This paper examines the ways ancient Romans divided document into segments, how graphic devices interact with textual features, how differently this operated in different contexts, and what kinds of usage were (dis)privileged by these configurations.\u202f It begins with a survey of mechanisms (e.g. blank space, sigla, columniation, font, formal page divisions) across a broad range of private and public document types.\u202f The most important distinction that emerges from this survey is that between single- and multi-user documents. The former exhibit a minimalist approach, even hostility, to formalisms, seen widely throughout Roman information culture.\u202f So they do not, for instance, separate out the unique information in otherwise formulaic documents.\u202f The forms of language used depend on ordinary syntax, rather than the more abstract structure of the document. Multi-user documents, by contrast, bring a number of devices to bear, often in combination with one another.\u202f (That the exceptional cases here are also distinguished by the presence of social and material scaffolding is itself also a known feature of Roman information culture.)\u202f These structures produced are typically \u201cflat\u201d but very granular.\u202f They seem normally to be targeted at narrowly defined effects, but the specifics of those effects vary greatly across document types.\u202f Some are meant to guarantee the integrity of individual entries.\u202f Others allow for searching out particular kinds of information, but only according to very specific search patterns.\u202f Perhaps most distinctively\u2014and this ties directly to the notion of a \u201cmulti-user document\u201d\u2014segmentation is set up to provide affordances for physical transformation of the document by subsequent users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though there are plenty of visual devices in early books, evidence for how readers engaged with them is scarce. However, there are some exciting exceptions. This keynote lecture will identify neglected evidence for modes of engagement with visual devices, including, it will propose, use of them as tools for thinking\u00a0with. It will focus on\u00a0the literary collections of\u00a0Cheshire landowner\u00a0Humphrey Newton (1466-1536) and\u00a0later members of his family.\u00a0The Newton materials include a large range of visual devices, among them a harp diagram,\u00a0a palmistry diagram, a quadrant diagram,\u00a0Veronica\u2019s veil,\u00a0a devotional sacred heart image, faces,\u00a0human figures, images of hairstyles and clothing, heraldic devices, a heraldic diagram centred on a \u2018tun\u2019, planetary charts, genealogical charts, two zodiac diagrams,\u00a0and\u00a0a plan showing the size of Christ\u2019s foot. Many of these visual devices are intriguingly sketchy and informal.\u00a0The family\u00a0also owned, and engaged with, other material relevant to visual devices including a calligraphic pattern book, a printed, illustrated book about heraldry, and an illustrated urinary, all of which survive. Despite their range and quantity, the visual aspects of the Newton collections\u00a0have attracted little previous discussion.\u00a0The\u00a0lecture will consider where Humphrey\u00a0and other household members\u00a0could have obtained models for the devices, what\u00a0their notes\u00a0tell us about how\u00a0they\u00a0understood and used them, and what these materials might contribute more broadly to our knowledge of the reception, use, and audiences for visual devices in the period.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this paper, I want to look at the uses and functions of images in early English printed texts that were aimed at popular audiences rather than more learned readers. It has been argued that the use of woodcut images was something of a genre convention in some of the early popular printed texts (see e.g. Luborsky 1987, Suhr 2011), much like the use of blackletter typeface was a marker of popular versus learned texts from the late sixteenth century until the mid-seventeenth century (see e.g. Bland 1998). For this paper, I will make use of the Early English Books Online\u202fdatabase to test this claim by investigating the illustrations found in three types of popular texts: romances, sensationalist news pamphlets and lay texts dealing with medical topics. How are images used in these texts? Are they found on the title-pages and\/or embedded in the body text? Are the images generic or specific to the texts? Are they referred to in the text? Are there differences in the uses and functions of images in the different types of texts? These are some of the questions I want to discuss in my paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bland, Mark. 1998. The appearance of the text in Early Modern England. Text 11: 91-154.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Luborsky, Ruth Samson. 1987. Connections and disconnections between images and texts: The case of secular Tudor book illustrations. Word & Image 3 (1): 74-85.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suhr, Carla. 2011. Publishing for the Masses: Early Modern English Witchcraft Pamphlets. Helsinki: Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 N\u00e9ophilologique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Prof. Andrew M. Riggsby (University of Texas): \u201cThe Segmentation of Roman Documents\u201d This paper examines the ways ancient Romans divided document into segments, how graphic devices interact with textual features, how differently this operated in different contexts, and what kinds of usage were (dis)privileged by these configurations.\u202f It begins with a survey of mechanisms (e.g. … <\/p>\n