Voices and Books in the English Renaissance

Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards

Two ideas lie at the heart of this study and its claim that we need a new history of reading: that voices in books can affect us deeply; that printed books can be brought to life with the voice. Voices and Books offers a new history of reading focused on the oral and voice-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader we have privileged in the last few decades, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tone—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others’ voices, as well as manage and exploit the voices of their readers. It offers fresh readings of the key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers: John Bale, Anne Askew, William Baldwin, Thomas Nashe. And it aims to rethink what a printed book can be, searching the printed page for vocal cues, and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process.

Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards

The history of reading has privileged particular kinds of evidence: the marks that readers left behind in books (annotation), and the layout of a printed page/book (paratext). This chapter explores whether other marks—not just layout but also punctuation and spelling—can be understood as vocal cues for oral readers. It does this by examining the contents and layout of Edmund Coote’s schoolbook used to teach boys and girls to read English (aloud). It argues that the eye and tongue were brought into alignment in the printed books of the sixteenth century, and gives this claim a context: debates on English spelling and punctuation. It makes a case for seeing ‘marks’ as prompts that need to be interpreted creatively rather than strictly followed, exploring Matthew Parker’s advice on reading psalms.


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin O'Kane

AbstractThe article explores the processes at work in a painting's engagement of its viewer in biblical subject matter. It accentuates the role of the artist as an active reader of the Bible and not merely an illustrator of biblical scenes, the dynamic that occurs in the text-reader process as paradigmatic for the image-viewer relationship and the important role of the developing tradition that felt the need to change or rewrite the biblical story. The processes are explored in terms of hermeneutics and exegesis: hermeneutics defined as 'the interweaving of language and life within the horizon of the text and within the horizons of traditions and the modern reader' (Gadamer) and exegesis as 'the dialectic between textual meaning and the reader's existence' (Berdini). Applied to the visualization of biblical subject matter, the approaches of Gadamer and Berdini illumine the key role given to the viewer in the visual hermeneutical process. The biblical story of the adoration of the Magi (Matt. 2: 1-12), the first public and universal seeing of Christ and one of the most frequently depicted themes in the entire history of biblical art, is used to illustrate their approach. The emphasis in the biblical narrative on revealing the Christ child to the reader parallels a key concept in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics, namely Darstellung, the way in which a painting facilitates its subject matter in coming forth, in becoming an existential event in the life of the viewer.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards

This chapter explores the printed books of the sixteenth century as ‘talking books’; it also explores how the voice is implicated in the printing process. It focuses on the work of two print-aware authors, John Bale and William Baldwin, who worked with the most influential ‘talking book’ in England in the 1540s: Erasmus’s Paraphrases. It explores Bale’s attentiveness to the physical voice of Anne Askew in his editions of her Examinations (1546, 1547), arguing that he uses print to turn the written form of her oral testimony into a script for oral readers. It attends to Baldwin’s representation of the voices of illiterate working men, medieval magistrates, and an array of untrustworthy characters, including some noisy cats, to create careful ‘listeners’ who are aware of the manipulative authorial voice that lies behind literary voices on the page as well as the risks of affective ‘mishearing’.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-253
Author(s):  
Eleazar Gutwirth

An examination, annotation and translation of the hitherto unpublished correspondence with Baer in the Baron papers lead to a re-contextualization. Intensified after his demise in 1980, a large stream of publications attempted to contextualize the work of the historian of the Jews of Christian Spain, Fritz Yshaq Baer, against the background of broadly known events of the twentieth century, identifying him with a “School” of Jewish history. Here this notion is traced to the early 1970s and alternative possibilities are explored. First, attention is paid to the role of institutions, networks and models in the production of knowledge without restricting this solely to the universities or to Germany. This leads to valuing the role of Spanish institutions and their intellectual presuppositions and practices. The history of reading raises questions as to the role of intended public, history of the book and genre in his publications. Finally, taking the ethics of reading into consideration, we ask who the participants in the dialogues he was constructing were. This includes his correspondence with Baron which is published as an appendix.


1993 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn

We should be careful since not all indifferent things which appear indifferent are. Florentines can disguise and color any thing; and it is now adays the common exercise of the greatest wits of the world to transform good into evil, evil into good, and both into indifferent; so that in these days scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.In linking the rhetorical machinations of the “Florentine” or stereotypical Machiavel with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological and political debate concerning the doctrine of “things indifferent,” this quotation from William Bradshaw invites us to reconsider the usual histories of Machiavellism in Renaissance England. In particular, it suggests that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric in the English Renaissance is more complicated than it might first appear.


Author(s):  
Kieran Fenby-Hulse

In this essay, I consider the music that has been chosen as part of the previous essays in this collection. I attempt to understand what this assemblage of musical tracks, this anthropology playlist, might tell us about fieldwork as a research practice. The chapter examines this history of the digital playlist before going on to analyse the varied musical contributions from curatorial, musicological, and anthropological perspetives. I argue that the playlist asks us to reflect on the field of anthropology and to consider the role of the voice, the body, the mind with anthropology, as well as the role digital technologies, ethics, and the relationship between indviduals and the community.


DIYÂR ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-82
Author(s):  
Taisiya Leber

This paper aims to examine the early stage of printing in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on mobile actors, tools and ideas. Which role did mobility play in the life of printers? How did it influence their professional life and how was it reflected in prefaces or afterwords of their printed books? The first Jewish, Serbian, Armenian, Greek and Muslim printers in the Ottoman Empire were foreign-born (Spain, Italy, England, France). Many of them had to remain mobile within and beyond the empire in order to escape persecution, religious censorship, business competition etc. Where did the knowledge of printing come from and how did it circulate? Were there any contacts between printers of different religious backgrounds and what role did the question of language and multilingualism play? By introducing case studies that originate from the early phase of printing in the Ottoman Empire (Sephardic legal code ʾArbaʿa Ṭurim, Constantinople 1493) until the first decades of the eighteenth century (İbrāhīm Müteferriḳa’s printing activities), this article will mainly focus on the aspect of mobility in a Transottoman context. It will show the role of networks and connections between the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe for the development and spreading of book printing among Ottoman Jews and Christians.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 148-157
Author(s):  
Kareem Murad ATEE ◽  
Alaa Abd Al Kadum JABAR

It appear in Iraqi stste in this time of the history of Iraq anew start level of paths and its considered as most important historial level by the voice of democracy and freedom it was the voice overpowering on all paths of state the operation of build the democracy which establish in any community it was to based shown the ability of regularity about limited ideas and culture pursuit through to based and action and the effect of that build inside the social environment then the operation of build of democracy it takes the distinction and privacy in the totality of cases interact between the multiple elites that build by it agroup of buildings and institutions then that for every elite inside the socity an prominent and important role in the field of existing them and when we talking of the cuitural elite and their role inside the civil society then that the role couldn’t reach to limit of judgment demand by that elite then its carry elements people of culture and defend of the intellectual cover


2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 940-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas McDowell

AbstractReferences to Rabelais in Andrew Marvell’s prose satires against religious intolerance,The Rehearsal Transpros’d(1672–73), offer insights into the Restoration reception of Rabelaisian satire in the universities and the coffeehouses as a specifically anticlerical form of wit. But these references are either misattributed or incorrect, suggesting that Marvell may never actually have readGargantua and Pantagruel,but rather picked up Rabelaisian anecdotes when conversing in intellectual circles in France in the mid-1650s. Critical focus on the history of reading tends to neglect the inevitable role of such conversation in literary transmission, both within a national culture and across national borders.


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