From 1570 until the early seventeenth century the dominant view of language in England is embodied in the image which represents a language as an organism, an organism following an inevitable cycle of growth, perfection, and decay. This organism theory of language, since the Elizabethans believe that English is in the first stage of the cycle, leads to a willing acceptance of neologisms,a, readiness to experiment with language, and a concentration on literary production (literature being the "flower" of the language plant) at the expense of grammar and dictionaries. During the seventeenth century the organism theory of language is weakened by the new science, antiquarianism, and the belief that English is now in, or close to, the period of perfection. It does, however, remain strong enough to lead to a desire to fix the language and to a hostility to neologisms. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well. Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.

Histories of medieval astronomy have brought to light a rich textual tradition, of treatises and tables composed and computed, transmitted and translated across Europe and beyond. These have been supplemented by fruitful inquiry into the material culture of astronomy, especially the instruments that served as models of the heavens, for teaching and for practical purposes. But even now we know little about the practices of medieval astronomers: how they obtained and passed on their knowledge; how they drew up and used mathematical tables; how they drafted the treatises in which they found words to express their ideas and inventions for their particular audiences. This thesis uses a case study approach to elucidate these medieval astronomical practices. Long thought to be a holograph manuscript in the hand of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Equatorie of the Planetis (Peterhouse, Cambridge MS 75.I) has recently been identified as the work of John Westwyk (d. c. 1400), a Benedictine monk of Tynemouth Priory and St Albans Abbey. His draft description of the construction and use of an astronomical instrument, with accompanying tables, provides an opportunity to reconstruct the practices of an unexceptional astronomer. The first chapter of this thesis reconstructs Westwyk’s astronomical reading and understanding, through an examination of the other manuscript that survives in his hand: a pair of instrument treatises by the outstanding monastic astronomer Richard of Wallingford. I show how Westwyk copied this manuscript in a monastic context, learning as he annotated texts and recomputed tables. In the second chapter I discuss the purposes of planetary instruments such as equatoria, their place among other astronomical instruments, and the physical constraints and possibilities experienced by their makers. Through this discussion I assess the craft environment in which Westwyk came to write his own instrument-making instructions. Chapters three and four assess Westwyk’s language, explaining the basis for his choice to write a technical work in the vernacular, and analysing how his innovative use of Middle English furthered his didactic objectives. In the final chapter, I undertake a technical reassessment of the Equatorie treatise, an integrated analysis of the instrument with the somewhat neglected tables that Westwyk compiled alongside it. The thesis thus applies a range of methodologies to examine the practices and products of a single inexpert astronomer from all angles. It aims to show what an in-depth case study approach can offer historians of the medieval sciences.