Used books : marking readers in Renaissance England / William H. Sherman

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sherman, William H., author.

Series:

Material Texts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Renaixement--Anglaterra.

Local Subjects:

Renaixement--Anglaterra.

Genre:

Llibres electrònics

Physical Description:

1 online resource (282 p.)

Edition:

1st paperback ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2010]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be "enlivened by the marginal notes and comments." For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition.William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase "mark my words" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers.Based on a survey of thousands of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the "manicule" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present.This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Part I. Of Marks and Methods

Chapter 1. Introduction: Used Books

Chapter 2. Toward a History of the Manicule

Chapter 3. Reading the Matriarchive

Part II. Reading and Religion

Chapter 4. ''The Book thus put in every vulgar hand'': Marking the Bible

Chapter 5. An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer

Part III. Remarkable Readers

Chapter 6. John Dee's Columbian Encounter

Chapter 7. Sir Julius Caesar's Search Engine

Part IV. Renaissance Readers and Modern Collectors

Chapter 8. Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers' Marks

Afterword. The Future of Past Readers

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [232]-249) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9786613212061

9781283212069

1283212064

9780812203448

0812203445

OCLC:

759158172