Book Use, Book Theory, 1500-1700

Book Use, Book Theory, 1500-1700 PDF Author: Bradin Cormack
Publisher: Joseph Regenstein Lib
ISBN: 9780943056340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
What might it mean to use books rather than read them? This work examines the relationship between book use and forms of thought and theory in the early modern period. Drawing on legal, medical, religious, scientific and literary texts, and on how-to books on topics ranging from cooking, praying, and memorizing to socializing, surveying, and traveling, Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio explore how early books defined the conditions of their own use and in so doing imagined the social and theoretical significance of that use. The volume addresses the material dimensions of the book in terms of the knowledge systems that informed them, looking not only to printed features such as title pages, tables, indexes and illustrations but also to the marginalia and other marks of use that actual readers and users left in and on their books. The authors argue that when books reflect on the uses they anticipate or ask of their readers, they tend to theorize their own forms. Book Use, Book Theory offers a fascinating approach to the history of the book and the history of theory as it emerged from textual practice.

Book Use, Book Theory, 1500-1700

Book Use, Book Theory, 1500-1700 PDF Author: Bradin Cormack
Publisher: Joseph Regenstein Lib
ISBN: 9780943056340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Get Book Here

Book Description
What might it mean to use books rather than read them? This work examines the relationship between book use and forms of thought and theory in the early modern period. Drawing on legal, medical, religious, scientific and literary texts, and on how-to books on topics ranging from cooking, praying, and memorizing to socializing, surveying, and traveling, Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio explore how early books defined the conditions of their own use and in so doing imagined the social and theoretical significance of that use. The volume addresses the material dimensions of the book in terms of the knowledge systems that informed them, looking not only to printed features such as title pages, tables, indexes and illustrations but also to the marginalia and other marks of use that actual readers and users left in and on their books. The authors argue that when books reflect on the uses they anticipate or ask of their readers, they tend to theorize their own forms. Book Use, Book Theory offers a fascinating approach to the history of the book and the history of theory as it emerged from textual practice.

The Acquisition of Books by Chetham's Library, 1655-1700

The Acquisition of Books by Chetham's Library, 1655-1700 PDF Author: Matthew Yeo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004206655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Drawing on recent debates about the methods of book history, this book explores in detail the foundation and development of Chetham's Library, in Manchester, from its foundation in 1655 until the end of the seventeenth century.

Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800

Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 PDF Author: Alisha Rankin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317058321
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Secrets played a central role in transformations in medical and scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. As a new fascination with novelty began to take hold from the late fifteenth century, Europeans thirsted for previously unknown details about the natural world: new plants, animals, and other objects from nature, new recipes for medical and alchemical procedures, new knowledge about the human body, and new facts about the way nature worked. These 'secrets' became popular items of commerce and trade, as the quest for new and exclusive bits of information met the vibrant early modern marketplace. Whether disclosed widely in print or kept more circumspect in manuscripts, secrets helped drive an expanding interest in acquiring knowledge throughout early modern Europe. Bringing together international scholars, this volume provides a pan-European and interdisciplinary overview on the topic. Each essay offers significant new interpretations of the role played by secrets in their area of specialization. Chapters address key themes in early modern history and the history of medicine, science and technology including: the possession, circulation and exchange of secret knowledge across Europe; alchemical secrets and laboratory processes; patronage and the upper-class market for secrets; medical secrets and the emerging market for proprietary medicines; secrets and cosmetics; secrets and the body and finally gender and secrets.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England

The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England PDF Author: Adam Smyth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192585185
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England provides a rich, imaginative and also accessible guide to the latest research in one of the most exciting areas of early modern studies. Written by scholars working at the cutting-edge of the subject, from the UK and North America, the volume considers the production, reception, circulation, consumption, destruction, loss, modification, recycling, and conservation of books from different disciplinary perspectives. Each chapter discusses in a lively manner the nature and role of the book in early modern England, as well as offering critical insights on how we talk about the history of the book. On finishing the Handbook, the reader will not only know much more about the early modern book, but will also have a strong sense of how and why the book as an object has been studied, and the scope for the development of the field.

New World Literacy

New World Literacy PDF Author: Carlos Alberto González Sánchez
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611480272
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book on the role of written and iconographic communication in the Atlantic World combines a broad outlook, geographically and chronologically, with the precise treatment of specific evidence extracted from the sources. The author argues that diatribes against chivalric fiction and the Index of Prohibited Books did not prevent proscribed literature from circulating freely on both sides of the Atlantic. On the contrary, he notes, such prohibitions may have increased the lure of certain books. A description of the process of registering and inspecting ships in Seville and upon reaching their destinations highlights opportunities for contraband, smuggling, fraud, and the corruption of officials entrusted with regulating the trade. Within the prominent spiritual genre, the author documents a shift from Erasmian to Tridentine thinking. The registers analyzed also suggest the growing popularity of literary works by Cervantes, Mateo Alemán, and Lope de Vega. It opens a fascinating window onto the book trade in the Americas. Different forms of participation in this culture included the use of books as fetishes and the possession of printed devotional images. The analysis of books as well as printed images supports larger contentions about their role as agents of evangelization and westernization. This book certainly opens up new worlds on the impact of books and images in the Atlantic World.

The Book

The Book PDF Author: Amaranth Borsuk
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
The book as object, as content, as idea, as interface. What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately. Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.

The Book in History, the Book as History

The Book in History, the Book as History PDF Author: Heidi Brayman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300223161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
The essays in this collection reach beyond book history to address fundamental questions about historicism with a broad range of issues such as gender and sexuality, religion, political theory, economic history, adaptation and appropriation, and quantitative analysis and digital humanities.

When Novels Were Books

When Novels Were Books PDF Author: Jordan Alexander Stein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674243420
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.” Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers’ hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books. The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel’s main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre’s insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.

Loving Literature

Loving Literature PDF Author: Deidre Shauna Lynch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618384X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don’t love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase “the love of literature” as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, “It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities.” With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.

Symbols and Things

Symbols and Things PDF Author: Kevin Lambert
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988410
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
In the steam-powered mechanical age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians depended on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Though not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book—from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton—relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues. The letters they exchanged, together with the equations, diagrams, tables, or pictures that filled their manuscripts and publications, were all tangible traces of abstract ideas that extended mathematicians into their social and material environment. Each chapter of this book explores a thing, or assembling of things, mathematicians needed to do their work—whether a textbook, museum, journal, library, diagram, notebook, or letter—all characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century British taskscape, but also representative of great change to a discipline brought about by an industrialized world in motion.