Libraries worldwide, when they decide to join the digital age, often turn first of all to the products of a former cultural and technological revolution: print. In the process, they make accessible some of the most beautiful and most significant material artefacts of the early modern age. This page includes a showcase of such projects, as well as scholarly web-sites on the history of the book and of printing and publishing.
History of Books, Publishing and Reading
General
SHARP Web
A wide range of resources for researchers, an electronic discussion list, information on the society (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing)
HoBo
History of the Book at Oxford website: information on events related to the history of the book, directory of Oxford scholars with relevant interests, web links, among other things (Ian Gadd, Martin Moonie)
Centre for the History of the Book
‘an international and interdisciplinary centre for advanced research into all aspects of the material culture of the text’; information on current projects, links (University of Edinburgh)
Early modern focus
The Printing Press and a Changing World
tracing the development of the printed book (taken from a set of lectures), with images and bibliography (Bruce Jones)
The Early Modern Book Website
materials from a course which aims ‘to explore various aspects of the production, circulation and reception of books in early modern England’ (David Scott Kastan)
Publishing in the Renaissance
topics include papermaking, printing, the problems of printing from manuscripts, and censorship (Internet Shakespeare Editions)
An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth-century Paris
An ‘enhanced’ version of an essay (and originally, presidential address) by Robert Darnton, the distinguished cultural historian of early modern France. As well as the text, it has maps and (translated) police reports corresponding to the places shown, images, songs (texts and translations, as well as performances for those with the software), an online discussion.
The Impact of Print 1500-1850
Aimed primarily at students, this offers a wealth of primary source extractss with well-written commentaries and introductions by staff at the University of East Anglia (Virtual Norfolk)
Online Exhibits and Presentations
General
Early Modern Printing 1480-1707
Has much of interest including incunabula, travel books, histories, bibles, herbals (Washington State University)
Books, Printers and the Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe
Site divided into four sections: ‘making the book’; ’scholarly publications’; ‘religious works’; ’secular books’ (Bryn Mawr College Library)
The Art of the Book
(University of Liverpool Library)
The Earliest Books
The Gutenberg Bible
the daddy of ‘em all: here are the BL’s two copies, digitised, indexed, fully searchable (both copies at once or alternately), and you just click on the image to get an enlarged version. (British Library)
(And you might want to join in the debate over whether Gutenberg really did invent movable type or not: What did Gutenberg invent?)
The Infancy of Printing
Includes sections on Gutenberg and the transition from manuscript to print, and on the world of the Renaissance print shop by Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Golda Meir Library)
The First Scottish Books
From the first printing press in Scotland, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, small books containing mainly poetry (National Library of Scotland)
Aldus Pius Manutius: Publisher of Renaissance Venice
The work of this late fifteenth/early sixteenth-century Venetian printer (Simon Fraser University Library)
Printing in the Renaissance and Reformation (Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina)
Print Cultures
Cultural Readings: Colonization and Print in the Americas
Explores Europeans’ attempts ‘to “read” native cultures of the Americas’ (and vice versa); six thematic sections, including ‘promotion and possession’, ‘viewers and the viewed’, ‘colonial fictions, colonial histories’ (University of Pennsylvania Library)
Chez la Veuve: Women Printers in Great Britain 1475-1700
The diverse output of early modern women printers; a good introduction followed by sections on educational books, religion and moral instruction, specialist printers (such as music), popular literature, and women involved in politically contentious printing and publishing (University of Illinois Library)
Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture
A selection from the manuscripts, rare books and maps in the Vatican Library, dating from the fifteenth century, presenting ‘the untold story of the Vatican Library as the intellectual driving force behind the emergence of Rome as a political and scholarly superpower during the Renaissance’ (Library of Congress)
Restoration Print Culture
A ‘multimedia presentation’, much of it ballad material (Francis Steen)
Early Eighteenth-century Newspaper Reports
An online ’sourcebook’, at present rapidly growing: it contains transcripts of reports on crimes, love and marriage, popular amusements, health and medicine, amongst others. Fascinating on each of the topics and as an introduction to the early newspapers (Rictor Norton)
Early Newspapers
This site is the work of an avid newspaper collector, largely, but not solely, focusing on early American newspapers (HistoryBuff)
William Hogarth and Eighteenth-century Print Culture
Topics include ‘reading the body’, ‘politics in prints’, ‘professional women’ (Northwestern University)
Accent on Images: the Language of Illustrated Books
15th and 16th centuries
18th century
(Claremont Colleges Libraries)
Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe
online exhibit, accompanying a series of lectures by Roger Chartier which examined ‘the relationship between plays in performance and plays in print and the often tortuous transmission of texts from the theatre to the printing house in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (British Library)
The clandestine universe of the early eighteenth century
An illustrated article about ‘clandestine’ books and manuscripts, a ’shadowy world of hidden printing presses, coteries of bold talkers, and aspirants to living by the fruits of one’s pen’ which, the author argues, nurtured the early stages of the Enlightenment (Margaret Jacob)
The Damned Art
online exhibit of books relating to the history of witchcraft and demonology (University of Glasgow Library)
