Bookselling in Early Modern England

FAIN: FT-270531-20

Kirk Melnikoff
University of North Carolina, Charlotte (Charlotte, NC 28223-0001)

Archival research leading to a monograph on bookselling in early modern England.

Bringing a wide variety of print and manuscript evidence to bear, Bookselling in Early Modern England will provide the first systematic, book-length study of the shape, venues, practices, and sway of the retail side of the book trade between 1557 and 1666, from the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company to the Great Fire of London. These years featured not just the close of the Renaissance in England, an extraordinary time of social, economic, and cultural change, but also the expanding influence of the printing press as a communications technology. This project will attend to bookselling across England (not just in London but in places such as York, Oxford, Cambridge, and Norwich), and it will acknowledge agents involved in the trade that too often have been ignored such as wives, widows, itinerant sellers (e.g. chapmen and chapwomen), and merchants from a variety of different guilds.