Early modern books were not stable or settled outputs of the press
but dynamic shape-changers, subject to reworking, re-presentation,
revision, and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history
of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were
re-packaged, redirected, and transformed in ways that their
original authors might hardly recognize. Processes of editing,
revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation,
translation, and posthumous publication resulted in a textual
elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between
text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and
print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author's
name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book's identity or
contents. This collection brings together original essays by an
international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history
that explore these various kinds of textual inconstancy and
variability. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and
technological aspects of book production and distribution
(discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller
John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial
incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also
in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their
meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a
variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early
modern religious, political, philosophical, and scholarly trends
and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of
publication including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse
miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy, and of
authors including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, John Dryden,
Thomas Burnet, John Tillotson, Henry Maundrell, Jonathan Swift,
Samuel Richardson, John Wesley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The
result is a richly diverse collection that demonstrates the
embeddedness of the book trade in the cultural dynamics of early
modernity.
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