The Rhetoric of the Page

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Blank Space ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
Google Books ◽  
The Rich

This book explores blank space in early modern printed books; it addresses physical blank space (from missing words to vacant pages) as well as the concept of the blank. It is a book about typographical marks, readerly response, and editorial treatment. It is a story of the journey from incunabula to Google books, told through the signifiers of blank space: empty brackets, dashes, the et cetera, the asterisk. It is about the semiotics of print and about the social anthropology of reading. The book explores blank space as an extension of Elizabethan rhetoric with readers learning to interpret the mise-en-page as part of a text’s persuasive tactics. It looks at blanks as creators of both anxiety and of opportunity, showing how readers respond to what is not there and how writers come to anticipate that response. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter 1), the &c (Chapter 2) and the asterisk (Chapter 3). The Epilogue uncovers the rich metaphoric life of these textual phenomena and the ways in which Elizabethan printers experimented with typographical features as they considered how to turn plays into print.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Blank Space ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Google Books ◽  
The Brain

The Introduction looks at blank space in an era in which the blank did not yet prompt readerly unease, suspicion of error, or the need for reassurance (as in Google books: ‘this page intentionally left blank’). It discusses the development of negative vocabulary for blanks, at cognitive research on how the brain responds to what is not there, at reading as an act of completion, and at typographical ways of representing stage business. It engages with the work of recent book historians on experimentation in early modern printed books. It reviews critical work on the architecture of the page and the page as a visual unit. It explores a number of early modern literary works that are thematically dependent on gaps of various kinds from things that are unsaid or glossed over to those that call attention to what cannot be articulated.

The Material World of a Household and Collection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Professional Expertise ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Public ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter demonstrates the significance of the Palais de Justice at the summit of Parisian office-holding society and as a centre of information and communication in the capital. It situates L’Estoile in the social hierarchy of the Palais, analysing his duties in its Chancery and his involvement in the sale of offices, a crucial factor in the complex and developing administration of the early modern French state. Like most office-holders, L’Estoile openly criticized the sale of offices while tacitly practising it. His understanding of his colleagues’ use and abuse of this system reveals how it worked from the inside. From his position in the Chancery, L’Estoile was particularly involved in the licensing of printed books, and his professional expertise gives his diaries unparalleled insight into the public presence of print in Paris and the limits that contemporaries imposed on its sale and circulation.

Zeitgeschichte im Druck

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-222
Author(s):  
Pia Eckhart
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The Rich

Summary Contemporary History in Print Augsburg Chronicle Editions of the 16th Century. A Reflection on the (In–)‌Stability of Printed Chronicles In late medieval and early modern cities, readers and writers were certainly interested in history and in chronicling contemporary events. Even after the establishment of the printing press in German speaking areas large amounts of local and regional chronicles were written and copied by hand. In contrast, very few non-scholarly, vernacular chronicles were published in print. This fact is usually explained by pointing out the functional differentiation between the handwritten and the printed medium: Chroniclers could easily change, enhance or update texts while copying and compiling as long as they worked in the medium of handwriting. While this is certainly true, printed chronicles deserve more attention. This article explores the connections between the rich tradition of urban chronicles, ongoing practices of chronicling as well as the printed medium and the new sources of information connected with the printed medium in the first half of the 16th century. These complex relations are examined through a group of four printed German chronicles published in Augsburg and subsequently in other cities in more than twenty editions. The paper focuses particularly on the processes of revision and adaptation taking place in Philip Ulhart’s printing shop in Augsburg. Furthermore, the article offers methodological reflections on how to study and compare multiple editions of printed books adequately. The aim is to show why it is necessary to focus not only on their content but also on layout, paratexts and codicological proprieties in order to reveal the textual (un–)‌fixity of printed chronicles.

Revelry and riot in Archaic Megara: democratic disorder or ritual reversal?

2005 ◽  
Vol 125 ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Forsdyke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Role Reversal ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Historical Question

AbstractPlutarch (probably following Aristotle's lost Constitution of the Megarians) associates several episodes of riotous behaviour with the existence of a radical democracy in Archaic Megara (Moralia 295c-d, 304e-f). Modern historians, in turn, have accepted that Megara was ruled by a democracy in the mid sixth century BC. I suggest that this conclusion is unjustified because the connection between riotous behaviour and democracy in Plutarch is based on fourth-century anti-democratic political thought. I propose instead that anecdotes describing the insolent behaviour of the poor towards the rich are better interpreted in terms of customary rituals of social inversion and transgression. Drawing on comparative examples from the ancient world and early modern Europe, I show that popular revelry involving role reversal and transgression of social norms was an important locus for the negotiation of relations between élites and masses. I argue that such rituals provided temporary release from the constraints of the social hierarchy, and served to articulate symbolically the obligation of the powerful to protect the weak. The comparative examples show that such rituals were usually non-revolutionary, but could turn violent in times of rapid social and economic change. I argue that the violent episodes reported by Plutarch reflect the escalation of ritual revelry into real protest and riot in response to the breakdown of traditional relations of reciprocity between rich and poor in Archaic Megara. I suggest that élites in Archaic Megara successfully warded off more far-reaching rebellion and political reform by enacting new measures for the economic relief of the poor (e.g. the return of interest legislation). In conclusion, I address the broader historical question of why subordinate groups use ritual forms to express discontent.

scholarly journals The Hanging Guard: William Hope’s (1660-1724) Invention of Self-defence and the Spirit of Enlightenment

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Alexander Will
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Implications ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Self Defence

Fight books can be much more than repositories of knowledge or cornerstones of tradition. In some cases they may also reflect fundamental changes in the intellectual and social life of a society and even attempt to change the latter for the better. This is very much true for the works of William Hope (1660-1724). In eight printed books the Scotsman covered a wide range of topics connected to smallsword fencing and duelling. He employed early scientific methods when developing his school of swordplay, reflected on the social implications of fencing, introduced the notion of “sport for better health” into early modern fencing, and sought to institutionalise fencing in order to curb violence. As a whole this reflects the mindset of the early Enlightenment as it started to flourish in Hope’s native Scotland during his lifetime. This paper will answer the question of how the early Enlightenment influenced a set of remarkable Scottish fight books from the early modern period.

‘This Page Intentionally Left Blank’; or, the Apophatic Page

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-108
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Blank Space ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Digital Books

Chapter 1 explores how readers interact with and interpret blank space and blank spaces on the early modern page. This is the beginning of this chapter’s enquiry into the ways in which practical typography came to be seen as creative opportunity, for writers as well as readers, and how modern editorial treatment elides that creativity. Part I focuses on the interactive reader generally as he/she is faced with items that invite filling in: incomplete rubrication in incunabula, errata lists, blanks for topical and personal references, initials for names, censorship. Part II covers literary works that exploit gaps and incompletion from the disingenuous ‘desunt nonnulla’ through metrical half-lines, incomplete quotations and gaps in collaborative manuscripts to direct addresses to the reader to fill in blank space left for their use. This section also reviews blanks in different media such as sculpture and cartography. Part III shows how editors treat blanks in print editions and digital books, exploring literary material from the medieval to the early modern.

Seville and Manila: Illegal trade, corruption, and the phenomenon of trust in the Spanish Empire

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eberhard Crailsheim
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Illegal Trade ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Trading Networks

At the beginning of the early modern period, the two port cities of Seville and Manila became bottlenecks in the rich inter-oceanic trade connecting Europe, America and Asia. To control this trade, the Spanish Crown tightly regulated all traffic between these continents and levied heavy taxes on all merchandise. The stricter the regulations became, the more the merchants tried to outwit them through contraband trading and bribery. Within this setting, it was often impossible for merchants to bring cases of non-compliance of agreements to the official courts. Hence, the question arises, how were merchants, lacking an institution in charge of penalizing dishonest commercial conduct, able to find the trust in partners to establish trans-oceanic trading networks? This note argues that the answer lies in the common ground that united certain groups of shared mental models, which enabled the merchants to trust in the social coercive power of these groups and consequently to trust their partners overseas.

scholarly journals Andrew Pettegree. The Book in the Renaissance. Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 421p. ISBN 978-0-300-11009-8. $40

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-55
Author(s):  
Norman D. Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
The Impact

It is ironic, as Pettegree points out in his “A Note on Sources” (353–56), that it has been the enormous growth of information about early printed books available through the Internet that has made this, by far the most significant publication yet on the social history of the book, possible. As outstanding and important as Lucian Febvre and Henry-Jean Martin’s groundbreaking The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1458–1800 (1976) and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) and her subsequent The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983) were, this masterpiece . . .

Multiple-source Record Linkage in a Rural Industrial Community, 1680–1820

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve King
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Multiple Source ◽  
Demographic Analysis ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Broad Outline

Re-creating the social, economic and demographic life-cycles of ordinary people is one way in which historians might engage with the complex continuities and changes which underlay the development of early modern communities. Little, however, has been written on the ways in which historians might deploy computers, rather than card indexes, to the task of identifying such life cycles from the jumble of the sources generated by local and national administration. This article suggests that multiple-source linkage is central to historical and demographic analysis, and reviews, in broad outline, some of the procedures adopted in a study which aims at large scale life cycle reconstruction.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Winter
Keyword(s):  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Oppression ◽  
The Rich ◽  
To Come

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.

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