NOTE: This is a revised transcript of the talk I gave at my department’s 1st year PhD students’ talks on June 18th 2009.

I want to begin by addressing how the digital humanities has effected my focus on the literature of the seventeenth century. A very loose definition of the digital humanities (or DH) would be that it’s a field of “study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities [… ] methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope.” In keeping with the spirit of DH, I’ve taken that definition from Wikipedia. I’ve always been very interested in technology, and more recently I’ve been asking myself: how can we use digital tools to enhance teaching in the humanities, and what new opportunities for research does it present to early modern scholars whose specialist period (that is, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) seems so remote from the concerns and developments of our digital revolution?

The following question was posed in the very first issue of the Digital Humanities Quarterly and it’s what initiated this line of thought I now find myself pursuing: “Can we learn anything about today’s resistance to new technologies from studying the reactions in the Renaissance to the introduction of printing?”. The connection implied here between early modern print culture and twenty-first century technology is intriguing: the spread of printed materials throughout Europe from the fifteenth century (combined with a steady rise in the levels of literacy) was a revolutionary turning point for a culture so used to the oral transmission of information, and it’s very tempting to draw analogies between the pamphleteering that emerged during the waning years of Charles I’s reign and the rise of the modern blogosphere. In fact, the heavy use of the micro-blogging service Twitter by Internet-users in Iran over the past few days adds weight to this: in both cases, a medium of mass-communication is seized upon by the public to speak against an authority under threat, whose voices would otherwise remain silent. Such analogies formed a useful starting point for my research, but ultimately served to accentuate the difference between our digital revolution and the rise of print culture in the early modern period. These differences remind us that what we’re seeing isn’t something completely new, but neither is it true to say that history is repeating itself.

A claim was made in an article in the Times earlier this month that the quantity of digital data produced worldwide in 2006 was 161 exabytes (an exabyte being one billion billion bytes) – equivalent, it holds, to “three million times the information contained in all the books ever written”, and this is expected to rise to 988 exabytes by next year. In the academic community online databases give us access to thousands of scholarly articles, and other sites such as EEBO, Google Books and Project Gutenberg provide limited or total access to full texts both new and old. With access to such unimaginably large quantities of information we find ourselves struggling to make sense of it all, and so as not to feel overwhelmed we categorise social media as Web 2.0, we bookmark links and tag blog entries, and in the scholarly community we turn to research aids including Zotero and Endnote to help us store and organise a wealth of bibliographic data. What these systems are battling against is a phenomenon often referred to as ‘information overload’. This is a modern term that’s gained a particular resonance in the past decade with the growth of the World Wide Web and the ubiquitous spread of digital media devices, but it’s a phenomenon we can trace back much earlier than the advent of the web or even of television.

As early as 1255 Vincent of Beauvais observed that “the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind”, and as a workaround to this Francis Bacon, writing three and a half centuries later, famously proposed that:

“…some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention”

By 1685 there were so many books to be read that one observer cried out:

“…we have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire”

And just as the number of readers increased, so too did the number of collectors – impressive personal libraries were built in this period by avid bibliophiles including the diarist Samuel Pepys, which you can get a sense of in the photograph of the Pepys Library Site hosted by Magdalene College (above). Bookshelves are just one example of the forms of knowledge storage and retrieval adopted during the early modern period, but equally indexes, Ramism, encyclopaedism and a host of other knowledge organisational aids point to a need among readers of this period for systems to help organise so much material.

To what extent did a growing readership in early seventeenth-century England contribute to the emergence (real or imagined) of information overload? I’m going to address this question by looking first at John Taylor’s poem “A Comparison Betwixt a Whore and Book” – part of a larger volume of poetry called A Common Whore With all these Graces Grac’d: She’s very honest, beautifull and chaste. Taylor, born in 1578, is more famously known as the ‘Water-Poet’, and he penned lots of so-called ‘nonesense’ verse, as well as accounts of his numerous travels around the British Isles and abroad. Although he counted the playwrights Dekker and Heywood among his friends, Taylor never gained the same recognition as his contemporaries, but he did continue writing (and travelling) at a prolific rate right up to his death in 1653. Now this particular volume, which Taylor dedicates to “no matter who”, was published in 1622, and the “whore” of Taylor’s title actually refers to the book itself. This entire text, in fact, is just a rather drawn-out analogy comparing printed texts to prostitutes. Here’s one example from the work:

He that doth Read a Booke he likes, would be
Alone, from any Interruption free,
And he that with a whore, would toy or lye,
I think desires no other Company

Taken in isolation, Taylor’s aim in this passage seems to be an effort to highlight the private, secretive nature of these acts, and given its juxtaposition here the act of reading is regarded as something shameful to be conducted out of sight. And yet earlier in the work the poet promptly assures his readers that, although he has called his book ‘A Whore’ they need not fear any humiliation for dealing with it: “For if ten thousand with her lodge and lye, / No reputation shall they lose thereby.” A lengthy tirade against historical lust and prostitution follows, and yet Taylor begins by excusing his self-styled ‘whorish’ book (which he imagines giving birth to as Jove did Athena) from the same carnal sins he assigns to historical concubines. So why make the comparison at all?

Perhaps the most striking comparative trope emerges when Taylor lets us know of the low maintenance costs involved in possessing his book:

She is not Couetous for any thing,
For what she hath, men doe vnto her bring,
(Her Temp’rance is a vertue of much honour)
And all her Commings in, are put vpon her.

Here, Taylor celebrates the multiplicity of reader-response in a phrase constructed from grotesque imagery. Books, like whores, are represented as pliant to the needs of the reader/client, but the inherent degradation involved confers a strong sense of victimhood onto the receptive textual/female body. This, combined with the dedication (or lack of) “To no matter who”, indicates that Taylor is surrendering his defenceless text to the variety of interpretive outcomes (both favourable and damning) that inevitably follow the process of textual dissemination into the marketplace. It is a gesture of authorial resignation, celebrated and grieved in equal measure, over which the poet refuses to exert any sort of control.

Like some afterthought, Taylor makes a reference to licensing at the end of his poem, and in keeping with his analogy compares it to the inspection of a prostitute’s body – although books, he notes, are “examin’d stricter than a whore.” Taylor’s sole attack against the pre-publication licensing of printed books is that if all prostitutes were called to account in the same way as books then there wouldn’t be any of them left (or it would be impossible to examine them all), John Milton, on the other hand, devotes a longer and more nuanced argument against the same subject in his Areopagitica, to which I now turn. Published in 1644, the work’s impassioned defence of the value of books is quoted even today – this engraving above the entrance to the Reading Room of the New York Public Library greets visitors with that strange image from Milton’s tract that speaks of embalming the blood of a spirit

This passage was discussed on the Milton-L mailing list back in February, where it was suggested that the human capacity for reason is a distinctly incorporeal thing and seems the strongest candidate for the “master spirit” Milton refers to here. Its lifeblood acts as some kind of sacrificial offering to future generations, maintaining the life of the author’s reason beyond the lifespan of his or her body. In light of what we’ve already seen of Taylor’s work, I’m going to close this entry by looking at the relationship between the body of the writer and the body of the text in Areopagitica, and how Milton’s refashioning of this relationship serves to fix the limits of reader-response.

In his book Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, Donald McKenzie turns to the aforementioned passage when arguing against the stability of printed texts whose meaning derives less from authorial intention than from the varieties of reader-response: “The precious life-blood of Milton’s master-spirit”, he writes, “is inevitably watered down as it is spread around.” And yet Milton’s relationship to his text presents a fantasy in which he reclaims authorial intention – or at least tries to. Milton, in stark contrast to Taylor, separates the author’s physical presence from the body of his work – in speaking of “pens and heads… sitting by their studious lamps” Milton “abstracts print-authorship from the physicality of the author”, as one critic puts it. To this image add his earlier allusion to “anvils and hammers waking” and the two together point to a system of labour where the labourer is absent, where books write themselves and instruments of war are fashioned by tools unattached to labouring hands.

In fact, in Areopagitica the threat of the physical is associated with the very body he writes against – namely, licensing. Milton writes against the “censor’s hand on the back of his title” and bemoans that writers have “only scaped the ferula to come under the fescue of an Imprimatur.” The licensor violates the incorporeal essence of the author’s unmediated reason with his gross appendages, sifting through it with his hands and beating into shape with his schoolmaster’s rod. The text, and thus the author, is punished like a schoolboy by a licensor who marks the body of the text. Consequently, the more a text comes under license the greater its burden of physicality and the less its authorial intention is communicated to the reader. Milton argues that the reader who surveys freely-transmitted vice finds virtue only by confronting and rejecting such vice: “though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left – ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness” Milton reminds us. And so, “books promiscuously read” becomes a positive enterprise for Milton, but where licensing prevents this freedom then promiscuity itself becomes the outcome for minds unexposed to vice as well as virtue. Deny the populace the understanding of vice, he argues, and vice will they claim.

Returning to McKenzie’s take on Milton, let’s look for a moment at the image preceding the embalming one we studied earlier: books, claim Milton, “preserve as in a violl the purest effacie and extraction of that living intellect which bred them.” McKenzie is right to contend that, in fact, books are not the stable, transparent phials of Milton’s fantasy, into which we peer to view the unchanging essence of authorial meaning. The multiplicity of reader-response shatters the ‘violl’, or as another critic put it:

“…the ideal conception of texts as authoritative authorial containers can be seen to co-exist uneasily with the awareness of a printed text’s instability as it circulates promiscuously in the marketplace”

, and this promiscuous behaviour subsequently threatens “to undermine faith in the idea of ‘text’ as concurrent with divine order.”

In an age where the death of the author has been summarily pronounced, we perhaps find it hard to attribute any credibility at all to Milton’s biblio-phials, and texts he wished to be read promiscuously in order to get at Truth are themselves behaving promiscuously in the marketplace of print. Milton ultimately had no control over how his material was received, even unlicensed; the fantasy of the bodiless authorial reason held within the unchanging phial becomes, in the busy hands of readers, an object to be claimed, consumed and, all-too-often, misinterpreted. Taylor, on the other hand, acknowledges his lack of control over the body of the text once it has circulated into the marketplace, and his strategy was to embrace the possibilities of such subjection to the whims of readerships.

I’d like to close with this quote: Leah Marcus writes that

“…it is both amusing and comforting to recognize how closely our uneasiness with the unleashing of previously fixed text into the nebulous freefall of cyberspace approximates the anxiety experienced by Renaissance authors as they surrendered their writings into what appeared to them as the impersonality and uncontrolled dispersal of print”.

This anxiety on the one hand was at odds with a desire on the other to control the meaning of the text as we’ve seen with Milton, and although his metaphor of the textual body might look flimsy when compared with Taylor’s playful allegory, it does point to a need in this period for a concentrated effort to reclaim control over the printed word in order to make sense of a more complicated world. It’s a familiar story.

Blair, Ann. “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003): 11-28

Hartle, P. N. “”All His Workes Sir”: John Taylor’s Nonsense.” Neophilologus 86.1 (2002): 155-170

Miller, Lucasta. “The Shattered Violl: Print and Textuality in the 1640s.” Essays and Studies 46 (1993): 25-38

Marcus, Leah S. “Cyberspace Renaissance.” English Literary Renaissance 25.3 (1995): 388 – 401

McKenzie, Donald Francis. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

McRae, Andrew. “The Literature of Domestic Travel in Early Modern England: The Journeys of John Taylor.” Studies in Travel Writing 12 (2008): 85-100

Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Hackett Publishing Company, 2003

Poyntz, Nick. “Information technology and early modern readers.” Mercurius Politicus. 30 Nov 2008 (http://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/information-technology-and-early-modern-readers/)

Raben, Joseph. “Introducing Issues in Humanities Computing.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.1 (2007). 30 Nov 2008 (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/1/000008.html)

Sherman, Sandra. “Printing the Mind: The Economics of Authorship in Areopagitica.” ELH 60.2 (1993): 323-347