(Minor Field) The London Book Trade, 1500-1650

RATIONALE In this field I will explore the institutional and economic conditions that determined how books, and especially plays, circulated in manuscript and in print in early modern England. Plays were usually written and performed first within the collaborative environment of the commercial theater, but from there they could have reached early modern readers through any number of scribal and/or print distribution networks. And since every early modern book we now read and study necessarily exists because of decisions made by certain sixteenth- and seventeenth-century individuals, I believe it is vital that we understand how books and manuscripts came into the possession of printers, booksellers, and readers, and then what these individuals did with those printed and manuscript texts in their possession. Thus I plan to research not only printing history and how printers inevitably shaped their texts, but also the history of print and scribal publication, within both the trade regulations of the Stationers' Company and the legal regulations of the government. How did censorship operate, and what effect did it have on the printing and publishing of books? What were the collaborative networks that obtained in the early modern book trade? What can the careers of individual printers and booksellers tell us about the early modern book trade? How did plays travel from printing houses to the houses of readers? What will the libraries of readers and their reading practices tell us about the reception of books? And lastly, how can this type of historical research refine, but also critique, claims made about the "nature of the book" and the early modern "printing revolution" in Europe?

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