Course Description
Working outward from the material book, this course will highlight the unique value of book history in the study of culture, religion, and politics of the early modern period. Case studies will range from Europe, to England, and North America c.1500–1800, and will include John Foxe’s book of martyrs, the Essais of Montaigne, and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Each student will also work closely with one historical source selected by the instructors based on his or her special interests, culminating in a brief presentation to the group on Friday. The course assumes a basic familiarity with book history, whether acquired at RBS (e.g. in a course like Martin Antonetti’s The Printed Book in the West to 1800), through a program of reading, or elsewhere. Using material from Harvard’s collections, mainly at Houghton Library, the seminar will emphasize the historical significance of choices made by producers of books (authors, printers, and others) and the impact of those decisions on readers. We will consider especially how authority was constructed and the author portrayed in different contexts and genres. In doing so we will discuss, among other topics, patronage and the financing of publication, the uses of manuscript and forms of manuscript publication, textual variations in print, censorship, and the many manifestations of social hierarchy in the handpress era. This course will model and help students develop skills in multiple kinds of book historical analysis, including the printing history of a text, close reading of paratexts and texts, attention to comparands, the study of book inventories and catalogs, and of reader annotations. Students are asked to bring a laptop to the course, though we do not anticipate use of the laptop at all the course meetings. The course will include one evening lecture (on Tuesday), and the option of working at Houghton until 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The course may include a short field trip to a local collection to which we would walk or travel by public transit.Faculty
Ann Blair
Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University, where she teaches in book history and the intellectual and cultural history …
David D. Hall
David D. Hall is Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History at Harvard Divinity School. He has taught at HDS since 1989, and was Bartlett Professor of New England …
Advance Reading List
Required Readings
Note: Students admitted to this course will receive further instructions for accessing these readings.
Amory, Hugh and David D. Hall, eds. A History of the Book in America, Volume 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Worcester & Cambridge: American Antiquarian Society & Cambridge University Press, 2000; reprinted in paper by University of North Carolina Press). Read Chapter 12, “Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century” (pp. 411–433).
Amory, Hugh. Bibliography and the Book Trades: Studies in the Print Culture of Early New England. Edited by David D. Hall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Read chapter 2, “‘Gods Altar Needs Not Our Polishings’: Revisiting the Bay Psalm Book” (pp. 34–57).
Blair, Ann. “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550–1700.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64:1 (2003): 11–28. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3228379/blair%202003.pdf?sequence=2.
Bowers, Fredson. “Purposes of Descriptive Bibliography, with Some Remarks on Methods.” The Library 8:1 (1953): 1–22. http://library.oxfordjournals.org/content/s5-VIII/1/1.full.pdf+html.
Genette, Gérard. “Introduction to the Paratext.” Translated by Maria Maclean. New Literary History 22:2 (Spring 1991): 261–272.
Hall, David D. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008 (paperback edition 2012). Read chapter 2, “Not in Print yet Published: The Practice of Scribal Publication” (pp. 29–80).
Jackson, Leon. The Business of Letters: Authorial Economics in Antebellum America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Read Chapter 2 (pp. 53–88).
Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Read chapters 1–2 (pp. 14–78).
King, John N. Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Read Chapter 1, “The compilation of the book” (pp. 21–69).
Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Read Chapter 2 (pp. 33–104).
McKenzie, D.F. Bibliography & the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Read Chapter 1, “The book as an expressive form” (pp. 9–30).
Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation. New York: Penguin Press, 2015 (paperback edition 2016). Read chapter 6 (pp. 143–163).
Pettegree, Andrew. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Read chapter 5, “The visual image” (pp. 102–127).
Visser, Arnoud S.Q. Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1550–1620. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Read Chapter 6, “How Readers Read Their Augustines” (pp. 95–114).
Course Evaluations
Course History
- 2015
Ann Blair and David D. Hall co-teach this course for the first time.