The James Ford Lectures in British History 2027
A Society of Authors?
18 February 17:00 | South School, Examination Schools
Professor Anthony Milton (University of Sheffield)
The modern UK Society of Authors is open to ‘anyone who creates work for publication, broadcast or performance’, and there is a similar tendency among historians to restrict the laurels of authorship to those writing for publication (whether print or scribal). This lecture seeks to expand our purview of authorship to embrace a much larger body of those who composed texts for other purposes in the early modern period. It also argues the need to re-classify as authored works a much wider range of forms of writing which existed beyond the format of the printed text (even if some of them sought to imitate it).
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.
