10:30 AM to 11:45 AM MW
Art & Design Building 2003
Section Information for Fall 2014
This course will analyze the impact of books and the written word on Western Europe both before and after the development of the printing press in Mainz by Johan Gutenberg in the 1450s. We shall focus on the early centuries of printing up to 1800, when each printed page was printed by hand and each piece of paper was made by hand. The course shall force you to consider books as material objects rather than just as vessels for texts. You will learn how the format or materiality of a book influenced how readers read them, in much the same way as you read a book differently and have different experiences when reading on a tablet, a computer screen, or holding a copy of the book in your hand. You will explore a number of early modern books and get hands-on experience with them at the Library of Congress. Over the course of the semester we shall examine a number of relevant questions: How were early printed books made and constructed? How did the printing press affect the Renaissance? What role did vernacular translations of the Bible play in the Reformation? Why did manuscript (literally, hand-written) books continue to circulate for centuries after the invention of the printing press? Why did readers have to learn to read books differently once they became available in cheaper printed formats? How did the printing press affect literacy rates in Western Europe? Could certain books, say Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract or Thomas Paine's Common Sense really cause revolutions? [Rousseau's Social Contract is one of the books George Mason is touching in his statue on campus!] You will learn the answers to these questions and many more. There will be two short essays (5-8 pp.) written outside of class as well as a mid-term and final exam. Class time will be divided roughly equally among lectures, small group discussions, and labs (hands-on work) either in class, in the GMU library, or in the Library of Congress. Also, everyone in the class will be required to get a Library of Congress reader's card. Readings will include Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, and several shorter essays and chapters available online or on Blackboard.
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Credits: 3
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