Mattison, Julia
MWF 11:30 AM
Park Hall 0136
Tudor Literature looks at the way that literature, in its material forms in manuscripts and print books, was composed, circulated, copied, collected, and read in early modern England. During this period, the production and status of books changed as printed books flooded the market, while the English Reformation brought the written word under new scrutiny. In this evolving cultural and social context, the relationship between material books and the literature they transmitted was dynamic. How did readers imagine the status of their books? How did writers achieve a reading public? Drawing on the literature of the period, including the works of William Caxton, John Skelton, Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Elizabeth I, Margaret Roper, Isabella Whitney, Amelia Lanyer, and William Shakespeare, as well as contextualizing historical sources, this course examines books and their texts as literary, social, and cultural objects.
The topics in this course range widely from the making of early printed books and poetic miscellanies to the role of gender in the creation of an author figure. We will learn the history of bookmaking as well as early modern paleography (the study of handwriting). This course is structured around four different avenues of investigation: the connection between the rise of printing and the authors’ idea of their roles, early modern processes of translation, the importance of early modern women’s writing and book collecting, and finally the role of language and multilingualism in the creation of early printed books. Other topics that will appear throughout the course are ideas of audience, patronage, and literary groups.