Abstract
In 1979, Elizabeth Eisenstein challenged early modern historians to reassess the period immediately after the invention of the printing press as a time of communication revolution—one that stimulated renaissance and reformation and instituted a break with the past.1 It was no longer enough to simply understand the importance of early texts in terms of content or the processes of production; it was now time to consider the roles of those texts in cultural and ideological formations. Since then, the printing press and the revolutions of which it was a part have been scrutinized from many angles, including the process of printing, book readers and literacy rates, and the ways in which books were used. The history of the book has become a recognized field of study. Yet this field has overlooked a crucial part of early modern texts: book dedications. Following the title, book dedications were the first words in an early modern printed book, but only a few modern studies exist that are devoted entirely to dedications. When modern scholarship does address dedications, authors still favor the body of the text as having more literary importance. These underutilized sources illuminate patronage relationships and, particularly, the importance of women to the first generations of printed texts in England.
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Notes
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Clara Gebert, An Anthology of Elizabethan Dedications and Prefaces (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933);
Mary Elizabeth Brown, Dedications: An Anthology of the Forms Used from the Earliest Days of Book-Making to the Present Time (New York: Burt Franklin, 1913);
and Henry Benjamin Wheatley, The Dedication of a Book to Patron and Friend (NewYork: A.C. Armstrong, 1887).
Franklin B. Williams, Jr. Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1962).
TaraWood, “To the most Godlye, virtuous, and myghtye Princes Elizabeth”: Identity and Gender in the Dedications to Elizabeth I (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2008).
William Wizeman, SJ, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).
Jaime Goodrich, “The Dedicatory Preface to Mary Roper Clark Basset’s Translation of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History.” English Literary Renaissance 40 (2010): 301–28.
Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Nieves Baranda Leturio, “Women’s Reading Habits: Book Dedications to Female Patrons in Early Modern Spain,” in Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 19–39.
Juan Luis Vives, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London: Thomas Berthelet, ca. 1529). STC 24856.
Maria Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (Kent, UK: Croom Helm, Ltd., 1986), 13.
See Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). In this, Pettegree explicates the central control of English print.
E. Gordon Duff, The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of Westminster and London from 1476 to 1535 (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 240.
Janel Mueller, ed., Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence (Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 2011), 425.
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© 2014 Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer
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Schutte, V. (2014). “to the Illustrious Queen”: Katherine of Aragon and Early Modern Book Dedications. In: Chappell, J.A., Kramer, K.A. (eds) Women during the English Reformations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465672_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465672_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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