The book explores the complex history surrounding the physical books attributed to Chaucer, focusing on the roles of printers, publishers, editors, antiquarians, librarians, and collectors. It presents Chaucer not merely as a medieval poet but as a figure shaped by the tumultuous journey of his works through various historical contexts and the evolving landscape of book production and marketing.
Focusing on the theory and practice of versification, this book advocates for a renewed appreciation of the formal qualities of English verse. Joseph A. Dane presents a comprehensive overview of various verse systems, including quantitative, syllabic, and accentual forms, while also exploring the musical origins of verse. Aimed at both students of literature and general readers, it offers practical tools for understanding and analyzing verse, along with resources for educators, including examples and a glossary of terms.
Mythodologies challenges the implied methodology in contemporary studies in the humanities. We claim, at times, that we gather facts or what we will call evidence, and from that form hypotheses and conclusions. Of course, we recognize that the sum total of evidence for any argument is beyond comprehension; therefore, we construct, and we claim, preliminary hypotheses, perhaps to organize the chaos of evidence, or perhaps simply to find it; we might then see (we claim) whether that evidence challenges our tentative hypotheses. Ideally, we could work this way. Yet the history of scholarship and our own practices suggest we do nothing of the kind. Rather, we work the way we teach our composition students to write: choose or construct a thesis, then invent the evidence to support it. This book has three parts, examining such methods and pseudo-methods of invention in medieval studies, bibliography, and editing. Part One, “Noster Chaucer,” looks at examples in Chaucer studies, such as the notion that Chaucer wrote iambic pentameter, and the definition of a canon in Chaucer. “Our” Chaucer has, it seems, little to do with Chaucer himself, and in constructing this entity, Chaucerians are engaged largely in self-validation of their own tradition. Part Two, “Bibliography and Book History,” consists of three studies in the field of bibliography: the recent rise in studies of annotations; the implications of presumably neutral terminology in editing, a case-study in cataloguing. Part Three, “Cacophonies: A Bibliographical Rondo,” is a series of brief studies extending these critiques to other areas in the humanities. It seems not to matter what we talk about: meter, book history, the sex life of bonobos. In all of these discussions, we see the persistence of error, the intractability of uncritical assumptions, and the dominance of authority over evidence
The new history of the book has become a dynamic academic field, with print culture theories at its core. Joseph A. Dane argues that typography, often overlooked, should be examined closely. He posits that typography acts not as a mere support to existing print theories but as a dissenting voice against them. In his exploration, he reveals how grand narratives of book history obscure valuable insights gained from examining books themselves. Dane investigates the discrepancies between internal and external evidence regarding Gutenberg's type and the misleading projections of seventeenth and eighteenth-century typesetting descriptions onto the fifteenth century, which complicate rather than clarify our understanding. He delves into modern myths surrounding gothic typefaces, the role of non-typographical elements in typographical form, and the assumptions influencing electronic editions of medieval poems and nineteenth-century visual representations of typographical history. Dane's work raises the question of whether he is a traditional or original historian of print, ultimately suggesting that one can embody both perspectives simultaneously.
