The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England

The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England provides a rich, imaginative and also accessible guide to the latest research in one of the most exciting areas of early modern studies. Written by scholars working at the cutting-edge of the subject, from the UK and North America, the volume considers the production, reception, circulation, consumption, destruction, loss, modification, recycling, and conservation of books from different disciplinary perspectives. Each chapter discusses in a lively manner the nature and role of the book in early modern England, as well as offering critical insights on how we talk about the history of the book. On finishing the Handbook, the reader will not only know much more about the early modern book, but will also have a strong sense of how and why the book as an object has been studied, and the scope for the development of the field.

1 - An Introduction: Thinking about the history of the book
2 - The Handmaids' Tale: Book History, Shakespeare, and Women's Textual Labour
3 - Cataloguing the Past: Periodisation and the Historiography of Print
4 - The Scale of Book History: Data, Distance, Description
5 - 'Inlaid with inkie spots of jet': Early modern book history and premodern critical race studies
6 - Religion and the history of the book
7 - Printing and book history: Insights from practice
8 - Monuments and trifles: which books do we use to tell the history of the book?
9 - What was a print shop, and what happened there?
10 - Scribes, Compositors, Correctors
11 - Authors
12 - Publishing Virginia (1608-15): Specialization, Commissioning, Networks
13 - Regional book and print trades
14 - Representing the labour of printing in image and text
15 - Printing and the Universities
16 - Illustrated books
17 - Typography
18 - Beyond the book: non-codex texts
19 - Science and the book in early modern England
20 - Waste, offcuts, remains, reuse
21 - 'The Book-sellars Shop': Browsing, Reading, and Buying in Early Modern England
22 - Internationalism and the English book trade
23 - 'A Gifte of good Moment': A New History of the Stationers' Benevolence to the Bodleian Library, 1610 to 1616
24 - Multi-lingual print
25 - Contexts for Circulation: Households, University, Inns of Court, and Professional Circles
26 - From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman: Buying and Selling Old Books in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
27 - Conversations about Time and Space: Early Modern Books and Contemporary Artists' Books
28 - The Early Modern Book as Metaphor
29 - Past, Present, and Future: Early Modern Collections and the Work of a Curator
30 - Self-reading books: marginalia, prosopopoeia and book history
31 - Book modification
32 - Early Modern Books and Phonography
33 - Transience and loss

Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford. He works on the connections between literature and material texts, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. He is the author of four books, including Material Texts in Early Modern England (2019), and the editor and co-editor of four collections of essays (including Book Parts (2019) with Dennis Duncan). He writes regularly for the London Review of Books.