Talking Books

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-229
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Bale ◽  
Printing Process ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
Anne Askew ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Authorial Voice

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’.

The Voice on the Page

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-75
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Vocal Cues ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Spelling ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Page Book

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.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
English Renaissance ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
John Bale ◽  
Renaissance England ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
Textual Meaning ◽  
The Voice

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.

scholarly journals Re-Reading “Greenes Groatsworth of Wit”

2012 ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Robert Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Robert Greene ◽  
Printing Process ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Authorial Voice ◽  
Print Industry

This essay focuses on the alleged attack by Robert Greene on Shakespeare as an “upstart crow,” a work reprinted in almost every collection of Shakespeare’s works, and a document that has produced its own body of scholarly assessment. Employing recent textual criticism of the print industry in early modern England —including works by Zachary Lesser, John Jowett, Jeffery Masten, and D. Allen Carroll— we re-read “Green’s Groatsworth of Wit” as a kind of literary criticism that helps to illuminate both its own textual status as well as the material conditions of the late sixteenth-century theatrical world which produced it. Following a review of the basic lines of interpretation of the piece, I examine the nexus of the Henry Chettle, Robert Danter and Greene connection, in an attempt to show that by considering the “collaboration” between these three, we should come to a better understanding of the document itself. Equally important, by re-examining the text, reviewing the printing process, and rethinking the authorial voice of the work, I hope to re-situate the pamphlet’s place in the present debate on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

John Bale and the Development of Protestant Hagiography in England

1973 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
John Bale ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Golden Legend ◽  
Anne Askew ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Scholarly Attention

One of the consequences of the Reformation in England (as elsewhere) was that for Protestants, at least, the image of sainthood changed considerably. Erasmus'sColloquieshad poked fun at the kind of saint honoured by theGolden Legend; and Thomas Cromwell drove the point home in his Injunctions of 1536 and 1538. ‘New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth …’ and a new cause naturally creates its new heroes. The changing conception of sainthood in sixteenth-century England, culminating in Foxe'sActes and Monuments,has attracted not a little modern scholarly attention, as for example in Helen C. White'sTudor Books of Saints and Martyrs.But one pivotal figure in this development deserves more intensive study: John Bale (1495–1563), the famous antiquary, dramatist and protestant propagandist. In the 1540s Bale published works on two protestant ‘saints’—Sir John Oldcastle and Mistress Anne Askew—which did much to imprint the new definition of sainthood on the English mind. For these little tracts alone (and particularly in the light of Bale's later relationship with John Foxe) Bale's contribution to protestant hagiography invites a closer look.

Disordered Books and Dynamic Archives: Rabbinic Scholarly Practices in Early Modern Ashkenaz

AJS Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Dynamic Activity ◽  
Modes Of Transmission ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Modern Learning ◽  
Shed Light

This article examines early modern learning through Ashkenazic responsa. Beyond explicit evidence from published responsa collections, implicit insights dwell in what these publications lack. These missing features shed light on sixteenth-century scholarly practices. The works’ organizational inconsistencies must be understood in context of learned archives. Such an adjustment offers a corrective to the regnant narrative, which views the introduction of print as a sharp rupture from earlier modes of transmission. This article suggests instead that the culture of printed books coexisted with older approaches, and that print was complemented by more disorderly and unconstrained forms of transmission. Comparing rabbinic “paper-ware” with contemporaneous humanist practices highlights the rabbi's working papers, focusing on a culture's dynamic activity rather than its stable output. This shift in perspective allows us to see rabbinic writings not merely as a collection of books but as a mode of scholarship.

‘HOW HARD AN ENTERPRISE IT IS’: AUTHORIAL SELF-FASHIONING IN JOHN DOWLAND’S PRINTED BOOKS

2007 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 43-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Title Page ◽  
The Other ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The One ◽  
Intellectual Activities ◽  
Modern Sense

The naming of John Dowland as ‘Author’ on the title page of his publication The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597) suggests a proprietary relationship between the composer and his work. This proprietary relationship is, perhaps, reinforced with the alignment of Dowland’s intellectual activities as ‘author’ with the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘invention’ in the same passage. All three terms could be used by the late sixteenth century to refer to notions of creativity, individual intellectual labour or origination. While many early examples of the use of ‘author’ refer specifically to God or Christ as creator, such as Chaucer’s declaration that ‘The auctour of matrimonye is Christ’, by the sixteenth century it was increasingly used to refer to an individual originator of intellectual or artistic creation closer to the modern sense of the word. Its sixteenth-century usage is, for instance, reflected in the title ‘A tretys, excerpte of diverse labores of auctores’, or as in a reference in 1509 to ‘The noble actor plinius’. Likewise, ‘invent’ or ‘inventor’ could be used to refer to the process of individual intellectual creation, exemplified by its use in 1576 ‘Your brain or your wit, and your pen, the one to invent and devise, the other to write’, while ‘compose’ could mean to make, to compose in words, ‘to write as author’ or, more specifically, to write music.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 283-290
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
Oral Reading ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Digital Medium ◽  
Technological Revolution ◽  
The Real ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Digital Books ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Work ◽  
The Voice

The Conclusion looks forward to future cross-disciplinary work on the physical voice. It reflects on why a literary scholar might be interested in the physical voice, recalling that literary texts are full of voices that make reference to the real voice off the page. It also suggests why a Renaissance literary historian might have something distinctive to offer future work on the voice, recalling the inter-relationship in this period between voice and printed books. It recognizes that a new technological revolution is well underway that is changing our relationship with print. It briefly considers how the digital medium uses or ignores voice, and asks whether a new history of oral reading can enable us to imagine different ways of interacting with—and immersing ourselves in—the print/digital books of the future.

The Voice in the Schoolroom

2019 ◽  
pp. 76-129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
School Education ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
Grammar School ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
The Voice

This chapter explores the centrality of voice to a Latinate, grammar-school education in the sixteenth century. It focuses on the part of rhetoric that has long been missed out of our histories of Renaissance rhetoric and reading: pronuntiatio (delivery). It considers the types of textual evidence we might use to recover training in vocal modulation. It explores the importance of pairing elocutio with pronuntiatio, focusing especially on Omer Talon’s Rhetorica; and it considers how attention to the performance of sentences from collections might help us to ‘listen’ to the historical schoolroom. It asks what happened to women’s voices when they were impersonated in the male-only schoolroom, and whether ‘real’ women were ever trained in pronuntiatio. Finally, it considers why Desiderius Erasmus chose the voice of a woman, Folly, to defend the importance of delivery to establish a relationship with God.

Sibylline Oracles

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich S. Gruen
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Sibylline Oracles ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Long Life ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Historical References

The Sibylline Oracles had a long life. The Sibyl was in origin a single Greek prophetess, renowned for the accuracy of her forecasts, divinely inspired, but portrayed as mad or raving, and regularly spewing forth dire forebodings. Additional Sibyls gradually sprang up in a variety of locations in the Mediterranean world, including the renowned Cumaean Sibyl whom Aeneas reputedly consulted. Sibylline prophecies were eventually collected in written form in Rome and used by Roman authorities to provide interpretation of unusual prodigies or natural disasters or to offer advice on significant matters of foreign entanglements and wars. Although that collection (insofar as it is historical) has long since disappeared, the voice of the Sibyl was reproduced in literary form. The extant Sibylline verses, composed in Homeric Greek hexameters, constitute twelve books of oracles, fashioned over a period of several centuries by numerous different and no longer identifiable hands. They constitute a motley assemblage of grim forecasts, historical references, apocalyptic visions, and denunciations of various peoples, especially Romans, for their abandonment of piety and indulgence in evil. The genre was appropriated by anonymous Jewish authors, speaking through the voice of the Sibyl, and employed to convey condemnation of cities and nations for the sins of idolatry, licentiousness, and a range of vices. Vivid portrayals of the end time and eschatological conflagration feature many of the texts. Subsequent Christian writers interpolated verses, added exaltations of Christ, and appropriated Sibylline pronouncements for their own ends. Others manipulated the oracles to record historical personages and events in the framework of prophetic pronouncements. The result was a complex and unsystematic compilation of reconstructed or fabricated prophecies ascribed to Sibyls but largely representing the ingenuity of Jewish and Christian compilers.

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