In the early 18th century, the American colonials were awash with both paper currency and its twin: counterfeit bills. Benjamin Franklin became a proponent of using leafs prints in currency as an anti-counterfeiting measure. Duplicating a leaf print is difficult not just because the resulting patterns are so complex, but because the original leaf is destroyed in the process. Franklin’s innovation, then, is that he shifts the burden of counterfeiting from copying the content of a note to discerning and iterating the process of its reproduction—even as that very process prevents the thing, the leaf, from ever being reproduced in the same way again. In this, we can see a kind of environmental nationalism: authority inheres not in the material substance of the paper itself but rather in the land that prints it and it printed upon it.
As early efforts to include women in the canon of Renaissance literature give way to gender-oriented research in material culture and book history, it is increasingly the scholar's task to marry the language of ideological negotiation to a more wide-ranging investigation into the many ways that women of all social ranks contributed to the making, weaving, writing, printing, etching, annotating, composing, and publishing of English literary culture. This essay takes a fresh look at the authorship of Isabella Whitney, the earliest identified woman to publish secular English verse in print. Specifically, Whitney restructures humanist notions of reading-as-gathering around “huswifely” textile work by drawing on the rich semantic context of the word slip. Situating Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay in the material culture from which she drew her metaphors illuminates its relationship to a range of Elizabethan verse miscellanies and demonstrates her innovation within the genre as a woman.
How do technologies track our reading? Digital devices today can monitor not only what you read electronically, but when, where, and for how long. From an artist’s book by Heather Weston and eighteenth-century commonplacing techniques to Kindle Highlights and social reading sites like GoodReads, this chapter takes a wide-ranging, playful look at the ways both humans and machines have used various platforms to track their reading over time. By critically examining the deep history of social reading practices, this chapter aims to bring into relief what is new or different about emerging digital technologies and the forms of reading they foster.
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