Description
Book SynopsisJeffrey Todd Knight excavates the culture of book collecting and compiling in early modern England, examining how the pervasive practice of mixing texts, authors, and genres into single bindings defined Renaissance ways of thinking and writing.
Trade Review"
Bound to Read is an enormously learned and yet always energetically written account of book collecting practices in early modern England. Making available to our view a material history of early modern books that later practices of text collecting and transmission ignored, or worse, obliterated, Knight brilliantly challenges a set of widely held and long-cherished assumptions about reading practices, about the literature we read, and about the literary histories we depend upon." * David Scott Kastan, Yale University *
"
Bound to Read is meticulously researched, absolutely stuffed with new facts about fascinating old books, elegantly written, cogently argued, and a genuinely new contribution to the history of the book." * Alexandra Gillespie, University of Toronto *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Compiling Culture
PART I. READERS
Chapter 1. Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries
Chapter 2. Making Shakespeare's Books: Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab
PART II. WRITERS
Chapter 3. Transformative Imitation: Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson's Hekatompathia
Chapter 4. Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne's Essays
Chapter 5. The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532-1623
Epilogue: "Collated and Perfect"
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
