Tudor Books and Readers: 1485-1603

FAIN: FS-50339-13

James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA 22807-0001)
Mark Rankin (Project Director: March 2013 to January 2015)

A five-week seminar for sixteen college and university faculty on the history of book production and reading in the Tudor era, to be held at three locations: Antwerp, London, and Oxford.

Over the course of five weeks in 2014, this overseas program would investigate the physical construction of books and the nature of reading during the era of the Tudor monarchs (1485-1603). We take an expansive view of this epoch in that we look back to the origins of English printing when William Caxton, the dominant force during the formative period of the Tudor book trade, founded his press at Westminster, just outside London, in 1476. We would give thought to how Tudor book culture gave rise to three vitally important publications during the years following the end of the Tudor dynasty: the King James Bible and the collected works of the best-known Tudor authors, William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, the epic poet of Elizabethan England. This proposed seminar would investigate the development of early English print and reading culture, book production technologies during the era of the hand press, and the history of the book and the history of reading as academic disciplines.