The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4

Front Cover
Richard Gameson, Nigel J. Morgan, D. F. McKenzie, Lotte Hellinga, John Barnard, Rodney M. Thomson, Joseph Burney Trapp, Maureen Bell, David McKitterick
Cambridge University Press, 1998 - 920 pages
"The history of the book offers a distinctive form of access to the ways in which human beings have sought to give meaning to their own and others' lives. Our knowledge of the past derives mainly from texts. Landscape, architecture, sculpture, painting and the decorative arts have their stories to tell and may themselves be construed as texts; but oral tradition, manuscripts, printed books, and those other forms of inscription and incision such as maps, music and graphic images have a power to report even more directly on human experience and the events and thoughts which shaped it. The seven volumes of the History of the Book in Britain will help explain how these texts were created, why they took the forms they did, their relations with other media, and what influence they had on the minds and actions of those who heard, read or viewed them. Its range, too - in time, place and the great diversity of the conditions of text production, including reception - challenges any attempt to define its limits and give an account adequate to its complexity. It addresses, whether by period, country, genre or technology, widely disparate fields of enquiry, each of which demands and attracts its own forms of scholarship. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain seeks to represent much of that variety. The volumes investigate the creation, material production, dissemination and reception of texts, effectively plotting the intellectual history of Britain."-- Publisher description.
 

Contents

Religious publishing in England 15571640
29
Oral and scribal texts in early modern England
97
Music books
127
University printing at Oxford and Cambridge
189
classical and historical scholarship
206
The literature of travel
246
Science and the book
274
private and public libraries
323
The economic context
568
French paper in English books
583
Bookbinding
620
Miseenpage illustration expressive form
632
The typography of Hobbess Leviathan
645
Popish Plot narratives 16781680
652
PRODUCTION
663
Scotland
687

Literature the playhouse and the public
351
Nonconformist voices and books
410
Women writing and women written
431
The Bible trade
455
household husbandry behaviour
514
The creation of the periodical press 16201695
533
constraints on
553
the Continent
735
the American colonies
744
THE LATE
753
STATISTICAL APPENDICES
779
Abbreviations
803
Index
857
Copyright

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About the author (1998)

D. F. McKenzie was amongst the most influential bibliographers of his generation. John Barnard was, until 2001, Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds. Maureen Bell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham.

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