Boxes and Books in Early Modern England
Materiality, Metaphor, Containment

Uses the idea of the box in early modern England to develop a new direction in book history and material culture.

Lucy Razzall (Author)

9781108831338, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 August 2021

290 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

In early modern England, boxes furnished minds as readily as they furnished rooms, shaping ideas about the challenges of interpretation, and negotiations of the book itself as text and material object. Engaging with recent work on material culture and the history of the book, Lucy Razzall weaves together close readings of texts and objects, from wills, plays, sermons and religious polemic, to chests, book-bindings, reliquaries and coffins. She demonstrates how the material and imaginative possibilities of the box were dynamically connected in post-Reformation England, structuring modes of thought. These early modern responses to materiality offer ways in which the discipline of book history might reframe its analysis of the material text. In tracing the early modern significance of the box as matter and metaphor, this book reveals the origins of some of the enduring habits of thought with which we still respond to people, texts and things.

1. Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England
2. The Renaissance of the Box: Metaphors of Interpretation
3. The Word in a Box: Reforming the Book
4. How to Read a Reliquary
5. 'Because This Box We Know': Embodying the Box.

Subject Areas: Material culture [JFCD], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature: history & criticism [DS]