Margaret Simon – författare

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.

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.

Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient states might actually enable self-formation.Looking at literary representations of sleep through formalism, biopolitics, Marxist theory, trauma theory, and affect theory, this volume envisions sleep states as a means of defining the human condition, both literally and metaphorically. The contributors examine a range of archival sources—including texts in early modern faculty psychology, printed and manuscript medical treatises and physicians’ notes, and printed ephemera on pathological sleep—through the lenses of both classical and contemporary philosophy. Essays apply these frameworks to genres such as drama, secular lyric, prose treatise, epic, and religious verse. Taken together, these essays demonstrate how early modern depictions of sleep shape, and are shaped by, the philosophical, medical, political, and, above all, formal discourses through which they are articulated. With this in mind, the question of form merges considerations of the physical and the poetic with the spiritual and the secular, highlighting the pervasiveness of sleep states as a means by which to reflect on the human condition. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Brian Chalk, Jennifer Lewin, Cassie Miura, Benjamin Parris, Giulio Pertile, N. Amos Rothschild, Garret A. Sullivan Jr., and Timothy A. Turner.

Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient states might actually enable self-formation.Looking at literary representations of sleep through formalism, biopolitics, Marxist theory, trauma theory, and affect theory, this volume envisions sleep states as a means of defining the human condition, both literally and metaphorically. The contributors examine a range of archival sources—including texts in early modern faculty psychology, printed and manuscript medical treatises and physicians’ notes, and printed ephemera on pathological sleep—through the lenses of both classical and contemporary philosophy. Essays apply these frameworks to genres such as drama, secular lyric, prose treatise, epic, and religious verse. Taken together, these essays demonstrate how early modern depictions of sleep shape, and are shaped by, the philosophical, medical, political, and, above all, formal discourses through which they are articulated. With this in mind, the question of form merges considerations of the physical and the poetic with the spiritual and the secular, highlighting the pervasiveness of sleep states as a means by which to reflect on the human condition. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Brian Chalk, Jennifer Lewin, Cassie Miura, Benjamin Parris, Giulio Pertile, N. Amos Rothschild, Garret A. Sullivan Jr., and Timothy A. Turner.