Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period / New Directions in Book History (PDF)

"This collection exemplifies the advances in the intellectual domain of book history in recent decades. There are new insights here for scholars and students not only of book history but also for other cultural, social and economic historians."

"This highly engaging and multifaceted collection of essays addresses in exciting new ways British regional histories of printing and bookselling in the hand press period from the mid-fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. By focusing on the agency of place in writing, production and distribution, contributors vividly illuminate the interactions between trades and communities and the legislative and institutional structures governing them, but also how those involved in regional printing and book trades created particular and often widely influential narratives about their regions. This welcome re-evaluation of regional print production challenges and reinvigorates the whole history of print in Britain across more than four centuries."

-James Raven FBA, Fellow of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature (2018) and co-editor of the collection of essays Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (2019).

Kaley Kramer is Deputy Head of English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the co-editor of Women During the English Reformations (Palgrave 2014) and Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave 2020).

Adam James Smith is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at York St John University, UK. He works on cheap eighteenth-century political print, with a particular interest in works of protest and satire. Smith has published on Joseph Addison, James Montgomery and Eliza Haywood.