The James Ford Lectures in British History 2027
The Impact of Hidden Authorship
4 February 17:00 | South School, Examination Schools
Professor Anthony Milton (University of Sheffield)
If anonymity and imposture were everywhere in the early modern period, how did this affect how contemporaries wrote and read books, and how might this affect historians’ readings of texts? How credulous were early modern readers compared with modern ones, and how adept were early modern authors at ventriloquizing the views of others? This lecture considers the implications of these questions for how we read early modern texts and how we assess their impact.
About the series
Hidden Authors and Invisible Books: Early Modern England in the Shadows
The mindset of early modern England can seem literally an open book when we contemplate the more than 146,000 printed titles available on the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database for the period 1473-1700. Yet this was also an age of acute textual ambiguity, when a substantial proportion of printed texts appeared either without an author’s name, or with a false or misleading one. Moreover, this was a time when an avalanche of books and other composed texts were devised and/or composed which cannot be found on EEBO, but which nevertheless often crucially shaped the nature and meaning of the printed texts that we can access. These lectures will explore the myriad ways in which authorial identities were hidden, declared, misconstrued and forgotten during this period, and the implications of this for how contemporaries and later historians have read and understood texts. They will also consider the many forgotten writers and ‘invisible’ texts which can help challenge our assumptions of what it meant to be an ‘author’ and to compose a ‘book’ in this period.
