Reading matter: animals, vegetables, and media in Renaissance England
Date
2012
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Reading Matter explores the poetic interplay of words and matter in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century English texts. Made of recycled clothes, slaughtered animals, and felled trees, books in Renaissance England were filled with visible traces of ecological matter. Reading Matter demonstrates that the flora and fauna from which a text was made were legible, significant elements of its poetic form. Attending to the ecologies of writing and reading in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, this dissertation seeks to first recover and then to read those organic elements of Renaissance texts that both inflect meaning and indicate much about the intertwined acts of poesis and textual production in Renaissance England. I consider how plant fibers in the pages of printed and written texts were legible to Renaissance readers, how animals became illegible or invisible in paper even as their boiled down body parts allowed readers to make themselves legible in the margins of their printed books, how blots on a page make legible that which one might wish to obliterate, and how trees might be read, misread, and ventriloquized on the stage of the wooden Globe theater. ☐ More broadly, by studying the negotiations between poetics and ecology in Renaissance texts and by drawing on critical approaches such as material culture studies, book history, and historical formalism, Reading Matter seeks to outline a scholarly reading strategy that attends to the natural history of books, to both the function and the form of the organic matter used to mediate human ideas. Though focused on Renaissance texts, the project offers a methodology by which others might interrogate the textual ecologies of millennia-old Eastern palm leaf books, eighteenth-century Japanese texts, post-colonial Caribbean texts, or the latest iPad.
Description
Keywords
Textual ecology, Shakespeare, Renaissance, Papermaking, Natural history of the book, Legibility