‘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.

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.

‘And all my children?’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Scott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Modern Period

Beginning with an exploration of the role of the child in the cultural imagination, Chapter 1 establishes the formative and revealing ways in which societies identify themselves in relation to how they treat their children. Focusing on Shakespeare and the early modern period, Chapter 1 sets out to determine the emotional, symbolic, and political registers through which children are depicted and discussed. Attending to the different life stages and representations of the child on stage, this chapter sets out the terms of the book’s enquiry: what role do children play in Shakespeare’s plays; how do we recognize them as such—age, status, parental dynamic—and what are the effects of their presence? This chapter focuses on how the early moderns understood the child, as a symbolic figure, a life stage, a form of obligation, a profound bond, and an image of servitude.

Professionalization Abroad

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-55
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Catholic Identity ◽  
Modern Period

Chapter 1 analyzes the profound importance of continental education in shaping the clerical leadership of Irish Catholicism in the Early Modern period. While not all clergy were educated abroad, formation in continental seminaries emerged as a key aspect of both the Catholic hierarchy and the guardians and preachers of the regular clergy. This system of clerical provision was based on the evolution of a somewhat haphazard network of continental colleges, but the decentralized nature of the system may in fact have conferred significant advantages. While impossible to determine the precise influence of this development, the evidence suggest that it was of profound importance in confirming the nature of the Catholic identity of most of the population.

Arminianism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Thomas H. McCall ◽  
Keith D. Stanglin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Preliminary Description

Chapter 1 discusses the purpose of the book as an introduction to the historical development of Arminian theology. It then offers a preliminary description and definition of Arminianism. The late medieval and early modern background of Arminianism is summarized. This background includes a brief overview of the most well-known aspects of Arminius’s thought. The chapter concludes with an outline of the contents of the subsequent chapters.

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