SCSC 2006 Panel report: Early Modern England in Print

<>"Early Modern England in Print: World, Self, Nation" explored the implications of print for inquiry into early-modern English religious and political thought. This graduate student panel was chaired by Gary Gibbs (History, Roanoke College). Ethan Shagan (History, Northwestern University) commented.

Matthew Thrond (History, University of Texas - Austin) presented "False Imprint as Geographic Imposture in Early Modern English Print." This paper reassessed the cultural meanings of a tactic frequently used by sixteenth-century printers either to commit forgery or to evade censorship and usually discussed as an instrument to one of these ends. It focused on two cases in which Protestant English printers identified their London lieux d’impression as Scotland. Because these imprints presented comparatively little hazard to their printers, Thrond used them to explore how printers used imposture expressively. In the first case, the printing of a piece of propaganda against Mary Stuart's sometime allies, he elaborated connections between levels of imposture, typographical and linguistic strategies, trade politics, and the contestation of “authorship” implicit in a misperformance of ethnicity. The second case,involving the Huguenot narrative of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, followed the elision of printerly "ego" through its interaction with authorial pseudonymy. Thrond argued that in this case the printer’s imposture, undertaken at the cost of his proprietary rights to the copy but without the motive of fear that characterized surreptitious print generally, put askew the rhetorical roles of printer, translator and author to reconstrue the ethical and political message of the printed book. What implications did internationality hold for the relationship between ideologies of plainness and proof, touted in the French text, and of dialogue and persuasion, suggested by the English printed book? <>Gregory A. Foran (English, University of Texas - Austin) delivered "'Incertainties now crown themselves assured:' Print, Prophecy, and Epistemology in Early Seventeenth Century English Literature." Foran's paper examined the treatment of prophetic foreknowledge and itsrelationship to the printed word, particularly in Shakespeare, Donne, and Bacon. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, English presses churned out a steady stream of prophetic literature, from cheap broadsheet ballads setting providential interpretations of miracles tomusic, to learned commentaries on Daniel and Revelation. Yet these works navigated competing imperatives; in a sense all were “visible sermons” but was their value to be felt in the spreading of the word, or in the suspicious iconicity and materiality of marketable books? Foran analyzedthe tactics by which writers expressed skepticism toward competing prophetic claims: Shakespeare's Macbeth unmasks the ideological motivations of prophetic discourse, while Donne's writings confine epistemological certainty to the afterlife, where knowledge comesunmediated by the printed word. Bacon’s dismissal of supernatural foreknowledge, which presents the problem of ambivalence toward the public world of print, points to the role of the state in his quasi-prophetic vision of scientific reform.

Anne Throckmorton (History, University of Virginia) gave her account of a polemical battle between an English Protestant and an exiled English Catholic in “Mediating Confessional Identity through History: Two Dialogues.” Sir Humphrey Lynde and John Heigham should have had nothing in common. Lynde was a knight and Heigham was a notorious smuggler of Catholic books. Yet these men who never met were preoccupied with the same historical problem: to stake a claim for their respective churches to the most ancient lineage and thereby to establish a monopoly on religious orthodoxy. This preoccupation led Lynde to write a book defending the historical legitimacy of the Protestant faith. Heigham responded to Lynde by writing his own book. <>While books and counter-books riddled with invective were not uncommon, Throckmorton argued that Lynde and Heigham were unusual because they ventured into publishing territory dominated by scholars and clergymen. Both thus bore witness in print to a crucial discontinuity of the Reformation even as, intellectually, one man was wont to minimize its novelty and the other to deny its having had a positive effect. Throckmorton analyzed how the works of both men engaged the contradictory currents of historical thinking that characterized the times, from the freighted problem of Luther’s place in the history of the Christian church to the connections between empiricism, visibility, and orthodoxy.

In the discussion that followed, commentator Shagan’s remarks centered on the question of how early modern English readers' subject positions—toward texts that raised or invoked epistemological doubts—were rhetorically constructed. Shagan responded to Thrond and Foran by urging them to articulate the problem of reader response more centrally in their arguments. How did rhetorical strategies in and of the book reach their targets—and did they? How do these results reflect early modern readers’ negotiation of disbelief and belief? He further suggested in response to Throckmorton's paper that in articulating the significance of her findings, she address recent research, by Anthony Milton among others, pointing to the paradoxical role of Protestant anti-Catholicism in undermining Puritanism. Significant audience contributions explored, for example, the tensions in Donne’s poetics of the sacred and the nuances of competition and collaboration in the London print trade.