Boxes and Books in Early Modern England : Materiality, Metaphor, Containment

Razzall offers close readings of literary texts alongside artefacts from chests to book-bindings and reliquaries, to reveal the importance of the box as object and idea in early modern culture. This book is for students and researchers in English Literature, History, and Art History, as well as book historians and librarians.

In early modern England, boxes furnished minds as readily as they furnished rooms, shaping ideas about the challenges of interpretation, and negotiations of the book itself as text and material object. Engaging with recent work on material culture and the history of the book, Lucy Razzall weaves together close readings of texts and objects, from wills, plays, sermons and religious polemic, to chests, book-bindings, reliquaries and coffins. She demonstrates how the material and imaginative possibilities of the box were dynamically connected in post-Reformation England, structuring modes of thought. These early modern responses to materiality offer ways in which the discipline of book history might reframe its analysis of the material text. In tracing the early modern significance of the box as matter and metaphor, this book reveals the origins of some of the enduring habits of thought with which we still respond to people, texts and things.