THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: THE EARLY MODERN BOOK AS SPECTACLE by PAULINE E. REID (Under the Direction of Sujata Iyengar) ABSTRACT This dissertation approaches the print book as an epistemologically troubled new media in early modern English culture. I look at the visual interface of emblem books, almanacs, book maps, rhetorical tracts, and commonplace books as a lens for both phenomenological and political crises in the era. At the same historical moment that print expanded as a technology, competing concepts of sight took on a new cultural prominence. Vision became both a political tool and a religious controversy. The relationship between sight and perception in prominent classical sources had already been troubled: a projective model of vision, derived from Plato and Democritus, privileged interior, subjective vision, whereas the receptive model of Aristotle characterized sight as a sensory perception of external objects. The empirical model that assumes a less troubled relationship between sight and perception slowly advanced, while popular literature of the era portrayed vision as potentially deceptive, even diabolical. I argue that early print books actively respond to these visual controversies in their layout and design. Further, the act of interpreting different images, texts, and paratexts lends itself to an oscillation of the reading eye between the book’s different, partial components and its more holistic message. This tension between part and whole appears throughout these books’ technical apparatus and ideological concerns; this tension also echoes the conflict between unity and fragmentation in early modern English national politics. Sight, politics, and the reading process interact to construct the early English print book’s formal aspects and to pull these formal components apart in a process of biblioclasm. INDEX WORDS: Vision, Early modern non-drama, Early modern drama, Rhetoric, Rhetorical history, Historical phenomenology, Book history, Material culture, Media, Early modern philosophy, Early modern cognition THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: THE EARLY MODERN BOOK AS SPECTACLE by PAULINE E. REID BA, Presbyterian College, 2007 MA, Clemson University, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Athens, Georgia 2014 © 2014 Pauline E. Reid All Rights Reserved THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: THE EARLY MODERN BOOK AS SPECTACLE by PAULINE E. REID Major Professor: Sujata Iyengar Committee: Michelle Ballif Fran Teague Electronic Version Approved: Julie Coffield Interim Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2014 iv DEDICATION To my family and friends, especially Willie and the Athens Area “Thinking Team” (you know who you are), for your unflagging support, laughter, and listening, as well as to my English teachers and professors past and present, who have encouraged me to read, write, think, and dream. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank my committee members, Sujata Iyengar, Michelle Ballif, and Fran Teague for their insightful feedback and intellectual guidance on this dissertation throughout its many stages. I am especially grateful to my advisor, Sujata Iyengar, for her patience with my earliest drafts, her open-mindedness towards this project’s transforming direction and her detailed response as it developed, and her faith in its future potential. Michelle Ballif generously aided me in shaping this project from a hydra-headed collection of texts into a more organized and readable project, and Fran Teague helpfully suggested several crucial sources and approaches that will help me develop this work further. Additionally, I would like to thank Kathryn Murphy for our animated and productive conversations about this project and for her in-depth feedback on early drafts of Chapters One, Two, and Three, particularly her commentary on the connections between memory and ecology in Chapter Two. I am also very thankful to the librarians and staff at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, and the Sydney Jones Library at the University of Liverpool: this project would literally not be the same without your kind assistance. I am grateful to the Rare Books School at the University of Virginia, where I received financial assistance to attend a book illustration course from Terry Belanger, whose course on book illustration processes gave me a foundation of bibliographical knowledge from which to draw. Finally, I thank the University of Liverpool English department and Eighteenth-Century Worlds seminar and the Shakespeare Association of America, in addition to my seminar leaders, fellow participants, and respondents vi at the 2013 and 2014 SAA conferences, for providing intellectually stimulating and constructive forums for me to share and exchange this research. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: A Perpetual Recollection .................................24 2 Recollection’s Limits: Poly-olbion’s Troubled Boundaries .................................................70 3 Visual Arrangement in the Work of Francis Quarles: Duplication, Duality, Duplicity .....110 4 Through the Looking-Glass: The Invention-Style Dialectic in William Caxton’s Mirrour and Description of the World and Stephen Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure .........................147 5 False Caterpillars and Taintured Nests: The Crisis of Visual Ecologies in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI ..............................................................................................................................182 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................218 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................239 1 INTRODUCTION “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known” KJV, Corinthians 13:12 “And in her other hand she fast did hold A booke, that was both signd and seald with blood, Wherein darke things were writ, hard to be understood” Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 1, Canto 10, sig. I4v My dissertation envisions the early modern English book as both a dark, hazy glass and as a fragile, fragmented material object. Renaissance readers perceived the print book as a thing that could be broken or reassembled, as well as a visual apparatus that had the power to reflect, transform, or deceive. The book was therefore culturally coded as both a thing and a medium. This view of the handpress-era book counters the conventional binary of print as linear and monologic in opposition to oral/digital media, coded as hypertextualand dialogic. This binary, featured in the influential work of media theorists and rhetoricians such as Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Jay Bolter, currently structures – and limits – the way we look at books in composition and literature classrooms, in popular conversations about media, and in our scholarship. Ironically, the dual strands of cultural nostalgia and techno-utopianism that contend with one another over the place of digital media in the academy also characterized how the print book was perceived in early modern England. Early modern writers, teachers, and intellectuals from William Caxton to the unknown author of Eikon Basilike (1649) drew on both nostalgic memories of England’s past and transformative visions of its future in the way they publicized, compiled, and arranged their books’ forms. Many early modern scholars’ studies of the book as an agent of material culture, such as those of Ann Moss, Peter Stallybrass, Randall McLeod, 2 Jeffrey Knight, and Adam Smyth, allow for a more complex understanding of the book’s formal and cultural elements. These scholars situate the print book as a complex medium in its own right. Nonetheless, this understanding has yet to fully influence outside disciplines or popular discourse. Additionally, the growing focus on the book as a “thing” of material culture in early modern studies often centers on its construction, rather than crucial moments of its fragmentation and disunity. Because of its status as both object and medium, the materiality of the book does not allow us to evade its political and interpretive problems. The early modern book is inextricable from political controversy and epistemic crisis. In this project, I explore the early modern book’s visual structure as a rhetorical and political spectacle. I argue that the current focus on the things of material culture does not constitute a way out of epistemological problems, but directly intersects with them. As Bill Brown contends in his article, “Textual Materialism,” the history of the book as a field represents a complication and deepening of textual criticism rather than a purely material “relief from theory” (24): things and their cultural or philosophical functions are not so easily separated. In a similar vein, Graham Harman draws from Husserl’s insight -- that what we encounter when we interact with a thing is not its totalizing, ontic presence, but