The English language was in a state of transition during the Early Modern period, which is defined here as extending from 1500 to 1700. In particular, it is suspected that changes were taking place on the borderline between speech and writing. However, these changes have rarely been researched in a systematic way. This study investigates these changes with reference to the writing contained within a corpus of original manuscript letters from Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (known as Bess of Hardwick), c.1527 to 1608. Manuscript letters are an excellent data source to use in order to investigate the changes taking place on the borderline between speech and writing during the Early Modern period because the writing contained within them has a different, possibly closer, relationship to speech than the writing contained within other kinds of text dating from the period. However, the use of manuscript letters as data sources is not straightforward because the notion of authorship is complex. In particular, letters can be holograph or scribal. In order to address this authorship issue, this study marries techniques from the fields of palaeography and historical pragmatics. Following an introduction, it is divided into two analytical parts. Part 1 outlines how a specially-designed scribal profiling technique was used to identify Bess’s holograph handwriting, and the handwriting of five of her scribes in a corpus of her manuscript letters. Part 2 outlines how four lexical features, namely AND, SO, FOR and BUT, were identified as salient discourse-organizational devices within the prose of Bess’s holograph letters, before presenting four case studies that compare the discourse function of these four lexical features in the six hands identified in Part 1. Having identified how these features pattern in the letters, Part 2 compares the results of the case studies with previous studies, and draws conclusions about linguistic change in the period. The study’s original contribution to knowledge is therefore threefold. Firstly, it showcases a reliable, replicable scribal-profiling methodology that can be assessed and critiqued on its own terms. Secondly, it shows how it is possible to successfully combine a sensitivity to the complex nature of Early Modern English manuscript letters with effective qualitative analyses of the language contained within them. Thirdly, with the findings produced by the four case studies, the thesis offers significant and important contributions to the fields of historical linguistics, manuscript studies and literary scholarship. The study also has implications for the editing of Early Modern English letters, the study of women’s history and letter- writing, and for biographical studies of Bess of Hardwick more specifically.

This thesis suggests a new approach to studying the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) containing Exodus. After surveying the history of research, Longacre suggests applying a contextualized approach to the study of these scrolls, which seeks to understand them first as individual material artefacts and then in comparison to other manuscripts which are most closely contextually connected to them. Each manuscript is only subsequently compared with increasingly contextually distant manuscripts according to a hierarchy of contextual proximity. A network of close contextual connections between the Hebrew DSS containing Exodus warrant the isolation of this corpus as a test case for application of a contextualized approach. Based on new transcriptions and reconstructions of each of the included manuscripts (1Q2 2Q2 2Q3 2Q4 4Q1 4Q11 4Q13 4Q14 4Q17 4Q18 4Q19 4Q20 4Q21 4Q22 4Q158 4Q364 4Q365 4Q366 Mur1), Longacre then analyzes patterns that emerge from a comparison of the characteristics of each of these manuscripts. Finally, from a close examination of textual overlaps from a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative perspectives, Longacre suggests several specific groups and clusters of texts and synthesizes them to provide clearer insight into the documented Hebrew-language textual history of the book of Exodus.

The bibliography of Greene's cony-catching pamphlets which precedes my discussion of them supplies a deficiency in our knowledge and enables us to distinguish between editions which in the past have been confused. In my opinion, however, its greatest value is that it supports Greene's claim for the immediate popular success of his 'Notable Discovery of Coosenage', and disproves the common assumption that Greene was deliberately misrepresenting the facts in his "Address" to The Second and last part of Conny-catching. This, in turn, affects our view of his character. Collation of the extant copies of the cony-catching pamphlets has revealed the existence of a hitherto unknown edition of 'The Thirde and last Part of Conny-catching'. It has also revealed that there is only one edition extant of 'The Defence of Conny catching'; a defective copy in the British Museum, made up with the Epistle from a copy of the 1592 edition of 'A Notable Discovery of Coosenage', has in the past been mistakenly described as another edition. Since 1915 there has been no exhaustive study of Greene in English. It is time that his character and work were reassessed in the light of our fuller knowledge of his age, and this I have attempted in the chapters that follow my bibliography.

By analysing the codicology and other features of a group of fifteenth-century medical manuscripts, my thesis aims to shed some light into the unexplored role of the compilers of medical material. These individuals assembled a number of booklets mostly produced in Middle English, and put them together with the intention to create volumes entirely dedicated to medicine. The thesis proposes a typology that will show the existence of a type of medical codices, whose substantial codicological alteration evince the involvement of the medical practitioners and earliest owners of the volumes in their making. I will argue that the manuscripts were gathered, arranged, and sometimes copied by these practitioners, who, in an attempt to create their own medical handbooks, customised their books in a manner they considered to be pertinent and useful for their practice. A comprehensive analysis of York Minster Library, MS XVI E, one of these practitioner-compiled composites (as I have labelled them) will offer new insights into a codex which has never been examined in detail. The study will eventually demonstrate that medical practitioners played a significant role in the production of fifteenth-century English medical books, especially in the compilation and arrangement of the codices’ booklets.

This thesis focuses on epistolary theory in early modern England. There are a few studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean letter-writing manuals to date, though scholars typically use chronological analyses of instructional texts printed between 1568-1640. However, the methodology of this dissertation departs considerably from earlier studies. Rather than study many texts chronologically, I focus on one: Angel Day’s The English Secretary. Day’s manual, printed nine times in fifty years, was the most popular of its time. I use these editions– many of them heavily revised – to trace developments of epistolary theory. This approach necessitates a two-part methodology: bibliographical analysis and textual criticism. Before examining The English Secretary as a letter-writing text, I take up the manual, and its nine editions, using principles of bibliography to locate the revisions that Day made to his manual. Once I locate his revisions, I use textual analysis to determine their signification. In so doing, I reappraise the critical consensus about Day’s manual. It reveals that Day, typically cast as a proto-epistolary novelist or pre-Richardson Richardson, did not write as a literary author. Rather, he wrote in turns as a government servant and professional – the approved roles of a writer in Elizabethan literary culture. This newly informs the purpose of Day’s manual, as well as epistolary theory: letter-writing instruction at this time did not preview the emergence of the epistolary novel but maintained a civic, professional, and social function in early modern England.

This thesis presents a study of the production and reception of English writing on witchcraft from the period 1560-1660 using the methodologies of the history of the book and the history of reading. The body of works under consideration includes scholarly treatises, news pamphlets, drama and ballads. The origins, literary contexts, production, dissemination and reception of these works are considered across the period. Analysis of reception involves consideration of contemporary library holdings, citations in print, binding and contemporary annotations; this section is based on study of the holdings of a number of research libraries in England and North America. The study supports the conclusions of recent research into scholarly writing on witchcraft, which has suggested that such writing was more thoroughly embedded in its intellectual context than has previously been appreciated; this study provides more evidence for this view and expands it to include the other genres of witchcraft writing under consideration. The study concludes that the concept ‘witchcraft writing' is not a useful one for our understanding of this material. Conclusions are also offered about the relative impact of individual works, and about the impact of this body of writing as a whole. While general works stand out (the treatises of Reginald Scot, William Perkins and James I, as well as many Continental treatises), the overall impression is that writing on witchcraft was not successful commercially. This supports the conclusion that witchcraft writing was not as representative of early modern belief more generally as has been previously thought.

This thesis focuses on some of the most significant and least understood aspects of the life of London publisher Henry Colburn (c.1784-1855). Its purposes are to correct the misinformation currently in circulation, to introduce new information, and to reassess Colburn‘s reputation and accomplishments in light of this evidence. The thesis first examines the errors and limitations of previous appraisals of Colburn and how various primary sources can be used to correct and augment them. It next considers Colburn‘s early years before surveying his periodical publications and his controversial publicity methods. The thesis briefly recounts Colburn‘s involvement with the ‘silver-fork’ school of fiction and then examines in greater depth his relationships with writer Benjamin Disraeli and one-time business partner Richard Bentley. Colburn‘s two marriages are also studied as the focus of the thesis moves onto the latter half of his career, his retirement, and his death. The final chapter tenders some general conclusions based on the foregoing matter and suggests further avenues of study concerning Colburn, his role in the history of publishing, and his place in the traditional paradigms of Romantic and Victorian literary culture.

Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book is about the book in Shakespeare's plays; the book as an object, wherein the article may disclose narratives, corroborate stories, expose versions of reality and perspectives of presence; and the semiotic of the book, wherein the language of the book, of holding, touching, turning leaves, opening pages, reading, revealing and closing may simulate an idea of the body or mind in motion. This thesis is about how the metaphorical and material book appears on Shakespeare's stage, and how the physical and figurative presence of the book challenges the imaginative and representational conditions of theatre. Having chosen seven plays for their particularly significant relationship to the book, I explore each play and its books for the demands they make of each other and what such demands reveal. The Introduction outlines the argument of the project and, drawing on a broad range of Shakespeare's plays, sets out the prevalence of the 'book' and an awareness of the potential discourses through which the object is beginning to move in the Elizabethan period. The thesis is then split into five chapters, the first two dealing with two plays each, Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, and The Taming of The Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost. The following three chapters deal with individual plays, Richard II, Hamlet, and The Tempest. Although the thesis follows, with the exception of Cymbeline, a chronology of the drama, I make no attempt to suggest that Shakespeare forged a linear narrative in his evolving relationship with the book. Rather, my conclusion demonstrates how the book's extraordinary semantics cope resists a continuum or progressive evolution. The ever-changing capacity of the book, its materiality and language, supports the stage in a quest to define and expand the representational relationship between seeing and thinking, moving and being. Shakespeare's books are, I will argue, like Hamlet's players, 'the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time', and, to that end, 'let them be well used).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2008. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Aug. 27, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-96).

Dreaming In Whispering Groves is an investigation into the production, transmission and reception of the book-as-object with specific reference to nine eighteenth century novels over four centuries: Robinson Crusoe; The Adventures Of The Count de Vinevil; Pamela; David Simple; Amelia; Betsy Thoughtless; Evelina; The Monk and The Italian. I examine the relationship between the reader, the book-as-text and the book-as-object, approaching my topic from the standpoint of a Reader Response and Rezeption-aesthetic critic. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, I draw upon Art, History, Literature, Philosophy, Social Science, Technology and Textual Scholarship, in order to create a context for, and trace the development of the social and physical derivation, distribution, adoption and cultivation of the physical object book. My centra-stance to reader-orientated theories is provided by Memetics. A relative newcomer to the critical scene which has evolved as a result of, and parallel to, the study of genetics. The purpose of this juxtaposition is that both Reader-orientated theories and Memetics are dependent upon the reading or interpretation of data - the words on the page or the material to be replicated (in the case of the meme). However, my perception is that both offer an explanation of the way in which 'culture' has evolved and will continue to evolve but perhaps most importantly for the purpose of this thesis they provide answers to questions with regard to the book-as-object. Original empirical research in the form of a web-based questionnaire and a traditional paper-based one, and class-based role-play forms the foundation of an investigation into readers' responses to the book as a physical object. The responses have provided substantial evidence to corroborate my original hypothesis (now thesis). The mode of presentation for this thesis (including the use of fonts based on samples of 18th and early 19th century type and printers ornaments that suggest the quirks of wood-cut and early metal type) is intended as an integral part of the way in which the argument is developed. The readers/examiner's response to this 'book/thesis-as-object' is being sought, and the reader is therefore asked to engage with the contents bearing this in mind.