licit’ imagery (associated with marriage) is a false one. She shows that imagery with sexual themes, if not necessarily ‘erotic’ in itself, was often connected with the marriage process, which could be a long-drawn-out series of events in the period before the Council of Trent.

“Illegitimate” Pantomime in the “Legitimate” Theater: Context as Text

Romantic era drama has received increasing attention, with sessions at conferences devoted to plays and theater, with performances of plays by, for example, Baillie, Byron, and Beddoes, and with fine monographs and scholarly editions. (1) Still, as I have argued else where, (2) editorial efforts on nineteenth-century drama face considerable difficulties arising from such factors as the volume of dramas--with more than 25,000 nineteenth-century play texts to consider--and the perceived value of these works, as many continue to see the period between Sheridan and Shaw as a vast dramatic wasteland. In the end, however, I think the heart of the problem was diagnosed by Jane Moody in our best account of the theater of the period: Moody reminds us that, whatever we think of the literary drama of the time, the Romantic era was a period of enormous theatrical innovation, where what happened on stage is a key to understanding plays that for us remain only as texts. As Moody demonstrates in outlining what she calls the physical, visceral and thus illegitimate aesthetic of Romantic era theater, the written text on stage is hedged round by eloquent if bodies as well as dazzling visuals and stirring music. My question is: how should a textual editor, usually focused on the word, approach what Moody calls mute performance? (3) In a sense, the editor's task is to take up the traces of what was once a live performance in order to create a self-consciously textual representation of what we call theatrical experience. In most periods, dramatic texts are considered simply as texts, a set of written words in manuscript or print that are then realized by actors; while there is surely always a tension between the literary text and its particular physical embodiments, few doubt that the word precedes the act and takes precedence. In other periods, we would not primarily think of worrying about performance versions of texts. For example, while considerable effort has been put into publishing John Philip Kemble's promptbooks for his productions of Shakespeare, no editor of Shakespeare would re-edit the early modern print texts with those performance versions in mind. Simply put, we do not correct texts collated from print or manuscript versions on the basis of performance information. situation is different in large stretches of nineteenth-century drama where action, sets, and music displace language. While one can find similar moments in particular texts in other periods, the problems they pose are not as acute as in the romantic era. Issues arise when stage directions are key to the meaning of the play, when it is theatrical action rather than dramatic words that matter. This point becomes clearer if we examine moments where stage directions literally take center stage. For example, there is the famous dumb show in Hamlet, which is obviously done in pantomime, but Shakespeare describes the action in considerable detail (see the stage directions following 3.2.123), and then the players perform the action again, this time accompanied by speeches (3.2.139-242); a director does not have to puzzle out how to stage the scene. (4) Perhaps the most famous bit of stage business ever, Exit, pursued by a (Winter's Tale, 3-357), surely allows a wide variety of stage action, from having a real bear appear to using a projection of a bear, but we know what occurs. Moving ahead several centuries, we get this stage direction: Meanwhile, Hedda walks up and down the room raising her arms and clenching her fists as though in desperation. Then she throws aside the curtains from the French windows and stands there, looking out. (5) Ibsen's stage direction may have allowed Ingmar Bergman to introduce a great deal of mime in his productions of the play, for which he was criticized by those who prefer words to action, but Ibsen has provided us with a clear description of the stage business he imagined. Compare these moments to stage directions from early nineteenth-century melodramas: The whole scene passes in a mysterious and rapid manner; or, The ensuing scene ought to be conducted with much haste and mystery. …

Fresh impressions: early modern Japanese prints

Fresh impressions: early modern Japanese prints

A Study on Robert Greene's Cony-Catching Pamphlets: Early Modern Print Market and the Metropolitan City

A Study on Robert Greene's Cony-Catching Pamphlets: Early Modern Print Market and the Metropolitan City

Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman and Early Modern Print

Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman and Early Modern Print

Introducing DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts

Introducing DEx:A Database of Dramatic Extracts Laura Estill (bio) Early modern readers and playgoers often kept commonplace books and miscellanies, where they would copy poems, aphorisms, letters, recipes, accounts, and any number of things—including selections from plays. Although a renewed interest in miscellanies has produced valuable digital tools, including Adam Smyth's An Online Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies (1640-1682), the Folger Shakespeare Library's Union First Line Index of English Verse, 13th-19th Century, and Abigail Williams's forthcoming Digital Miscellanies Index, these resources often focus on print and poetry. Laura Estill's DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts will fill this gap by helping scholars find selections from plays copied into manuscripts.1 By offering transcriptions of these dramatic extracts, DEx will contribute to the ongoing opening of the archives facilitated by the digital turn. DEx builds on and complements Peter Beal's monumental Index of English Literary Manuscripts and forthcoming online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 by offering transcriptions and comparison to printed texts and also listing extracts from works by anonymous or lesser-known authors, such as Peter Hausted or William Peaps. Though we may overlook lesser-known plays and playwrights, early modern readers did not make the same distinction: consider Archbishop Sancroft (1617-93), who collected excerpts from Quarles's The Virgin Widow alongside quotations from Shakespeare and Fletcher. Extant manuscript evidence suggests that the phenomenon of copy selections from English plays began around the 1590s; as such, DEx focuses on seventeenth-century manuscripts. Although dramatic extracting continued in the Restoration, at the moment DEx catalogs only extracts from plays written and published before the closure of the theaters in 1642. That is to say, DEx includes manuscripts from the late seventeenth century that contain extracts from earlier works, such as BL MS Lansdowne 1185, which is a manuscript with eighty pages of Shakespearean extracts copied around 1700. The first iteration of DEx will allow users to search dramatic miscellanies, those manuscripts comprised primarily of selections from plays. Extant dramatic miscellanies contain thousands of extracts from dozens of early modern plays. [End Page 128] DEx users will be able to search and browse by playwright, by play, and by manuscript. The results will be displayed as a transcription with, where possible, act, scene, and line references and links to scholarly online editions of the plays, such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions, which will allow scholars to easily see the extract in the context of the full play. Scholars will also be able to sort results by folio number and click to the description of the manuscript from its repository (for instance, the British Library's Manuscripts Catalogue), to get a sense of the extract in its manuscript contexts. DEx's bibliography page will indicate all the sources used, including early modern print and manuscript as well as modern scholarly editions. DEx will also include a page of links to resources for manuscript study.2 DEx will offer full-text searching so that scholars can search the database by keyword or subject. DEx is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) database that includes transcriptions encoding using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The transcriptions in DEx include original manuscript spellings and abbreviations with regularizations and expansions, which increases the usability of the full-text search: for instance, a search for "country" will also bring up results for "countrie" and "countrey." Manuscript compilers often changed the dramatic extracts they copied. DEx will allow users to compare the manuscript version of an extract to a print counterpart. For instance, one mid-seventeenth compiler took "'Tis a favour her betters sue for" (from J. W.'s The Valiant Scot [1637]) and changed it to "Thy bed is a favor betters sue for." Examples like this abound in seventeenth-century manuscripts—early modern readers had no compunction about adapting and altering dramatic extracts. Although the first release of DEx catalogs seventeenth-century dramatic miscellanies that contain extracts from Renaissance plays, in the future it could be expanded to include more manuscripts, such as commonplace books and verse miscellanies, extracts from Restoration plays, and eighteenth-century manuscripts. DEx will evolve as further dramatic extracts are discovered, more...

On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities by Giovanni Botero (review)

Reviewed by: On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities by Giovanni Botero Adam Woodhouse Mowl Giovanni Botero, On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, trans. and intro. Geoffrey Symcox (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2012) xxxvii + 95 pp. Niccolò Machiavelli continues to cast a long shadow over the intellectual history of early modern Europe. Whilst Machiavelli is studied as a canonical author in the history of western political thought from, say, Plato to Marx, the name of his compatriot Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) remains very much embedded in the peculiar historical context of Counter-Reformation Europe. Indeed, Botero’s most celebrated work, The Reason of State (Della ragion di Stato), has since its publication in 1589 been appreciated primarily as a Christian defense against Machiavelli’s perceived secularization of political life. As such, Botero, a Jesuit theologian and political theorist, is generally read today as a spokesman for the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church’s response to the works of Machiavelli and the “Machiavellianism” of his supposed followers. This is not surprising, as Botero served as a consultore on the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books, a body that expended considerable effort chasing Machiavelli and his ghosts around early modern print culture. However, in [End Page 234] publishing this new English translation of one of his lesser-known treatises, Geoffrey Symcox makes a case for engaging with Botero on his own terms. As Symcox explains in his introduction to the text, On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities (Delle cause della grandezza e magnificenza della città) has long been a victim of the success of The Reason of State. On the Causes was published in a stand-alone edition by Botero in 1588, the year before the editio princeps of The Reason of State, but in virtually its entire subsequent publishing history this slim text has been attached as an appendix to Botero’s magnum opus. Symcox argues convincingly that “this ancillary placement of On the Causes as a companion piece to The Reason of State has meant that scholars have not paid it the attention it merits” (xi). It is his intention to introduce a new generation of English readers to Botero’s treatise on cities. So why should non-specialists be interested in On the Causes? Symcox begins by stressing the “precocious originality” of Botero’s text. As he points out, On the Causes cannot be said to belong to a utopian tradition of Renaissance political thought, represented chiefly by Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella, nor can it be absorbed into the genre of practical architectural treatises, re-established in the middle of the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti with his revised Vitruvianism (xii–xiii). On the Causes, Symcox proposes, represents a new approach to studying the city: “Botero shifts the focus of enquiry from the forma urbis … to economics, demography, and the political factors that foster urban development, causing some cities to rise and prosper while others do not” (xiii). Symcox notes that these highly innovative features have led Botero’s treatise to be hailed by some scholars as the first socio-economic analysis of cities (xii). On the Causes should thus be of interest not only to historians, but also to historically-minded sociologists, economists and political theorists. Yet it is not just its author’s status as a student of urban socio-economics avant la lettre that makes On the Causes an important text for studying the intellectual history of Europe; Botero is also the first European author to treat seriously a range of non-European evidence when discussing the city. As Symcox observes, this procedure allows him to view the development of cities from a “global perspective” (xiii). An insight into why Botero chose to embark on a work of comparative history can be gleaned from Symcox’s helpful summary of his life and career. After travelling the length of the Italian peninsula from his native Piedmont to Sicily, Botero spent time teaching in Jesuit colleges in France. Symcox suggests that “[his] exposure to a very different society and culture stimulated the interest in geography and the comparative study of political systems that would...

Recusants and the Rosary: A Seventeenth-Century Chapel in Aberdeen

Provost Skene’s House, Aberdeen, is home to a painted ceiling depicting scenes from the lives of both Christ and the Virgin. This decoration has intrigued scholars and visitors alike for around sixty years since it was renovated and unveiled to the public in the early 1950s. The ceiling, painted in the seventeenth century, has suffered a considerable amount of damage. Unfortunately, half of the original decorative scheme has been lost. In addition to this, panels that do survive have been modified slightly during restoration. This article examines some of the early-modern continental prints used as sources by the original painters in order to determine that they were Scottish, and not travelling artists from the Low Countries. It also reconstructs the majority of the historic layout of the ceiling, by examining pre-restoration photographs of lost details in conjunction with further early-modern print sources. The article will attempt to identify some of the images which have been lost from the ceiling and argue that the original cycle of images depicted The Mysteries of the Rosary. It will also examine how the painted ceiling, created in the aftermath of the Reformation, survived both the effects of anti-Catholic legislation in Scotland and time. Finally, the relationships between the patron and his local recusant community are discussed in conjunction with the significance of the deliberate inclusion of the IHS monogram within the ceiling’s design.

Review: Cities at War in Early Modern Europe, by Martha D. Pollak

Martha D. Pollak. Cities at War in Early Modern Europe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 370 pp., 223 b/w illus. $95, ISBN 9780521113441. The cities in Martha Pollak’s new book are not really at war. They are preparing for war and commemorating war, but the actual warfare is left out of the picture. Though most of the cities she discusses experienced one or more sieges, the military operations themselves are not the focus of her study. Likewise, Pollak does not examine fortifications as such, but rather their multifarious effect on the conception and representation of the city—what she calls “military urbanism”: “an international style of urban design characterized by uniformity, geometrical clarity, architectural economy, and unadorned monumentality” (i). The ambitious aim of Cities at War in Early Modern Europe is to demonstrate that the military component was of central importance in the history of urbanism between 1550 and 1700. Of course, the gripping conjunction between cities and war has been explored before; a fine example is La ville et la guerre , edited by Antoine Picon, oddly never cited by Pollak.1 But overall historians of urban design have hitherto downplayed military considerations. A notable exception is Enrico Guidoni and Angela Marino’s two-volume Storia dell’urbanistica , to which Pollak is evidently indebted.2 Pollak’s subject matter—urban design and military culture—remains that of her earlier book, Turin, 1564–1680 (1991), but she now expands her survey to the whole of Europe, and offers not a chronological narrative but a thematically organized study.3 She splendidly succeeds in rectifying the familiar picture by showing how well-known manifestations of baroque city planning were generated by military urbanism. The pan-European approach is particularly praiseworthy, for although war was the most international of phenomena, most modern studies of military architecture and urbanism remain confined within present-day national frontiers. Pollak’s comparative survey ranges from Valletta to Stockholm and from Naples to London. Her attention goes mainly to the leading and …

Fictional Elements in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Sonnet Sequences and Early Modern Fictions

Sonnet sequences printed in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contain fictional mechanisms such as truth-telling frames, arguments, and meta-fictional discourse, and display elements of early modern printing practices also employed in the printing of fictional narratives. A comparison with similar elements present in early English narratives and novels suggests that early modern writer, reader, and editor saw elements of narrativity in sonnet sequences, which invites a reconsideration of the sonnet sequence as a part of the history of fictional writing.

Book Review: Oronce Fine Considered: The Worlds of Oronce Fine: Mathematics, Instruments, and Print in Renaissance France

ORONCE FINE CONSIDERED The Worlds of Oronce Fine: Mathematics, Instruments, and Print in Renaissance France. Edited by Alexander Marr (Shaun Tyas, Donington, 2009). Pp. xvi + 224. £49. ISBN 978-1-90028-996-2.Oronce Fine (1494-1555) is remembered today - when he is remembered at all - as a geographer, cartographer, and book illustrator. To his contemporaries, however, Fine was much more. A polymath, Fine engaged in the full spectrum of the Renaissance mathematical arts, from teaching as the first Royal Lecturer in mathematics at the French College Royal to making instruments and overseeing Paris's bustling printing houses. He inspired the admiration and envy of aspiring younger scholars, including Pedro Nunes and Petrus Ramus. Yet, despite these accomplishments, Fine remains an often over-looked figure in the history of science, one usually dismissed as a mediocre popularizer rather than an original thinker.The essays in this volume attempt to situate Fine in the context of the sixteenthcentury French mathematical and scholarly world. By emphasizing how Fine is representative of larger trends in early modern culture and scholarship, they thus aim to rehabilitate the mathematician as an important subject of study for modern historians. The contributions themselves grew out of a 2006 conference organized by the volume's editor, Alexander Marr, and held in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. The collection will be of use to scholars interested in the Ufe and work of Oronce Fine, as well as historians of Renaissance French intellectual life, early modern instrument-making and printing, and mathematics.The contributions, culled from a distinguished group of international scholars, cover the breadth of Fine's career. Articles by Isabelle Pantin and Angela Axworthy explore Fine's role as Royal Lecturer in mathematics and the relationship between his mathematics and the French humanist tradition. Another set of papers by Pascal Brioist, Sven Dupre, and Catherine Eagleton examine Fine's work in the realm of practical mathematics and instrument design, and, in particular, the relationship between Fine's experiential knowledge and the textual tradition. Articles by Jean-Marc Besse, Adam Mosley, and Jean-Jacques Brioist explore Fine's contributions to cosmography, geography, and cartography. His legacy is afforded special attention in the final three contributions by Henrique Leitao, Giovanna Cifoletti, and Anthony Turner, who examine Fine's reception by later mathematicians and instrument manufacturers.The breadth of Fine's own career could easily have produced a collection with few unifying themes. …

Towards a Political Economy of the Early Modern Print Industry in Chosn

AbstractThis article examines the rise of a modern print industry in Chosn Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The common view is that the beginning of Japanese rule in 1910 suppressed a nascent print industry, but after a “dark” period, it underwent a renaissance after the March First Movement in 1919. An examination of available statistics from the period suggests that this view needs to be slightly revised. Though it is true that print capitalism fully emerged in the 1920s, the production of print began to increase significantly after the mid 1910s. The article also discusses the print industry’s role in the formation of the bourgeoisie and how this process was affected by the dynamics of modernization under colonial rule.

“A knowing people”

In 1646, Dorothy Burch, a working class wife and mother who lived in a small village in Kent, published A Catechism of the Several Heads of the Christian Religion. This essay draws upon such diverse sources as county histories, public records, taxation lists, and churchwarden's accounts in order to attend to the factors that allowed Burch to enter early modern print culture. In the early 1640's, a Royalist minister arrived at her local parish church and insulted the local parishioners, the majority of whom worked as fisherman, oyster-dredgers, and mariners. Dorothy Burch wrote her catechism to demonstrate her-and her community's-knowledge of the Protestant faith. She chose to write a catechism in part because of the importance accorded to catechizing within Evangelical Protestantism, but also because catechisms were a genre traditionally associated with women and mothers.

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

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.

Spenser and Jokes: The 2008 Kathleen Williams Lecture

WE ARE AWARE THAT Spenser was associated with many books and made use of a wide range of reading materials throughout his life.* 1 Yet, as is often the case, scholars have been extremely keen to explore his reading of European, especially Italian, literature; classical culture; history; medicine and science; the law, and so on, but not his use of more popular forms of writing and culture, even though it has long been established that popular culture was consumed by every social rank in the sixteenth century, a situation that disappeared within two hundred years. It is impossible to analyze early modern print culture without thinking about popular culture, the central point of Peter Burke's seminal book on popular culture in early modern Europe, which established a whole field of enquiry. Popular culture, argued Burke, was everyone's culture, shared by high and low life, rich and poor, literate and illiterate. Yet, the way that The Faerie Queene is usually read, one would struggle to realize this.2Spenser has indeed been radically severed from any traces of popular culture and his reputation outside the academic world is not inspiring, a fact that determines the ways in which the poem is read and often, I suspect, makes his admirers all the more bloody-minded in hauling him back into the ivory tower and keeping him there as the poet's poet, caviar before the general. Even other poets sometimes think he is a lost cause: the Irish poet, Tom Paulin, for example, referred to The Faerie Queene, with one eye on Spenser's reputation as yet another English butcher in Ireland, as Spenser's mercifully unfinished epic.3A recent brave but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to cross this division served to highlight the problems of Spenser's uncomfortable cultural location. A fledgling theater group, Cilgwyn Theater Company, staged a version of sections of The Faerie Queene at Sadler's Wells Lillian Bayless Theatre, 11-29 December 2007. The performance, dogged it has to be said by a great deal of bad luck, was not a critical or commercial success. Reviewers were, as anticipated, rather savage. The performance was billed as an eco-friendly performance and attracted some early publicity, which, sadly backfired. Lyn Gardner, writing in The Guardian opened her review by describing the play as One of the more bonkers Christmas offerings, and not in a good way.4 Complaining that the play was largely characterized by actors leaping about and mumbling, the reviewer in The Times concluded his review with the acid comment: Nor was the much-hyped use of recycled materials for the design anything special, though hopes briefly rise at the arrival from above of a vengeful goddess in the form of a gigantic potato masher. The serious point I want to make stems from the opening comment made by the same reviewer, one which was echoed elsewhere in the-mercifully-limited press coverage the poor play received: Edmund Spenser's interminable romantic epic is the famously unread tome of English literature, and the Cilgwyn Theater Company's production of a small chunk of it doesn't whet the appetite for more.3 Spenser's work is seen as, at best, worthy and humorless, esoteric and at odds with enjoyment, however good it might be for those hapless few who read it. If there was one assumption that was shared by the reviewer and the theater company it was an excessive reverence for the substance of Spenser's poem, which remained, I think, largely un-reread. It continued to be part of the strata of intellectual (unfunny) culture, and was cut off from the lively, vulgar (funny) arena of popular culture.What this episode reveals is that there is a huge gap in our understanding of the intellectual culture in which Spenser developed his work, because, in fact, Spenser's poetry developed out of a culture that bridged the divide between the high and the low. Moreover, the poet often tells us that he is making use of works of popular culture.6 A specific case in point is that of early modern jest books, of which several survive dating from the early sixteenth century that were reprinted and developed throughout that period. …

Foxe'sBook of Martyrsand Early Modern Print Culture. John N. King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii+351.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewFoxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture. John N. King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii+351.Janel MuellerJanel MuellerUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author University of ChicagoPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 107, Number 2November 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/648005 Views: 5Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Editing Music in Early Modern Germany

This excellent book combines the philologist's method, offering up page after page of archival discovery and textual insight, with a cultural historian's grasp of the various reception discourses of the new scholarship on early modern Europe. Hammond's historical point of view itself is strikingly fresh for the discipline of musicology. Only very recently have some music historians begun to join their colleagues from the related disciplines in considering the years between about 1400 and 1700 in the longue durée terms of a unitary ‘early modern’ period. Further, the interdisciplinarity so richly evident in Hammond's work testifies to the fruitfulness of the cooperative trend over the past twenty years among Renaissance, Reformation and baroque historians, not least among them Anthony Grafton, whose Princeton seminar on the highly ramified early modern print culture inspired the author to her present investigation. One of the principal challenges of the new early modern scholarship has been to the great dates and events—the before-and-after watersheds—that have constituted the positivistic markers of historiography since the nineteenth century. In the field of musical editing, 1850 has long held such canonical status. As late as the tenth printing of The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (2001) and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition (2001), 1850—the founding of the Bach Gesellschaft and origin of the critical edition—continued to serve as the date only after which one could claim that ‘musicologists have produced an enormous quantity of distinguished editions’ (Grove 7, p. 886). Randel's volume dedicates a single paragraph to the history of editions before 1850 (pp. 264f.); Sadie's gives one column (p. 896) to pre-1850 editions, which were allegedly useful ‘less for their content than as illustrations of the history of music scholarship’. Hammond's book, distinguished in both style and content, may be taken as an implicit argument, not for rejecting outright, but for revising through greater historical appreciation the disciplinary certainty that authentic musical editions began only in the mid-nineteenth century. Stated another way, Hammond's analysis, which applies Peter Burke's bricolage model of diffusion (meaning in this case: early modern northern European editors of anthologies of Italian madrigals and canzonettas operated pragmatically, choosing and adaptating according to criteria predicated on utility—an unpardonable sin in the minds of the Romantics), finds much about German editorial practice in the seminal years between Friedrich Lindner's Gemma musicalis I–III (1588–90) and Martin Rinckart's Triumphi de Dorothea (1619) that is worthy of being called ‘critical’ in its own right. For this achievement alone, Editing Music in Early Modern Germany deserves special recognition.

Editing Music in Early Modern Germany (review)

Reviewed by: Editing Music in Early Modern Germany Susan Forscher Weiss Editing Music in Early Modern Germany. By Susan Lewis Hammond. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xvii, 265 p. ISBN-13: 9780754655732. $99.95.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Editing Music in Early Modern Germany is arguably the first full-length study that examines the role of northern editors in adapting and collating Italian madrigals for use by readers in German-speaking lands. The author, Susan Lewis Hammond, highlights the importance of editors within a network that included composers, performers, printers, publishers, and patrons. She states that "the inspiration for the project dates back to Anthony Grafton's graduate seminar [at Princeton University] on early modern print culture, which sparked my interest in the networks of authors, printers, editors, publishers, and agents that brought books to the public" (p. xv). She also builds on the work of other scholars including Martha Feldman, Gary Tomlinson, Emma Dillon, Jane Bernstein, Mary Lewis, Stanley Boorman, Richard Goldthwaite, Lorenzo Bianconi, Tim Carter, and Roger Chartier. The introduction presents an outline of her method and content, setting up a case for the growing importance of the editor (compiler, translator, poet) in both the selection and presentation of material for German anthologies of music, particularly the madrigal, in the decades around 1600. These anthologies become important vehicles for the distribution and dissemination of the Italian madrigal in German-speaking lands. Lewis Hammond includes a well-known quote from one of, if not the most famous etiquette books of the Renaissance, Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano ("The Book of the Courtier"), published in Venice in 1528. This passage contains advice to a student on how to select, gather, imitate, judge, and transform the best qualities learned from his or her teacher. Oddly, of the many translations of this work, the one in German did not appear until 1566 in Munich, preceded by one in Spanish (1534), in French (1537), in English (1561) and in Latin (printed in Wittenberg) in 1561. An interest in things Italian and in Italian humanism had developed in a number of European countries before it spread to German-speaking lands, and edited anthologies appeared in Europe long before the first publications in Germany. Lewis Hammond contends, however, that despite the earlier presence of anthologies such as Petrucci's Harmonice musice Odhecaton A, published in Venice in 1501, or those by Pierre Attaingnant beginning in the 1520s in France, or even those in the 1530s in Germany, edited by Hans Ott and printed by the Petreius firm in Nurem berg, none gave recognition to the editor on the title page. Rather, it was the printer and/or composer whose names dominated those pages. At the same time, she emphasizes the tension between editor and author; these are revealed especially in the conflict between an author's intentions and the economic constraints of the print shop. In chapter 1, "The Anthology and the Birth of the Professional Music Editor," Lewis Hammond explores the social and cultural role of the editor in the music book trade of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here she draws on the work of Martha Feldman, who examines the importance of editors' reputations and the authorial function and responsibility thrust upon them. Lewis Hammond argues that the need for editors was "strongest in German-speaking lands where demand for Italian music necessitated the reliance on editors to translate verbal texts into German and rewrite new texts appropriate [End Page 500] for Protestant listeners" (pp. 8–9). To reveal these changes she focuses on editorial additions such as title pages, prefaces, dedications, tables, and visuals that help make a book more attractive and accessible. Following the 1540s, the title pages that typically featured a composer, begin to give prominence to the editor. No longer was the editor an anonymous figure, but rather someone whose services were necessary for getting the music books published and sold. In this chapter, Lewis Hammond also makes a case for the importance of the layout and indexing, guides that provided "a visual snapshot of the anthology" (p. 35). In relating the sixteenth-century procedure to a much earlier manuscript tradition, she draws on the work of...

O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (review)

O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage. By Amanda Eubanks Winkler. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. 232 pp. To study the English stage during the turbulent seventeenth century inherently involves grappling with disorder. Before and after regicide and revolution divided England, disharmony and faction seemed a permanent condition of the kingdom, so the most a monarch could hope for wasn't the containment of discord (not that was ever really a possibility) but escape from it (9). In O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage Amanda Eubanks Winkler unveils the English theater as a mediating space for public discourse during a century when the nation continually, and often violently, redefined the boundaries of political, religious, and social order. Winkler delves into the heart of this uneasy dramatic period and focuses the reader's attention on character types that defy easy categorization and reflect the underlying anxieties of a nation struggling to retain control. Specifically, she studies representations of the witch, lovesick, melancholic, and mad and thereby reveals shifting views of the gendered body and mind that influenced social interaction over the course of the seventeenth century. While her argument thus far is likely familiar to early modern English historians, literary critics, and gender theorists, Winkler reaffirms music's prominent role within this study. She emphasizes music's central symbolic value in seventeenth-century England's Neoplatonic understanding of the relationship between the political nation and the individual and offers her subsequent analysis of the dramatic stage as an answer to the following question: In this age of conflict, this century that completely reformulated the relationship between monarch and subject, between man and woman, between the macrocosm and microcosm, how did music, dance, and theater negotiate this obvious social tumult? (11) Although Winkler draws on abundant early modern print sources as well as contemporary literary and critical theory to support her observations, her deep familiarity with the masques and plays of the entire seventeenth century and her rich musical analyses of the theatrical music therein are the most persuasive evidential sources in the book. Winkler's concise survey of the wide variety of musical genres found on the English public and private stages provides a nuanced introduction for novice readers; she does not assume her readers' familiarity with the drama and genres she discusses, and she situates her examples before detailing their particular relevance. She also provides ample musical excerpts for readers to trace her observations if they so desire. The inclusion of a recording of these examples (either included with the text or available online) would have been an additional bonus and would have encouraged readers, like seventeenth-century audiences, to listen for the meaning encoded in the music. Following opening critical and structural commentary, Winkler introduces readers in her second chapter to the ideological contractions in musical representations of witchcraft and shows how onstage English witches threatened social and religious authority by challenging conventional gender roles (12). From the start of the seventeenth century, the roles of English witches were typically performed by adult men, while young boys played other feminine characters. Winkler points to this casting decision as the first among many physiological and behavioral factors to contradict Jacobean ideals of femininity. English witches recited and sang lines in deep unnatural voices, and they moved across the stage in erratic dances that symmetry and harmony of form (20). (1) Furthermore, these unnatural witches who consorted with devilish familiars and mimicked sacred rites in their demonic rituals directly subverted normative patriarchal authority and incited anti-Catholic sentiment. …