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Inscription and Erasure--Now in Paperback

Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century
Roger Chartier
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
224 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3995-9 | $55.00 | £36.00
Paper 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2046-9 | $22.50 | £15.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

Roger Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing or of publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends.

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Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Printing the Middle Ages--Now Available

Printing the Middle Ages
Siân Echard
344 pages | 6 x 9 | 83 illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4091-7 | $65.00 | £42.50
A volume in the Material Texts series

Printing the Middle Ages focuses on the life of medieval texts after the Middle Ages, tracing the impact of the books that transmitted medieval literature to the English-speaking world, showing how these books imitated and refashioned the medieval past for later audiences.

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Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here. 

Marriage and Violence--Now Available

Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy
Frances E. Dolan
248 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4075-7 | $47.50 | £31.00

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what--or who--must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We have inherited from early modern England a model of marriage, she contends, so flawed that its logical consequence is conflict.

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Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Death of Reading Greatly Exaggerated?

Reading, Not So Dead After All, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, gives a snapshot of the blog battles surrounding the NEA's "To Read or Not to Read" report.

Jacob in the LA Times

Penn Press author Margaret C. Jacob recently shared her knowledge of eighteenth century literature with The Los Angeles Times. In a recent article on "Ceremonies and Religious Customs of All the Peoples of the World," Jacob describes early attempts to ban that particular document.

Mark This! Used Books is "lively and learned"

In the December/January Bookforum, reviewer Anthony Grafton calls William H. Sherman's Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England "learned and lively. . . the first comprehensive account of the ways of readers in the last age when books held, or seemed to hold, the answers to all of the most profound questions."

The full review is available at bookforum.com.

Used Books--Now Available

Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England
William H. Sherman
280 pages | 6 x 9 | 36 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4043-6 | $45.00 | £29.50
A volume in the Material Texts series

"Sherman's work is indispensable, offering and demanding a complete revision of standard notions of reading in favor of a much more capacious concept of the 'use' of books before the modern era . . . . An essential book."--Stephen Orgel, Stanford University

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Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg at ellenpt@pobox.upenn.edu.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Reading Women--Now Available

Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
Edited by Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly
280 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus.
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4054-2 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the Material Texts series

"Destined to become a landmark study and a fixture in the bibliographies of feminist and textual scholars, literary and social historians, students of the English Renaissance and the American Republic alike."--William Sherman, University of York

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Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World--Now Available

Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World
Catherine M. Chin
280 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2007 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4035-1 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series

"Breathtaking both in the scope of its intellectual ambition and in its actual accomplishment. . . . Classicists, students of Christianity, and anyone remotely interested in the formation of the 'Western' tradition in art and literature will find in this study a sobering reminder of the importance of late antiquity and Christian culture in the creation of what everyone now refers to as the classical past."--Richard Lim, Smith College

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Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Shamelessly Disorderly Reading

If your leisure reading habits have been a bit haphazard lately, you are in good company. In a recent essay for Common-place, Matthew P. Brown shamelessly admits to grazing magazines and a rising stack of half-read books. He argues that there may be a method to this reading madness.

I should feel shame about my disorderly reading, but I don't. In fact, I'd like to defend it as a reading practice of depth, rather than superficiality. Disorderly reading mimics the mind's generative activity of thought and discovery, those instances where you know something is happening but you don't know what it is. We might better call it discontinuous or nonlinear reading and acknowledge its long history, a history that reveals the fact that nonlinear reading lends itself to routinized procedure as well.

Brown is the author of The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England. The rest of his defense of disorderly reading, along with his thoughts on nonlinear reading practices past and present, can be found in the Common Reading section of the October volume of www.common-place.org.