Volume 4 of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain covers the years between the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557 and the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. In a period marked by deep religious divisions, civil war and the uneasy settlement of the Restoration, printed texts - important as they were for disseminating religious and political ideas, both heterodox and state approved - interacted with oral and manuscript cultures. These years saw a growth in reading publics, from the developing mass market in almanacs, ABCs, chapbooks, ballads and news, to works of instruction and leisure. Atlases, maps and travel literature overlapped with the popular market but were also part of the project of empire. Alongside the creation of a literary canon and the establishment of literary publishing there was a tradition of dissenting publishing, while women's writing and reading became increasingly visible.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain

The Latin trade

This book deals with the De Bry collection of voyages, one of the most monumental publications of Early Modern Europe. It analyzes the textual and iconographic changes the De Bry publishing family made to travel accounts describing Asia, Africa and the New World. It discusses this editorial strategy in the context of the publishing industry around 1600, investigating the biography of the De Brys, the publications of the Frankfurt firm, and the making of the collection, as well as its reception by Iberian inquisitors and seventeenth-century readers across the Old World. The book draws on a wide variety of primary sources, and is hence important for historians, book historians, and art historians interested in the development of Europe's overseas empires.

The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages, 1590-1634

Religious books, in conventional terms, are found to have been the single most important component of the publishing trade. In England, apart from oral communication, there was a mass of both polemical and devotional material which, if published, was published scribally, surviving only in manuscript. Some of the most active preachers of the age never appeared in print, or never in their lifetimes. A large part of the story of indoctrination concerns English Bibles, and there is no better case study of the interaction of public and private interest, commerce and edification, than the English Bible. Many of the Catholic books of the devotional writers included prefaces addressed to the impartial Christian reader, and not just to the Catholics. The use of a commonplace book was typical of university-trained readers, but Nicholas Byfield's Directions for the private reading of the Scriptures, first published in 1617 or 1618, was an attempt to make the practice more widespread among lay Bible readers.

Religious publishing in England 1557–1640

The English provinces

From Tudor miscellany lyrics to Johnson's masques and Shakespeare's plays, this book presents Elizabethan lyrics in their musical contexts in madrigals, ayres, consort songs, dances and royal entertainments. A detailed study of Shakespeare's songs links form to function; and Sidney's theory is compared with his practice. The first book of comparable scope for forty years, it correlates recent musicological research and literary sholarship, and provides many fresh insights. Scholars and students of Renaissance literature and music, all those interested in the relationship between Renaissance poetry or drama and music.

Patricia Thomson

Papers

Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music

Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists

George Sand and the Victorians: Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century England

Sidney's Poetry. Contexts and Interpretations

An Elizabethan Sonnet Problem. Shakespeare's Sonnets, Daniel's Delia and Their Literary Background