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01A - Theory and Methodology
Winter, Michael F.,
Theorizing the History of the Book: The Relevance of Rationalization
The present effort is focused on the uses of Western European social theory for understanding the evolution of authorship, books, and libraries, largely in the West. It seeks a theoretical framework broad enough to encompass both the development of the written and the printed text; both the transition from oracy to literacy as well as the transition studied by Elizabeth Eisenstein and others as the movement between the “scribal” and “print” cultures of European modernity. The discussion of a theoretical framework is based on an examination of four evolutionary patterns: 1) The emergence of punctuation in early books of the ancient Mediterranean; 2) The use of annotations and glosses in canonical text-and-commentary scholarship; 3) The growth of endnotes, footnotes, and cited references reflecting a sea change of scholarship in early modernity; and finally 4) Patterns of knowledge classification, and how these have played out in the evolution of reference works and in the classification schemes used in libraries. These developments suggest a long-term process akin to Max Weber’s concept of “rationalization” (Rationalisierung), in the expansive sense in which this concept is understood by neo-Weberians like Karl Jaspers and S.N. Eisenstadt. There are also useful related contributions in Marx’s special focus on rationalization in capitalist production, in Georg Simmel’s concept of “intellectualization” of human societies with money economies, Karl Mannheim’s critiques of reason, ideology, and utopia, and Jürgen Habermas’ analytical discussions of the roles of reason in Western societies.
Murray, Simone, Publishing Studies: Critically Mapping Research in Search of a Discipline
Academic scholarship is inclined to view contemporary book publishing as a medium for disseminating research, rather than as itself a focus of research. Despite this general trend, academic research into the book publishing industry from the 1960s to the present exists on the periphery of a number of other disciplines: industry research and vocational information; memoir, autobiography, biography, house history and the ”bibliophile book”; history of the book; media, cultural studies and sociology; and nationalist and post-colonial discourses.
The paper briefly surveys research in these areas before honing in on the history of the book and media/cultural studies as the most promising disciplinary sites for developing critical research into contemporary book publishing.
Studies of contemporary book industries (understood as late-20th-century and 21st-century) currently suffer from marginalisation within academic, institutional and disciplinary structures. The history of the book (itself a recently emerged interdisciplinary field) offers scholars of contemporary publishing the benefits of a foothold in internationally recognised research universities, useful conceptual schemas, and a rich critical research tradition. However, book history’s intellectual debts to social history and bibliography have tended to privilege research on book cultures prior to the 1930s paperback revolution. Conversely, media and cultural studies offers contemporary publishing studies interface with influential theoretical debates around identity politics of class, race, gender and sexuality, a receptivity to contemporary content flows and adaptations between media forms, and a vibrant international research and publishing community. Yet cultural studies’ original revolt against literary studies has left its legacy in the discipline’s tendency to privilege popular fiction genres over the “literary” – thus narrowing the possibilities for understanding contemporary literary industries as themselves the product of complex cultural formations.
The paper considers the various benefits and disadvantages of publishing studies’ current accommodation within these host disciplines, and the complex theoretical and methodological implications of publishing studies’ present institutional settings. It closes by sketching what the principal objectives and foci of a self-described publishing studies discipline should be: a conscious focus on contemporary book industry developments; attention to cross-media flows in the digital era; and the foregrounding of cultural politics within publishing research. Such consolidation of publishing studies’ disciplinary profile would benefit not only researchers currently working within the field of contemporary book industries, but would also seed publishing studies’ materialist conception of print culture across cognate humanities disciplines.
Lundblad, Kristina, Codex Simulations
By "codex simulations" or codex simulaters" I understand the various hard- and software products that imitate the form of the codex and /or simulate the function of it. They can be designed with the main purpose either to transfer literary work, as with "ordinary" electronic books, or to communicate the looks of a specific original artefact, as with those simulaters used by libraries for displaying digital fac simil manuscripts electronically. As phenomena, codex simulaters generate a number of questions about the meaning of the relation between form and content, the implication of form to human understanding, historically coded knowledge perception etc. It also illuminate problems related to technical transition; why should a new technique such as electronic and digital media imitate old forms like the codex? This, however, has happened before – e.g the earliest printed books imitated manuscripts. Other interesting issues brought about by this phenomena is its affiliation to simulation techniques used in areas such as entertainment and medicin. Is it possible to find causes and intentions that these different areas have in common? One such issue would be security – displaying a simulated manuscript instead of the original item is a matter both of making available and of security. So is much of the use of simulaters in medicin, for example the use of simulater patients for training students and hospital teams. From this point of view its important to consider epistemological as well as empirical aspects of possible differences between "the real thing" and simulations.
Main question: How can an analysis of codex simulations/codex simulaters contribute to our understanding of the impact of the codex as form, cultural symbol and technical tool and to what degree is it symptomatical of todays socio-culture where technical possibilities generate new concepts and where the conflict between availability and security constantly has to be adressed?
Context: The steadily growing use of codex simulaters and technical research (electronic paper, e-book readers etc) and production of new applications and hard wares make up the empirical context. The interest in these questions from the academic as well as from the art world is increasing, they make up a part of the interest in the complexity of new media in general. Questions concerning the particularities of old forms transferred to new media haven't been subject to any deeper studies however. The terms "codex simulation" and "codex simulaters" are of my own invention, at least I haven't seen them used by any one else.
Who would be interested and why? This paper should be of interest to persons who engage in questions on form, materiality and meaning; technique – cultural meaning; and mediation. I hope to contribute to the mapping of a field that hitherto has been fairly little examined, but which tie together classical issues of book history with questions shared by the larger community.
01B - Encounters in the East: The West and Print Culture in China
Nesta, Frederick, Before Gutenberg: A Thousand Years of Printing in China
When Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in China in 1582 he began an interchange of Western and Chinese culture that continues to this day. He also discovered a print culture that amazed and impressed him. The great convenience of Chinese wood block printing allowed Ricci to use his own domestic helpers to print his Chinese translations of Western religious and scientific books for distribution, allowing him to initiate a dialogue using print in a Chinese context. This paper will look at the influence of print in the cultural contacts between China and the West, examining such issues as the early development of print technology in China, the nature of the reading audience, the distribution and availability of print, the reception of foreign cultures in China, and the image of Chinese print culture in the West.
Bussotti, Michela, Marginal Notes on Western Prints in China, Chinese Types in Europe
This paper will review the history of two kinds of printing techniques and enterprises that we could consider marginal if compared to most important activities of printing in Europe and China. In China xylographic printing on wood blocks dominated and metal engravings were only a minor technique for reproduction – in quality and quantity. In the 18th century metal engraving was employed to produce some pictures and maps at the Palace and these productions are today well known, in part because of their particular and prestigious production context. A priest of Congregazione di Propaganda Fide, Matteo Ripa (1682-1746), was commissioned by the emperor to engrave 36 copper plates of the imperial summer palace in Jehol, Bishu shanzhuang tushu. Returning to Italy, Ripa created a Chinese College in Naples (1732-1868). At the beginning of 19th century this institution was probably involved in publications and production of some of the oldest European types of Chinese characters.
Zhang Zhiqiang, The Missionaries and the Modernization of Chinese Publishing in Late Imperial China
Wood block printing was in use from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), and the printing played a very important role in Chinese society. After the Opium War (1842), Western missionaries entered into China and participated in publishing. Their missionary work also promoted the modernization of Chinese publishing by using Western printing technologies to publish Chinese books. At the same time, the missionaries started to publish journals and newspapers in Chinese, for example, Chinese Monthly Magazine, Eastern Western Monthly Magazine, Chinese Repository, etc. Journals and newspapers were a new type publication to China at that time, and were readily accepted by the Chinese society. As more and more Chinese people worked at the foreign press and publishing houses they learned the new printing techniques and started to set up their own houses or press in China. As an example, The Commercial Press, the biggest publishing house in the Republic of China, was found in 1897 by four people, three of whom worked at the printing house of the China Gazette, which was a famous foreign newspaper in late Imperial China. This paper will illustrate how new printing technologies and periodical publications introduced by the missionaries transformed Chinese printing and publishing.
01C - English Seventeenth-Century Political Pamphlets
Bregman, Alvan, Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732): The Collector as Reader
Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732), parliamentarian and diarist, was one of the greatest of English book collectors. Like Thomason, he gathered together and annotated ephemeral material with its price and the date of its publication. Unique survivors abound because of his collecting habits. This paper looks at the collector as reader and examines systematically the textual annotations and other marks Luttrell made in many of his pamphlets. The paper also looks at the use of this material in the formation of his massive but little-studied diary, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols. (Oxford: University Press, 1857). Luttrell has not been much noticed in work published about early modern English marginalia, and this paper will be of interest to scholars in that area, among others. The paper is based on research currently being undertaken at the Newberry and Huntington Libraries.
Mann, Alastair J.,
James VII and II: The Advice of the First Jacobite
The study of James VII is a peculiarly odd business. For biographers sub-titles such as “rise and fall” or “study in failure” inevitably spring to mind. With such great prospects, especially in Scotland, why was James so apparently, to use Ronald Huttons’ words, “ham-fisted, opinionated, inept and disastrous”? What is more, did he learn from the catastrophic events of the revolution of 1688/89 and so reflect on his political failings. Had he fallen victim to the political ideas of his grandfather and father, James VI and I and Charles I? Much is revealed to us in James’s memoir which, though surviving only second hand, nonetheless provides insight into the fallen king’s analysis of events. More is discovered in one of the most interesting documents written by James, his Advice to his Son (1692), in which he imitates his grandfather’s attempts to advise his eldest son Henry in his Basilikon Doron (1599). In The Advice James apparently shows himself an unrepentant absolutist. He declared that habeas corpus was an inconvenience and that his son should always have a considerable body of Catholic troops to keep his safe. His prescription for England was complex: there should be two secretaries of state, one Protestant and one Catholic, the secretary of war should be Catholic, the secretary of the navy Protestant, the royal household should be Catholic and as many as possible of army officers. Meanwhile, for Scotland, the clergy were to be groomed at the Scot’s College in Paris, union with England prevented at all costs, Scotland’s ancient families being the most loyal, and with regard to the Scottish parliament: The constitutions of the Parliament there are very good, and ought not to be altered, especially that of the Lords of the Articles for by that means a parliament can do no great harme, and I have observed, that those who had a mind to be troublesome and to have it in their power to be so, endeavoured to take that great prerogative from the Crown’. So the Scottish parliament was to be closely controlled through its traditional management committee, but in a manner his grandfather would surely have understood. This paper will reflect on the text and context of James’s Advice to his Son and compare James VII’s political philosophy on kingship and government with that of his grandfather James VI. The first Jacobite may have been on the losing side but his political ideas had a resonance for many outside his immediate Catholic circle.
Lindquist, Eric N.,
King James’s Basilikon Doron and Its Readers
In his Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, Kevin Sharpe has argued that “politics involved, at all levels, negotiations with texts and the processes of interpreting and constituting meanings from texts.” In this paper, I will consider how one of the most famous political texts of the period, King James’s Basilikon Doron, was read and interpreted through much of the eventful century that followed its publication. The book has left much more evidence of its reception than most books of the period. King James VI of Scotland composed it around 1598 as an advice manual for his young heir, Prince Henry, to whom, he said, it “only appertained.” Basilikon Doron was written for a single reader, but it did not remain private for long, and in 1603, it became a best seller when King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England as well. Peter Blayney has suggested that as many as 16,000 copies were printed for English subjects eager to learn about their new king. Some historians have suggested that Basilikon Doron was owned more than read, but there is much evidence that the text was in fact examined carefully, and argued over, by many of the king’s new subjects. Some took to quoting it to him, not necessarily in ways he was happy to hear. Like many authors, James found that he had lost control of his text once it was disseminated and that it was, by his lights, being misread. Interest in the work lessened after 1603, but the text was not forgotten. At least five readers have left notes on the work from their readings later in the century. King James himself offered a kind of rereading of the work in his Meditation on verses in Matthew, subtitled A Paterne for a Kings Inauguration (1620). Much later in the century, we find intriguing evidence of the book’s susceptibility to a variety of readings. During the Exclusion Crisis, Basilikon Doron was appropriated by both sides. In 1681, a whig pamphleteer published excerpts in a tract entitled Vox Regis. The next year, the entire work was reprinted at the command of King Charles II. A study of Basilikon Doron and its readers offers an unusually rich opportunity to understand how texts and politics interacted in a period of heightened political interest.
01D - Gender and the World of Books in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Schrunk Ericksen, Janet, Anglo-Saxon Books and Female Readers in Sixteenth-Century England
British Library MS Stowe 2 contains a Latin psalter and thirteen canticles, with a running interlinear gloss in Old English and attractive but not exceptional decoration. The manuscript was probably produced at the New Minster in Winchester in the middle or late 11th century, and by 1638 it was owned by Sir Henry Spelman. How and from whom Spelman acquired the manuscript remains unknown, but the manuscript is not silent about the 400 years of its life between production and known collection. It bears signs of 14th century liturgical use, for instance, but also of private reading in the 16th century by a woman who signs herself “Kateryn Rudston”. Only one other Anglo-Saxon manuscript has been identified as similarly marked: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 422 (the Red Book of Darley) also bears a woman’s 16th century signature, Margaret Rollysley, but her use of the book seems to have been limited to a single sitting and a pen trial – though it seems that she did own this Latin and Old English book. Rudston’s hand, in contrast, is also visible in the numbering of some psalms, and perhaps elsewhere, as the manuscript includes 16th century erasures and rewritings of the Old English gloss, as well as marginal sketches that seem to be from the 15th or 16th century. While at least two families with the surname Rudston were prominent in 16th century England – one Robert Rudston, known to Thomas Wyatt, was named a co-conspirator in a 1554 political plot – no Kat(h)eryn Rudston has yet turned up in documentary resources. What has been recovered are two plausible routes by which a woman in either Rudston family might have acquired and read an Anglo-Saxon manuscript. Presumably Rudston was reading the Latin rather than the Old English, but at a time when Anglo-Saxon studies and antiquarian interests were on the rise, among men at least, complete ignorance of the prominent gloss seems unlikely. Whether she read the Latin only or also studied the Old English, Rudston left traces of an early modern female readership of and response to an Anglo-Saxon manuscript. Her contact with the book, moreover, might reflect an obscured but widespread and intimate possession of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – and a more continuous presence of Old English – in the first century of print, alongside and at times echoing the public collectors and religious politics.
Lyons, Tara, Early Authorial Awareness: Joan Brome and the Lyly Plays
My paper proposes that Joan Brome, the first woman to arrange the publication of a playbook in London, held a virtual monopoly of John Lyly’s plays and proved an awareness of dramatic authorship years before Jonson’s 1616 folio. It appears that no public playwright's known titles were amassed as consistently by one publisher in England before Brome owned Lyly’s plays in the early 1590s. Evidence also indicates Joan’s intentions to sell a quarto volume containing five of Lyly’s dramas, which would have been the first single-author collection of professional English plays printed in England. Because of potential errors in records on Joan and her husband, William Brome, the savvy female publisher’s contributions to the London book trade have been overlooked, until now.
My argument rests on discrepancies between Pollard and Redgrave’s Short Title Catalogue (STC) and Edward Arber’s Stationers’ Register. The Register records that William Brome died in 1588, but the STC and the title pages from two of Lyly playbooks cite William as the publisher in 1591, three years after his death. However, the title pages for these two plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, may wrongly attribute publication to W[illiam] Brome rather than to W[idow] Brome. It seems that Joan published three other Lyly plays within the same time period, Endymion in 1591, Midas in 1592, and Gallathea in 1592, all of which contain Joan’s name on their title pages. Furthermore, Joan’s epistle to Endymion states that it is the first of the Lyly dramas published by her shop; she offers to invest in other Lyly plays if readers enjoy the first. If Endymion is the first, then it would follow that Joan Brome is responsible for the publication of all five of Lyly’s dramatic works. Joan’s innovative marketing techniques use strategies utilized years later in the 17th century to advertise English plays by “brand” or more importantly by “author”.
Ultimately, this paper is a contribution to feminist histories of the book because it challenges assumptions made by editors, who have erased under-recorded women's activities in the book trade. As feminist historians of the book, we must attempt to recover works produced by women that are incorrectly attributed to men. I urge further research on female material producers of the book but also careful scrutiny of editors’ gendered assumptions about the book trade in early modern England.
Taylor, Nancy, Editing the Letters of Lydia DuGard
Lydia DuGard, a girl of no particular means, is orphaned in London at the age of eleven and is sent to live with her uncle and his family in a small village in Warwickshire. She falls in love with her cousin, who is a student at Oxford. She lives the day-to-day life of a young woman in a small village, writes regularly to her cousin eventually marrying him, has three children and dies in childbirth. Her letters of courtship are preserved in the Folger Shakespeare Library and are available in my edition: Cousins in Love: The Letters of Lydia DuGard, 1665-1672.
Lydia’s letters are extraordinary. They are reflective, almost literary, in tone and there are enough of them to tell a sustained story. I decided to edit Lydia’s letters and was fortunate to find that the MRTS was interested in publishing them as a part of their medieval and renaissance text series. I knew that Lydia represented a group of women not widely known and that this string of letters was very special, both in number and in quality; I also knew that Lydia’s proficiency in writing and her reference to many women friends, relatives and neighbors, who also wrote regularly, forced a reassessment of literacy rates of women in the provinces. But I wanted to do more than just show Lydia as representative of a group adding to our general knowledge of social history. Precisely because letters like Lydia’s are so rarely preserved, I wanted to reproduce them exactly. I wanted readers to see how elegantly she wrote, how much she paid attention to conventions and how she defined herself through her writing. I wanted to reveal her individual story, her unique setting, and her special circumstances. I wanted to find out everything I could about her individual life. This meant identifying all the people she mentioned; it meant following her every step through her neighborhood, to nearby villages, to Oxford, Worchester, and London; it meant documenting her daily activities and her moods; it meant representing her words exactly, not modernizing the text; and it meant setting her words in the context of the lives of the middling sort and especially the courtship practices and conventions of 17th century England. The details were important to me. I wanted to give the fullest picture I could of her life and her particular story.
While Lydia’s story is indeed special and deserves to be told in detail, I would also argue that her sensibilities and her skills are not. If Lydia is any indication, women by 1670 were both capable of writing informal, passionate letters and did so with ease and frequency. And letters, which exist in the multitudes in record offices throughout England, are a rich source for understanding women’s lives and for documenting the individual stories of ordinary women.
01E - The Book in Eastern Europe
Landis, Dennis C.,
Early Americana in Eastern Europe
The integration of ten new members into the European Union (with the planned addition of more) invites comparisons of the roles these countries played in early European book history. One index of the similarity of book cultures across Europe (ca. 1500-1800) is the enumeration of publications of a given type. "Americana", for example, is a category of imprints containing information about the new geographical realms unknown to ancient writers. The identification of "Americana" as a separate subject emerged in the 19th century, as collectors and bibliographers identified myriad books that contained references to "discoveries" of every kind in the new continents. In the beginning, this was perceived as a field largely of the western and southern European seafaring nations. The first major subject enumeration, Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana (1868-1936), focused largely on the publications of those countries. However, when the subject was taken up afresh in a chronologically-organized publication, European Americana ... 1493-1750 (1980-97), the spectrum was enlarged to reflect the fact that new geographical knowledge was in fact disseminated through a broad swath of Europe, including areas just now being economically reintegrated. Political identifications have frequently changed, but the publications produced reflect the interest of an informed intelligentsia aiming at a circumspect knowledge of the world, and the assumption of an interested public.
Some of the earliest maps and texts on the Americas were printed in 16th-century Cracow. An important work of geography was carried from there to a press in Kronstadt, Transylvania (now Brasov, Romania) in 1541. In Prague early vernacular and Latin printing on geography and science helped spread the news about American subjects. There and in other towns of the present Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, important chronicles of American missions were printed. The lives of American saints such as Rose of Lima and Luis Bertrand were issued in 17th-century Prague, Cracow, and Vilnius (Lithuania). Hebrew printers in Brno and Prague, and in the Ottoman empire produced narratives that disseminated details of American places. In 18th-century Riga and Jelgava (Latvia), German printers issued important travel, medical and philosophical narratives treating American subjects. In Malta, too, a medical work of American interest was published in 1762. An illustrated American narrative was also manufactured in Turkish – in Arabic characters – in 1731. Information gleaned from eastern European libraries was limited, however, and still greater reserves of printed works in the field may yet come to light.
Dreimane, Jana, Censorship of Foreign Literature in Libraries of Latvia During the Years of the Second Soviet Occupation (1944-1960)
A library is an institution for the recognition, acquisition, sort-out and long-term preservation of published information. In a democratic system libraries provide for an unconfined availability of information resources to all members of the society. Under an antidemocratic regime libraries are subjected to censorship – system of undertakings in the interests of the ruling political power, the aim of which is to restrict or prohibit the dissemination of undesirable for the society information.
In 1944/1945 the Red Army for the second time occupied the territory of Latvia. Up to 1991 lasted the period of the second Soviet occupation. In that time the main ideological task of libraries of Latvia (the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic/LSSR) was to form the so called homo soveticus – citizens, loyal and obedient to the new regime, instead of Christianity to introduce postulates of Soviet ideology. Information carriers, both national and foreign ones, considered to be antagonistic to the dominating ideological principles, were taken out from the general circulation. Restricted number of them was allowed to be kept only in three research libraries: the State Library of LSSR, the Fundamental Library of the Academy of Sciences of LSSR and the Scientific Library of the Latvian State University. Acquisition of books issued in the so called capitalist countries was interrupted until the Khruschcev’s “thaw” period in USSR (1953-1959).
The aim of the work is to analyse acquisition, holding and availability of foreign information resources in these research library collections during the periods of Stalinism and Khruschcev’s “thaw”, including also withdrawal and destruction of the banned literature. Some limitations in acquisition and availability of foreign literature were abolished at Khruschcev’s “thaw” period. Since 1959 the above mentioned research libraries were allowed direct literature exchange with capitalist countries. Besides a part of foreign periodicals in technical sciences were liberated from censorship. The State Library and the Fundamental Library of the Academy of Sciences got the permission to cooperate with foreign institutions in the field of interlibrary loans. In 1956 the system of bibliographic information on foreign publications was established:
1) a union catalogue of foreign literature in Latvia (books and periodicals);
2) an informative bulletin about foreign book acquisitions in the Fundamental Library of the Academy of Sciences of LSSR.
The Khruschcev’s “thaw” period made it possible for the research libraries to widen a little the spectrum of newly acquired foreign literature.
Dular, Anja, Enlightenment and Freemasonry. Book Trade Connections between Eastern and Western European Countries
Booksellers have the ability to bring new ideas, new knowledge and new philosophy to all parts of the world. I would like to show, through selected examples, how in the 18th century, in the period of the Enlightenment, Eastern European countries learned about the social life and changes in Western society by means of books. Booksellers' catalogues featured the book assortment made specifically for their costumers, which is revealing in considering their influence on the growth of knowledge in particular environment.
The other point of my paper is to call attention to the movement of Freemasonry among booksellers. A large number of booksellers active in Austria, for example in such provinces of the old monarchy as Slovenia, Croatia or Hungary, were in fact members of various Freemasonry lodges. Many 18th-century sales catalogues list song-books, apologies (apologiae) and other books edited by members of this movement. On the basis of these facts we can, for instance, better understand reasons behind the arrival and the background of the later significance of bookseller Wilhelm Heinrich Korn, who was born in Maastricht and in the late 18th century became one of the most important booksellers in Ljubljana.
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Last update: 23 June 2006