Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric

Marotti, Arthur F.

doi:10.7591/9781501728501

Cited by 586 publications

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“…Moreover, with the publication of Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright's collection, Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry , we have the first readily available selection of women's writing that remained in manuscript, including the ornately bound 1589 presentation volume to Queen Elizabeth by Jane Seager, and the work of Hester Pulter, whose impressive and extensive presentation copy of poems, Poems Breathed forth By the Nobel Hadassas , was discovered in the 1990s (Millman and Wright 15–19, 108–27) . The heightened interest in manuscript writing and circulation (what Harold Love discusses as “scribal publication”), encouraged by the work of Margaret J. M. Ezell and Arthur Marotti, and the consequent attention to heretofore unknown writings, miscellanies, and commonplace books such as Ann Bowyer's, discussed above, will undoubtedly shed further light on women's literacies in the early modern period (see Ezell, Social Authorship ; Marotti; Love 54–58; Justice and Tinker; Burke and Gibson; Ostovich, Sauer, and Smith).…”

Section: Toward a Conclusion: Paths Of Further Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women's Literacies and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern England

Ferguson

Suzuki

2015

Literature Compass

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This article argues for a historically contextualized investigation of literacy that attends to early modern literacies in different and mixed media and to literacy as a complex set of practices and theories. Early modern literacy, for example, does not necessarily include both reading and writing: the criterion of measuring literacy by the signature is biased against women of various ranks as well as against poor men. Therefore, literacy rates of women should not be measured solely by means of their ability to sign their names but also by evidence provided by books dedicated to noblewomen or addressed to women of different ranks. A more expansive conception of authorship that includes anonymously, pseudonymously, and collectively written documents, as well as translations, can give a more accurate idea of the literacy of women of different social groups. Future research on literacy will be advanced by the discovery of hitherto unknown writings, and scholars will need to work on cultural documents of many kinds to gather evidence on the so-called "unlettered women," and thereby to focus our attention on the negatively charged side of the literacy/illiteracy dyad.for the negative part of the dyad "literate/illiterate"; the expression litteras (ne)scire, "not to know letters," may refer to lack of culture rather than to illiteracy in the narrow sense (Harris 5).Although Adam Fox argues that "by the end of the 14th century the modern usages [of literacy], denoting basic ability to read and write in the vernacular, were becoming widespread," and that "[i]n the 16th century they were normal" (46; our emphasis), he offers no evidence for this claim that literacy was considered to be the ability both to read and write by the 16th century. In fact, reading and writing skills were not taught together, either in schools or homes, and this fact has significant consequences for students of early modern literacy. 2 Children in England learned to read religious textsand recite catechismsseveral years before they learned to write, if they learned the latter (expensive) skill at all. 3 Many children, especially girls and lower-class boys, did not stay in school long enough to embark on writing instruction. Moreover, in some early modern primary schools, curricula were differentiated in ways that ref lected the views of pedagogical authorities such as Thomas Salter, who advised women to work with the "distaffe, and Spindle, Nedle and Thimble" rather than develop "the skill of well using a penne" (Trill 1). 4 Fox's view of literacy as "widespread" in England by the 16th century is countered by the research of many scholars and particularly by the statistics compiled by David Cressy and others who use the "signature method" of measuring literacy rates across the population. Cressy, who shares R. S. Schofield's view that the ability to sign one's name on a document constitutes an imperfect but nonetheless the best available measure of literacy (see Schofield 319), concludes from his research on signed documents, including business a...

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Section: Toward a Conclusion: Paths Of Further Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women's Literacies and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern England

Ferguson

Suzuki

2015

Literature Compass

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“…While Marotti, analyzing the passage from manuscript to printed poetry, has identified a "recoding of social verse as primarily literary texts in the print medium," Jones's preface announces a first recoding of a playtext as a primarily literary text in the print medium. 55 It is significant that the first distinct attempt to drive a wedge between stage and page as early as 1590 is that of a publisher. It suggests that the printers' and publishers' commercial strategies thus preceded, and quite possibly helped bring about, the playwrights' artistic self-consciousness as writers -later even "authors"of playtexts that could be printed and read.…”

Section: Part I Publicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

Erne

2013

113

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The legitimation of printed playbooks in Shakespeare's time When were printed playbooks first considered literature? When did playwrights first become authors? What are the cultural and material forces that shaped these processes? Scholarship has investigated these questions and proposed answers or, more often, taken certain answers for granted. In this chapter, I am going to suggest that these answers need to be refined or, in some cases, corrected. The standard critical argument in the past has been that the concept of dramatic authorship emerges in the early seventeenth century with the advent of a new kind of scholarly writer, the first "self-crowned laureate," to use Richard Helgerson's designation, who was also a dramatist. 1 He was neither a professional writer of the sort of Robert Greene, who scraped a living with his pen, nor a writer in the service of a nobleman, like Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton, nor a courtier or a gentleman writing to please his own private circle, like Sir Philip Sidney. Instead, he was a scholar interested in writing and bringing a new kind of self-confidence to the profession. In the more sweeping version of this argument, his advent in print is first signaled by the publication of Jonson's Workes in 1616. Commenting on the "conception of the nature and status of drama," one scholar has written that: One man can be said to have. .. changed literary history abruptly. This man, Ben Jonson, deserves his place in English cultural history not just for his brilliant hardedged comedies, but also for his insistence that a play is literature. The moment that changed the conception of the nature and status of drama came in 1616. In that year Jonson published a folio of about a thousand pages containing nine of his plays, eighteen of his masques and entertainments, and a substantial body of his epigrams, panegyrics, and verse letters; he called this miscellany of traditional literary forms and dramatic texts The Works of Benjamin Jonson.

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“…As far as the author is aware, this study is the first direct comparison of spelling in contemporary scientific manuscripts and print publications; for contrastive studies of manuscript and print, see e.g. Boffey (2012), Marotti (1995) and Sönmez (1993). The fact that the corpora represent the same genre is important, particularly from the perspective of both semi-automated normalisation methods and quantitative analysis, because Early Modern genres varied greatly in the amount of multilingual content, and genres like medicine contain sometimes considerable amounts of text in Latin and Greek (see Pahta, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Modern Medicine in Manuscript and Print

Tyrkkö

2020

ijes

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The standardisation process of English spelling largely came to its conclusion during the Early Modern period. While the progress of standardisation has been studied in both printed and manuscript texts, few studies have looked at these processes side by side, especially focusing on the same genre of writing and by using corpora that are sufficiently large for quantitative comparison. Using two Early Modern medical corpora, one based on manuscripts and the other on printed sources, this paper compares the trajectories of spelling standardisation in the two textual domains and shows that while spelling standardisation progressed in an almost linear fashion in printed texts, the manuscripts reveal a much more varied and shallow cline toward standardisation.

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Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric

Cited by 586 publications

References 0 publications

Women's Literacies and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern England

Women's Literacies and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern England

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

Early Modern Medicine in Manuscript and Print

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