Graduate Studies

MPhil in European Literature & Culture | Course content | Modules | I-D Book - History of the Book, 1450-1650

MPhil in European Literature & Culture

Interdisciplinary | I-D Book

History of the Book, 1450-1650
(Convenor: tbc)

The period 1450-1650 saw a revolution in communication: printing was invented, and the development of the printed book had a profound impact on knowledge, literature, religion, systems of belief, and social relations, including gender relations. Recent research has turned the history of the book into one of the most exciting gateways for us onto the Renaissance and early modern period, because it unites the study of ideas with the study of material culture. This module enables you to investigate many dimensions of intellectual and literary culture and practice, whether or not you have previously studied the period.

Each session will be devoted to a general topic, such as:

- Humanism, Reformation, and print culture
- Controlling the word: censorship and the regulation of printing and publishing
- The urban centres of the printing world
- The poetics of reading
- Paratexts
- Women writers in print
- The medieval background: format and status of the text in a manuscript culture

Since the print revolution was a fundamentally international phenomenon, the course will range across Western Europe, though in your own work you will be free to specialize in the language(s) of your own choosing. You will be able to study major writers (e.g. Cervantes, Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, Montaigne etc.) as well as major issues. You will also have the opportunity to handle early printed books and to be shown how they were made and what information they yield as artefacts. The libraries of Cambridge, with their exceptional holdings of early printed books, will provide an invaluable resource for teaching and for your own research. For some students, the module will be a fascinating end in itself; for others, it will provide excellent training for a PhD in Renaissance or early modern studies. This module can be taken whether or not you have already studied this period. If you wish to focus on this period, then the module combines very well with the 'Europe and the Renaissance' module.

The sessions will be taught by some of the following: Peter Bayley, Abigail Brundin, Rodrigo Cacho, Mark Chinca, Philip Ford, David Holton, Sylvia Huot, Neil Kenny, Andrew Taylor and Joachim Whaley - a team which includes leading scholars and provides a wealth of expertise upon which you can draw. Supervision of individual projects will be provided by these and by other experts.

Preliminary reading
Susan BROOMHALL, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002
Guglielmo CAVALLO and Roger CHARTIER (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, first published 1997
Roger CHARTIER, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, tr. Lydia Cochrane, Princeton UP, 1987
Roger CHARTIER, The Order of Books, tr. Lydia Cochrane, Stanford UP, 1994
M. CHEVALIER, Lectura y lectores en la España del siglo XVI y XVII
Elizabeth EISENSTEIN, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, Cambridge UP, 1979
Jean-François GILMONT, The Reformation and the Book, Ashgate, 1998
Paul GRENDLER, Culture and Censorship in late Renaissance Italy and France,1981
Sandra HINDMAN (ed.), Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books 1450-1520, Cornell UP, 1991
Rudolf HIRSCH, The Printed Word: Its Impact and Diffusion, London: Variorum reprints, 1978 (includes chapter on censorship)
Adrian JOHNS, The Nature of the Book, Chicago UP, 1998
Henri MARTIN, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siè, 1984
D. F. McKENZIE, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, London, British Library, 1985 (repr. CUP, 1999);,br. Marshall McLUHAN, The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, 1962
Mary Catharine O'CONNOR, The Art of Dying Well = The Development of the 'Ars moriendi', (1942)
Brian RICHARDSON, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge UP, 1998

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