Bøker i Material Texts-serien

Examines how speech, visual images, and written texts all interact as manifestations of the human desire to know and remember. This book seeks to address the reductive opposition both between written and oral texts and between script and print in the Early Modern period.

Knowing Books examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources that deploy language to emphasize their status as physical objects and their circulation as commodities. In Lupton's account, these texts use this device to enhance their appeal as entertaining objects, making them part of an ongoing tradition of self-conscious media.

Eileen Reeves examines the ways in which a long-standing association of reportage with covert surveillance and astrological prediction was altered by the near simultaneous emergence of weekly newsheets, the invention of the Dutch telescope, and the appearance of Galileo Galilei's astronomical treatise, The Starry Messenger.

Edited by Marta Straznicky, this seminal collection is the first to explore the multiple and intersecting forms of agency exercised by Shakespeare's stationers in the design, production, marketing, and distribution of his printed works.

Alberto Manguel examines metaphors of readers and reading from literatures across centuries and the globe, from the ancient epic Gilgamesh to the World Wide Web, from the adventures of Ulysses to the tragedy of Emma Bovary, and he considers how these metaphors reflect the cultures that invent them.

The Mind Is a Collection approaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theory of the mind from a material point of view, examining the metaphors for mental activity that invoked the material activity of collection.

An anonymous book appeared in Venice in 1547 titled L''Alcorano di Macometto, and, according to the title page, it contained "the doctrine, life, customs, and laws [of Mohammed] . . . newly translated from Arabic into the Italian language." Were this true, L''Alcorano di Macometto would have been the first printed direct translation of the Qur''an in a European vernacular language. The truth, however, was otherwise. As soon became clear, the Qur''anic sections of the book—about half the volume—were in fact translations of a twelfth-century Latin translation that had appeared in print in Basel in 1543. The other half included commentary that balanced anti-Islamic rhetoric with new interpretations of Muhammad''s life and political role in pre-Islamic Arabia. Despite having been discredited almost immediately, the Alcorano was affordable, accessible, and widely distributed.In The Venetian Qur''an, Pier Mattia Tommasino uncovers the volume''s mysterious origins, its previously unidentified author, and its broad, lasting influence. L''Alcorano di Macometto, Tommasino argues, served a dual purpose: it was a book for European refugees looking to relocate in the Ottoman Empire, as well as a general Renaissance reader''s guide to Islamic history and stories. The book''s translation and commentary were prepared by an unknown young scholar, Giovanni Battista Castrodardo, a complex and intellectually accomplished man, whose commentary in L''Alcorano di Macometto bridges Muhammad''s biography and the text of the Qur''an with Machiavelli''s The Prince and Dante''s Divine Comedy. In the years following the publication of L''Alcorano di Macometto, the book was dismissed by Arabists and banned by the Catholic Church. It was also, however, translated into German, Hebrew, and Spanish and read by an extended lineage of missionaries, rabbis, renegades, and iconoclasts, including such figures as the miller Menocchio, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Montesquieu. Through meticulous research and literary analysis, The Venetian Qur''an reveals the history and legacy of a fascinating historical and scholarly document.

Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Joseph Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.

Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls investigates the creation of "obscene writings and images" -from popular medical works to stereoscope cards-and the process through which these texts were deemed dangerous to the intellectual and emotional lives of vulnerable consumers in nineteenth-century Germany.

Joseph A. Dane examines the field of material book history by questioning its most basic assumptions and definitions: How is print defined? What are the limits of printing history? What constitutes evidence?

Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates the culture of book collecting and compiling in early modern England, examining how the pervasive practice of mixing texts, authors, and genres into single bindings defined Renaissance ways of thinking and writing.

By reconstructing the aural culture of sermons in Puritan New England, Neuman shifts our attention from the pulpit to the pew, demonstrating how sermon auditors helped to shape this dominant genre of Puritan New England.

Drawing on a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires, comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song-sheets, and early literary criticism, this book uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that plagued the antebellum period and shows how they at once made and unmade American literature.

In The Queen's Library, Cynthia J. Brown examines the cultural issues surrounding female modes of empowerment and book production in late medieval and early Renaissance France.

Printing the Middle Ages focuses on the life of medieval texts after the Middle Ages, tracing the impact of the books that transmitted medieval literature to the English-speaking world, showing how these books imitated and refashioned the medieval past for later audiences.

The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America illuminates the connections between poems and critical ideas about poetic genres, and tracks the emergence and disappearance of poems and poets in American culture by examining how people encountered and made sense of poetry.

Offering a new history of proprietary authorship, this volume is able to address contemporary debates of copyright, intellectual property, and fair use by reorienting critical attention away from authorial rights and toward authorial responsibilities.

In Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain leading scholars approach the letter from different disciplinary perspectives to illuminate its workings. Contributors to this volume examine how elements, such as handwriting, seals, ink, and use of space, were vitally significant to how letters communicated.

The Road to Jerusalem traces the survival of the literature of pilgrimage as part of the broader literature of travel from the late fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, a time when powerful forces, from navigation to theology, were redefining travel.

In Romantic Marks and Measures, Julia S. Carlson examines Wordsworth's poetry of "speech" and "nature" as a poetry of print, written and read in the midst of topographic and typographic experimentation and change.

In 1823 Sir Henry Bunbury discovered an early edition of Hamlet that radically differs from the known and celebrated version of the play. Zachary Lesser examines how this improbable discovery forced readers to reexamine accepted truths about Shakespeare as an author and the nature of Shakespeare's texts.

Front Lines documents the literary practices of imperial Spain's common soldiers. The epic poems, chronicles, ballads, and autobiographies that these soldiers wrote at the front provide a critical view from below on state violence and imperial expansion.

Early African American Print Culture presents seventeen original essays that demonstrate how the study of African American print culture might enrich the study of print culture, while at the same time expanding the terrain of African American literature beyond authorship to editing, illustration, printing, circulation, and reading.

Roger Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing or of publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends.

"The Pilgrim and the Bee makes a broad claim about a reading-centered history, reclaiming for this purpose a distinctive body of texts. Brown's analysis marks an important step toward a better history of reading."-David D. Hall, Harvard University

Robert Darnton explores the scandalous literature of libel and the colorful lives of libelers in eighteenth-century France. By doing so he shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Old Regime and became absorbed in a new, more radical, political culture under Robespierre.

Through a wide-ranging examination of antebellum images and literature, The Camera and the Press shows how Americans' first encounter with photography was more textual than visual. This thoroughly illustrated case study reexamines current theories on new media and reconnects print and visual culture in nineteenth-century America.

This book examines one of the most important axes of the book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and German-speaking Europe. The first detailed study of the Franco-German trade, it shows how book dealers mediated the transmission of literature across the frontiers of nation, language, and culture.

Ways of Writing is about the making of texts in seventeenth-century New England, whether they were fashioned into printed books or disseminated in handwritten form. David D. Hall explores issues of authority and authenticity, the roles of intermediaries, and the political and social contexts of publication, among other issues.

"Voice in Motion is a book of interdisciplinary reach, solid scholarship, and imaginative resonance."-Bruce Smith, University of Southern California