Cutting up print work in early modern england

What is it about?

These essays explore the widespread practice of cutting up printed books in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. They explore the various functions of this pre-cursor to scrap-booking, and the reasons that its products have remained hidden for so long in our archives.

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Why is it important?

Studies of how people read their books in the early modern period have focused on the diaries and marginalia left by readers, but they have rarely had access to the evidence that readers cut their printed books. The proposition that cutting and pasting are themselves forms of reading and writing changes and enlarges what we understand about early modern texts and the ways they were read.