In Early Modern Europe the first readers of a book were not those who bought it. They were the scribes who copied the author’s or translator’s manuscript, the censors who licensed it, the publisher who decided to put this title in his catalogue, the copy editor who prepared the text for the press, divided it and added punctuation, the typesetters who composed the pages of the book, and the proof reader who corrected them. The author’s hand cannot be separated from the printers’ mind. This book is devoted to the process of publication of the works that framed their readers’ representations of the past or of the world. Linking cultural history, textual criticism and bibliographical studies, dealing with canonical works - like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s plays - as well as lesser known texts, Roger Chartier identifies the fundamental discontinuities that transformed the circulation of the written word between the invention of printing and the definition, three centuries later, of what we call 'literature'.

This book presents the human hand from an overall perspective – from the first appearance of hand-like structures in the fins of big fishes living millions of years ago to today ́s and the future’s mind-controlled artificial hands. Much focus is given to the extremely well-developed sensation of the hand, its importance and its linkage to brain plasticity mechanisms. How can active hands rapidly expand their representational area in the brain? How can the sense of touch substitute for other deficient senses, such as in Braille reading where hand sensation substitutes for missing vision? How can the mere observation of active hands, belonging to others, activate the hand area in the observer’s own brain and what is the importance of this phenomenon for learning by imitation and the understanding of other peoples’ actions, gestures and body language? Why are some of us left-handed and what are the consequences from cultural and physiological viewpoints? Why does phantom sensation and phantom pain occur after hand amputation, and what can we do about it? Why can salamanders regenerate new extremities while humans can not? Is it possible to transplant a hand from a diseased individual to an amputee? Can artificial robotic hands be controlled by our mind, and can they ever gain the role of a normal hand? What role did the hand and the brain play during evolution in tool construction and development of language and cognitive functions? The hand has a high symbolic value in religion, literature and art and our hands have a key role in gestures and body language. The Hand and the Brain is aimed at anybody with interest in life sciences, in the medical field especially hand surgeons, orthopaedic specialists, neurologists and general practitioners, and those working in rehabilitation medicine and pain treatment. The original Swedish version of The Hand and the Brain has also become very popular among physiotherapists, occupational therapists, psychologists, and among a general population with an interest in science.

This study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive examinations ever devoted to a critical transformation in the material substance of the printed page; it carries out this exploration in the history of the book, moreover, by embedding these typographical changes in the context of other cultural phenomena in eighteenth-century Britain. The gradual abandonment of pervasive capitalization, italics, and caps and small caps in books printed in London, Dublin, and the American colonies between 1740 and 1780 is mapped in five-year increments which reveal that the appearance of the modern page in English began to emerge around 1765. This descriptive and analytical account focuses on poetry, classical texts, Shakespeare, contemporary plays, the novel, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, sermons and religious writings, newspapers, magazines, anthologies, government publications, and private correspondence; it also examines the reading public, canon formation, editorial theory and practice, and the role of typography in textual interpretation. These changes in printing conventions are then compared to other aspects of cultural change: the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the publication of Johnson's Dictionary in 1755, the transformation of shop signs and the imposition of house numbers in London beginning in 1762, and the evolution of the English language and of English prose style. This study concludes that this fundamental shift in printing conventions was closely tied to a pervasive interest in refinement, regularity, and standardization in the second half of the century—and that it was therefore an important component in the self-conscious process of modernizing British culture.

"A startling argument . . . provocative . . . absorbing." --The Boston Globe "Ambitious . . . arresting . . . celebrates the importance of hands to our lives today as well as to the history of our species." --The New York Times Book Review The human hand is a miracle of biomechanics, one of the most remarkable adaptations in the history of evolution. The hands of a concert pianist can elicit glorious sound and stir emotion; those of a surgeon can perform the most delicate operations; those of a rock climber allow him to scale a vertical mountain wall. Neurologist Frank R. Wilson makes the striking claim that it is because of the unique structure of the hand and its evolution in cooperation with the brain that Homo sapiens became the most intelligent, preeminent animal on the earth. In this fascinating book, Wilson moves from a discussion of the hand's evolution--and how its intimate communication with the brain affects such areas as neurology, psychology, and linguistics--to provocative new ideas about human creativity and how best to nurture it. Like Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould, Wilson handles a daunting range of scientific knowledge with a surprising deftness and a profound curiosity about human possibility. Provocative, illuminating, and delightful to read, The Hand encourages us to think in new ways about one of our most taken-for-granted assets. "A mark of the book's excellence [is that] it makes the reader aware of the wonder in trivial, everyday acts, and reveals the complexity behind the simplest manipulation." --The Washington Post

Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, the country's annexation by Spain in 1580, and ongoing religious controversy, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. This did not prevent them, however, from persisting in their craft. Indeed, many of their works reflected precisely on the question of what poetry could do and what, ultimately, its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions, and which are explored in this book, ranged from lofty ideals to the more practical concerns of making ends meet when one depended on the whims of the powerful. This volume articulates a 'pragmatics of poetry' that combines literary analysis and book history with methods from sociology (network analysis, sociology of professions, valuation studies) to explore how poets thought about themselves and negotiated the value of their verse in the court, with patrons, or in the marketplace for books. It reveals how poets compared their work to that of lawyers and doctors and tried to set themselves apart as a special group of professionals. It shows how they threatened their patrons as well as flattered them and tried to turn their poetry from a gift into something like a commodity or service that had to be paid for. While poets set out to write in the most ambitious genres and to better their European rivals, they sometimes refused to spend months composing an epic without the prospect of reward. Their books of verse, when printed, were framed as linguistic propaganda as well as objects of material and aesthetic worth at a time when many said that non-devotional poetry was a sinful waste of time. This is a book about the various ways in which poets, metaphorically and more literally, tried to turn poetry and the paper it was written on into gold.

This book focuses on the different forms in which authorship came to be expressed in eighteenth-century Italian publishing. It analyses both the affirmation of the “author function”, and, above all, its paradoxical opposite: the use of anonymity, a centuries-old practice present everywhere in Europe but often neglected by scholarship. The reasons why authors chose to publish their works anonymously were manifold, including prudence, fear of censorship, modesty, fear of personal criticism, or simple divertissement. In many cases, it was an ethical choice, especially for ecclesiastics. The Italian case provides a key perspective on the study of anonymity in the European context, contributing to the analysis of an overlooked topic in academic studies.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. However, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.