Philobiblon: Another question for my early modernist readers

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Another question for my early modernist readers

Any recommendations for sources on the (to use anachronistic terms) production, marketing, administrative, management practices of printers in London at the end of the 16th century? (No, I'm not asking much ...)

I'm trying, perhaps hopelessly, to create a chronology for four pamphlets published in 1594 - none of which unfortunately were entered in the register of the Company of Stationers ... (in case you were wondering.)

As a reward, I offer in return a link to an article from Harvard Magazine arguing for the study of neo-Latin writers of the (broadly) early modern period. Which makes me think of Women Latin Poets - a book I'm promoting every way I can, since I think anyone interested in early modern women writers (or medieval, or later) should read.

4 Comments:

Blogger Natalie Bennett said...

Clanger, I'll comment on your first comment first: I entirely agree with you about the abdication of academic responsibility in the retreat into jargon (and that often it is pure playing with gobbeldygook). I did an honours year exam in politics some years ago and got stuck answering a question I really hadn't wanted to answer on postmodernism. I always thought that you could just throw jargon around in a very ungrad way and get away with it, and I proved it with the result of the exam. And the most intelligent of my lecturers later commented on how well I'd handled the question with a distinct glint in his eye. I glinted back and we both knew exactly what we meant.

There is some terribly important stuff in Derrida and Foucault, and stuff that was a necessary corrective to American-style "scientific" positivisim, but it has become every bit as much of a meta-straight-jacket as the worldviews it was trying to overturn.

Thanks for the intellectual book refs - happily the London Library will either have them or be able to get them - it is a wonderful place ... and living a 10-minute walk from the BL has its advantages!

As for the MA - it is an idea (actually I keep playing with the idea of a PhD), but I've already done 10 years of uni (full-time equivalent) and perhaps that is enough. I feel like in part I'm doing a DIY PhD at the moment - when I looked back to the start of research on this book, I have learnt a lot since, although there's still plenty to learn. I go to as many seminars at the IHR and elsewhere as I can, go to conferences, and of course I have a couple of online advisers: thanks!

I am actually making quite good progress on the four Helen Branch elegies. I have a thesis about the order in which they were published - that was what prompted the reference request and thanks! I wasn't expecting a full booklist. (And I have found some work from the Twenties on Epicedium - it attracted a little interest then because it contains, apparently, the second known printed (although indirect) reference to Shakespeare.)

I visited the wonderful printing museum in Antwerp a couple of years ago - it has the original 17th-century press, type-cases etc still in situ, which really helps me in thinking about the process of this.

I've done fragments of original research before, but this is the first really substantial block of it on a subject where there are few guides. Problem is that in working on the book this really isn't what I should be doing, but it is so fascinating... And I'm going to submit a couple of papers to academic conferences/seminars out of it. Helen Branch is such a fascinating character she really deserves to be better known.

Oh, yes, I've found her will!!!!!! (And downloaded it in a PDF - isn't it a wonderful world.) Now all I've got to do is read it - I admit that my DIY PhD is a bit short as yet on technical training in such matters, but I'll see how I go...

3/12/2006 07:03:00 pm  
Blogger Natalie Bennett said...

Ah, sorry. I regale people at parties with this so often I've forgotten I haven't discussed it recently on the blog.

THE book, or rather series of books, is a popular "history of the women of London". It started out as one book and is now four, and I've written/researched about a third of that (Going from Henry VIII to the Glorious Revolution). It is built around 16 individual (and in a couple of cases paired) biographies of "ordinary women", or as close as I can get to that, and is primarily based on secondary sources, except when I find pressing gaps.

I have an agent looking at it now and umming and ahhing, but if you know anyone in popular history publishing I'd LOVE to know about it.

Helen Branch is one of the paired chapters (with Dame Alice Owen) - "the philanthropists" - and is the only one (so far anyway) in which I'm heading so heavily into original research. It wasn't meant to be that way, but I've got fascinated.

And a lot of what I'm doing now is not going to fit in the book, so I've been thinking a couple of conference presentations and a journal paper ... but there is an (academic) book in her actually. Not sure, however, that I want to go quite so far to writing it. It would have to be heavily English lit. focused, and I'm more of a historian, or like to consider myself as such anyway. But it is something to think about...

So I'm really a generalist - a year or so ago I would have been regaling you with questions about maternal mortality statistics, when working on the midwife chapter ...

3/12/2006 09:41:00 pm  
Blogger Lis Riba said...

Not quite sure if this is what you want, but Peter W.M. Blayney wrote a book on The First Folio of Shakespeare that goes into detail the whole rights-gathering, compositing, printing, sales, and binding processes (including a map of the booksellers around St. Paul's).
Obviously, its primary focus is on Shakespeare's Folio, but it may be of assistance in general info on process and procedures.

Unfortunately, my copy is currently on loan so I can't check in more detail if it has what you want. The book was published in 1991 to coincide with an exhibit in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.

Let me know if this helps. Otherwise, I know a couple other hobbyists and academics on LiveJournal who might have more information...

3/13/2006 02:43:00 am  
Blogger Natalie Bennett said...

Ah, yes Clanger, I do feel the pull of the dark side ... but the side of the light - all those thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands ... who knows, to be made to understand that women have always been half of humankind ...

What ideally I'd like to do, I think, is try to maintain parallel writing careers with a bit of each. And then there's the blogging, and the theatre-reviewing and Green politics ... if only I could give up sleeping.

But that TV idea is a good one. I did talk to a BBC woman and she said "do the book first", but then she was a BBC book person.

3/13/2006 09:54:00 pm  

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