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This chapter explores the ways in which historians have used Gangraena as a source, and explains how new approaches to the history of print culture, the history of the book, and of reading will be used to explore Gangraena as a text. The discussion of Edwards’s training at Cambridge and his experience within the Laudian church in London and Hertford are followed by an account of divisions amongst English Puritans over church government in the early 1640s. The publication of Edwards’s Antapologia in 1644 marked a crucial stage in the emergence of profound religious divisions amongst Parliamentarians.

Chapter One examines several texts produced or published by Spanish friars that narrate the origins of some of the most significant apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the colonial Philippines. Often serving as the preface to novenas (a nine day cycle of prayers), these apparition tales reach a zenith of mass production in chapbook form in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They make history out of popular lore and render complete accounts with only incomplete archival records. These apparition tales are also, at times, violent narratives of exclusion of those communities that posed the greatest threat to Spanish authority. But insofar as these tales are usually written in the local vernaculars and attuned to the specificities of place, they invite one to read against the grain of their colonial authors’ agendas. These texts represent the worldview whereby the sacred was highly localized, particular, and believed immanent to material forms.

This chapter presents the first sustained study of Donne's reading and his scholarly methods, through paying detailed attention to his use of Saint Augustine's works. The chapter situates Donne's approach to Augustine in the context of Renaissance patristic scholarship and demonstrates the breadth and range of Donne's Augustinian reading. The chapter focuses on Donne's patristic sources: how many (and which) of Augustine's works he cited; whether Donne consulted the original Augustinian texts or intermediary sources, and how he dealt with these different types of patristic recourse. A survey is provided of the patristic editions that were available to divines in the early modern period, concentrating on the three sixteenth-century editions of Augustine's Works. The chapter then turns to Donne's philosophy of quotation, explaining his scholarly protocols, and the moral and theological thought which underpins them.

This chapter outlines some of the most characteristic ways in which Donne absorbs, digests, and reworks Augustine's texts by presenting a series of case studies. It falls into two halves. The first part focuses on citations probably gleaned directly from Augustine's works: the chapter summarizes the evidence for Donne's first-hand knowledge of Augustine's texts and presents examples designed to showcase his Augustinian expertise in different ways. The second part devotes itself to the medieval and early modern mediators of Augustine that were available to Donne. It is organized according to textual genre and category, and surveys patristic handbooks, Scripture commentaries, and various types of excerpt collections, among others, to track the sources and mediating channels of Donne's Augustinian citations. The chapter reconstructs Donne's reading in detail, demonstrates his recourse to sixty different Augustinian texts, and excavates a whole spectrum of sources that have been completely neglected in literary scholarship of the early modern period.

Linearists, as they might be called, have staked deep claims of cultural and other value on the linear exposition of history, narrative, argument, and other forms of thought. Theorists of networks, hypertext, and other domains of today's digital era stake equally significant claims on the nonlinear, often represented in network-style or other postlinear graphical visualizations. Indeed, they often elevate the importance of graphical knowledge in general. Informed by media history extending from oral culture and the history of the book to digital new media, this chapter asks the simplifying question: what if there never was any linearity to defend or to contest? What if the idea of linearity has always been an ideology deployed through graphical knowledge systems that are realized in graphics as the visualization of any era's idea of authoritative linearity—for example, who gets to go to the front of a line and why—and ultimately of its sense of history? The chapter makes Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" (with its invocation of "meaningless plungings" yet also visualization of seas "portioned" into fixed "emblazoned zones") a recurrent touchstone of its argument—in part by using digital humanities text analysis methods to render the poem as visualizations.

The first section examines the complex terminology of ghosts in sixteenth-century France, reviewing a range of French terms variously poetic (‘ombre’, ‘idole’), classical (‘larves’, ‘lares’, ‘manes’), everyday (‘esprit qui revient’, ‘fantôme’) or specialist (‘spectre’). This need among early modern authors to define and control the topic lexically, though not always successful, derived in part from the increasing intellectual prestige of the vernacular. The next section discusses the methodology adopted, promising a role for the history of the book—the material history of demonology—far larger than is customary in existing studies of witchcraft and magic. Following this is a justification of the chosen corpus—one which deliberately excludes verse and dramatic representations of ghosts. Finally, the Introduction offers a summary of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter studies the change from prior senses of history to today's “real time” sense of history—or instant sense of community—of social networks. How was the equivalent of a sense of history experienced, and mediated, in prehistorical oral cultures? How did print culture at the height of the history of the book, which coincided with narrative historicism in the mode of Leopold von Ranke (Historismus), alter the sense of history? And how do "Web 2.0" and social networking today yet again change the sense of history? Can today's society "friend" past ones to imagine, and absorb, prior senses of history as a layered, enrichening texture of the present? What continuities—for example, of internet transmissions following the routes once forced by imperial roads across conquered lands—lock the digital present to its historical past? But, also, what discontinuities allow past historicism and today's information empire to challenge each other's assumptions, thus enabling a more humane texture of the present mindful of the past?

Al-Jāḥiẓ wrote The Book of Living in response to these apocalyptic expectations and social concerns. The enterprise began as an attempt to fulfil a moral imperative — the need to thank God for His creation by producing a comprehensive inventory of it. The production of such an inventory involved the proper application of the special gift which God had given to man: the reasoning intellect. Al-Jāḥiẓ sought to codify his inventory in the form of a totalising book. Yet the process was paradoxical: in order to write it, al-Jā?i? had somehow to become the ideal writer. Al-Jā?i? was also required to fashion an audience of ideal readers able to read and respond to such a book. He produced possibly the longest, and probably the most complex, book written in Arabic at the time.

Using the records and publications of the Quakers, this chapter considers the religious and political context behind the creation of the Quaker archive and the relationship between scribal material and print culture in making meaning. The story of Mary Fisher’s (c.1623–1698) trip to Constantinople to convert the Sultan of the Ottoman Turks provides a valuable case study in how a letter became an archival document before circulating widely in print. Initially a product of the zealous, evangelical epistolary culture that characterised Quaker writings of the 1650s, it was transferred into the public archive created during the extreme persecution of the 1660s to situate the Quakers within a longer history of suffering. Later it was used to advance the political argument for toleration by offering an instance of Muslim hospitality in counterbalance to Christian cruelty. The chapter highlights how changing historical contexts transform the nature of the truth of archives.

This chapter discusses the particular influence that the immensely popular Geneva Bible had on Bible-reading practices in the sixteenth century. It gives an account of the publication history of the Geneva Bible, and of the material features which made it so popular. This chapter shows that as this Bible greatly extended the possibility for the application of private reading practices to the scriptures and promoted domestic Bible-reading, it gained an important place in the reading life of women. The chapter illustrates ways in which women engaged with the material features of their Bibles, through annotations and embroidering bindings, for example. It argues that these material practices are important components of the reading act.

The ‘Epilogue’ (2.7) picks up the discussion from the ‘Prologue’ (1.1) and extends it across a broader canvas in the history of the book and of reading. It asks how the case studies in previous chapters (including Pierre de L’Estoile), and new ones in this chapter of Bishop Camus, Pierre Charron, and Pierre Bayle, might revise the sketch of the Essais offered in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. I argue that the fundamental issue at stake in the early modern making and transmission of the Essais is the issue that is explicitly raised by Marie de Gournay in her preface of 1595, and, in a different style and context, by Charron’s use of Montaigne in De la sagesse (1601, 1604): how best to preserve and regulate the well-born individual’s natural liberté of judgement, their franchise or frankness, through reading and writing, in an age of moral corruption and confessional conflict.

This chapter begins with a series of bibliographic basics that define the particular forms in which music was printed, with special attention to partbooks, choirbooks, oblong formats, single-impression typography, and serial publication. Tract volumes (also known as binder’s volumes) are defined and discussed, as well as the challenges these forms present to cataloguers. An introduction to the field of music bibliography and studies of music printing is paired with specific cases from the chanson repertoire, illustrating the rationale for study of the material forms in which music circulated in the sixteenth century. The chapter introduces the book’s methodology, drawn from studies of print culture, book history, and performance-oriented histories of reading.

This introductory chapter makes three related points about the nature of early modern demonology. First, the chapter argues that many scholars were forced to discern the truth behind witchcraft accusations at second hand, from the safety and comfort of their study. Second, it argues for the apparent novelty of demonology as a field of knowledge in the late sixteenth century. Third, it suggests that this sense of distance and apparent novelty contributed to its appeal among early modern elites. While not denying its deadly intent, the entertainment value of early modern demonology must also not be ignored. The origins of the Disquisitiones as a course taught at the Leuven Jesuit College must be placed within this wider context, while its print history further bears out its particular appeal.

The introduction argues that the Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608) and his Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600) have been widely misunderstood. Social historians have postulated links between witch-hunting and demonology which have turned the latter into a science inevitably founded on inquisitorial experience. As a result, insufficient attention has been paid to the individuality of demonological texts. The mould of the Malleus maleficarum (1486) must be abandoned. Demonology in the late sixteenth century should be conceived as a pressing problem that was in many ways approached anew. Study of the numbers of printed editions shows that the Disquisitiones was more important and long-lasting than any of its rivals. When studied within the context of Delrio’s other works of classical and biblical scholarship, the Disquisitiones sheds new light on the nature of elite witchcraft belief which was able to thrive in a confessional, yet humanist environment.

Interview with Ann M. Blair, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University. Topics include intellectual history; history of the book; history of science; the organization of knowledge; natural philosophy; and Jean Bodin.