The James Ford Lectures in British History 2027
The Ubiquity of Hidden Authorship
21 January 17:00 | South School, Examination Schools
Professor Anthony Milton (University of Sheffield)
This lecture discusses the remarkable abundance of early modern printed works in which the author’s precise identity is hidden, and the multiple purposes that anonymity could serve. We will see that it was not necessarily a ‘weapon of the weak’, but was part of a toolkit that most people (including the authorities) used at one point or another. Ambiguous authorship was a key but unstable feature of the early modern intellectual landscape, and one that arguably problematizes the current tendency to urge the analysis of ‘authorial intention’ as the key interpretative task for historians of ideas.
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.
