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From Print Error to Human Errancy in Print

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Renaissance Responses to Technological Change
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Abstract

Part I, “The Comedy of Errata,” disinters the clash and periodic carnivalism between humanist drives and typographic culture. For the sake of focus and cohesion, Nayar constricts herself to the Renaissance culture of print error. With even more ontological breadth, Nayar attends to the period’s growing, print-induced potential for rhetorical errancy, including pitched polemics, plagiarism, and even a perceived errancy of the English language itself. “From Print Error to Human Errancy in Print” provides, in this way, a necessary build-up of context—a kind of ethnographic collation of print error—suitable and necessary for engaging with Chap. 3.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, “Paperworlds: Imagining the Renaissance Computer,” in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (London: Routledge, 2000), 1.

  2. 2.

    Ibid.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 12.

  4. 4.

    Cecile M. Jagodzinksi, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 7.

  5. 5.

    Ibid.

  6. 6.

    David R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscripts and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 134. Carlson suggests that, for early English printers, humanism was the perceived stigma (Ibid.).

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 12, 77–78.

  8. 8.

    Iván Jaksić, “Don Quijote’s Encounter with Technology,” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 14, no. 1 (1994): 89.

  9. 9.

    Carlson, English, 100.

  10. 10.

    Desiderius Erasmus, “Catalogue of His Works/Catalogus lucubrationum” [1523], in The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 47.

  11. 11.

    Carlson, English, 84.

  12. 12.

    Anthony T. Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 43–44.

  13. 13.

    Quoted in Ibid., 44.

  14. 14.

    Grafton, Forgers, 45.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.

  17. 17.

    Ibid.

  18. 18.

    H.S. Bennett, quoted in Wendy Wall, “Authorship and the Material Conditions of Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 74.

  19. 19.

    Victoria Sancho Lobis, “Printed Drawing Books and the Dissemination of Ideal Male Anatomy in Northern Europe,” in The Nude and the Norm in Early Modern Low Countries, eds. Karolien De Clippel et al. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 51.

  20. 20.

    Richard de Bury, The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury [1473], trans. E.C. Thomas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925), 31–32.

  21. 21.

    Geoffrey Chaucer, The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933), 628.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 563.

  23. 23.

    Lothar Müller, White Magic: The Age of Paper, trans. Jessica Spengler (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014), 84.

  24. 24.

    Desiderius Erasmus, The Adages of Erasmus, ed. William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 226.

  25. 25.

    Müller, White, 84. Such revising was applicable, too, to early modern manuscripts, as in the case of circulated handwritten verse. See Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 191.

  26. 26.

    William Thynne, “Sir B. Turke’s Dedication to Thynne’s Chaucers Workes,” in Francis Thynne’s Animadversions upon Speght’s first (1598 a.d.) Edition of Chaucers Workes (London: N. Trubner & Co., 1876), xxiv–xxv.

  27. 27.

    David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 90.

  28. 28.

    Ann Blair, “Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, eds. Sabrina Alcorn Baron et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 27.

  29. 29.

    Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10.

  30. 30.

    Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: The British Library, 2011), 48.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 32.

  32. 32.

    Quoted in Ibid., 79.

  33. 33.

    McKitterick, Print 122–123.

  34. 34.

    Ibid.

  35. 35.

    Grafton, Culture, 108.

  36. 36.

    Blair, “Errata,” 27.

  37. 37.

    Seth Lerer, “Errata, Print, Politics and Poetry in Early Modern England,” in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42.

  38. 38.

    Grafton, Culture, 126.

  39. 39.

    Quoted in Ibid., 80.

  40. 40.

    Quoted in Ibid., 146–147.

  41. 41.

    I hesitate and yet—given this chapter’s theme—need to acknowledge that I have lost the original source for this quotation.

  42. 42.

    Jasper Heywood, preface to The seconde tragedie of Seneca entituled Thyestes… (Imprinted at London: In Fletestrete in the hous late Thomas Berthelettes, Anno. 1560. 26. die Martij), Early English Books Online.

  43. 43.

    Thomas Elyot, The dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght (Londini: In aedibus Thomae Bertheleti typis impress. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, [Anno. M. D. XXXVIII. [1538]), Early English Books Online.

  44. 44.

    McKitterick, Print, 139.

  45. 45.

    Richard Watkyns, “An aduertisement to the Reader,” in Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght and of strange noyses, crackes, and sundry forewarnynges… (Printed at London: By Henry Benneyman for Richard VVatkyns, 1572), Early English Books Online.

  46. 46.

    Quoted in Grafton, Culture, 84. The book was Jacob Wimpheling’s Epithoma rerum Germanicarum (Ibid.).

  47. 47.

    Erasmus, Adages (II i 1), 144.

  48. 48.

    Grafton, Culture, 208–209.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 199.

  50. 50.

    Polydore Vergil, On Discovery [1499], ed. and trans. Brian P. Copenhaver (Cambridge, MA: The I Tatti Renaissance Library of Harvard University Press, 2002), 27.

  51. 51.

    Abraham Fraunce, The lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis… (London: Printed by Iohn Wolfe, for Thomas Newman, and Thomas Gubbin, Anno Dom. 1587), Early English Books Online.

  52. 52.

    Quoted in Richardson, Printing, 78.

  53. 53.

    Richardson, Printing, 151.

  54. 54.

    McKitterick, Print, 88, 147.

  55. 55.

    Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 106.

  56. 56.

    McKitterick, Print, 139.

  57. 57.

    John Taylor, All the Workes (London: Printed by I[ohn] B[eale, Elizabeth Allde, Bernard Alsop, and Thomas Fawcet] for Iames Boler; at the signe of the Marigold in Pauls Churchyard , 1630), Early English Books Online.

  58. 58.

    John Davies, Wits Bedlam [1617] (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1992), proquest.com.

  59. 59.

    Adam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 211.

  60. 60.

    Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson, English in Print: From Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 37.

  61. 61.

    While Eisenstein has come under recent scrutiny for promoting how print standardized text, she fully recognized that printed copies were neither identical nor perfect, calling attention instead to the “visual aids” easily assimilated by print—for example, tables, calendars, title pages, indexes (see Sabrina Alcorn Baron et al., Agent of Change, 14–15).

  62. 62.

    Cohen, Technology, 211.

  63. 63.

    Marianne Gateson Riley, ed., Whore of Babylon, by Thomas Dekker: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1980), 96.

  64. 64.

    Quoted in Saenger, Commodification, 106. The complainant was Quidam, a customer of printer Robert Copland (fl. 1515).

  65. 65.

    George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie [1589], in Elizabethan Critical Essays, Volume II, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 85.

  66. 66.

    Ibid.

  67. 67.

    Hotchkiss and Robinson, English, 37.

  68. 68.

    Ibid.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 173.

  70. 70.

    Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 168.

  71. 71.

    Richardson, Printing, 133.

  72. 72.

    Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 168.

  73. 73.

    R.A. Skelton, Decorative Printed Maps of the 15th to 18th Centuries; a Revised Edition of Old Decorative Maps and Charts (London: Staples Press, c. 1952), 3.

  74. 74.

    Quoted in Ibid., 9. Italics added.

  75. 75.

    Skelton, R.A., Decorative, 9.

  76. 76.

    Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans . David Fausett (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994), 110.

  77. 77.

    R.A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 27. Matthias Merian’s view of London had relied on 1606’s Civitas Londini (Ibid.).

  78. 78.

    Lestringant, Mapping, 112.

  79. 79.

    Robert Ralston Cawley, Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 215.

  80. 80.

    Ibid.

  81. 81.

    John Rennie Short, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475–1600 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 105.

  82. 82.

    Ibid., 104.

  83. 83.

    Lestringant, Mapping, 119–120.

  84. 84.

    Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (The Theatre of the Whole World), London 1606, by Abraham Ortelius, Series of Atlases in Facsimile, Fourth Series, Vol. IV (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1968).

  85. 85.

    Arthur L. Kelly, “Maps of the British Isles, England and Wales, and Ireland: New Plates, States, Variants, and Derivatives,” in Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of his Death, 1598–1998, eds. Marcel van den Broecke et al. (Houten, the Netherlands: HES, 1998), 236.

  86. 86.

    Robert Norman, The newe attractiue, Containyng a short discourse of the magnes or lodestone… (Imprinted at London: By Ihon Kyngston for Richard Ballard, 1581), Early English Books Online.

  87. 87.

    Ibid.

  88. 88.

    Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 19.

  89. 89.

    Grafton, Culture, 50.

  90. 90.

    Quoted in Carlson, English, 154–155.

  91. 91.

    Carlson, English, 154–155.

  92. 92.

    Ibid., 155.

  93. 93.

    Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, no. 6 (1986): 12.

  94. 94.

    Ralphe Brooke, A Discoverie of Certaine Errours Published in Print in the Much Commended Britannia, 1594. Very Prejudicial to the Discentes and Succession of the Auncient Nobilitie of this Realm (London: Printed for J. Woodman and D. Lyon, 1724), Hathi Trust Digital Library.

  95. 95.

    Peter Burke, quoted in Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), 199.

  96. 96.

    Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 102.

  97. 97.

    See Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 241.

  98. 98.

    John Lyly, Pappe with an hatchet Alias, A figge for my God sonne… ([London]: Imprinted by Iohn Anoe, and Iohn Astile… [1589], Early English Books Online. On the pamphlet, the author appears as “V.V.”

  99. 99.

    Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 102, 109. By 1590, the pamphlets had engendered anti-Martinist satires on the stage (Ibid., 107).

  100. 100.

    Lerer, Error, 9.

  101. 101.

    Quoted in Halasz, Marketplace, 103.

  102. 102.

    Halasz, Marketplace, 102–103.

  103. 103.

    Tribble, Margins, 105.

  104. 104.

    Ibid., 108.

  105. 105.

    Jesse M. Lander, “1588–1589,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. Joan Raymond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 559.

  106. 106.

    Melissa Hull Geil, “Reproducing Paper Monsters in Thomas Nashe,” in The Age of Thomas Nashe: Text, Bodies and Trespasses of Authorship in Early Modern England, eds. Stephen Guy-Bray, John Pong Linton, and Steve Mentz (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 92.

  107. 107.

    Quoted in Ibid., 101–02.

  108. 108.

    François Rigolot, “The Renaissance Fascination with Errors: Mannerism and Early Modern Poetry,” Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2004): 1219.

  109. 109.

    Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 167.

  110. 110.

    Rigolot, “Renaissance,” 1220.

  111. 111.

    Thomas Nashe, Christs teares ouer Ierusalem… (London: Printed [by George Eld] for Thomas Thorp, 1613), Early English Books Online.

  112. 112.

    Quoted in Grafton, Culture, 137.

  113. 113.

    Owen Feltham, Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political (London: Pickering, 1840), xxiv.

  114. 114.

    Saenger, Commodification, 108.

  115. 115.

    Quoted in Ibid., 109.

  116. 116.

    Saenger, Commodification, 109.

  117. 117.

    H.S. Bennet contends that readers rarely intervened to correct a book’s errata (Saenger, Commodification, 109). But if reading was still “essentially ‘intensive’ in nature” (Richardson, Printing, 156), then the possibility of what I am suggesting still holds.

  118. 118.

    Grafton, Culture, 24.

  119. 119.

    Quoted in Grafton, Culture, 23. See also Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 53.

  120. 120.

    Saenger, Commodification, 49 n. 105.

  121. 121.

    Halasz, Marketplace, 31–32.

  122. 122.

    Ibid., 32.

  123. 123.

    Ibid.

  124. 124.

    Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 330.

  125. 125.

    Hotchkiss and Robinson, English, 33.

  126. 126.

    Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 7.

  127. 127.

    Hotchkiss and Robinson, English, 148.

  128. 128.

    Thomas Heywood, Pleasant dialogues and dramma’s, selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid, &c.… (London: Printed by R. O[ulton] for R. H[earne] and are to be sold by Thomas Slater at the Swan in Duck-lane, 1637), 249, Early English Books Online.

  129. 129.

    Johns, Nature, 5.

  130. 130.

    Ibid., 30.

  131. 131.

    Colin Burrow, “The Sixteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22.

  132. 132.

    Ibid.

  133. 133.

    Ibid.

  134. 134.

    Quoted in Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6–7.

  135. 135.

    Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities, 1611 (London: Scholar P, 1978).

  136. 136.

    William M. Schutte, introduction to Coryats Crudities, 1611, by Thomas Coryate (London: Scholar P, 1978), xiv.

  137. 137.

    Ibid.

  138. 138.

    Goddard, William. A mastif vvhelp and other ruff-island-lik currs fetcht from amongst the Antipedes… (Dordrecht: By George Waters, 1616?), Early English Books Online.

  139. 139.

    Burrow, “Sixteenth,” 24.

  140. 140.

    Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum. … (London: [By Richard Bradock] for Robert Dexter, … 1599), 17, Early English Books Online.

  141. 141.

    Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Malden, MA: Polity, 2000), 150.

  142. 142.

    Grafton, Forgers, 43–46, 28.

  143. 143.

    Burke, Social, 150.

  144. 144.

    Garrett Sullivan and Linda Woodbridge, “Popular Culture in Print,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 279.

  145. 145.

    Ibid.

  146. 146.

    Ibid.

  147. 147.

    Gerry Knowles, A Cultural History of the English Language (London: Arnold, 1997), 64, 69.

  148. 148.

    Charles Barber, Early Modern English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 48. See Roger Ascham’s prefatory dedication of Toxophilus to Henry VIII for an example of one Englishman’s promotion of his native tongue for technical writing (Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, ed. Edward Arber [London: Queen Square, Bloomsbury, 1869], 14, books.google.com).

  149. 149.

    Barber, Early, 48.

  150. 150.

    Knowles, Cultural, 69.

  151. 151.

    John Skelton, The Complete English Poems of John Skelton, ed. John Scattergood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 77–78.

  152. 152.

    Quoted in Edmund Valentine Campos, “Imperial Lexicography and the Anglo-Spanish War.” Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 75.

  153. 153.

    Knowles, Cultural, 69.

  154. 154.

    Campos, “Imperial,” 75.

  155. 155.

    S.S. Hussey, The Literary Language of Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1982), 12–13.

  156. 156.

    George Gascoigne, Certayne Notes of Instruction. Elizabethan Critical Essays, Volume I, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 51.

  157. 157.

    Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 57. This could also lead to outsiders taking cultural potshots, such as when, in History of the Netherlands (1559), Emanuel van Meteren belittles the English language for being a veritable salmagundi of imports, with the English never “speaking out of their heart…, but only prattling with the tongue” (quoted in Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999], 311).

  158. 158.

    William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Pearson, 2014), 747, 664. The emphases originate with Hussey, Literary, 22.

  159. 159.

    Hussey, Literary, 24.

  160. 160.

    Prescott, Imagining, 57.

  161. 161.

    Ben Jonson, Poetaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 251–252. Many of these coinages are borrowed from—as a form of skewering—the satirist John Marston.

  162. 162.

    Tom Cain, ed. Poetaster, by Ben Jonson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 253 n. 502.

  163. 163.

    John Taylor , The Praise of Hemp-Seed… (London: [By E. Allde] for Henry Gosson, … 1623), 559, Early English Books Online.

  164. 164.

    Grafton, Forgers, 43–46.

  165. 165.

    Edwin H. Zeydel, preface to Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brant, trans. and ed. Edwin H. Zeydel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 24.

  166. 166.

    Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools [c. 1509], trans. and ed. Edwin H. Zeydel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 174–175.

  167. 167.

    Zeydel, ed., Ship, 388 n. 7.

  168. 168.

    Brant, Ship, 335.

  169. 169.

    Zeydel, preface to Ship, 22.

  170. 170.

    Geil, “Reproducing,” 85.

  171. 171.

    Quoted in Geil, “Reproducing,” 85.

  172. 172.

    Anthony Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 2 (Autumn 1980): 278.

  173. 173.

    This he wrote in a letter to Jodocus Jonas (quoted in Margaret A. Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 143 n. 54).

  174. 174.

    Erasmus, Adages, 223.

  175. 175.

    Christa Grössinger, Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 150.

  176. 176.

    Ibid., 150, 148.

  177. 177.

    Ibid., 148.

  178. 178.

    Charles Talbot, “Prints and the Definitive Image,” in Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, eds. Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 191.

  179. 179.

    Ibid. Bruegel’s paintings of peasants may appear to belie this point, but they are ultimately satirizations intended to bemuse patricians.

  180. 180.

    Grössinger, Picturing, 150.

  181. 181.

    Halasz, Marketplace, 27.

  182. 182.

    Watt, Cheap, 5.

  183. 183.

    Ibid.

  184. 184.

    Wall, Imprint, 161.

  185. 185.

    Watt, Cheap, 7–8. Rather than simply pasting ballads into their commonplace books, however, the élite would copy them out longhand, presumably as a means of educated appropriation (Ibid., 17).

  186. 186.

    Ibid., 141.

  187. 187.

    Ibid., 206–207. See also Blair, Too Much, 54. Thomas Bodley wanted unbound materials excluded from Oxford’s library, citing “the harme that the scandal will bring unto the Librarie, when it shalbe given out, that we stuffe it full of baggage [i.e., mass market] bookes” (quoted in Halasz, Marketplace, 1).

  188. 188.

    Quoted in Halasz, Marketplace, 12–13.

  189. 189.

    See Karen Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 58.

  190. 190.

    Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima Et Vita, trans. Carlos G. Norena (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 58.

  191. 191.

    Chris Holcomb, Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 177.

  192. 192.

    Ibid. 137. Holcomb is here channeling Wayne Rebhorn.

  193. 193.

    Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), 733.

  194. 194.

    Wall, Imprint, 15.

  195. 195.

    Quoted in Wall, Imprint, 169. The word “baggage” was also caustically associated with promiscuous women (Halasz, Marketplace, 1).

  196. 196.

    John Day, “The P. to the Reader,” The tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex…. (London: By Iohn Daye, dwelling ouer Aldersgate, [1570], Early English Books Online. (The play is also known as The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex.)

  197. 197.

    Holcomb, Mirth, 165.

  198. 198.

    John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 98–99.

  199. 199.

    Holcomb, Mirth, 165.

  200. 200.

    Peters, Marvelous, 99.

  201. 201.

    Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 87.

  202. 202.

    Ibid., 15–16.

  203. 203.

    Ibid., 86. Here, she is citing Mary Ann Doane on the maternal body.

  204. 204.

    Ibid., 83. Aristotle posits this in The Generation of Animals.

  205. 205.

    John Florio, “Preface,” in The essayes or morall, politike and millitarie discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne… (London: By Val. Sims for Edward Blount dwelling in Paules churchyard , 1603), Early English Books Online.

  206. 206.

    Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 39–40. The printing press could also be likened to an incontinent child indiscriminately discharging its waste (John Scanlan, On Garbage [London: Reaktion Books, 2005], 39).

  207. 207.

    Kember, Virtual, 87.

  208. 208.

    Taylor, Praise, 548.

  209. 209.

    Ibid., 553–554.

  210. 210.

    Ibid., 556.

  211. 211.

    Alexander Gill panned Ben Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady by suggesting it ought to be printed in wrapping paper because “brown paper is too good for thee” (quoted in Ben Jonson, The Magnetic Lady, ed. Peter Happé [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000], 215).

  212. 212.

    Taylor, Praise, 557.

  213. 213.

    Ibid., 558.

  214. 214.

    This he does regarding Pierce Penniless (1592). Quoted in Geil, “Reproducing,” 78.

  215. 215.

    Geil, “Reproducing,” 78.

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    By strange fate, while writing this chapter’s first draft, a new copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio has been discovered in Scotland. And how was it scrutinized for assurances of authenticity? By way of its print errors, as well as the inky thumbprints left by its Jacobean printers.

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    Catalogue. Arcimboldo, 1526–1593, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Milan: Skira, 2007), 219.

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Nayar, S.J. (2019). From Print Error to Human Errancy in Print. In: Renaissance Responses to Technological Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96899-5_2

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