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.

This dissertation focuses on fragments of Notre Dame manuscripts that made their way to German speaking Europe during the medieval period. The first chapter focuses on their contexts of reuse. Dominican, Cistercian as well as Franciscan bookbinders played a role in these processes of medieval and early modern recycling. The potential for fragments to elucidate bookbinders’ techniques will be explored, and existing hypotheses as to the circulation of Notre Dame manuscripts will be critically reviewed. Furthermore, an emphasis is placed on the importance of the reconstruction of medieval book collections. The second chapter is dedicated to the discovery of a set of conductus fragments reused by a bookbinder of the Dominican convent of Soest. Taking one known fragment as a point of departure, I was able to assign five further leaves(now in Münster, Cambridge and New Haven) to this set of fragments. The third chapter sheds new light on the history of two host volumes, in which, during the twentieth century, organum fragments were discovered. It addresses questions of the changing ownership of manuscripts, focusing on the role of post Reformation and nineteenth century book collectors. The final chapter, a case study of the conductus Porta salutis ave, discusses editorial problems in conjunction with a close analysis of the piece’s main stylistic features. As the text was originally designed as a seal inscription, questions of material culture and music are also addressed. Furthermore, my systematic search for text sources for the distich Porta salutis ave revealed more than twenty previously unconsidered manuscripts transmitting the poetic text only, whose fuller, contents point to complementary contexts and functions to those suggested in the musical sources and the seals.

This thesis offers an examination and analysis of the manuscript compilation of three poems: Judgement Day I, Resignation A and Resignation B (ff.115v-19v) found in Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501. It argues that paratextual information including textual division, subordination and manuscript layout are indicative of compiler intention and are significant in the interpretation and subsequent editing practice of Old English texts. An examination of other Old English manuscripts reveals that compilation of this sort was not uncommon; this compilation is indicative of the intended function of the poems as conceived by the manuscript compiler. Evidence from Old English homilies provides a context for the compilation of JDayI with ResA and ResB, where the poems can be seen to share themes common to sets of Rogationtide homilies. An analysis of the use of textual division markers found throughout the Exeter Book manuscript is also provided. This thesis is divided into five main sections: methodology; thematic evidence; contextual evidence; manuscript evidence; and a transcription of JDayI, ResA and ResB. Section I presents the methodology which informs this study, examining the significance of manuscript context in the interpretation and editorial practice of Old English poetry; it also provides an editorial rationale for the semi-diplomatic transcription of Section V. Section II: Thematic Evidence provides an individual review of each poem’s critical history, genre classification and literary analysis, and re-evaluates the poems anew. Section III: Contextual Evidence brings together the thematic evidence of Section II to argue the poems were compiled together in the Exeter Book because they reflected themes common to Rogationtide homilies. Using evidence of similar manuscript compilation in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 201 (CCCC 201) and in the Vercelli Homilies (specifically VercHomXIX-XXI) it is argued the three Exeter Book poems were placed together for use during Rogationtide, and thereby designed to promote compunction, confession and penance among the audience. Section IV: Manuscript Evidence examines the layout and textual division of these three texts and results displaying the textual division and subordination practice found throughout the Exeter Book manuscript are provided. Finally, Section V: Transcription presents a diplomatic transcription of the texts with facing facsimile image to reflect their manuscript context. The original contributions of this thesis are therefore twofold: i. It presents original data and analysis of textual division practice used in the Exeter Book manuscript ii. It provides thematic, contextual and manuscript evidence of manuscript compilation of JDayI, ResA and ResB and provides an explanation of the purpose such compilation sought to offer.

This thesis addresses a range of research questions regarding literacy in early modern Scotland. Using the early modern manuscripts and printed editions of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s late sixteenth-century 'Cronicles of Scotland' as a case study on literacy history, this thesis poses the complementary questions of how and why early modern Scottish reading communities were encountering Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', and how features of the material page can be interpreted as indicators of contemporary literacy practices. The answers to these questions then provide the basis for the thesis to ask broader socio-cultural and theoretical questions regarding the overall literacy environment in Scotland between 1575 and 1814, and how theorists conceptualise the history of literacy. Positioned within the theoretical groundings of historical pragmatics and ‘new philology’ – and the related approach of pragmaphilology – this thesis returns to the earlier philological practice of close textual analysis, and engages with the theoretical concept of mouvance, in order to analyse how the changing ‘form’ of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', as it was reproduced in manuscript and print throughout the early modern period, indicates its changing ‘function’. More specifically, it suggests that the punctuation practices and paratextual features of individual witnesses of the text function to aid the highly-nuanced reading practices and purposes of the discrete reading communities for which they were produced. This thesis includes extensive descriptive material which presents previously unrecorded data regarding twenty manuscripts and printed witnesses of Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles', contributing to a gap in Scotland’s literary/historiographical canon. It then analyses this material using a transferable methodological framework which combines the quantitative analysis of micro-data with qualitative analysis of this data within its socio-cultural context, in order to conduct diachronic comparative analysis of copy-specific information. The principal findings of this thesis suggest that Pitscottie’s 'Cronicles' were being read for a combination of devotional and didactic purposes, and that multiple reading communities, employing highly nuanced reading practices, were encountering the text near-contemporaneously. This thesis further suggests that early modern literacy practices, and the specific reading communities which employ them, should be described as existing within a spectrum of available practices (i.e. more or less oral/aural or silent, and intensive or extensive in practice) rather than as dichotomous entities. As such, this thesis argues for the rejection of evolutionary theories of the history of literacy, suggesting that rather than being described antithetically, historical reading practices and purposes must be recognised as complex, coexisting socio-cultural practices, and the multiplicity of reading communities within a single society must be acknowledged and analysed as such, as opposed to being interpreted as universal entities.

The present dissertation investigates the process of transmission of hieroglyphs from Egypt to Early-Modern Europe. This phenomenon has been studied by Egyptologists and Art Historians, mostly from a historical and descriptive standpoint, but here an original theoretical perspective was adopted: Grammatology or the study of writing. In order to understand this process of stimuli diffusion, and its outcome, it was deemed necessary to delve into both the Egyptian writing-system and the hieroglyphic phenomenon in the Renaissance, which led the dissertation to be divided into two parts. The First Part is devoted to The Ancient Hieroglyph: Chapter One addresses the mechanics of Egyptian hieroglyphs, their grammatological functions and the outline of a theory for the text-image dynamics in this context; Chapter Two examines the terminology of “hieroglyph” in Egypt, and its conceptual difference from the Greek and Contemporary views on the matter; Chapter Three describes the historical development of the Egyptian writing and a hypothesis for the emergence of a “hieroglyphic hermeneutics”; Chapter Four is dedicated to Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica, which is regarded as the main vector of diffusion between Ancient and Modern hieroglyphic traditions. The Second Part focuses on The Early-Modern Hieroglyph: Chapter Five outlines the early process of diffusion and the first ideas of hieroglyph in the Renaissance; Chapter Six discusses the creation of new hieroglyphic codes; Chapter Seven tackles the role of hieroglyphs in the birth of the emblematic tradition and its continuous relationship on different culture levels; Chapter Eight look into the Spanish jeroglificos, regarding it as a hybrid genre of hieroglyphs and emblems; Chapter Nine explores the impact of Renaissance hieroglyphs on the cultural perception of writing; and finally, in Chapter Ten, the process of convergence between hieroglyphs, alchemical iconography and emblems is analysed in the light of the previous chapters. It was found that there is an objective relationship between Ancient and Modern hieroglyphs, not easily perceptible and often downplayed as a result of a certain logocentrism, but of great importance – especially in terms of its impact on the establishment of a European text-image tradition. Another conclusion is that, if Renaissance scholars, artists and poets thought it possible to write through images, and in fact created speaking pictures, visual compositions can be considered as a form of writing - being therefore a potential subject of Grammatology. This finding does not exclude other instruments of analysis, but creates a number of theoretical solutions in the field of text-image studies that have been employed in the present study.

In the field of manuscript studies, the identification of individual scribes and the reconstruction of their lives and work through examination of manuscript material has recently undergone revival. This thesis contributes to that field by presenting two biobibliographical case-studies of two fifteenth-century scribes and Carthusian monks, William Mede and Stephen Dodesham of Sheen. It sets out to demonstrate the value of an integrated biographical and comparative approach in the examination of the making and circumstances of making of manuscript books. This is demonstrated by building scribal biographies based on the integration of evidence from documentary record and the analysis of the material manuscript output of Mede and Dodesham. Dodesham, as the more prolific of the two, has been more fully investigated in recent scholarship. New documentary evidence, however, has necessitated a fresh appraisal of his life and the contexts of his copying, contexts which I argue are strongly educational. I show that Mede’s life and work as a Carthusian reader, copyist, and perhaps writer, is therefore worth further scholarly investigation. Chapter one considers the current state of the field of historical biography and, more specifically, scribal biography. It assesses the usefulness of integrating biographical and codicological approaches in the study of manuscripts and provides a definition of codicology in its broader sense (as a means of writing biobibliographical histories). As not all aspects of codicology are considered here, I also identify those aspects of codicological enquiry I have chosen to apply to the manuscripts of Mede and Dodesham. The case is made for the usefulness of codicological methods as a means of interpreting historical material. As the main focal points of this study are the lives and work of two Carthusian scribes, chapter two provides context on the Carthusian life, incorporating an evaluation of recent work on Carthusian textual culture, a brief summary of the Order’s history, its administrative structure, Carthusian spirituality, its participation in the intellectual culture of the late medieval period, how it responded to changing patterns in devotion, and its members’ attitudes and approaches to the acts of reading, writing and copying. This background is essential in contextualising the scribal activity of Mede and Dodesham and will be referred to in the following chapters. Chapters three and four are dedicated to the case studies examining the lives and work of William Mede and Stephen Dodesham of Sheen. Chapter three, containing the case study of William Mede, includes analysis of his Anglicana and other idiosyncratic features of his hand; full descriptions of each of the six manuscripts so far attributed to him; and study of his language and punctuation practices, which vary, I argue, depending upon for what sorts of audience Mede is writing or copying. A detailed study of the Speculum devotorum demonstrates this adaptive scribal behaviour in action and also investigates the possibility that Mede may have been the author of the text. The above are all discussed in relation to the making and circumstances of making of Mede’s manuscripts. The conclusion to the chapter offers a summary of Mede’s life and work and makes the case for the importance of further investigation of this Carthusian scribe. Chapter four, the case study of Stephen Dodesham, includes a reappraisal in light of new evidence of his early scribal career, including his ordination at Sheen charterhouse, potential connections with the prominent Dodesham family of Somerset and connections with middle-class, professional families in London and around the south-western counties of England. This new evidence has made it possible to more firmly place the contexts of Dodesham’s manuscript copying. Much of chapter four is dedicated to analysing his language, and providing brief descriptions of those manuscripts so far attributed to him; the above all discussed in relation to the making and circumstances of making of Dodesham’s manuscripts. The conclusion offers a summary of Dodesham’s life and work and makes the case for the importance of further investigation as of particular interest in the areas of developing literacy and education. In chapter five, I bring both case studies together, assess the usefulness of the biographical approach in the context of this particular study, and evaluate its successes and limitations as a framework for combined biographical and codicological investigation.

Thomas Middleton’s work as a playwright and pamphleteer was highly collaborative: from 1601 to 1627 he wrote with at least ten of his contemporaries including Dekker, Jonson and Shakespeare. However, Middleton’s texts are even more collaborative than these writing partnerships would suggest. This thesis defines collaboration as the act of sharing in the process of making meaning, and so proposes that Middleton’s collaborators included not only his many co-writers but also performers, printers and editors. Middleton’s partnership with Thomas Dekker, the three plays and two pamphlets they co-wrote together, are the starting point from which I explore early modern collaboration. Since these texts have survived only in print form, the best information available about the creative processes that generated them is archival sources and the evidence provided by attribution studies. Yet there are two potential problems with the use of attribution evidence. First, because attribution involves assigning parts of texts to writers, it can imply that co-written texts were always singly authored in separate sections then pieced together. Secondly, attribution’s concern with tracking the presence of authors can suggest that non-authorial contributions to a text are not worthwhile. This thesis challenges both of these assumptions. To resolve the tension between valuable evidence provided by attribution studies and their misrepresentation (as I see it) of collaboration, this thesis takes as its starting point those poststructuralist theories which call for a decentred conception of the author. Co-writing can then be understood as an essential aspect of how meaning in a text is made but not the only significant aspect. My thesis reframes attribution evidence in light of this idea and uses it to gain insight into how and why Middleton and Dekker wrote together, rather than to discover ‘who wrote what’. I argue that Middleton began writing with the more experienced Dekker to hone his craft and that their process changed as Middleton became more practised. Taking this approach to attribution scholarship means that I can investigate co-writing without devaluing non-authorial collaboration: Middleton and Dekker’s co-writing is presented alongside the collaborative acts of those who performed, printed and edited their texts. By applying the idea of a decentred author to attribution evidence, this thesis offers an original way to approach early modern collaboration: one which analyses co-writing whilst recognising it as part of a larger network of collaborative acts.

This work is a textual study of the Gospel of John as it is preserved in the catena compiled by Nicetas of Heraclea. In part 1, a stemma is drawn up based on an examination of full transcriptions of all known witnesses: Gregory-Aland 249 317 333 423 430 743 869. Though some scholars have stated that G-A 841 886 1178 2188 contain the catena as well, closer examination shows they contain other works. The manuscripts of Nicetas are related as follows: 1) 249 333 423 are descendants of a common ancestor, β; 2) 333 was the exemplar for 423; 3) 317 869 are descended from a common ancestor, γ; 4) 430 is an independent witness with an idiosyncratic text; 5) 743 has a high degree of majority text contamination and an unclear relationship with the other witnesses. The second part of the study consists of a reconstruction of Nicetas’s text of John with a full apparatus.

This thesis investigates the donation of books made by Alexander Thistlethwayte (?1718–1771), a Hampshire grandee and bibliophile, to the Fellows’ Library of Winchester College, the oldest of the English public schools. The first two chapters demonstrate the largely untapped potential of two unique books in the Thistlethwayte benefaction to advance scholarly understanding of topics relating to the copying and transmission of early modern literary texts. The second part of the thesis examines the collecting habits which shaped the physical configuration of Thistlethwayte’s books and the contents of his library. Chapter Three rediscovers the role of the anthology in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultures of compilation, through a comparison of Sammelbände assembled by Thistlethwayte with those that he acquired from an Oxford graduate of the 1690s. Chapter Four traces the growth of Thistlethwayte’s library in the context of his life as a gentleman, taking in evidence from Thistlethwayte’s later donation of books to his alma mater, Wadham College, Oxford. The thesis concludes by reflecting on the conditions of access to the Fellows’ Library from which this doctoral project has benefited, and considers ways of extending the benefits of access and community engagement to scholars and the wider public.

This dissertation argues that a major factor in Pentecostalism's rapid world-wide growth was the emergence of a strong literary, as distinct from oral, tradition. From its earliest days the movement gave birth to a plethora of publications and publishing houses, mostly operating by faith, that proved highly successful in disseminating the distinctive tenets of the movement across the globe. The first part of this work outlines the social, historical and religious background to the movement in the USA and Britain, and highlights the distinctive doctrines and practices of Pentecostalism. The second section examines the emergence of Pentecostal publishing movements and their products in the USA, especially the role played by the prototypical magazine of W. J. Seymour, The Apostolic Faith. The third and major part of this dissertation is a detailed case study of the earliest, and most influential, Pentecostal magazine published in Britain, Confidence. The crucial role that this journal and its editor, A. A. Boddy, played in formulating and propagating the beliefs and practices of the nascent movement is critically examined, together with an assessment of its contribution to wider issues of religious life and thought in Britain. Areas of subsequent influence in the development of historic Pentecostalism and its contemporary offshoots are also discussed