This is actually an article I have yet to write and would like to write. If you're reading this and find it interesting, please tell me why. Add a leaf to this florilegi de pensaments. It's an idea I've had off and on a long while, reactivated again after a recent remembering of my old academic and Amazon reviews of the following books. Here I've revised those little texts to get some of the grad school out of them.

I reviewed the Wheale book for the Sixteenth Century Journal, and I think I may have done Eden's as well. Earle Havens' Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century is another, the basis for this exhibition at Harvard's Beinecke Library.

These (and many other) books bear some degree of influence from the strangely avoided, if not disowned, legacy of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan's unique contribution to thought was to explore the impact of literacy on psychology and society. He was also a gregarious person who wrote for a popular audience and became an international academic celebrity during his lifetime. Being outgoing and popular is the best way to garner the snobbish resentment of your peers if you are a professional scholar, and that is what happened to McLuhan. You'd think bookish people would be pleased when books, literacy, and intellectual seriousness become popular, but that is not the case. If you find any contemporary scholarship referencing McLuhan, you will see the author criticizing McLuhan, apologizing for mentioning him, or both. Nevertheless, McLuhan's mark remains in the flowering of interest and study that is still taking place in many (often segregated, often technologically behind the times) academic disciplines about language, technology, and culture. It is also a subject that is deeply relevant to daily life and affairs in a world and economy that is increasingly "online."

I got this book for a graduate seminar on early modern print culture at the Newberry Library. It is full of stories. It is thick, deep and easy to read with comprehensive references to further reading. Johns writes like a gang of Umberto Ecos, who is also great on the same subjects. Johns avoids giving you a grand narrative of 17th century English print culture; instead he focuses on the marginal characters alongside the famous, and he pays attention to their physical, material world with incredible detail. If this doesn't fascinate you, it will inform you with things you won't forget. It is not what you might expect from "academic" or "scholarly" writing.

Taking something of a cheap shot at Elizabeth Eisenstein and McLuhan, Johns argues that the emergence of print technology did not stabilize and thus give authority (influence, cultural power) to texts -- on the contrary, print culture could be even messier than manuscript culture. Authority and fixity were attributes and values that had to be constructed and ascribed to printed texts over a substantial period of time. (Eisenstein and McLuhan generalized about movable type stabilizing texts and made important points about the significance of that.)

Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain (1590-1660)

Writing and Society is a fine little introduction to early modern/Renaissance England through the lens of increasing public literacy, printing, and their socio-political implications across the various strata of English society. Wheale makes use of the past 20 years' work in critical theory and historiography as applied to the disciplines of history and literature. He doesn't get all lefty either, in the naive way a lot of English literature scholars do. He doesn't belabor you with oppression, repression, and how The Man always wins, which was the standard theme for a lot of literary history work in the 1980s-90s. This is largely thanks to his use of Cindia Clegg's revisionist work on press censorship in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England. These volumes are all in Google Books and so is Debora Shuger's Censorship and cultural sensibility: the regulation of language in Tudor-Stuart England (2006), which also owes something to Clegg.

There are lots of good "further reading" tips in Wheale's book too. Attractive facsimile pages of period texts and paintings are interspersed throughout the book with additional commentary.

After the introductory chapter, Wheale outlines the dynamic structure of English society from the highest to lowest positions, paying attention to the significance of gender at each level. Then he considers education after the Reformation at length--its effects and different kinds of people's access to it. He considers how women increasingly had access to learning and examines the reasons for this. Then there is extensive treatment of the the Stationers' Company (Printing/Publishing Guild) -- which still exists as The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

Wheale uses the Stationers to get into the system of publishing in England, along with the politics the Company was involved in from its founding up through the turbulent pre-Civil War/English Revolution years and after. State censorship is addressed in theory and practice in terms of attempts to regulate religion, the theaters, print in general, and the indigenous Celtic languages and literature of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Two chapters are devoted to fascinating case studies centered on the fascinating lives of John Taylor ("The Water Poet"), Dorothy Hazzard, and Lady Anne Clifford.

Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception

This book poses an eloquent challenge to the common conception (among people who study these things) that hermeneutics (philosophy of interpretation and interpretive methods) is a subset of epistemology and a purely modern field within German philosophy. Eden however traces a continuous tradition of thought on the act and art of interpretation from Republican Rome to Reformation Europe, arguing that the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is in the ancient tradition of rhetoric. Eden shows how theories of interpretation (and also semiotics) developed from from Classical rhetoric and law (Plato and Cicero) to Augustine, Erasmus, and Melanchthon.

I did some study and writing on this subject at one point, and I learned that the process of what is now called textual criticism and philology was formerly the starting point of educated people's primary education from classical times through the early modern era. Text criticism and philology involves the reconstruction of typically old texts from multiple sources whose condition, provenance, and differences make it quite difficult to establish a single "authoritative" text and call into question the sense and rationale for attempting to do so. Yet if you want to read "Chaucer," or "Beowulf," or Plato," or "Homer," you probably want to read "a" text, which you will think of as "the" text despite the immense lack of, shall we say, "version control" with the sources, editions, translations, and other redactions over time.

Back in the day (before the late 15th century) when books, scrolls, tablets, etc. were scarce and hand-produced, you had to acquire the best text you could get, often by creating it yourself or paying professionals to do that from source texts that were probably fragmented, interpolated, abridged, or poorly copied from other fragmented, interpolated, poorly copied texts. To become an educated person knowledgeable in the history and culture of the Greco-Roman world, you also had to learn to read, write, (and potentially speak) at a high level of fluency in Latin, Greek, and/or Hebrew, which was often done in the process of reading, correcting, and creating a monumental work like Virgil's Aeneid. You had to first put together a good text, usually based on bad ones. This involves historical, linguistic, and cultural analysis; it's deep interpretation, or hermeneutics. St. Augustine in his autobiography (Confessions) goes into great detail about the material, intellectual, social, and educational world of books and scrolls in late antiquity. (Brian Stock has written several amazing books about that.) This sort of scholarship went on in the imperial and Christian world as well as within the various Jewish and Islamic communities, which were all organized around the teachings and authority of their scriptures and other writings.

David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910

This book is especially important if you are interested in medieval studies, the social/cultural history of English as a discipline, medieval English philology and editing, and the future of the same. 18th-19th Century editors Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson, Walter Scott, Fredric Madden, and Frederick Furnivall all receive their own chapters, making Charlotte Brewer's book, Editing Piers Plowman: The Evolution of the Text, an excellent reading companion.

The story in a nutshell: increasingly sophisticated amateurs did the textual and historical work necessary to create a national literary canon, and then this was professionalized in disciplines and institutions. Which are now perhaps dying. Newspapers, books, and deadtree publishing in general all follow the same arc.

Considering the intriguing details of the social and material history of medieval texts from the 18th to the 20th century, Matthews raises questions about the present and future of medieval studies. In his view, medievalists have almost always been marginal, and all things considered, they now have a better situation than they ever have had--more books, and more readers.

• Amateur vs. professional writers in Shakespeare's day -- very similar to the blogger/citizen journalist issues of the present.
• Reactions to Elizabethan "bloggers"
• Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan discuss violence, alienation and the "electronic envelope."
• McLuhan's Wake (Documentary)
• The Medium is the Massage