The Multimaterial Imagination in Early Modern Books

By the seventeenth century in England, the printed book had become the dominant medium for circulating information. Yet printed books frequently drew on the rhetoric of other textual technologies to shape and communicate their contents. Just as contemporary screens and e-readers rely on print-based metaphors such as page turning and indexing, early modern books adapted features associated with seemingly outmoded or distinct forms, including scrolls, public inscriptions, manuscript compilations, monuments, and inscribed objects. Through these adaptations, authors and printers expanded the communicative possibilities of print, using it to address emerging cultural concerns such as women's authority in scripture, memorialization, the social exchange of poetry, and the language of colonial trade. The Multimaterial Imagination in Early Modern Books rewrites the history of the English printed book through its engagement with these alternative textual forms. Early modern readers encountered writing across a diverse material landscape that included inscribed jewellery, manuscript miscellanies, public monuments, scrolls, rolls, and woodcut prints. Authors and printers drew on the authority, intimacy, permanence, and social meanings associated with these media, incorporating them into the conceptual framework of the printed codex. Rather than replacing earlier textual forms, print absorbed and reconfigured them. Scrolls, inscriptions, and other media persisted within books as imaginative and rhetorical resources, gaining new functions through the portability, durability, and wide circulation of print. In tracing these exchanges, Margaret Simon reveals the remarkable adaptability of the early modern book. Through references to non-book technologies, printed texts became conceptually hybrid forms that connected past media traditions to new social, religious, and commercial purposes. As Margaret Simons shows, multimateriality emerges not simply as a way of thinking about textual technologies, but as a means of understanding the broader economies, networks, and cultural practices through which texts acquired meaning and authority.