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David Matthews explores how Caxton’s awareness of linguistic change informed his editing methods. Caxton’s editing of Trevisa's translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, shows a distinct diachronic consciousness and a desire to forge something new out of Trevisa's ‘old’ English. This stands in contrast to his more deferential treatment of Chaucer. Matthews thus differentiates between philology as a tool for understanding another language and as an editorial practice focused on rendering texts transparent.

“Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” traces how, for over half a millennium, the printed page has informed the way we’ve imagined, designed, constructed, inhabited, administered, and navigated our cities. My exploration ranges from architectural treatises, maps, and pattern books to newspapers, contemporary niche periodicals, and new urban spaces for public reading.

This chapter examines some of the effects of literature’s association with state power, as distinct from literature’s entanglement with nationalism. Through laws that create intellectual property, regulate commerce, and censor publications, state power affects literature in the United States (and together the United States and United Kingdom have affected Anglophone public culture’s treatment of these matters). The construction of literary authorship and changing formulations of aesthetic autonomy have been two of the most crucial features of literature’s platform impacted by state power, and both of them were shaped by the legal history of print. In considering how the scope of aesthetic autonomy came to be narrowed, it examines the career of Charles Brockden Brown in the 1790s.

This chapter recounts the struggles of publishers, printers, editors, and contributors to American magazines of the national period. It shows how the magazine occupies a liminal place at best in the history of print in the early republic. The book and the newspaper dominate far more space in the story of the print's rise, and rightly so, as the magazine seems dominated by random posturing, by armchair moralists with neoclassical pseudonyms offering their opinion on everything from fashion to dueling. It is no wonder that modern readers have favored two forms—novel and newspaper—whose genealogies are more immediately traceable into the twentieth century.

Chapter 4 examines the available evidence for an actual readership of Fabri’s texts in the first century after their appearance, via an analysis of their manuscript transmission, marginalia, and printing history. In exploring the lines of transmission (where they exist), this chapter traces the movements of the extant manuscript copies for each of Fabri’s writings, with special attention paid to the copyists and their adaptations. The second section of this chapter briefly examines the marginalia evidence for how late-medieval readers may have approached Fabri’s texts. The final section of the chapter examines the printing history of Fabri’s Pilgerbuch in order to discover information about readers of Fabri’s pilgrimage narratives up until the late sixteenth century, when pilgrimage became mainly a literary and metaphorical trope.

The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.

A number of recent discussions of The Book of Mormon have attempted to push beyond the tired debates of apologists and critics by “bracketing” questions of the book’s ancient historicity. According to this approach, old efforts at affirming the text’s historicity only restrain and delimit our interpretive efforts by requiring in advance either dismissals of the volume’s sacred status (showing, for example, how many elements in the text have some correlative cultural referent in Joseph’s Smith’s New England religious environment; hence, fraud) or else faith-promoting reconstructions of its ancient historical origins (showing, by contrast, how many elements in the book can be explained only by transhistorical, angelic delivery; hence, Word of God). This essay argues that despite these pitfalls the narrative and structural realities of The Book of Mormon make all such attempts impossible. It is in this sense that the book provides a valuable case study in textual interpretation.

Literary historians long considered Thomas Browne uninterested in the great events of his day. While more recent scholarship has revised this picture, it has tended to place the famous Dr Browne on the wrong side of a conflict between conservatives and radicals. This chapter begins by re-examining the relations between and among writing, politics, and class in revolutionary England, emphasising the fluidity of the ideological context in which Browne’s meditation was first written and published. The second part of the chapter traces the processual character of Browne’s text, that is, the multiplicity of material forms and circumstances in which his Religio Medici might have been encountered, and the various interlocutions that soon attached themselves to it and mediated its meanings. Finally, it seeks to reconstruct the religious subject and the spiritual politics constituted out of the text’s distinctive rhetorical form. Stepping out provisionally, with a sense of limitation, with a sense of style, this chapter argues, Religio Medici brilliantly addresses itself to the heresy of certainty under which Browne saw the Stuart church beginning to buckle.

The history of the Octavia’s reception begins in humanist Padua. Its impact on the writing of tragedy and modern praetextae was from the outset considerable. Challenging widespread hellenocentric views as to the basis for the rise of vernacular tragedy, it is argued that the models for this revival were more Roman than Greek, with Seneca and the Octavia as the far more familiar, but less prestigious, and therefore commonly unacknowledged, sources of inspiration. The handling of a set of typical ghost and dream scenes by the Italian pioneers are shown to affirm the strong awareness of Senecan drama, from Trissino, Giraldi, and Dolce to Tasso. Examples from France, Portugal, Flanders, and England, among them a drama about Mary Stuart and Busenello and Monteverdi’s Poppea, illustrate how the prestige of the Octavia only went into decline when the rise of normative Aristotelean poetics made its frequent changes of settings look ‘childish’.

“Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis…,” examines the entwined histories of brick-making, mark-making, and city-building. I examine how urban surfaces have served as substrates for writing, from ancient epigraphy to contemporary graffiti; how written documents have been critical to our cities’ operations; and how our scripts’ formal properties are often reflected in urban form.

“Speaking Stones: Voicing the City,” considers how the city itself functions as a sounding board, resonance chamber, and transmission medium for vocality: public address, interpersonal communication, and vocal expressions of affect. We consider ancient urban acoustics and the ongoing evolution of spatio-sonic politics related to such issues as the Muslim call to prayer and political protest.

This is a detailed study of the extant sources related to the life and teachings of Chaitanya, most of which were produced shortly after Chaitanya passed away. This survey includes three key aspects connected with Chaitanya hagiographies available in manuscript form: the pressing literary and cultural quest for their discovery, the problem of their interpolation, and their printing history since the mid-19th century. This chapter studies five hagiographers in some detail, implying their intrinsic importance of their work to the reconstruction of the life and teachings of Chaitanya. This includes a critical treatment of the greatly controversial work Govindadaser Kadcha which has come to be seen in intensely polarised ways as possibly the earliest among hagiographies or else a modern forgery.

“Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound,” describes how, since the mid-19^th century, our urban atmospheres have been charged with electric and electromagnetic telecommunications: telegraph and telephone wires and radio waves. I explain how these technologies have shaped, and continue to shape, urban form, and make themselves heard in the urban environment.

“Coding Urban Pasts and Futures,” uses the recent reconstruction of Palmyra’s destroyed Arch of Triumph as a case study to explore many themes that resonate throughout the book: the entangling of materialities, temporalities, and geographies; the cultural politics of media archaeology and archaeology-proper; and the potential implications of these past-oriented fields of exploration for our urban-media futures.

This chapter explores the eighteenth-century afterlife of Milton’s Mask, as it was renamed Comus and reshaped into an expression of Protestant poetics and Whiggish political opposition. Music by Thomas Arne, new text by John Dalton, and branding by the publisher Robert Dodsley made Comus speak to its moment and helped define its critical legacy in ways that are not widely understood. In its altered form, Comus became one of Milton’s most popular, if partly apocryphal, works. By studying the publication and performance networks responsible for the text’s transformation, we gain insight not only into the text’s eighteenth-century reception, but also the more recent scholarly tendency to misread Milton’s early Mask as an expression of his later reformist zeal.