Reading Practice

Reading Practice PDF Author: Melissa Reynolds
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226823636
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through portraits of readers and their responses to texts, Reading Practice reconstructs the contours of the knowledge economy that shaped medicine and science in early modern England. Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read when they wanted to attend to their health or understand their place in the universe. Before then, these works had largely been the purview of those who could read Latin. Around 1400, however, medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English while manuscripts became less expensive. These vernacular manuscripts invited their readers into a very old and learned conversation: Hippocrates and Galen weren’t distant authorities whose word was law, they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered to suit a manuscript compiler’s needs. This conversation continued even after the printing press arrived in England in 1476. Printers mined manuscripts for medical and scientific texts that they would publish throughout the sixteenth century, though the pressures of a commercial printing market encouraged printers to package these old texts in new ways. Without the weight of authority conditioning their reactions and responses to very old knowledge, and with so many editions of practical books to choose from, English readers grew into confident critics and purveyors of natural knowledge in their own right. Melissa Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body. Her study shows how readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge gradually, through everyday interactions with utilitarian books.

Reading Practice

Reading Practice PDF Author: Melissa Reynolds
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226823636
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through portraits of readers and their responses to texts, Reading Practice reconstructs the contours of the knowledge economy that shaped medicine and science in early modern England. Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read when they wanted to attend to their health or understand their place in the universe. Before then, these works had largely been the purview of those who could read Latin. Around 1400, however, medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English while manuscripts became less expensive. These vernacular manuscripts invited their readers into a very old and learned conversation: Hippocrates and Galen weren’t distant authorities whose word was law, they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered to suit a manuscript compiler’s needs. This conversation continued even after the printing press arrived in England in 1476. Printers mined manuscripts for medical and scientific texts that they would publish throughout the sixteenth century, though the pressures of a commercial printing market encouraged printers to package these old texts in new ways. Without the weight of authority conditioning their reactions and responses to very old knowledge, and with so many editions of practical books to choose from, English readers grew into confident critics and purveyors of natural knowledge in their own right. Melissa Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body. Her study shows how readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge gradually, through everyday interactions with utilitarian books.

Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640

Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 PDF Author: Tessa Watt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521458276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation.

Difficult pasts

Difficult pasts PDF Author: Mimi Ensley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526157888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period. Difficult pasts examines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre’s popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’, a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.

Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII

Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII PDF Author: TatianaC. String
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351575767
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring the intersection between art and political ideology, this innovative study of art in Henrician England sheds new light on the ways in which Henry VIII and his advisers exploited visual images in order to communicate ideas to his subjects. The works analyzed include water triumphs, coronation pageants and funeral processions, printed title pages of vernacular Bibles, coins, portrait miniatures, and murals, as well as panel paintings. With her analysis of these categories of objects, and using communication theory as a starting point, String presents a new model of communication based on the concepts of magnificence, topicality, persuasiveness, and propaganda. Through this model she shows how medium, location, display, and viewership were all considered in the transmission of royal messages. Using the art of Henry VIII's reign as a case study, String enriches our understanding of the fundamental contribution of imagery to communication, and also provides a model for the study of the dissemination of ideas and the patron-artist relationship in other royal courts and historical periods.

Reforming Printing

Reforming Printing PDF Author: Alexandra da Costa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191650374
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book investigates how Syon Abbey responded to the religious turbulence of the 1520s and 1530s. It examines the eleven books three brothers - William Bonde, John Fewterer and Richard Whitford - had printed during this period and argues that the Bridgettines used vernacular printing to engage with religious and political developments that threatened their understanding of orthodox faith. Through these works - and their some twenty-six editions - the Abbey presented itself as part of the vanguard of the Church, fighting heterodoxy with a three-fold commitment to reformed spiritual leadership, vernacular theology and the spiritual education of the laity. It used its printed books to to augment inferior parochial instruction; bolster orthodox faith and contradict evangelical argument; resist Henry VIII's desire for ecclesiastical supremacy; and defend the monastic way of life. The book has three principal aims. First, to continue the debate about the nature of late medieval Catholicism by directing attention to one community that publicly proclaimed a very specific Catholic identity. Second, to highlight the shifting nature of that identity, which developed continuously in response to evangelicalism. Third, to emphasise the importance and impact of conservative vernacular theology in this period. Reforming Printing makes a strong contribution to our understanding of the Bridgettine community of Syon Abbey, and more generally the monastic and Catholic response to the developments that culminated in Henry VIII's break with Rome. It sheds new light upon the religious climate of the 1520s and 30s and will be of considerable interest to literary scholars and historians of the English Reformation, especially those working on early modern religious writing.

Manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible in the Bodleian and Oxford College Libraries

Manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible in the Bodleian and Oxford College Libraries PDF Author: Elizabeth Solopova
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781382980
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
The catalogue is a detailed study of Oxford manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete translation of the Bible in English.

Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science

Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science PDF Author: Allen Kent
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 9780824720230
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science provides an outstanding resource in 33 published volumes with 2 helpful indexes. This thorough reference set--written by 1300 eminent, international experts--offers librarians, information/computer scientists, bibliographers, documentalists, systems analysts, and students, convenient access to the techniques and tools of both library and information science. Impeccably researched, cross referenced, alphabetized by subject, and generously illustrated, the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science integrates the essential theoretical and practical information accumulating in this rapidly growing field."

Boudica's Odyssey in Early Modern England

Boudica's Odyssey in Early Modern England PDF Author: Samantha Frénée-Hutchins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317172957
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
This diachronic study of Boudica serves as a sourcebook of references to Boudica in the early modern period and gives an overview of the ways in which her story was processed and exploited by the different players of the times who wanted to give credence and support to their own belief systems. The author examines the different apparatus of state ideology which processed the social, religious and political representations of Boudica for public absorption and helped form the popular myth we have of Boudica today. By exploring images of the Briton warrior queen across two reigns which witnessed an act of political union and a move from English female rule (under Elizabeth I) to British/Scottish masculine rule (under James VI & I) the author conducts a critical cartography of the ways in which gender, colonialism and nationalism crystallised around this crucial historical figure. Concentrating on the original transmission and reception of the ancient texts the author analyses the historical works of Hector Boece, Raphael Holinshed and William Camden as well as the canonical literary figures of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She also looks at aspects of other primary sources not covered in previous scholarship, such as Humphrey Llwyd’s Breuiary of Britayne (1573), Petruccio Ubaldini’s Le Vite delle donne illustri, del regno d’Inghilterra, e del regno di Scotia (1588) and Edmund Bolton’s Nero Caesar (1624). Furthermore, she incorporates archaeological research relating to Boudica.

Some Did it for Civilisation, Some Did it for Their Country

Some Did it for Civilisation, Some Did it for Their Country PDF Author: Jane E. Elliott
Publisher: Chinese University Press
ISBN: 9789629960667
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 672

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book marks a total departure from previous studies of the Boxer War. It evaluates the way the war was perceived and portrayed at the time by the mass media. As such the book offers insights to a wider audience than that of sinologists or Chinese historians. The important distinction made by the author is between image makers and eyewitnesses. Whole categories of powerful image makers, both Chinese and foreign, never saw anything of the Boxer War but were responsible for disseminating images of that war to millions of people in China and throughout the world.

The Last Knight Errant

The Last Knight Errant PDF Author: Christopher Wilkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857714244
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sir Edward Woodville was the medieval knight par excellence - except that his life coincided with the beginning of the Renaissance. With this vivid and long-awaited biography, Christopher Wilkins demonstrates how Sir Edward carved out an important role for himself in the 15th century, marrying the old-fashioned values of a chivalric age with the modernising trends that were dramatically re-shaping Europe. Far from an anachronism, The Last Knight Errant reveals how this quintessentially medieval figure, riding from battle to battle across Europe, was also profoundly engaged in the events that built the post-medieval states of England, Spain and France. The Last Knight Errant is the first full biography of this pivotal figure in English history for over a century and reveals him to have been a true hero whose significance in the politics of the period is often overlooked. Drawing on original research throughout Europe, Christopher Wilkins draws out Sir Edward Woodville's fascinating life and unusual character in the context of his remarkable family, who have been traditionally cast as among the most unpopular in English history. Sir Edward's eldest sister, Elizabeth, was married to King Edward IV and his brother was guardian to the Prince of Wales but disaster struck when Richard of York executed his coup in 1483. Edward escaped with ships, money and men to Brittany where he became the first of Henry Tudor's new supporters, providing much needed credibility to that cause. He fought at Bosworth but once Henry was crowned and married to his niece, Edward sailed off to fight the Moors before returning to England in time to command the cavalry during the invasion by the pretender to the throne, Lambert Simnel. Never far from the centre of the action, ultimately Edward was killed at the Battle of St Aubin in 1488 where he was leading a freelance expedition to fight the French, contrary to King Henry's own wishes. The Last Knight Errant restores Sir Edward Woodville to his rightful place at the heart of power in 15th-century England and represents him as a true hero whose reputation suffered at the hands of that genius of propaganda, Richard III.