Early Print Research Articles

Encountering the Word of God in Early Tudor England

Abstract The arrival in England of Tyndale’s New Testament in the 1520s is still widely heralded as a transformative moment. This article argues that the lingering effects of triumphalist Protestant rhetoric concerning the ‘Word of God’ have obscured the many other contexts in which it was possible for the laity to encounter the Bible in early Tudor England. They have also glossed over some of the difficulties of transmitting Scripture to a largely illiterate populace. Protestant insistence on the literal interpretation of vernacular Scripture should chiefly be seen as propaganda for the evangelical cause. Early Tudor print culture demonstrates that the reading of Scripture was understood as a complex process involving a spiritual encounter shaped by faith, imagination and emotion, not just a textual encounter. In practice, Tyndale and other reformers, no less than their more conservative opponents, taught the laity that the Bible needed to be ‘unlocked’ and explained. For the lay reader encountering works of religious devotion and instruction, the ways in which early Tudor print culture mediated the Bible remained heavily indebted to late medieval religious practice. This shaped the context in which the ‘Great Bible’ of 1539 was conceived and published and this first official English Bible should be recognised as a contested text, which in its final form may have been as much a reflection of late medieval attitudes as the achievement of English Protestants.

Implications of the Many Versions of the Early Printings of Kaishien gaden, the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual

Abstract Kaishien gaden was a widely read and influential pair of Japanese books based on the famous Chinese painting manual, Jieziyuan huazhuan. They are among the earliest examples of Japanese color printing. Close examination of many almost identical copies of Series A (1748) and Series B (1753) offers insight into the publishing practices of four different sets of publishers. Even with exemplars printed by the same publisher, there was much variation in the use of seals and color palettes, leading to many different states of each book. Assuming that each print run would be identical in not only the pages printed from the blocks, but also in the use of seals and colors, it can be estimated that there were roughly fifty to eighty print runs of each of these books over their 65–70 year initial history.

Provoking Performance: Printed Dialogue and Early Modern Publics in Christopher St. German's Salem and Bizance

This essay argues that Christopher St. German made tactical use of the dialogue form to cultivate a public in his print controversy with Thomas More on the subject of reform. Publishing in the early 1530s, More accused St. German of disseminating disgruntled speech in print absent a real constituency of speakers voicing such complaints. St. German countered More's critique by incorporating a dialogue between the characters Salem and Bizance that conflated the reading of his printed works with the speaking and sharing of their political concerns. Although the role of performance in early modern politics has long been recognized in connection to the theater and theatricality, St. German's work demonstrates that early print also invoked the bodily interactivity and iterability characteristic of performance in order to script readers’ use of the relatively new medium. St. German's Salem and Bizance dialogue thus prompted print readers to understand themselves as, and indeed to become, partisan members of a public speaking in and about the debate.

A history of content marketing

PurposeContemporary practitioners of content marketing (CM) often suggest their discipline is an ancient one, yet mainly limit its origins to the custom-published magazines of the late 1800s. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize some of the many definitions of CM and to report the first scholarly history of its development and practice.Design/methodology/approachThis study’s purposes led to the following research questions: To what extent were CM strategies and tactics used before the 20th century? How have the uses and characteristics of CM changed or remained the same over time? Sources included general histories focusing on the earliest uses of advertising and promotions and edited book chapters and journal articles on the histories of branding and early print advertising, marketing and advertising practices in ancient and medieval periods and the development of consumer cultures around the world.FindingsResearch findings support three conclusions: CM existed much earlier than often acknowledged; has emerged as a unique marketing discipline, strategically and tactically distinguishable from the others (e.g. advertising and sales promotion); and possesses objectives, strategies and tactics that have remained remarkably consistent in practice across the millennia.Originality/valueThe research supports several insights to the history of marketing and the practice of CM. Some of the CM strategies and tactics identified in this paper, for instance, have previously been concluded to be part of advertising’s history. Findings also reveal that many of advertising’s American pioneers actually used CM to persuade 19th-century businessmen to adopt widespread advertising. In addition, the emphasis on interactive, digital media in CM definitions offers a likely explanation for the recent enthusiasm behind CM as a response to global trends in consumer preferences and global competition, as well as why contemporary CM practitioners have often failed to recognize they are practicing a “new” discipline that has actually been in use for thousands of years.

Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–914)

Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one of the earliest Dalit articulations in print in South Asia during the colonial period. Extending studies on anti-caste thought by foregrounding the Tamil cosmopolis, this conceptualises how the most oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century, through studying the works on and of Pandit Iyothee Thass and his movement. The article proposes that these experiments with print opened the chance of a political to emerge, which was otherwise foreclosed, towards wording a caste-less community at this earlier time in Indian history.

Print Culture and Sufi Modernity: Al-Tuhāmī al-Wazzānī’s Embodied Reading of Morocco’s Nahḍa

Abstract Rethinking Arabic literary modernity, this article addresses what the act of reading means as Morocco moves from manuscript to print. In 1941, a leading figure of Morocco’s nahḍa, al-Tuhāmī al-Wazzānī, began to serialize his autobiography al-Zāwiya in one of the country’s earliest newspapers. Heralded as Morocco’s first novel, the moment marks the inauguration of a new reading public. Yet the text does not rely upon the reconfigured relationship with the reader accompanying the rise of print cultures in much of the Middle East and North Africa. Al-Zāwiya is a Sufi autobiography, a genre that invites its readers to assimilate the actions found within its pages. Al-Wazzānī draws upon this long tradition, using intertextual engagement to create a space of discourse that complicates the presumed secularity of Arabic literature during the nahḍa. Early Moroccan print culture thus provides an opportunity to reconsider the continuities of tradition embedded within modern literary practices.

Printing the Goddess: Intersections of Language, Place, Technology, and Agents of Transmission in Nepali Manuscript and Early Print Culture

Abstract In late nineteenth-century Nepal, the advent of print and mass reproduction marked a critical and as yet understudied junction in Nepal’s literary history and attendant manuscript and print cultures. This article employs Nepal’s popular Svasthānīvratakathā to illuminate key shifts and intersections between language of composition, technologies of writing, places of composition or reproduction, and the agents of transmission that are emblematic of local manuscript practices and paradigmatic of the emergent print culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nepal. The practices and actors involved in Svasthānī transmission shifted the text away from the private, domestic sphere to the public, translocal realm on multiple levels. Attending to these shifts as evidenced in one living devotional tradition indexes significant developments and intersections that deepen our knowledge of the changing linguistic, technological, geocultural, and socioeconomic aspects of the literary landscape in Nepal and South Asia more broadly.

“Woe unto us”: divine wrath and godly sorrow in an English plague sermon (1637)

ABSTRACT The historiography of early modern plague assumes that early modern emotions mirrored the volatile fearfulness dramatised in contemporary English plague literature, and that there was no comfort to be found in its reformative message. Meanwhile, historians have struggled to explain the resilience of English communities through frequent epidemics. Using the case study of a 1637–8 epidemic in Kingston upon Hull, where the preacher Andrew Marvell (c. 1584–1641) was broken from quarantine to return to his pulpit, this article contests that the persistence of sermons in plague provided a vital point of pastoral continuity, as well as a tool for emotional resilience. A close reading of Marvell’s surviving manuscript plague sermon, delivered at the funeral of a plague victim, will demonstrate how narratives of divine wrath and godly sorrow, embedded within early modern print culture, could offer emotional direction and succour in practice.

Psychology: Early print uses of the term by Pier Nicola Castellani (1525) and Gerhard Synellius (1525).

We identify the putatively earliest extant print source of the neoclassical term psychologia, long presumed to have been a 1575 work, as two 1525 works, one by Pier Nicola Castellani and another by Gerhard Synellius. We provide a history of pertinent etymology and introduce the new sources. The full paragraph containing two uses of the term by Castellani is included in translation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Color, collation, and curious creatures: a technical study of 15th-century block books at The Morgan Library & Museum

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, owns one of the largest and most prestigious collections of block books in the world, most of which are attributed to the Netherlands and Germany and dated to ca. 1460–1490. Block books are rare examples of early multi-page works produced entirely from hand-colored woodcuts, with both imagery and text carved in relief from a single block. Although created for only a few decades in the late 15th century, block books are relevant in that they represent an alternative production method to the coeval invention of typographic printing, which, upon introduction, quickly dominated the book market. As little is known about the composition of early printing inks and, more broadly, of the materials constituting these unusual objects, an extensive campaign of scientific analysis was undertaken using various non-invasive and micro-invasive techniques. Examination of the paper and watermarks provided information regarding provenance and dating of the books. Their polychrome imagery was found to have been created through a widespread use of both mineral pigments and natural dyes, often present in complex mixtures and applied in various ways. Similarly, the printing inks typically consist of combinations of carbon-based and iron gall inks, sometimes mixed with red mineral pigments likely to adjust their hue. In a few cases, modern pigments were also identified on inserted replacement pages, pointing to later interventions. This research has substantially enriched the current knowledge of the materials and techniques employed in block books and securely links them to single-leaf woodcuts of the 15th century, placing them in a medieval illumination tradition.

Visualizing textual similarity of Shakespearean suspect texts: An examination of the Henry VI plays

Abstract The relationship between Shakespeare’s First Folio and early printings, published in his lifetime, has been a matter of dispute for centuries. A computer program that I have developed visualizes the fluctuating quality of textual correspondences between Folio texts, Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Three, and texts that have been suspected as memorial reconstructions of the Folio, The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York. The memorial reconstruction hypothesis assumes increased similarity between the two texts when an alleged actor–reporter is on the stage or speaking and vice versa. The visualization of similarity between two texts, based on the Dice similarity metric, does not show a strong association between the fluctuation of similarity and actor–reporter factors, which challenges the memorial reconstruction hypothesis on statistical grounds. In addition, the distribution of line-by-line similarity scores suggests scene division is a considerable explanatory factor for fluctuating similarity, which is not inexplicable, considering the practice of collaborative writing in the early modern playhouse.

Emery Walker’s Counsel

Abstract Process engraver and printer Emery Walker was a pivotal figure in the English, American, and continental European Private Press Movement from the 1880s until his death in 1933. This article looks at his theories for the typography, design, and production of books, and how those theories were developed by key designers and close associates of Walker such as William Morris, T. J. Cobden Sanderson, and Bruce Rogers and through the practical teaching of figures such as J. H. Mason and Edward Johnston. It examines how the theories were then taken up by the exponents of fine printing from the early 20th century through to the 1930s, focusing on the presses of Bernard Newdigate, Harry Kessler, Harold Curwen, and Francis Meynell. From these presses, and also via Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, Walker’s theories are shown to have spread into mainstream book publishing in the first half of the 20th century. The article considers questions of whether the improvement in the readability of books in the early 20th century has had a continuing impact in book publishing, and makes suggestions how to access the incunabula referenced by the designers discussed, as well as collections of private press books and other early 20th-century fine printing.

Do We ‘Laugh’ or ‘La8gh’? Early Print Knowledge and Its Relation to Learning to Read in English and French

ABSTRACT Models of reading development point to a role for knowledge about the orthography quite late in children’s reading development; here we explore the contributions of early orthographic knowledge – of the features of print – to word reading development between kindergarten and Grade 1. We did so in a longitudinal study of 93 emergent bilingual children whose formal instruction was in French, a different language than they spoke at home, followed from senior kindergarten to Grade 1. Linear regression analyses showed that early print knowledge in both English and French significantly predicted French word reading in Grade 1; no such relations emerged to English word reading. Analyses included control measures of parental education and English vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and autoregressive controls of earlier word reading. These results suggest that print knowledge can be used to predict progress in second language word reading in emergent bilingual children.

Pergaminos impresos inventariados en el archivo histórico provincial de León

This article shows and catalogues leafs and pieces proceeding from 16 liturgical books printed on parchment. This association has been doing by the point of view of writting support proper the significance of these units in relation to the early printing. The pieces are printed between 1488 and 1567 and add up to 49 leafs, 6 halfleafs, 7 fragments and 3 strips. The stencil, an special printing system, has been mentioned, because it's an appropiate resort to leather printing.Finally has been marked some features of the music sings evolution, which have been influenced by the manuscript, and also by the printed tradition.The bibliography of the page hasn't been included because the text before the catalogue pretends to show the printed papers, not to study them in their different points of view.

The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints by Ad Putter Judith A. Jefferson

The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints by Ad Putter Judith A. Jefferson

Common Medicine for the Common Man: Picturing the “Striped Layman” in Early Vernacular Print

The disruptive figure of the “striped layman” appeared in printed texts and images around the year 1500 in the southern German lands. This essay shows how it came to represent a new kind of reader of vernacular medical publications. Exploring the illustrated books of the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, their local context of humanist discourse, and the visual practice of their publisher, Johann Grüninger, I argue that their oft-neglected woodcuts of people in striped clothes constitute powerful visual commentary of Brunschwig's (and others’) mission to impart medical agency and expertise to the “common man” at the eve of the Reformation.

Predicting Literacy Development of Orally Trained Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children in Taiwan: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study.

Twenty-eight deaf and hard of hearing Chinese-speaking public school children in Taiwan were tested on literacy achievement tasks at the end of kindergarten (T1), first grade (T2), and second grade (T3) over 2 years. After nonverbal IQ and hearing threshold were controlled for, the results revealed that early oral vocabulary and print awareness tested in kindergarten were related to word recognition in first grade. Moreover, receptive oral vocabulary (T1) was related to reading achievement in first and second grade. Phoneme (onset-rime) blending (T1) was associated with reading achievement in first grade, but not second grade. While onset-rime blending made more unique contributions to picture-book reading comprehension (T2), oral receptive vocabulary contributed uniquely to reading comprehension in T3 more than onset-rime blending. The time (in minutes) per week parents spent in shared book reading with their child was moderately related to reading comprehension at T3.

Le livre illustré du «long xve siècle». Pour l’analyse conjointe des manuscrits tardifs et des imprimés précoces

This study advocates research bridging the gap between manuscripts and prints while studying a popular topic: the complex and diverse relationships between texts and images (including illuminations as well as woodcuts) in Late Medieval and Early Modern books. In order to shed light on the shift between Middle Ages and Renaissance, specialists pertaining to different research fields, especially historians, have promoted investigations taking in consideration a “long fifteenth century” (namely the period covering the years 1370-1520); at the same time, the overlaps between the topics and objects explored by codicologists and bibliographers have grown larger. Hence a more nuanced vision of the features linking Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, especially at cultural and artistic levels. By contrast, it remains too exceptional to investigate the text/image paradigm through corpuses of illustrated books comprehending both manuscripts and early prints. Nevertheless, such innovative case studies have been published recently. In this article, we underline the coherence of the following studies, all of which have been conceived with the collective aim of extending and enriching the corpus and methodology of such pioneering publications.The necessity remains to reach a better understanding of the purposes and methods thanks to which book makers designed hand-illuminations and printed images (some of them hand-coloured) associated with hand-copied or printed texts. In order to fulfil this goal, we promote the idea of bringing to the fore large textual traditions, and to elaborate new tools, for instance a “philology of images” allowing wide-ranging comparisons.

The 1484 Nuremberg Jewry Oath (More Judaico)*

Abstract In many territories of the Holy Roman Empire, Jews had been obliged to take a special oath during certain interactions between Jews and Christians since the medieval era. The 1484 Nuremberg Jewry Oath was probably the first Jewry Oath ever to be printed, and it became the dominant model for oath formulas until the eighteenth century. This article explores the legal, historical, and social background of the Jewry Oath, and its role in the history of Nuremberg during the transitional period between manuscripts and early printing. It looks closely at the elements and the conception of the 1484 Jewry Oath, and shows that it was incorporated as rather an afterthought into Die Reformation der Stadt Nürnberg, the city’s innovative, elaborately printed legal code. While its inclusion and careful wording were an acknowledgement that interactions with Jews were vital, and needed a legal framework that was valid for both Christians and Jews, the fact that it was less integrated than other legal rules suggests that its future removal was envisioned. This question is explored in the context of the expulsion of Jews from Nuremberg in 1498–99 and the 1503 edition of Die Reformation der Stadt Nürnberg.

Early Modern Comets and Printing

Early Modern Comets and Printing