[pt] Com a reprodutibilidade técnica, segundo Walter Benjamin, a obra de arte, ao aproximar-se do humano, sendo difundida em inúmeras cópias circulantes, perderia o caráter único que a distinguia na sua sacralidade pré-industrial, isto é, perderia a aura. A hipótese deste trabalho é a de que o livro impresso, apesar de ser um produto da indústria cultural, preservaria ainda hoje algo dessa aura de que nos fala Benjamin, como um traço remanescente de sua longa história. Nesse sentido, faz-se um recuo no tempo, partindo-se da preeminência da escrita na cultura ocidental como fato fundamental no processo de auratização do livro, com o objetivo de refletir sobre as possíveis razões da sobrevivência de seu prestígio como meio de comunicação e como produto cultural no início do século XXI, isto é, numa época caracterizada pela revolução comunicacional gerada pelo avanço dos meios eletrônicos e digitais. / [en] According to Walter Benjamin, with the mechanical reproduction, work of art has came near to the human being, loosing its aura - the sacred uniqueness of the objects that distinguish themselves in pre-industrial society. The hypotesis of this written essay is that the printed book, although being a industrial culture product, could preserve something of this aura, that Benjamin told us about, as a remaining vestige of the book´s long history. In this sense, we come back on time line, starting on the pre-eminence of the writing on the occidental culture as a fundamental fact to the process of book´s auratização, with the objective of reflect about the possible reasons of the survival of its prestige as a media and as a cultural product in the beginning of the 21st century, that is, in a period characterized by a communicational revolution generated on the advances of electronic and digital media.

Books printed before 1800 present major problems for OCR. One of the mainobstacles is the lack of diversity of historical fonts in training data. The OCR-D project, consisting of book historians and computer scientists, aims to address this deficiency by focussing on three major issues. Our first target wasto create a tool that identifies font groups automatically in images of histori-cal documents. We concentrated on Gothic font groups that were commonlyused in German texts printed in the 15thand 16th century: the well-known Fraktur and the lesser known Bastarda, Rotunda, Textura und Schwabacher. The tool was trained with 35,000 images and reaches an accuracy level of 98%. It can not only differentiate between the above-mentioned font groupsbut also Hebrew, Greek, Antiqua and Italic. It can also identify woodcut im-ages and irrelevant data (book covers, empty pages, etc.). In a second step,we created an online training infrastructure (okralact), which allows for theuse of various open source OCR engines such as Tesseract, OCRopus, Krakenand Calamari. At the same time, it facilitates training for specific models offont groups. The high accuracy of the recognition tool paves the way for theunprecedented opportunity to differentiate between the fonts used by individual printers. With more training data and further adjustments, the toolcould help to fill a major gap in historical research

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In mid-eighteenth century Paris, two Benedictine monks from the Congregation of Saint-Maur – also known as the Maurists – started compiling a universal dictionary of arts, crafts, and sciences. The project was initiated simultaneously with what would become one of the most famous literary enterprises in Western intellectual history: the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. The latter started as an augmented translation of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, but it was constructed with another French dictionary as its ideological counterpart: the Jesuits’ Dictionnaire de Trévoux. While the Encyclopédie eventually turned into a controversial but successful best-seller, considered as the most important medium of Enlightenment thought, the Benedictines never finished or published their work. After a decade, the manuscripts were put aside in the monastery library, and were soon forgotten. For about two hundred and sixty years, the Maurists’ dictionary material has largely escaped the attention of researchers, and its history of production has been unknown.      This dissertation examines the history and characteristics of the Maurists’ enterprise. The manuscripts are compared to the Encyclopédie and the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, and the project situated within its monastic environment of production, the history of the encyclopedic dictionary, and the Enlightenment culture. The study has an interdisciplinary character and combines perspectives of History of Science and Ideas, History of Monasticism, History of Encyclopedism, and History of the Book. The research procedure is distinguished by a microhistorical approach, where the studied materials are analyzed in a detailed manner, and the research process included in the narrative.       The dissertation shows that the Maurists early found themselves in a rival situation with the embryonic Encyclopédie, and that the two projects had several common denominators that distinguished them from the predecessors within the genre. At the same time, the Maurists were making a dictionary unique in the eighteenth century, which assumed a third position in relation to the works of the encyclopédistes and the Jesuits. The study provides new perspectives on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, the intellectual activities of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, as well as the editor in charge of the Maurist dictionary: Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety, otherwise known for his alchemical writings.

The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s and expanded and revised between 1559 and 1610, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset and Richard Niccols extended the Mirror’s scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the 1587 edition of the original text with Higgins’s ancient British and Roman complaint collections profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. However, while there has been a recent resurgence of critical interest in the editions of 1559 and its 1563 ‘Second Part’, the later additions are still largely neglected and disparaged, and the transmission of the original text beyond 1563 has never been fully explored. Without an understanding of this transmission and expansion, the importance of the Mirror to sixteenth-century intellectual culture is dramatically distorted. Higgins, Blenerhasset and Niccols’s contributions are invaluable witnesses to how verse history was conceptualised, written and read across the period, and to the way in which the Mirror tradition was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical scepticism. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes right across the Mirror’s history. This thesis provides a comprehensive reassessment of the Mirror’s expansion, transmission, and appropriation between 1559 and 1610, focusing in particular on Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s work. By comparing editions and tracing editorial revisions, the changing contexts and attitudes which shaped the early texts’ development are explored. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s contributions are analysed against this backdrop for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with the early editions. A broad reading of the themes and concerns of these recensions, rather than the limited approach which has characterised previous scholarship, takes account of their depth and variety, and provides a new understanding of the extent of the Mirror’s influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.

The art of reading and its application to knowledge acquisition and innovation by elites have been largely neglected by historians of print culture and reading in late imperial China (1368-1911). Unlike most studies, which are concerned more with the implied reader and individual reading experience, the present study assumes that the actual reader and the social, cultural and epistemic dimensions of reading practices are the central issues of a history of reading in China. That is, while the art of reading was internalized by the individual, his learning and application of it had social, cultural and epistemic features. At a time when secular reading practices in Renaissance England were informed by Erasmian principles, Ming literati, regardless of their different philosophical stances, were being trained in an art of reading proposed by Zhu Xi (1130-1200), whose Neo-Confucian philosophy had been esteemed as orthodox since the fourteenth century. Transformations and challenges in interpreting and applying his art did not hinder its general reception among elite readers. Its common employment determined the practitioner’s epistemic frame and manner of knowledge innovation. My dissertation consists of five chapters bracketed with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter One discusses Zhu’s theory of reading and the implied pattern of acquiring and innovating knowledge, based on a careful reading of his writings and conversations. Chapter Two describes the transmission of Zhu’s theory from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. During its transmission, Zhu’s art was reedited, rephrased, and even readapted by both government agencies and individual authors with different intentions and agendas. Chapter Three focuses on the reception of Zhu’s theory of reading by 1500 and argues that the moral end of reading eventually triumphed over the intellectual one in early Ming Confucian philosophy. Chapter Four explores the affinity of Ming philosophers of mind with Zhu’s theory in their reading concepts and practices from 1500 to the mid-seventeenth century. Despite their attempts to separate themselves intellectually from the Song tradition, Ming philosophers of mind followed Zhu’s rules for reading in their intellectual practices. Chapter Five outlines the reading habits and knowledge landscape based on a statistical survey of extant Ming imprints. Despite some deviations, the Ming reading habits and knowledge framework largely accorded with Zhu’s theory and its Ming adaptations. The continuity of reading habits from Zhu’s time to the seventeenth century, I conclude, inspires us to rethink the Ming apostasy from the Song tradition. The particularity of scholarly knowledge acquisition and innovation in Ming-Qing China by the eighteenth century was not invented by Ming-Qing scholars but anticipated by Zhu through his theory of reading. With respect to late imperial China, the history of reading, together with the history of knowledge, is yet to be fruitfully explored. With this dissertation, I hope to be able to make a contribution to the understanding of the East Asian orthodox habit of reading as represented by Zhu’s admirers. By placing my investigation in the context of the history of knowledge, I also hope to contribute to the understanding of the relationship of reading to the way that knowledge evolved in traditional China. Intellectual historians tended to consider the Ming Confucian tradition as having broken off from the Cheng-Zhu tradition, but at least in reading habits and practices Ming elite readers perpetuated Zhu’s theory of reading and the knowledge framework it implied.

My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.

Tomando como objeto de estudio “La Biblia de 42 líneas impresa por Johann Gutenberg” en el Bloque Uno se comprenderán los orígenes de la industria gráfica a partir de una visión histórica de la vida de Gutenberg, Fust y Schöffer. En el Bloque Dos, se desarrolla el panorama de cómo se llega a la resolución gráfico-operativa que hizo posible la realización de los tipos móviles y su utilización en la imprenta. En la primera parte, se describen los elementos que se tenían antes de empezar la impresión; en la segunda, se analizan los elementos propios de la Biblia de 42 líneas; y en la tercera, se explica de cómo se realizó el paso hacia los tipos móviles. En el Bloque Tres, la parte práctica se divide en dos. Describe por un lado la presentación del catálogo digital de los tipos de la Biblia llamado “ginyB42” y por el otro, el análisis de clusters para comprobar con exactitud la existencia de diversas matrices de fundición para una misma letra. / The object of study in the present monographic research is the 42-line Bible allegedly printed by Johannes Gutenberg, in Block One will understand the origins of the printing industry from a historical view of the life of Gutenberg, Fust and Schöffer. In Block Two, our objective is to demonstrate that the graphic-operative solution that made possible the transition from calligraphy to movable types In Block Three, first introduce the digital catalogue of the Bible type called "ginyB42" and then, the cluster analysis to interpret a reality by means of a verification system that has served to mark with accuracy the existence of several font matrices for a same letter.

The book world of sixteenth-century England was heavily focused on London. London's publishers wholly dominated the production of books, and with Oxford and Cambridge the booksellers of the capital also played the largest role in the supplying and distribution of books imported from Continental Europe. Nevertheless, by the end of the sixteenth century a considerable network of booksellers had been established in England's provincial towns. This dissertation uses scattered surviving evidence from book lists and inventories to investigate the development and character of provincial bookselling in the period between 1520 and 1640. It draws on information from most of England's larger cities, including York, Norwich and Exeter, as well as much smaller places, such as Kirkby Lonsdale and Ormskirk. It demonstrates that, despite the competition from the metropolis, local booksellers played an important role in supplying customers with a considerable range and variety of books, and that these bookshops became larger and more ambitious in their services to customers through this period. The result should be a significant contribution to understanding the book world of early modern England. The dissertation is accompanied by an appendix, listing and identifying the books documented in nine separate lists, each of which, where possible, has been matched to surviving editions.

This thesis examines provincial literary culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, through the printed and manuscript records of reading associations, the diaries of their members, and a range of other print materials. These book clubs and subscription libraries have often been considered to be polite and sociable institutions, part of the cultural repertoire of a new urban, consumer society. However, this thesis reconsiders reading associations' values and effects through a study of the reading materials they provided, and the reading habits they encouraged; the intellectual and social values which they embodied; and their role in the performance of gender, local and national identities. It questions what politeness meant to associational members, arguing for the importance of morality and order in associational conceptions of propriety, and downplaying their pursuit of structured sociability. This thesis examines how provincial individuals conceived of their relationship to the reading public, arguing that associations provided a tangible link to this abstract national community, whilst also having implications for the 'public' life of localities and families. The thesis also considers how these institutions interacted with enlightenment thought, suggesting that both the associations' reading matter and their philosophies of corporate improvement enabled 'ordinary' men and women to participate in the Enlightenment. It assesses English and Scottish associations, which are usually subjected to separate treatment, arguing that they constituted a shared mechanism of British literary culture in this period. More than simply a 'polite' performance, reading, through associations, was fundamentally linked to status, to citizenship, and to cultural participation.