1st Edition
The Printer as Author in Early Modern English Book History John Day and the Fabrication of a Protestant Memory Art
This is the first book to demonstrate how mnemotechnic cultural commonplaces can be used to account for the look, style, and authorized content of some of the most influential books produced in early modern Britain. In his hybrid role as stationer, publisher, entrepreneur, and author, John Day, master printer of England’s Reformation, produced the premier navigation handbook, state-approved catechism and metrical psalms, Book of Martyrs, England’s first printed emblem book, and Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book. By virtue of finely honed book trade skills, dogged commitment to evangelical nation-building, and astute business acumen (including going after those who infringed his privileges), Day mobilized the typographical imaginary to establish what amounts to—and still remains—a potent and viable Protestant Memory Art.
1 The deluxe design of The Cosmographical Glass (1559)
2 Renovating the Catechism (1553) and Metrical Psalms (1562)
3 The grand enterprise of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563)
4 Underwriting England’s first Protestant emblem book (1568)
5 The compelling visuality of Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book (1569, 1578)
Conclusion: Making History
Biography
William E. Engel is the Nick B. Williams Professor of English at The University of the South: Sewanee. He has published seven books on literary history and applied emblematics, two previously with Routledge, Chiastic Designs (2016) and Early Modern Poetics (2016), and has contributed chapters to several Routledge volumes, including The Birth and Death of the Author (2020), The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory (2017), and Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2004).
"Engel makes a compelling, highly erudite intervention, using the lifework of John Day.... Engel's mastery of the scholarship of early modern book history, together with the other scholarly disciplines that he imaginatively brings to bear, is evidenced by the extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter. Most insightful, however, are the sustained material and iconographic analyses of Engel's primary sources.... Engel's arguments are lucid and carefully presented." --Renaissance Studies 36.4 (Sept 2022)
"...provides valuable insights into the practical and material side of collective book production in early modern England. [...] Engel's book proves to be a highly impressive and valuable contribution to the fields of authorship and material studies." --Anglistik 34.3 (2023): 256-57.
