Uses the collections of ephemera popular in the late seventeenth century as a way to understand the reading habits, publishing strategies and thought processes of late Stuart print culture. Cheap' genres of print such as ballads, almanacs and playing cards were part of everyday life in seventeenth-century society - ubiquitous and disposable. Toward the end of the century, however, individuals began to preserve, arrange and display articles of cheap print within carefully curated collections. What motivated this sudden urge to preserve the ephemeral? This book answers that question by analysing the social, political and intellectual factors behind the formation of cheap print collections, how these collections were used by their owners, and what this activity can tell us about 'print culture' in the early modern period. The book's central collector is John Bagford (1650-1715), a shoemaker who became a dealer of prints and other 'curiosities' to important collectors of the time such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane and Robert Harley. Bagford's own rich and largely unstudied collection is afascinating study in its own right and his position at the centre of commercial and intellectual networks opens up a whole world of collecting. This world encompasses later Stuart partisan political culture, when modern parties and the 'public sphere' first emerged; the 'New Science' and 'virtuoso culture' with its milieu of natural philosophers, antiquaries and artisans; the aural and visual landscape of marketplaces, streets and alehouses; and developing practices of record-keeping, life-writing and historical writing during the long eighteenth century.

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating—the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.

Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print bringstogether established and emerging scholars of early modern print culture to explore the dynamic relationships between words and illustrations in awide variety of popular cheap print from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. While ephemerawas ubiquitous in the period, it is scarcely visible to us now, because only a handful of the thousands of examplesonce in existence have been preserved. Nonetheless, single-sheet printed works, as well as pamphlets and chapbooks, constituted a central part of visual and literary culture, and were eagerly consumed by rich and poor alike in Great Britain, North America, and on the Continent. Displayed in homes, posted in taverns and other public spaces, or visible in shop windows on city streets, ephemeral works used sensational means to address themes of great topicality. The English broadside ballad, of central concern in this volume, grew out of oral culture; the genre addressed issues of nationality, history, gender and sexuality, economics, and more. Richly illustrated and well researched, Studiesin Ephemera offers interdisciplinary perspectives into how ephemeralworks reached their audiences through visual and textual means. It also includes essays that describe how collections of ephemera are categorized in digital and conventional archives, and how our understanding of these works is shaped by their organization into collections. This timely and fascinating book will appeal to archivists, and students and scholars in many fields, including art history, comparative literature, social and economic history, and English literature. Contributors: Georgia Barnhill, Theodore Barrow, Tara Burk, Adam Fox, Alexandra Franklin, Patricia Fumerton, Paula McDowell, Kevin D. Murphy, Sally O’Driscoll, Ruth Perry

This richly illustrated and interdisciplinary study examines the commercial mediation of royalism through print and visual culture from the second half of the seventeenth century. The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere. Koscak considers the affective subjectivities made possible by loyalist commodities; how texts and images responded to anxieties about representation at moments of political uncertainty; and how individuals decorated, displayed, and interacted with pictures of rulers. Despite the fractious nature of party politics and the appropriation of royal representations for partisan and commercial ends, print media, images, and objects materialized emotional bonds between sovereigns and subjects as the basis of allegiance and obedience. They were read and re-read, collected and exchanged, kept in pockets and pasted to walls, and looked upon as repositories of personal memory, national history, and political reverence.

This book provides a new perspective on book history, with essays from leading scholars showing how communities of writers, publishers and readers across early modern Europe shaped the consumption of print.

This volume addresses two key questions: 1) How can ephemera be understood as a critical category of literary and historical inquiry? and 2) How can ephemera serve pedagogical purposes in the classroom? Each of the essays in Encountering Ephemera 1550-1800: Scholarship, Performance, Classroom addresses these questions by exploring a diverse range of materials as well as periods. The essays collectively work to define ephemera as a complex and multi-faceted critical category in terms of its literary, cultural, and historical significance. Each contributor works to complicate the traditional binary opposition between the ephemeral/transitory and the canonical/enduring, in part by recognizing how attending to the material processes of textual production, transmission, and dissemination highlights the potential instability and mutability of texts (and textual relationships), whether discussing broadside ballads or coterie poetry. By shifting the focus to the processes by which texts are constructed and construed, the prospect of recognizing any text (regardless of its canonical status) as a static and fixed entity becomes difficult and, in turn, the ephemeral qualities that define and constitute the text’s materiality come more sharply into focus. Along these lines, the “ephemeral spaces” across and between discourses – what might be called the “ephemera of cultural poetics” – play a key role in shaping literary texts. Thus, early modern and eighteenth century ephemera constitute both the material (texts not intended to last or designed for limited cultural life) and the process (fleeting and transitory aspects of cultural production). Whether discussing the circulation of cheap print, the performative traces of music and gesture in Shakespeare’s plays, or the diffuse cultural influences that both surround and pervade literary texts, attending to ephemeral matters underscores the dynamic unfixity of early modern and eighteenth century cultural practices.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

"Published in association with BSECS, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies"

In this book, Carl Goldstein examines the print culture of seventeenth-century France through a study of the career of Abraham Bosse, a well-known printmaker, book illustrator, and author of books and pamphlets on a variety of technical subjects. The consummate print professional, Bosse persistently explored the endless possibilities of print – single-sheet prints combining text and image, book illustration, broadsides, placards, almanacs, theses, and pamphlets. Bosse had a profound understanding of print technology as a fundamental agent of change. Unlike previous studies, which have largely focused on the printed word, this book demonstrates the extent to which the contributions of an individual printmaker and the visual image are fundamental to understanding the nature and development of early modern print culture.

Books and Readers in Early Modern England examines readers, reading, and publication practices from the Renaissance to the Restoration. The essays draw on an array of documentary evidence—from library catalogs, prefaces, title pages and dedications, marginalia, commonplace books, and letters to ink, paper, and bindings—to explore individual reading habits and experiences in a period of religious dissent, political instability, and cultural transformation. Chapters in the volume cover oral, scribal, and print cultures, examining the emergence of the "public spheres" of reading practices. Contributors, who include Christopher Grose, Ann Hughes, David Scott Kastan, Kathleen Lynch, William Sherman, and Peter Stallybrass, investigate interactions among publishers, texts, authors, and audience. They discuss the continuity of the written word and habits of mind in the world of print, the formation and differentiation of readerships, and the increasing influence of public opinion. The work demonstrates that early modern publications appeared in a wide variety of forms—from periodical literature to polemical pamphlets—and reflected the radical transformations occurring at the time in the dissemination of knowledge through the written word. These forms were far more ephemeral, and far more widely available, than modern stereotypes of writing from this period suggest.