Project:
Renaissance Music and its Transformation Through Print

Richard Freedman
Associate Professor of Music, Haverford College
PhD 1987, University of Pennsylvania

Having extensively explored the relationship between 16th century French Protestant Orlando di Lasso's music and the printed sources in which it was made known to its audiences, Dr. Freedman anticipates furthering his investigations. Lasso's musical output totaled some 3500 compositions. With such an expansive corpus at hand, Dr. Freedman explicates many questions and concerns. What sorts of printed books did Lasso use? How did he use the poems contained within these sources? How do his retrospective chanson albums (issued during the last decades of his long career) compare with similarly retrospective 'complete secular works' brought by some of his contemporaries in France and the Low Countries? What can such books reveal about changing relationships among composers, printers, and musical readers during the 16th century? Dr. Freedman's project works to situate Lasso's printed music in the broader history of intellectual property. Thanks to the intervention of French kings and Imperial princes, Lasso was granted an exclusive right to control how and by whom his music would be printed. Operating as he did in a period of profound transformation of music by the relatively new medium of print, Lasso's efforts to exert control over his artistic property in some ways mirrors processes at work today in the rapidly changing world of sound recordings and new media. By knowing more about the changing status and meaning of musical texts, we will come to recognize how our own knowledge of the musical past -whether in musicological editions, in performance, or in sound recordings - is shaped by the means through which we encounter it.

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Project:
Caxton and the Ethics of Editorial Choice

Maud Burnett McInerney
Assistant Professor of English, Haverford College
PhD 1994, University of California, Berkeley

An Englishman living in Germany, where a technological revolution in the production of books was taking place, William Caxton learned printing and established his first press at Bruges. In 1574, Caxton produced the first book printed in English, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye. In 1476, his translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse was the first book printed in England, and from that point on, he never looked back. By the time of his death in 1491, Caxton had published over one hundred works, including over a dozen that he translated himself. Caxton’s impact upon the development of English literature has long been recognized; his choices concerning what to print (and perhaps more significantly, what not to print) established for the first time a canon in English. Historians have, however, been somewhat too ready to take Caxton’s version of his own story literally. Rather, the prologues and epilogues in his texts suggest that he was far from being without ideology, and that his protestations of being nothing more than a conduit for the words of others was disingenuous. The most obvious aspect of this ideology reflects class consciousness: a highly successful member of the mercantile class, Caxton made aristocratic literature available, at least potentially, to the nascent bourgeoisie, but his reference to patrons both actual and hoped for suggests that his desired audience was always itself aristocratic. The choices that Caxton made, not only editorially but as a translator, reveal a network of social and political pressures and influences, and a complex attitude towards the value of narrative as a cultural force. At this crucial point in history, when the question of what it means to read is once again being challenged by new technology, it seems more worthwhile than ever to explore Caxton’s work. Dr. McInerney will explore both an ethics of publication and a theory of translation from Caxton’s prologues and epilogues. In doing so, she will situate these in the broader context of the social and political world inhabited the first printer in English.

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Project:
Novel Entitlements: Titles, Property, and the Making of the English Novel

Eleanor F. Shevlin
Assistant Professor of English, West Chester University
PhD 2000, University of Maryland

With its themes of marriages made, inheritances lost, estates restored, identities reclaimed, bankruptcies endured, and fortunes earned, the novel as a genre-in-the-making bespoke 18th century English society’s ubiquitous concern with property and its regulation. Dr. Shevlin uses the concept of “property” to construct an alternative history of the 18th century English novel. In delineating the roles property played in the making of the English novel, this project addresses the novel’s simultaneous status as a material object and a socio-historical form, which thematically embodies 18th century notions of the contested nature of property. To consider these seemingly disparate concerns, Dr. Shevlin takes a closer look at a phenomenon that straddles the world of printed texts and the world of cultural conversations rooted in history – the title of the text. Not until the early decades of the 18th century did the title assume all its modern functions – referential, commercial, descriptive, interpretive, and legal. Once these roles were in place, the title emerges as literally tied to property, both as a text’s identifying sign and as its symbol. As a sign of property, the title records ownership claims exercised upon a work. As such, the process of entitling a text can mark a range of claims: stages in a work’s composition, marketing decisions made by publishers, legal restrictions of textual ownership, or revampings of textual meaning by reader-inspired title alterations. At the same time, as abstracts of the works they label, titles present ideological résumés of the “world-making” novels perform – they encapsulate the various views that early novels offered on how property should structure society. Held together by bonds of property, these intersections between the practices governing the titling of texts, the growth of literature as commercial products, and developments in English laws regulating property fashion a dynamic model of generic formation. This formation replaces responses to “what is a novel?” with ones that address how the English novel was made, how the “novel” as property became actually vested as a genre, and how this making integrates larger socio-historical developments defining England in the 18th century. More than just a project on the 18th century novel, Dr. Shevlin’s study also offers new avenues for generic theorizing, for integrating materialist approaches to literature with traditional bibliographic methods, and for constructing literacy histories within the frame of cultural and historical contexts.

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