scholarly journals Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing Bibliographical Alterities

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Drucker
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Book History ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Graphic Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Practices

To conceptualize a future history of the book we have to recognize that our understanding of the bibliographical object of the past is challenged by the ontologically unbound, distributed, digital, and networked conditions of the present. As we draw on rich intellectual traditions, we must keep in view the need to let go of the object-centered approach that is at the heart of book history. My argument begins, therefore, with a few assertions. First, that we have much to learn from the scholarship on Old and New World contact that touches on bibliography, document studies, and book history for formulating a non-object centered conception of what a book is. Second, that the insights from these studies can be usefully combined with a theory of the “conditional” document to develop the model of the kinds of distributed artifacts we encounter on a daily basis in the networked conditions of current practices. Finally, I would suggest that this model provides a different conception of artifacts (books, documents, works of textual or graphic art), one in which reception is production and therefore all materiality is subject to performative engagement within varied, and specific, conditions of encounter.

scholarly journals Thinking Through the History of the Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Howsam
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Conceptual Category ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Form ◽  
Organic Change

An impressive body of meticulous scholarship in the history of the book has led scholars to reject outmoded models of revolutionary change and technological determinism, and instead to explore themes of evolution and organic change. Similarly, the old unitary and Eurocentric book history is being supplanted by a series of parallel narratives where the focus is on human adaptation of new technologies to newly felt needs and fresh marketing opportunities. The article suggests that the study of book history is a way of thinking about how people have given material form to knowledge and stories. It highlights some particularly ambitious recent arguments, and emphasizes research, theory and pedagogy as the means to a wider understanding. Rather than being an academic discipline, book history is identified as an “interdiscipline,” an intellectual space where scholars practicing different disciplinary approaches and methodologies address the same capacious conceptual category.

scholarly journals A Companion to the History of the Book, 2nd edition. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Jessie Sherwood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Book History ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
History Of

When he declared, “the physical book really has had a 500-year run” in a 2009 interview, Jeff Bezos might well be forgiven for thinking that the book began with Gutenberg. Histories of the book have tended to give the impression that it emerged with movable type and existed largely, if not exclusively, in Mainz, New York, London, Paris, Venice, and environs. The first edition to A Companion to the History of the Book, first published in 2007, was a welcome, albeit modest, corrective to this narrow focus. While the bulk of its attention was on print in Western Europe and the United States, it incorporated chapters on manuscripts, books in Asia and Latin America, and the Hebraic and Islamic traditions, broadening the scope of book history both chronologically and geographically.

scholarly journals Conglomerate Karst in Slovenia : History of Cave Knowledge and Research of Udin Boršt (Gorenjsko)

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrej Kranjc
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Rock Cutting ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Grammar School ◽  
World War ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Folk tales and tradition evidence that people in Udin Boršt were aware of caves from old. In the 19th century a special type of outlaws occurred in Gorenjska. One of the centres was in Udin Boršt where brigands hid in caves. Under the French occupation the villagers hid in the caves, while during the 2nd World War they were partisans. Water is another factor playing an important role at studying Udin Boršt. Most of the villages were water supplied from Udin Boršt, partly out of caves. As elsewhere in conglomerates in Udin Boršt also there are traces of rock cutting for millstones. The first printed news about the caves in Udin Boršt are found in Valvasor’s Die Ehre des Herzothums Crain. The book History of the Ljubljana Bishop’s Diocese cites seven caves. The modern caving research started in 1946. In 1954 the members of the Natural Science Circle of the 1st Grammar School, Kranj started to visit caves in Udin Boršt. About that time a co-worker of the Karst Research Institute from Postojna started to research these caves. The caves in Udin Boršt were revisited in the seventieth of the past century in connection with the project “Speleological Map of Slovenia”. The connection between the people and the land can be seen from the topographical names too. The last part of the paper deals with these names, including the explanation of the name Udin Boršt. Da so ljudje jame v Udin borštu že dolgo poznali, se odraža v ljudskem blagu in izročilu. V 19. stol. je nastalo rokovnjaštvo. Eno od središč je bilo v Udin borštu, kjer so se rokovnjači skrivali po jamah. Pred Francozi so se skrivali po jamah tudi vaščani, med II. svetovno vojno pa partizani. Drugi dejavnik, ki je igral veliko vlogo pri spoznavanju jam v Udin borštu, je voda. Večina vasi je dobivala vodo iz Udin boršta, deloma iz jam. Kot drugod v konglomeratu, so tudi v Udin borštu sledi lomljenja kamine za mlinske kamne. Prva tiskana vest o jamah v Udin borštu je v Valvasorjevem delu »Slava vojvodine Kranjske«. V Zgodovini fara Ljubljanske škofije je omenjenih sedem jam. Sodobno jamarsko raziskovanje se je pričelo leta 1946. 1954 so pričeli obiskovati jame v Udin borštu člani Prirodoslovnega krožka I. gimnazije iz Kranja. V istem času se je raziskovanja teh jam lotil sodelavec Inštituta za raziskovanje krasa SAZU iz Postojne. Jame v Udin borštu so bile ponovno obiskane sredi sedemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja, v okviru velikega projekta »Speleološka karta Slovenije«. Povezanost človeka z zemljo se vidi tudi iz krajevnih in ledinskih imen. Zadnji del prispevka se ukvarja s temi imeni, vključno z razlago imena Udin boršt.  

Reformed Monasticism and the Narrative of Cistercian Beginnings

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-556
Author(s):  
Martha G. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Monastic Reform ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Practices

AbstractThis essay explores the ongoing debates about the character of early Cistercian monasticism, the dating of early Cistercian documents, and assumptions about the Cistercians’ place in eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic “reform.” It analyzes the Cistercians’ narratives of their foundation in relation to particular moments in the twelfth-century history of the order, drawing on and elaborating recent theories about the dating of these documents. Although the Cistercians often seem the quintessential example of “reformed monasticism,” this essay argues that the earliest Cistercians did not present themselves as reformers but only gradually developed a rhetoric of reform over the course of the twelfth century. Finally, it suggests that reform is less a specific set of changes than it is a rhetorical use of the past that authenticates current practices and affirms that these interpretations of the past must be right and true.

HISTORY AND ITS ENDS IN CHARTIST EPIC

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela K. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
End Of History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
Long Poems

In the mid-1800s, two significant and widelyread Chartist poems appeared, both written in prison by Chartist organizers, and both using the epic form to interrogate the present, body forth a utopian future, and rewrite a history conceived both as broadly human and specifically national. These long poems, Thomas Cooper'sPurgatory of Suicides(1845) and Ernest Jones'sThe New World, first published in 1851 and then republished after 1857 as theRevolt of Hindostan, have much to tell us about how radicals envisioned the history of Britain, its relationship with empire, and the fulfillment of the ends of history. Cooper's poem proceeds in ten books, written in Spenserian stanzas, in which he dreams of visiting a purgatory of suicides: mythical and historical personages who have committed suicide debate the reasons for their condition and the condition of the world. Jones's poem was written in couplets, supposedly on the torn pages of a prayer book, in his own blood. The poem surveys the rise and fall of multiple empires, and also surveys recent political history closer to home. The two poems look to the past and the future, to universal history and its end. They thus participate in utopian political discourse, with its emphasis on the end of history, as well as the epic tradition. Both utopian and epic discourse in this period were affiliated with specifically national narratives, and the internationalist and universal elements of the poems sometimes inhabit these genres uneasily. Additionally, both poets attend to the religious tradition of eschatological discourse that underlies the secular notion of the end of history, and work to reconcile it with the political vision they are promoting. These writers use unique combinations of spatial and temporal frames to achieve the reconciliation of their diverse goals with the genres and discourses that they claim and transform.

Literary Debt

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1480-1488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Book Production ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of

Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “the book”—that is, about early modern Britain (Nature). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History, “the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

Introduction to AJS Review Symposium: The Jewish Book: Views and Questions

AJS Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-357
Author(s):  
Adam Shear
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Book History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Impact

In the last several decades, the study of reading, writing, and publishing has emerged as a lively field of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Historians and literary scholars have engaged with a number of questions about the impact of changes in technology on reading practices and particularly on the relationship between new technologies of reading and writing and social, religious, and political change. The new field of the “history of the book,” merging aspects of social and intellectual history with the tools of analytical and descriptive bibliography, came to the fore in the second half of the twentieth century at the same time that the emergence of new forms of electronic media raised many questions for social scientists about the ways that technological change have affected aspects of human communication in our time. Meanwhile, while the field of book history emerged initially among early modernists interested in the impact of printing technology, the issues raised regarding authorship, publication, relations between orality and the written word, dissemination, and reception have enriched the study of earlier periods.

UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Brouillette
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Developing World ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Global History ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Media System ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Developed World

This article establishes the importance of UNESCO’s role within the global history of the book. Its focus is the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. It shows how these claims were undermined by the interests of the developed world and sidelined by the emerging discipline of book history.

scholarly journals National Histories of the Book in a Transnational Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Book History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Traditional Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
National Book ◽  
The Impact

In the 1990s and 2000s, national histories of the book achieved a double milestone: firstly, they marked the coming to maturity of the subdiscipline of the history of the book itself, especially in English-speaking countries; at the same time they established landmarks in the cultural history of their own countries. My presentation will discuss the fate and the impact of national book histories from the point of view of the History of the Book in Australia, which I coedited and to which I contributed several chapters. Two historiographical events have challenged the agenda of national book histories. The ‘transnational turn’ has thrown into question the fundamental framework which governed their conception and production. To a lesser extent, the growth of the digital humanities also makes a radical departure from the ‘traditional’ research methods of the 1990s. My presentation will assess the legacy of the History of the Book in Australia so far, and ask whether national book history has any role to play in the age of transnational approaches. I will suggest in answer to my own question that there remains a place at the table for all three levels—transnational, national and also micro-histories of the book.

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