Communication
| Discussion topics | Documents | Reading |
Discussion topics and Essay questions
- Was there a print 'revolution'?
- To what degree did print continue to interact with manuscript and oral cultures?
- How did print change people's access to information and knowledge in early modern Europe?
- To what degree did changes in communication affect different social groups?
Documents
**NOTE: Some eresources are accessible only on-campus or via off-campus proxies or the athens service**
Texts |
[Interpret] | Images |
[Interpret] |
Audio and Video links
- 'The Print Revolution': podcast discussion of David Cayley with Richard Helgerson, Bronwen Wilson, Patricia Fumerton and Julie Cumming ('The Origins of the Modern Public', part 4)
- 'Seventeenth Century Print Culture' podcast from 'BBC Radio 4 In Our Time series'
- 'Caxton and the Printing Press' podcast from 'BBC Radio 4 In Our Time series'
- 'Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press', BBC 4 Programme in 'The Medieval Season'
Secondary literature
Selected Key Texts
- E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (1979) (ebook)
- E. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983) (ebook) [abridged edition of her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change]
- A. Grafton, E. Eisensten, A. Johns, ‘American Historical Review debate: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?', American Historical Review 107 (2002) containing: A. Grafton, 'Introduction', A. Johns, 'How to Acknowledge a Revolution'; E.L. Eisenstein, 'An unacknowledged revolution revisited' and E. Eisenstein, [How to Acknowledge a Revolution]: Reply]'
- A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (2000)
- R. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe (1988)
- M. Knights and A. McShane, 'From Pen to Print - A Revolution in Communications?' in B. Kumin (ed.), The European World (2009)
Further Reading
a) Early Modern Print Culture and Communication
- Anna Bayman, 'Printing, Learning and the Unlearned' (Ch. 7) in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (2011) (ebook)
- W. Behringer, 'Communication in Historiography', special issue of German History, vol. 24, issue 3 (2006)
- A. Briggs and P. Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (2009)
- R. Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1994)
- F. de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (2006)
- B. Dooley (ed.) The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (2010)
- M.U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (1994) (ebook
- )H. Ettinghausen, How the Press Began: The Pre-Periodical Printed News in Early Modern Europe, Janus. Anexo 3 (2015), ch. 1 (downloadable ebook from Academia.edu)
- L. Febvre & H-J. Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800 (1984)
- S. Füssel, Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing (2003)
- K. Hill, ‘Anabaptism and the World of Printing in Sixteenth-Century Germany’, Past and Present 226 (2015), 79-114
- A. Johns et. al, “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011), 1392-1435
- M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (2005) (ebook)
- A. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (2010) (ebook)
- D. Raven, ‘Elizabeth Eisenstein and the Impact of Printing’, European Review of History 6, no. 2 (1999)
- J. Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (2011) (ebook), esp. chs by T. Harris, A. Bayman, H. Hackel, S. Dobranski, J. Crawford, A. McRae, P. Lake, A. McShane, J. Raymond
- B. Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (1999)
- R. Salzberg, Ephemeral City. Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (2014)
- R. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk : Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (1981
- J. Van Horn Melton, Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment: Constructing Publics in the Early Modern German Lands (2002)
- A. Walsham and J. Crick, The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 (Cambridge, 2004).
b) Oral and Manuscript cultures
- Bellingradt, Daniel, "The Early Modern City as a Resonating Box: Media, Public Opinion, and the Urban Space of the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne, and Hamburg ca. 1700" Journal of Early Modern History, 16:3 (2012): 201-240
- F. Bouza, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain, trans by Sonia Lopez and Michael Agnew (2004)
- R. Chartier, “Orality Lost: Text and Voice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Bill Bell, Philip Bennett and Jonquil Bevan (eds), Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture and Commerce (Winchester, 2000), 1–28.
- M. Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (2010) (ebook)
- J. Daybell, Early Modern Women's Letter-writing 1450-1700 (2001) (ebook)
- E. Dursteler, 'Power and Information:The Venetian Postal System in the Mediterranean, 1573-1645' (available via Academia.edu)
- K. Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation (2011)
- H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1993) (ebook)
- B. Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (2009)
- H. Schilling and S. Toth (general eds), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, Vol. 3, Correspondence and cultural exchange in Europe, 1400-1700, ed. F. Bethencourt and F. Egmond (2007)
- S. Whyman, The Pen and the People : English Letter Writers 1660-1800 (2009)
c) Literacy
- G. Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (1986)
- D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (1980) (ebook)
- H. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture (1986)
- S. Nalle, ‘Literacy and culture in early modern Castile’, Past and Present 125 (1989)
Module Forum
Module Homepage
E-Resources
Chronology
External Links
Centre for Editing Lives and Letters - project focused on digitising correspondence and letters
Early 18th century newspaper reports - sourcebook of newspaper accounts
English Broadside and Ballad Archive - digital collection of seventeenth century broadsides and ballads
French Political Pamphlets, 1547-1626 - digital collection of French political pamphlets
Publishers, Printers, and the Printed Book - resource exploring the ways printers and publishers shaped presentation of printed plays
British Book Trade Index - biographical and trade details of those who worked in the English and Welsh book trades before 1851
Women in the Book Trade - details of women's involvement in the early modern book trade
The Atlas of Early Printing - interactive map detailing the spread of prining over 15thC
Woodcuts in early printed books at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - short article