HIST 430/42300 CHSS 37200 HIPS 26400
The Book in Early Modern
Spring Quarter 2005
Syllabus
Course Outline
This course examines the development and historical importance of the printed book from the invention of the press in the mid-fifteenth century to the development of mechanized printing at the beginning of the nineteenth. Its focus is on the different practices that came into being around the book: printing itself, certainly, but also new kinds of commerce, reading, thinking, and acting. The aim is reach a historical understanding of how the book participated in the profound cultural transformations of the early modern period.
Course Requirements
The class meets on Thursdays, from 2:30 to 5:20, in the Special Collections area of the Regenstein Library. You are expected to attend all scheduled course meetings and complete all readings. Please note that Special Collections has special rules. No pens, no bags, and no coats are allowed: these may all be left in a locker room at the entrance to SC.
You will be expected to write a midterm paper and a final paper. Details of these will be provided in due course. You are also expected to make an oral presentation to the seminar at least once in the quarter.
There are three principal texts, plus one more that will be useful for those wanting to get a sense of the history of the book as a discipline. Of the three major books, the first, by Elizabeth Eisenstein, is a sweeping account of the impact of the press. It offers a survey of the effects caused by the introduction of printing in Europe, covering a lot of ground and raising many questions, but going into no particular topic very deeply. Chartier’s and Darnton’s titles are more advanced and deal more selectively with particular issues.
Finkelstein and McLeery’s volume is for students who are interested in pursuing the history of the book more broadly: it collects together a number of influential papers in the field.
· R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (NY: Norton, 1996).
· D. Finkelstein and A. McLeery (eds.), The Book History Reader (NY: Routledge, 2001).
These texts should all be available in the Seminary Co-op, although there are limited quantities of the Book history reader. In addition, for each week there are assigned readings from more specialized works. These should be available on e-reserve, and on physical reserve at the library.
Appointments
My office is in Foster 510. I have office hours on Fridays at 10-12. You are welcome to come by at these times and ask me anything about the course. My network phone number is 702-2334. My email address is johns@uchicago.edu.
The Book in early modern Europe
Weekly Topics
3/31/05 1 Introductory meeting
There is no reading for this meeting, which provides a chance to distribute syllabi, address opening questions, organize student presentations, and the like.
4/7/05 2 The concept of a printing revolution
To start with, we consider the idea of a printing revolution - that is, a radical transformation in culture allegedly brought about by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the press in the mid-fifteenth century. Was there a printing revolution, and if so, what exactly was it? We’ll ask how to characterize the implications of print in a general sense, such that we do justice to the nature and uses of books before the invention of the press as well as after. This will also serve to introduce some of the major themes to be addressed in the succeeding sessions.
· H. Love, “Scribal publication in seventeenth-century England,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9 (1987), 130-54.
4/14/05 3 Printing
and printers
This week’s session is devoted to a close look at the work and culture of the printing house itself. We shall look at how a book emerged from the coordinated actions of different workers around the press. In particular we’ll examine the role of the “master printer” - the patriarchal figure on whom the whole operation was thought to depend.
4/21/05 4 Commerce and circulation
This week we look at the book in the contexts of commerce and patronage. We’ll examine the role of booksellers and trade fairs in deciding what was printed, and what read. The practice of giving books as gifts will also be discussed - a non-commercial form of exchange that was of enormous significance in a culture of patrons and clients.
· N.Z. Davis, “Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983), 69–88.
· P. Findlen and T. Nummedal, “Words of Nature: Scientific books in the seventeenth century,” in A. Hunter (ed.), Scientific books, libraries, and collectors (4th edn., 2000), 164-215.
· R. Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), 122-47.
4/28/05 5 The book as object and artifact
In this session we examine the appearance and material character of the book itself. We’ll look at the importance of typography, and at how variations in the “look” of the page could affect the apparent meanings of texts, be they poems, plays or scientific treatises.
· Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, 185-225.
· D.F. McKenzie, “Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve.” In G. Barber and B. Fabian (eds.), Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1981), 81–123.
· H.-J. Martin, The French Book: Religion, Absolutism, and Readership, 1585-1715 (1996), 77-96 (plus figs.).
· G. Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” Representations 17 (Winter, 1987), 28-61.
5/5/05 6 Reading
What did people make of this strange object, the printed book? This week we look at the practices of interpretation to which books were subjected. We’ll examine how readers believed that the engagement with the printed page affected them. We’ll also ask how they sought to change ways of reading in order to ensure that books had only beneficial effects on their users.
5/12/05 7 Collecting, sorting, classifying and believing
In this session we ask how readers attempted to cope with their books. Merely housing the things became a major issue after the invention of printing, because the number of printed works in circulation suddenly soared. Readers found themselves facing unanticipated problems: how to comprehend this mass of material, how to discriminate between knowledge and error, and how to organize their new, private libraries.
· Chartier, Order of Books, 61-88.
· W.H. Sherman, John Dee: The politics of reading and writing in the English Renaissance (1995), 29-52.
· A. Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (1996), 101-33.
· A. Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550-1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 11-28.
5/19/05 8 Regulation and resistance
Starting very soon after the invention of the press, those in power
attempted to monitor and regulate the production of books. They had various
aims in doing so. Certainly, they wanted to temper print’s effects on the
morality, conduct, political opinions and religious beliefs of their
citizens. But they also wanted to protect a nascent industry from
stifling competition, and to reward enterprising and loyal subjects with
monopolies. This week we look at the
development of what has come to be called “censorship” in these various
contexts.
5/26/05 9 Periodicity
One of the most remarkable innovations brought about in the world of print was also one of the simplest: the idea of periodicity. Newspapers, scholarly journals, novels issued in parts, and other genres all depended on the ability to produce (more or less) regular “numbers” of small size and affordable price, to be distributed to paying customers. Here we look at the effects of periodical publishing, not least in constituting a new kind of political entity called the “public sphere.”
· C.J.Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information(1996), 17-45.
· T.Broman, “Periodical Literature,” in M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine(eds.), Books and the Sciences in History (2000), 225-38.
· A.Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (1995), 54-97.
6/1/04 10 Authorship, literary property, and the public
One measure which governments took to regulate the press was to insist that every published book be identified with an individual who could be held responsible for its contents. This amounted to an insistence on authorship. Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, it was in the eighteenth century that society started to acknowledge the author in general as a creative individual bearing a unique relationship to the work. This final session is devoted to the concept of authorship that thus emerged, in particular in relation to a new notion of the readership for print - one that accorded the medium a prime role in the political process just as the “age of revolutions” was approaching.
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