Patents, Pictures and Patronage by Elizabeth Evenden

CITATION: Evenden, Elizabeth. Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2008. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did the presentation of Day's most famous books result in his reputation as master of the trade?
• Answer: Day "saw the necessity of patronage in the Church and at court in securing the patents and... the crucial importance of patronage by proving himself the best man for the job... by proving his technical mastery of the trade... [b]y creating visually impressive books..." (178)
• Method: Evenden explains Day's business acumen through his patents, bookshops, and advertisements, and describes his courtly politicking in terms of religious conflict and prestigious illustration.
• Assumptions: Evenden has mixed assumptions about the status and format of illustrated books. She claims on 69-70 that A&M "created yet another prized monopoly" by "putting an end to what could otherwise have been an open market for printers of smaller, ephemeral martyrological works."
  But on 103, she argues that Day might hypothetically "produce pamphlets made up of various woodcuts in order to maximise the range of customers and so increase his income, as one might expect a printer to do, in order to ensure a healthy profit." There are a few discrepancies between these two accounts:
  (a) the profitability of pamphlets for Day relative to a "monopoly" on A&M, and
  (b) the role of A&M--passive or deliberate--in preventing a market for martyrological formats.
  It's unclear whether Evenden believes that early modern consumers treated large folios and pamphlets as comparable, or the degree to which Evenden believes Day was subject to the profit motive. 
• Sententiae: "Day borrowed woodcuts from Grafton on a number of occasions, particularly since Grafton, the King's Printer, owned a stock of elaborate woodcuts that emphasized the monarchical imperialism and the central position of the monarchy within the Reformation." (11)
  "... Day's connection to Stamford has appeared tenuous; especially since the only evidence, hitherto known of his printing De vera obedientia in Stamford rests upon this single comment by Foxe which, moreover, only appeared in the first edition and was never reprinted.
  "Day was [sic] in Lincolnshire at some point during the period 1553-54, for during that time he rented two acres in the village of Barholm, on land owned by William Cecil...
  "There is also typographical evidence to prove that the Michael Wood texts were printed by John Day. The roman type found in these tracts also occurs in Day's edition of John Ponet's A short catechisme from early 1553 and also in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Banket of Sapience from 1557...
  "Nevertheless no works appear bearing the Michael Wood imprint after May [1554], and even if De vera obedientia was printed in early June, it seems that the Michael Wood press remained inactive through that summer and early autumn. Why? It is likely that Day had run out of paper." (32-35)
  "Day's and Cecil's attempt to house an illicit press in England, while bold and not bereft of concrete results, nevertheless was doomed to failure." (46)
  "[Day's] production of Foxe's huge work effectively smothered any potential English competition, putting an end to what could otherwise have been an open market for printers of smaller, ephemeral martyrological works." (69)
  "It was only a matter of time before Day's demand outstripped supply... In July 1566 John Foxe made a request to Cecil that the law limiting the number of foreign workmen allowed to work for a printer to four be lifted for Day." (96)
  "Nor did [Day] simply produce pamphlets made up of various woodcuts in order to maximise the range of customers and so increase his income, as one might expect a printer to do, in order to ensure healthy profit." (103)
  "The removal of [John Day's] stock [by Richard Day and Henry Bynneman], however, became blatantly obvious when one of John Day's most notorious woodcuts, the initial C, which depicted him alongside William Cecil and John Foxe in attendance of the queen, was used in a book printed by Bynneman." (163)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Clearly I'm smitten with Evenden. She has a special talent at stringing together narratives that are both clear and revealing regarding Day, his relationship to Cecil, and to early modern print. I have nothing but praise for this eminently readable book.
• Synthesis: Naturally Evenden leans heavily on her shared research as part of Evenden & Freeman. But furthermore, Evenden offers a surprising response to Collinson's argument in an essay I have yet to read--one in King and Highley's John Foxe in His World.
• Application: Evenden presents an ambivalent pair of views, noted in "Assumptions," regarding the profit motive and status. My hypothesis is that Day refrained from re-packaging A&M for pamphlets because he wanted to preserve the status of the folio. That is, I believe, commensurate with profit-maximizing motives. Yet I struggle to imagine a test suitable to the hypothesis: there were so few contemporaneous printers as successful and prestigious as Day that it's hard to tell how an alternative strategy would have done.
  Also, Evenden repeatedly remarks on Day's replenishment-rate of paper, which leads me to wonder whether there's an absolute "speed of paper" for all non-royal stationers. If so, it's tantalizing to imagine that early modern English print can be expressed by a definite production frontier, fixed by the fixity of paper.

The Religion of the Protestants by Patrick Collinson

CITATION: Collinson, Patrick. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How can Jacobean-historiographical taxonomies of "Anglican" and "Puritan" be reformed?
• Answer: The Puritan movement was more conservative and consistent with the episcopacy, and Laudians reacted to Calvinist pressures in universities to become the main agitators of religious discourse prior to the Civil War.
• Method: Collinson focuses on the social, not theological, formation of English Protestantism. He nearly disregards high philosophy in favor of institutional practices.
• Assumptions: Collinson responds to two related streams of criticism: one which attributes the Civil War to Puritan anti-ecclesiastical tumult; another, championed by Christopher Hill, which treats the Puritans as necessary and inevitable precursors to revolutionary socialists.
• Sententiae: "So the protestant governing class progressed from the Elizabethan demand for a new religious order to the Jacobean enjoyment of such an order, already partly achieved. And when in the reign of Charles I that order appeared in danger of overthrow by a new conjunction of the forces which had never ceased to threaten it, the recation was defensive and conservative. But whether in assertion or defence, the animating spirit was not one of disobedience or ill-affection but of a profound veneration for order and a strong disposition towards obedience: the double need to objey God and his earthly representatives, and in turn to exact the obedience due from inferiors." (153)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Collinson's argument is persuasive and edifying for my Puritanical tendencies.
  Lastly, I won't lie: I had a long, hard time with this book. The evidence is too far removed from my main interests, and the argument seems far removed from present discourses. What one reviewer called "his distaste for literary organization" obfuscates the structure of Collinson's lectures.
• Synthesis: I'm having trouble conceiving how Knapp related his research to Collinson's, at least since this work focuses on the Jacobean period. But I suppose that Collinson relocates iconophilia to the insurgent Laudians--and accordingly the iconophobic culture of the Puritans could be related to the dominant ecclesiastical institutions in the Jacobean period.
• Application:It would be interesting to re-examine parodies of academics in the Jacobean period--eg, Love's Labours Lost--for an overtone of institutional cooperation with Puritans.

The Idolatrous Eye by Michael O'Connell

CITATION: O'Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Understanding

• Question: How did drama negotiate word and image during early modern debates regarding iconoclasm?
• Answer: While early modern dramatists did not directly respond to contemporary scholars, they responded to Medieval ecclesiastical debates regarding incarnation, text, and embodiment.
• Method: First, O'Connell refers to ecclesiastical restrictions on religious and secular theater alike in order to establish their common idolatrous visuality. Second,  O'Connell contextualizes logocentric early modern humanism against a tradition of embodied Christianity stretching through the early modern period. Third, O'Connell proposes the importance of dramatic bodily torture to late-medieval religious drama. Fourth, O'Connell juxtaposes dramatic bodily torture with a textualized dramatic God. Fifth and finally, O'Connell addresses Jonson and Shakespeare's image-textual epistemology in the tug-of-war between humanists and Puritans.
• Assumptions: O'Connell assumes that pre-Filioquean controversies reverberated in a meaningful way through the York cycle and into Shakespeare's plays.
• Sententiae: "What I am proposing is that the iconoclasm of the Reformation was not a mere change in the style and emphasis of the worship of Christian Europe. Rather, it emerged from tensions in the relation of image and word that inhere in the central religious doctrine of Christianity, the incarnation, the belief that God, in taking on a human form, became subject to representation as an image." (200)

Overstanding

• Assessment: O'Connell has buried the lede, which says that the incarnation of power and pain in Christ implicates the bodies and consciousnesses of the audience. This seems to extend from a passage of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, but is necessary for understanding O'Connell's treatment of iconicity, iconophobia, and iconoclasm.
• Synthesis: O'Connell's project is an interesting compliment to Knapp's, because O'Connell treats the prehistory of early modern image, whereas Knapp addresses early modern history in images.
• Application: The most interesting challenge from O'Connell is to locate how, exactly, early modern dramatists propose that their senses were embodied by players. What play-texts support an extension of Scarry's Christology?

The First Folio of Shakespeare by Peter W.M. Blayney

CITATION: Blayney, Peter W.M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991.
Understanding

• Question: How do the resources of the Folger Library reflect the origins of Shakespeare's first folio?
• Answer: Charlton Hinman contextualized the Folger's variant copies of the folio through textual collation to a time and a group of collators, and Blayney adds to that research information about the inclusion of Troilus, sales, rentals, and resales of the edition, paratexts, and reception.
• Method: Some of the bibliographic methods include: the collation of broken type (to time); collation of spelling variants (to compositors); collation of copperplate alterations (to an engraver); collation of proofsheets (to stop-press corrections); the synthesis of records of purchase and rebinding.
• Assumptions: Blayney draws extensively from Hinman's work, but accepts modifications to Hinman's description of compositors: he abandons Hinman's five-compositor account for the fullest nine-compositor account.
• Sententiae: "The printing of the Shakespeare Folio began in early 1622, perhaps at the beginning of February, when Jaggard was still working on two books that had been started in 1621. One of them--an edition of Thomas Wilson's Christian Dictionary--was almost complete... Augustine Vincent's Discoverie of Errours--was of greater importance to William Jaggard than was the First Folio." (5)
  "Like many pages in the text, [the engraved portrait on the Folio title-page] is variant. In the first few copies printed, there is so little shading on the ruff that Shakespeare's head seems to be floating in mid-air. The plate was therefore modified, most notably by shading an area of ruff below Shakespeare's left ear... It is unlikely that anyone but [engraver Martin] Droeshout would have considered those alterations necessary." (18)
  "Some booksellers, though, apparently did lend books for a fee... The most likely interpretation of the note [in Folger copy 60] is that [Thomas] Bourne lent out this folio (perhaps more than once) for an unknown sum that included a 'security deposit' of half the cost of replacing the book." (29)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Obviously Blayney knows what he's doing, and he's synthesizing a great deal of information in the Folger collection into a very concise format.
• Synthesis: Blayney's treatment of Droeshout's engraving--as something worthy of revision--conflicts slightly with the "iconic" understanding argued by Katherine Acheson. Whereas the Folio illustrated a popular personality, Acheson's books illustrated "foure-footed beastes," and therein may be the difference.
• Application: Blayney's interpretation of the notes in Folger copy 60 might be interpreted in light of the division of profits: it might be revealing to consider the proportion of the "security deposit" relative to the profits of other parties (printers' thirds, etc.).

Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England by James A. Knapp

CITATION:  Knapp, James A. Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2003.
Understanding

• Question: How did the visual page change English historiography in the Elizabethan period?
• Answer: The visual page helped distinguish the emerging categories of objective history and imaginative arts. 
• Method: After engaging numerous assumptions and commonplaces regarding the early modern visual page, Knapp analyzes statements regarding text and image surrounding Sidney's Apology, Foxe's Actes and Monuments, Holinshed's Chronicles, and Derricke's Image of Ireland.
• Assumptions: Knapp responds to many assumptions regarding early modern printed image, but most importantly, Knapp participates in a historiographic tradition which locates the Elizabethan episteme in the middle of a shift from visual to textual modes.
• Sententiae: "Hilliard's aesthetic vision conflicted sharply with the Protestant critique of worldly materiality and the Reformation's thoroughgoing emphasis on the world. Hilliard's response was to establish a place for the miniature in an age of iconoclasm by reserving such dangerous images for the ruling class." (78)
  "But if history has a claim on the truth of objective reality, the arts, concerned with fictive imagination, apparently operated in a different representational register... For Sidney, only poetry dealt with a subject truly free from earthly matters." (111)
  "... Sidney co-opted the language of visual representation as a metaphor for poetic practice. As a metaphor for the creative process, the reference to the visual is a reference to a mode rather than a thing, and the mode of poetic seeing is much more easily assimilated into a Protestant ethics of virtuous action." (118-119)
  "Three longstanding misconceptions guide Wooden's assessment [of Actes and Monuments]: 1) that images were intended to extend a book's message to a wider audience, 2) that woodcut illustrations could 'speak'  to the unlettered, and 3) that such images were thus 'accessible to all who could look.'" (124)
  "While, in 1563, the interrelation of text and image specific to a particular episode helped to individuate even the smaller cuts, the repetition of the endless variety of smaller cuts in 1570 lead to an emphasis on the martyrs' similarities--similarities that mark the outlines of an emergent Protestant community." (160)
  "Sidney's problem with the historians is with the polyphonic nature of their texts..." (175)
  "Helgerson describes the relation of chronicle and chronography as a representational division of labor, between the spatial part (made visible by descriptions of known localities, and ultimately the land) and the temporal whole (represented in the chronicle of kings which comes to stand for the state)." (186)
  "Rather than offer a 'visual translation,' [of Holinshed's Chronicles] a parallel representation in a different medium, the cuts enable the multifaceted text to function contrapunctally." (205)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Knapp engages at length in his introduction and first chapter with issues close to my own projects. I can't overstate how much I'll quote-mine this book and citation-mine his bibliography.
• Synthesis: Knapp draws extensively on King's account of Tudor iconography and to Aston's response to King's treatment of Foxe. Anticipating my future reading, Knapp also responds to Collinson's treatment of Protestant iconophobia. Lastly, Knapp draws on Watt's work on price, to which Evenden and Freeman also responded.
• Application: I have a few possible responses to Knapp's groundwork:
  1. Knapp's treatment of price (p. 54-56) needs to be reconsidered in light of Evenden and Freeman's smackdown on Greenberg, Watt, et al.
  2. Knapp's assumptions regarding epistemic shift must be considered in light of economics and reader response. Whether or not the shift signified in Sidney's Apology translates into popular culture must be determined, as well as the significance of this shift in light of other consumer media (eg theater).
  3. Knapp's claims regarding nascent Rawlsian progressivism have great consequence for the Jacobean and Carolignean periods. I suspect that the Stuart era strains his (and Patterson's) Whiggish history to its limit, and accordingly complicates the antecedent claim of an epistemic shift.

Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England by James A. Knapp [Sententiae from Introduction]

[I love this book so far. There's so much in the introduction that it deserves a separate post for its sententiae.]
CITATION: Knapp, James A. Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2003.

• Sententiae:
  "By figuring the material traces of early modern visuality as afterimages, it is possible to emphasize what is lost to historical inquiry without denying the way in which the present is haunted by its memory of the past. Because material artifacts seem to ground our inquiry at the same time that they demand our interpretations, the temptation to imagine the historical endeavor as one of voyeuristic reconstruction--of the challenge to explain the inarticulate presence of the past--is often overpowering." (2)
  "Textual purification--or more precisely, the tendency to treat images and text in isolation--appeared early in the history of textual theory, and it has been a staple of editorial practice from its inception... [T]he editorial history of some of the most important sixteenth-century illustrated books has been profoundly affected by a cultural turn, roughly beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, away from images, an era, if you will, after images [sic]." (5)
  "The present study addresses [Paul] Ricoeur's epistemological difficulty by beginning from the premise that what we see when we look at the pages of early modern books is not the same as what was seen by the first generation of those book's readers--that the epistemological basis for interpretation has shifted with the passage of time." (6)
  "The peculiar quality of the 'rare' book in the twenty-first century is a feature of its lack of familiarity, a feature, in other words, of its historical alterity. But of course this quality would have been imperceptible to the early modern viewer/reader. The gain in looking at something that is removed from the history it purports to convey derives less from some inaccessible historical authenticity (whether or not the artifact is real) than from our understanding of the ways in which such material interlopers enable an articulation of the present sense of the past." (7)
  "But at the opening of a new millennium, it appears that an emergent emphasis on the visual may soon displace the former hegemony of the verbal, print based, narrative forms in the realm of cultural production, creating the possibility of non-narrative, non-linguistic interactions with and representations of the past." (8)
  "Ian Donaldson points out the irony that the flood of work on the history of the book is indebted to the digital technologies that have bade the statistical collation and comparative analysis of books in distant locations a reality." (11)
  "This interpretive pitfall is even more likely to occur when dealing with the visual features of early modern books, especially illustrations, as they seem to offer both a palpable materiality and a mimetic transparency that is often lacking in historical texts. The widespread practice, on the part of historians and literary critics in particular, of using early modern visual material for its referential value--a woodcut of a Roman mass to show 'what a mass looked like'--is just one example of the difficulty of avoiding the temptation to believe that we see the past as it was in the visual traces of the material record." (11-12)
  "Almost forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan (following Walter Ong) characterized print as a visual medium. Moreover, he saw in 'electronic circuitry' (at that time particularly radio, television, and telephone) the potential end of 'typographic man' and the return to the full sense world that reigned in pre-print culture. Interestingly, the introduction of computer technologies, the next stage of electronic media, has re-embedded text in a visual medium, the illuminated computer screen." (13-14)
  "Though most accept the view that the 'fabric' of medieval culture was visually inflected in comparison with the Word centered culture of the English Renaissance, medieval and early modern scholars alike have begun to question the usefulness of such sweeping generalizations." (17)
  "I argue that more effort is required to distinguish the use of the archaic--abundant in the period--from the influence of the residual. For example, Spenser's use of the archaic (that which harks back to an earlier age) is primary in The Shepreardes Calender, where the visual illustrations and the generic structure explicitly call on a form that can be identified as past... But I contend that another crucial aspect of The Faerie Queene, its density of visual imagery, is a component of a residual visuality that continued to influence Spenser's production despite his immersion in the dominant iconophobic culture of the Reformation." (20)
  "In both the visual and the verbal sense the import of an illustration resides in its ability to 'clarify,' a concept which is penetrated with the language of vision in its own right... The concept of illustration was by no means limited to visual material in the sixteenth century, as teh subject to be illustrated often governed the form of the illustration. If one were to illustrate the grace of God, to take an obvious example, a picture would not do." (23)
  "Thus in the experience with the illustrated text, there are two crucial factors related to the distinct modal qualities of visual and verbal representation: first, through their proximity to text, the meaning or function of visual illustrations is contingent on the text in which they are printed, and second, visual representations depend on formal characteristics... unlike those of language--characteristics governed by both the symbolic language of visual composition and the phenomenological attitudes of the perceiver (including their sense of the epistemological status of referentiality)." (24)
  "This assertion [from Luborksy, "Connections and Disconnections"] that disjunction occurs in this last instance is based on the assumption that sixteenth-century readers imagined direct illustration as the illustrative ideal, and that they merely accepted general illustrations as a practical compromise." (26)
  "The models of disjunction described by Luborsky and [Marian] Rothstein both assume that the connections (or disconnections) made in the mind of the early modern reader are recoverable through an examination of the formal qualities of the books in question, that the image-text relation was circumscribed by the printing industry and the textual tradition. However, if there was a transition from a visual culture to a culture of the word in the sixteenth century, then the changing attitudes towards the visible world and to the nature of vision must be considered at least as important as the 'fit' between words and images in the very limited worlds of particular books. Thus, on the other hand, the most interesting aspect of these books  from the point of view of literary and cultural criticism would seem to be the possible ways in which connections and disconnections between images and text might alter our understanding of early modern English attitudes towards the visual and the ideal." (26-27)
  "For the sixteenth-century historical observer, the question was not 'What happened?' but 'What is the lesson in this episode of history?'" (32)
  "Rather than reproduce the trends set on the Continent, English illustration followed a unique pattern of development... The changing character of English book illustration over the course of the century reflects both the responsiveness of the trade to religious and political developments of the age and the importance of the visual page in shaping and reflecting such developments." (38)
  "Rather than capturing the natural relation of objects in a single visual field--a use of single-point perspective often taken as symptomatic of the birth of the subject in early modern culture--perspective is employed in the engravings to differentiate temporally distinct episodes in Ariosto's cantos by placing them in relation to one another spatially." (43-44)

"Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images" by Justin Champion

CITATION: Champion, Justin. "Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 255-275. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did visual representations of religious institutions shift between 1651 and 1714?
• Answer: British printed images moved from Protestant attacks to more accepted diversity. Religious attacks and satires shifted from sectarian focus to personal caricature. 
• Method: Champion analyzes a succession of title-pages, especially Hobbes', and satires for their emblems and narrative structure.
• Assumptions: Hobbes responds to a scholarly tradition that identifies "fear of popery" in early modern discourse.
• Sententiae: "Recovering, historically, this sense of meaning manifest in print is complex but involves reconstructing the readers' capacity for interpreting the relation of iconic components. The scribal 'Instructions' [Anthony Cooper, 3rd Earl] Shaftesbury prepared (for circulation to printers and others) allow unfamiliar readers (past and present) to decode the prints." (269)

Overstanding

• Assessment: It's slightly misleading to identify this as an essay on Hobbes, as the title does. But Champion nevertheless makes a bold (if not entirely convincing) argument for evidence of tolerance in the age of the Popish Plot, the Glorious Revolution, etc.
• Synthesis: Champion's argument is orthagonal with Pierce's account of Whiggish satire. Both parties recognize the development of anti-Tory caricature and satire, but Pierce attributes this to continued Protestantism that was amplified by emergent Parliamentary politics, whereas Champion sees tolerance and diversity in counter-Republican philosophy promoted by Hobbes.
• Application: The real issue at stake between Pierce and Champion is whether the prominence printed image corresponds with increased Parliamentary discord, and such an effect might be observed in the late Carolignian period--a worthy task both for expanding the range of inquiry and for resolving the Pierce-Champion dispute.