Tudor Books and Readers Materiality and the Construction of Meaning [Paperback]

These essays by expert historians of the book exploring all aspects of Tudor book culture.Offering a comprehensive account of Tudor book culture, these essays by experts in early book history consider the formative years of English printing; book format, marketing, and the reception of books; print, politics, and patronage; and connections between reading and religion.Offering a comprehensive account of Tudor book culture, these essays by experts in early book history consider the formative years of English printing; book format, marketing, and the reception of books; print, politics, and patronage; and connections between reading and religion.The consumption of books is closely intertwined with the material conditions of their production. The Tudor period saw both revolutionary progress in printing technology and the survival of traditional forms of communication from the manuscript era. Offering a comprehensive account of Tudor book culture, these new essays by experts in early book history consider the formative years of English printing; book format, marketing, and the reception of books; print, politics, and patronage; and connections between reading and religion. They challenge the conventional view of the 1557 foundation of the Stationers Company as an event that marks a shift between older and newer modes of book production, sale, and reading. Both continuity and change led to the gradual development of late medieval book culture into the genuinely early modern book culture that emerged by the death of Queen Elizabeth.Introduction John N. King; 1. Prologue: the first years of the Tudor monarchy and the printing press Lotte Hellinga; Part I. Book Format, Marketing, and the Reception of Books: 2. The myth of the cheap quarto Joseph A. Dane and Alexandra Gillespie; 3. English literary folios 15931623: studying shifts in format Steven K. Galbraith; 4. Closing the books: the problematic printing of John Foxe's histories of Henry VII and Henry VIII in his Book olƒ.