In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination—less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright’s proscriptions. These are followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative—and prophylactic. Bright’s technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information—as theory, and technology.

The year 2008 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the first publication of King Lear, and for four centuries the play has remained a consummate bibliographical mystery. Winner of the 2007 Jay L. Halio prize for best manuscript in Shakespeare studies, Shakespeare in Shorthand demonstrates that many textual anomalies derive from the play's transcription in Elizabethan shorthand. The shorthand system of John Willis, Stenographie (1602), shows a high correlation with the unusual textual features found in the first quarto of Lear (1608). The patterns of variants in the quarto conform to Willis' rules regarding the reduction of diphthongs and digraphs and the omission of aspirated, doubled, or unsounded letters. In the past two decades the textual interrelation of quarto and folio (1623) Lear has proven one of the most contested issues in Shakespearean studies, and an examination of Stenographie reveals that some of these textual differences result not from authorial revision, but from transmission in abbreviated writing. Bibliographical evidence also indicates that some textual omissions from the folio version are neither authorial nor theatrical, but derive from the printing house.

This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a "real" or "universal" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language, but as an illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code, supposedly amounting to a script of things, the character was to support scientific discourse through a universal database, in alignment with cosmic truths. In all these ways, J.D. Fleming argues, the world of the character bears phenomenological comparison to the world of modern digital information—what has been called the infosphere.

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

This is the first of three volumes offering a new history of lexicography in and beyond the early modern British Isles. This volume focuses on the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600, exploring the first printed dictionaries, Latin and foreign language dictionaries, and specialized English wordlists.