A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.” Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers’ hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books. The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel’s main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre’s insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.

This wide-ranging collection of essays reflects the manifold scholarly interests of legal historian Charles Donahue, whose former students engage here with questions related to foundational Roman law concepts, the impact of the law on women and families in medieval and early modern Europe, the intersection of law and religion, and the echoes of legal ideas on later developments in American law and in world literature and philosophy. From the monks of Metz to the book sellers of colonial Boston, from fourteenth-century English charters to the writings of Faust, these essays invite you to experience law at once learned and lived. Contributors are: Charles Bartlett, Anton Chaevitch, Wim Decock, Rowan Dorin, Sally E. Hadden, Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch, Nikitas E. Hatzimihail, Samantha Kahn Herrick, Daniel Jacobs, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Amalia D. Kessler, Saskia Lettmaier, Sara McDougall, Stuart M. McManus, Elizabeth W. Mellyn, Bharath Palle, Ryan Rowberry, Carol Symes, James R. Townshend, and John Witte, Jr.

The Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700 presents abstracts of documents relating to the book trade and book production between 1641 and 1700. It brings together in one sequence edited abstracts of entries referring to named books, printers, and booksellers selected from the manuscripts of the Stationers' Company Court Books; all references to printing, publishing, bookselling, and the book trade occurring in major historical printed sources (Calendar of State Papers Domestic; the Journals of the Houses of Lords and Commons; Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts) ; and entries for contemporary pamphlets. The labour records of the printing and bookselling trades probably represent the fullest account of any work force in early modern England and the printed products of the trade survive in such great numbers that they enable us to examine them for evidence not only of who made and sold them but also of how they were made. These volumes constitute a reference work of importance not only for literature specialists, bibliographers, and historians of book production but also for economic, social, and political historians. Not only do they bring together records from a variety of separate printed sources, thereby making explicit their interconnections, but also they make accessible some less well-known manuscript sources, notably from the Stationers' Company archives. Most importantly the Chronology and Calendar extends the earlier work of Arber, Greg, and Jackson on the earlier seventeenth century. As a chronological sequence the volumes meet the need for a preliminary narrative history of the trade in the later seventeenth century; and the provision of title, name, and topic indexes renders this an indispensable reference tool for research into the social, political, and economic contexts of the book trade, its personnel, and its printed output.