Two networks transformed the early modern world. The first was the Iberian network of discoverers and conquerors that helped usher in an age of European world domination and colonialism. The second was facilitated by a new technology, printing, which helped unleash the huge religious and political disruption we know as the Reformation. What Niall Ferguson describes as a “religious virus that came to be known as Protestantism” disrupted an ancient ecclesiastical hierarchy, fractured into many pieces Europe’s Catholic Christianity, and ushered in a long era of violent conflict. This chapter investigates religious networks within the Lutheran, Reformed, and Radical wings of the Reformation and highlights the formation, evolution, suppression, and ultimate survival of the Jesuit Order as a classic transnational network within Catholic Christianity.

Historians of Christianity, even when innovative in theory and method, have mostly written within national, denominational, or institutional frameworks. Yet many of the most important changes and developments within Christianity have been transnational in scope, trans-denominational in character, and not easily contained within institutional or hierarchical structures. What difference would it make to reimagine the history of Christianity in terms of transnational networks, nodal junction boxes of encounter and transmission, and a greater sense of the core memes and messages of religious traditions and expressions? That is the principal question to be explored in the following chapters.

The conclusion, Victorian Ignorance, places the history that Selling Sexual Knowledge has traced into conversation with the emergence of a new history of sexual knowledge at the dawn of the twentieth century. While considering how well publishing activities that the book explores would have served Victorian readers, it argues that the ways Victorians discussed their reading experiences evince what the historian Kate Fisher has called an “epistemology of sexual ignorance,” in which sexual knowledge is thought of as a set of facts that must be learned through interaction with an expert. It further argues that commercial and rhetorical practices explored in the book not only encouraged this way of conceptualizing sexual knowledge, but helped foster the emergence of a historical narrative about Victorian censorship that would serve as a powerful justification for sexual-scientific research and sex reform movements in the twentieth century. At the same time, this narrative would obfuscate the extent to which Victorians enjoyed access to sexual information in the new age of mass print.

This chapter delves into the production of scientific knowledge and its practice within the expansive temporal and geographical scope of the Ottoman Empire. Organized chronologically into two main sections, the chapter portrays the foundational scientific institutions and conventions while also introducing the textual and material facets of scientific enterprises. Through this focused lens, the chapter traces the enduring and evolving elements of scientific pursuits and their sociopolitical implications from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

This chapter addresses early modern England’s ‘useful’ genres of plant writing – printed herbals and gardening manuals. As they developed in printed formats across the sixteenth century, received by enthusiastic users and consumers, both genres of plant literature promised to improve the lives of their readers, bringing them pleasure and profit and guiding them in the cultivation, identification, appreciation, and therapeutic application of vegetable beings. This chapter explores more deeply exactly what it meant for these works to be ‘useful’, and the various uses to which they were put, through a consideration of their bibliographic and literary form, extant evidence of readerly engagement, and their long-reaching effects when it came to cultural and scientific authority and the development of botany as a colonial science.

Taking the nationalisation of the telegraph in 1870 as a starting point, this chapter considers how information was understood as immaterial yet depended upon a complex material infrastructure. The first section addresses telegraphy as a technology of the present, enabling people to experience new kinds of contemporaneity, while, at the same time, ensuring that it remained stubbornly uneven. The second turns to text, exploring how it was made suitable for transmission by new information technologies and the new kinds of workers employed to process it. The third looks at the print archive. To ensure the right information could be readily retrieved, systems of bibliographic control were developed to manage the material from which it derived. Throughout, I return to Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). Trollope’s novel is deeply interested in the contemporary, attending to the technologies that structure the moment and those that make that moment pass.

In this chapter, I show how the urge to monumentalize the book-bound novel in the face of cultural and technological transformations inspires a range of strategies to make literature anew. Starting from contested notions of the “end of the book” and then examining several “renaissances,” I explore the resilience of paper-based literature in the era of its foretold death. First, I examine how comparative literary studies has responded to the shift from analog to digital by developing new frameworks and critical tools. Then, I zoom in on recent innovations in, and reinventions of, analogue literary practices, in book art and book design as well as literary fiction. I end with a reflection on a specific form of bookishness that emphasizes the novel’s size and scale, and thus reinvents it as monumental. On all these levels, we will see, the digital has brought the book, and the novel as the literary art form bound by the book, into sharper focus.

This chapter treats the design considerations for dictionaries as printed books, the transition from print to digital formats in the thirty years around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the considerations for digital and online formats. Section 1: Customer-focused decisions about format, size, and extent of physical dictionaries; the mapping of book and page components of printed dictionaries; the mutual influence of editorial and design choices; and the advent of digital composition and production for printed formats. Section 2: Factors driving the choice of digital versus print formats for changing customer needs; functional challenges of converting printed dictionaries to digital; design considerations for online interfaces, including both technical performance and user experience.

This chapter surveys the numerous publishing formats of postwar story-manga and analyzes the way in which these formats have affected its visual and narrative structure beyond editorial choices or reader expectations. Starting from obsolete manga-centric publishing media like akahon and rental comics by minor publishers, the chapter moves on to introduce how monthly children’s magazines by major publishers changed into weekly and monthly manga magazines, which are still present in the market. I address Republishing practices and formats like pocketbooks and complete editions, each possessing different characteristics for different purposes. How digital comics have changed the way of providing and consuming manga content, giving way to new formats like webtoons is introduced. Finally, franchising, which has been raising manga sales even when the market has to battle diverse forms of rivaling entertainment and declining birth rates, is highlighted.

As Chapter 5 details, the theatrical promise of courtliness, prestige, and technological innovation attracted talented men and women who sought careers as dramatists. The duopoly, however, severely limited their opportunities, as did the ever growing backlog of old plays. After 1682, only one company remained to which they could sell their product, and overburdened payrolls consumed budgets that could otherwise be spent on new play development. Dramatists thus found themselves in the contradictory position of, on the one hand, affecting the gentility necessary for belonging to this exclusive cultural enterprise, and, on the other, chasing after diminishing opportunities like any common hack. And, finally, the theatre’s embrace of luxury and innovation made scarce another limited resource over which dramatists now competed: sumptuous scenic effects to adorn their scripts. By the end of the century, so deeply felt was disaffection with working conditions that few literary-minded writers took up drama as a profession, thereby establishing a pattern that would continue well into the eighteenth century.

This chapter provides a helpful primer to Swift’s relationship with the early eighteenth-century book trade. The first section focuses on the formats, sizes, prices, and lengths of Swift’s works, most of which were first published separately and not in anthologies. The second section examines imprints, in particular those of ‘trade publishers’, and how these imprints could be used as cover for anonymous and risky publications. The third and final section looks at the issue of copyright and how it shaped Swift’s decisions when publishing in London and Dublin. As the chapter shows, Swift showed loyalty to book-trade members who showed loyalty to him, including those in Ireland.

This chapter assembles information about the UK’s supply of news in order to estimate the amount and variety of news available. Though information is sometimes limited or absent, it maps out the number and the nature of TV, radio, print and online news sources to provide an account of the news landscape. It then examines the content and quality of the news sources available, comparing commercial and public service news and misunderstandings about their bias. The importance of internal pluralism is discussed.

This chapter examines how Byron draws attention to the material forms in which his works are mediated, beginning with Beppo, which ends because ‘My pen is at the bottom of a page’. It suggests that, in the artistic process of composition, Byron pondered questions that have concerned later critics and theorists from Walter Greg and F. W. Bateson to René Wellek and Nelson Goodman. By attending to the ways in which Byron marked his manuscript page, the chapter suggests that he thought of the literary work as having a distinctive, layered ontology. It situates his implied understanding of the nature of the literary work in relation to that of recent textual scholars such as John Bryant, Peter Shillingsburg, Jack Stillinger, and Paul Eggert. Byron wrote with a keen attention to the materiality of pens, ink, and paper, but he was also well aware that his poems could become mass-produced printed commodities. He was therefore concerned with how remediation changed the effect of a poem, and even its meaning, as effects specific to manuscript did not translate into print. Beppo provides a case in point, as it imagines itself as script, print, and voice by turns, or sometimes all at once.

This chapter contextualizes narrative drawing, first identifying the types of drawing that are specific to comics. It proposes that the comics medium intervenes in the long history of drawing, by introducing polygraphy as a recurrent feature of comics. Referring to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony (or multiple voices) in the novel, polygraphy accounts for the techniques of accumulating diverse graphic indices of the labor and ideas of drafters and comics producers and distributors. The chapter shows how polygraphy produces comics, considering the work of William Hogarth, Katsushika Hokusai, Rodolphe Töpffer, Marie Duval, George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Osamu Tezuka. Through this cast of creators, the chapter also foregrounds important moments in comics history such as the boom in periodical print in the nineteenth century, the influence of acting and performance practices, and, later, movie. This chapter equips readers with the necessary tools to understand the fundamental means of visualizing stories in comics – drawing – and offers a comics history contextualized through relevant developments in popular visual and print culture.

Despite the dependence of the American colonies on London for their supply of books and their literary style in the eighteenth century, literature functioned as a crucial catalyst of revolutionary fervor and national identity in the 1770s. This mobilisation of radical republican sentiment occurred both in the realm of non-fiction prose (most famously through Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense) and in poetry, from irreverent ‘carrier addresses’ published in local newspapers to high-toned ‘satires of the times’. The career of African American poet Phillis Wheatley offers a poignant example of the way British literary prestige and pro-revolutionary political expression were at cross-purposes during the revolutionary period. Writers like Wheatley unsettle the dominant cultural nationalist paradigm of American literary history, which sees political independence paving the way for American literary and cultural independence by the mid-nineteenth century, and instead point towards alternative conceptions of freedom in the imperial Atlantic world.