Department of English

This course will focus upon the material culture of reading, writing, and printing from 1100 to 1700. We will focus upon a range of specific topics: learning to read and write; text and performance; graffiti; word and image; books, pamphlets, and broadsides; manuscript publication; the relations between manuscript and print; printing and publishing; censorship. The main texts for the course will be the Bible, Shakespeare's Sonnets, the First Folio of Shakespeare, John Marston's The Malcontent, the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, Milton's Paradise Lost, and The New-England Primer. The course will also be an introduction to the extraordinary collections at the Library Company, the Free Library, and the Rosenbach Library, as well as at Penn, and will give you a chance to find archives that will be relevant for whatever research you will go on to do.