Week 2
Week Two opens with a session devoted to assessing different modes of literacy; uses of handwritten manuscript marginalia; and Keith Thomas’ thesis that typefaces corresponded to different levels of literacy. We will consider how typography guided learned readers of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and illiterati (“illiterate” or “unlearned” readers) whose literacy was confined to the vernacular. Central to our investigation is the competition between “black letter,” a type modeled on late medieval handwriting, and roman type based on classical script, which prevailed on the Continent by the mid-sixteenth century and in England much later. We will consider whether literacy differed between men and women and ponder recent findings that women were more involved in book production and reading than has been thought. Looking back to the early Christian era, we will consider the emergence of silent reading as opposed to reading aloud.
We shall then to embark on the broad study of “Religious Books: Pre-Reformation, Reformation, and Counter Reformation” that will preoccupy the remainder of this seminar. In order to clarify issues under discussion, we will present secular books for purposes of comparison. In devoting our Wednesday meeting to early book illustration, we will consider evidence that suggests that the inclusion of pictures was contingent upon a hierarchy of speech acts addressed to different kinds of readers. Professor Martha Driver will co-lead this session, and will also speak to participants about their individual study projects. Art historians share the interest of book historians in studying the use of illumination (i.e., illustration by hand) to make relatively inexpensive printed books look like more expensive manuscripts. The insertion of woodcut illustrations into monastic manuscripts demonstrates continuity between manuscript and print culture. We will consider differences in the materiality and reception of books produced for nuns, who were typically literate in vernacular languages, from books produced by medieval monks literate in Latin and sometimes Greek.
Week Two will close with a rare book exhibition and workshop focused on Continental versus native English bookmaking traditions. It will address important issues exemplified, for example, in pre-Reformation religious books that later underwent modification due to religious change. Collections of medieval saints’ lives such as the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend) anticipate influential Protestant martyrologies including John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which repudiates the Golden Legend even though Foxe incorporates martyrologies not wholly unlike those in this precursor. The exhibition will include a rich selection of books of hours, including a fifteenth-century French example with substantial 18th-century additions featuring a travel narrative to the Holy Land; sixteenth-century books based on or critiquing these models, a Lutheran church history dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I; seminal illustrated books by Luther and his opponents, including an early sammelband of Lutheran flugschriften (inexpensive ephemeral pamphlets); a sammelband containing Henry VIII’s defense of the sacraments against Luther and Luther’s Latin response to Henry; and more.