350:622

Index # - 13313

Distribution Requirement:  A2

Tuesday – 4:30 p.m.

MU 207

Thomas Fulton

Book History and the Early Modern Text

The growing field of book history has taught us a great deal about the ways in which the technologies of production – intellectual as well as mechanical technologies – need to be taken into account in comprehending a textual artifact.  The field broadly encompasses various approaches and sub-disciplines, which include manuscript study, print history, textual materialism, the status of the author, and the history of reading.  This course will draw on each of these approaches, but the main focus of inquiry will be on the effect of book history and textual materialism on problems of interpretation.  Toward this end, the course will not only undertake a theoretical survey of the major secondary work done in the field, but it will also provide hands-on engagement through a series of case studies of the most interesting moments in early modern book history.  Working chronologically from the inception of print in England through the revolutionary period and Restoration, these include case studies of problematic texts such as Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, John Donne’s satires and poems, Milton’s “Digression” and other works, Katherine Philips’ poetry, and Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia.  The course will be divided into a series of thematic sections, including manuscript versus print culture, what people read and how (an investigation of libraries and book collections and the records of reading, margins and marginalia, commonplace books and habits of note-taking), and censorship and the problems of interpretation: how the institutional control of publishing shaped meaning and authorship.

While this course is primarily interested in the effects of book history and textual materialism on the interpretation of texts, it also hopes to provide practical training in bibliography, archival research, and manuscript study.

The final aim of the course is an original research paper of about 20-25 pages, but there will be a few shorter assignments – mostly geared toward developing a final project – though the course of the semester.

Primary Readings will include:

Shakespeare, Munday, and several others, The Book of Sir Thomas More (1592-95)

Gabriel Harvey, selections from marginalia

Shakespeare, Three Texts of Hamlet

Shakespeare, Sonnets

Ben Jonson, Sejanus

Donne, Satyres and Songs and Sonnets

Milton, Areopagitica

Milton, “Digression” to the History of Britain

The notebooks and commonplace books of Milton and others

Katherine Philips, Poems

Secondary Reading will include

David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., An Introduction to Book History (2006)

David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., Book History Reader (2006)

D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland, 1994)

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998) [selections]

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983)

Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Ownership (selections)

Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

Harold Love, Scribal Publication in seventeenth Century England (1993) [selections]

Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Women Writers: Patterns of Manuscript Circulation and

Publication” in The Patriarch’s Wife

Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “Shakespeare and the Materiality of the Text”

Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"

Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication [selections]

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