The acquisition of “Western knowledge” in late Tokugawa Japan, particularly in fields of science, technology, and medicine, has functioned as a central resource not only in modernization narratives but in the legitimization of imperial geographies that situate Japan as Asia’s rightful hegemon. This chapter brings together emerging research that decenters and pluralizes existing understandings of “Western knowledge,” placing “Western knowledge” instead within broader flows of global modernity. Specifically, by examining how a “transimperial educational commons” rendered diverse new texts and resources available to late Tokugawa scholars, this chapter argues that “Western knowledge” was in fact the product of networks of mediation across South, Southeast, and East Asia. Particular sites considered include circulation and brokerage through Dutch Indonesia and Qing China. The sum of these studies indicates that the problem of late Tokugawa engagements with Western knowledge can only be solved by examining sites both beyond the West and beyond Japan.

Publications were the most important links to Enlightenment intellectual culture across the Atlantic World. Jamaicans acquired publications in quantity despite the difficulty and expense, challenging the colonial reputation of philistinism. The trade in books and periodicals was connected to a commercial revolution that brought a variety of cultural commodities—musical instruments, telescopes, globes, etc.—to colonial and metropolitan doorsteps. These objects helped assert their owners’ gentility: a wealthy planter might house his collection in a suitably dignified library, but a Kingston businessman could showcase his modest collection in a mahogany bookcase, and a merchant based in a small coastal town could increase his intellectual capital by borrowing reading material from neighbors and friends. Evidence drawn from a variety of sources—advertisements for books and book furnishings; book orders and library inventories; accounts of borrowing and lending—show that Jamaican readers could satisfy a desire for everything from the classics of Antiquity to now-canonical Enlightenment works, from sentimental and scurrilous novels to popularizing works of science and practical how-to treatises.

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans had as much access to published materials as they desired whether through purchase from local merchants or metropolitan booksellers, orders through factors in England, or borrowing from friends. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

Part III, “Tristram Shandy in the Tropics: or, Reading Enlightenment in Jamaica,” begins with vignettes that demonstrate how acquiring publications was as important for Jamaicans as it was for British people of the metropole and North America and that they did so for similar reasons. Part III thus addresses a significant lacuna in the histories of the book and reading, vigorous fields in European and early American Enlightenment studies. As in Parts I and II, Part III shows the continuity in a colonial context of metropolitan intellectual practices and their adaptation by colonists to suit their needs, interests, and purposes. It begins with an impressionistic survey of reading on the island that explores what publications colonists secured and how they did so. It then delves into the meaning of reading for two Jamaicans, the ex-overseer Thomas Thistlewood and the planter Robert Long, by focusing on two themes: race and slavery, and religion. While the practices of these two readers cannot be generalized to all Jamaican readers, they demonstrate how colonial readers took possession of Enlightenment through reading and suggest how their reading was informed by personal experience, social status, intellectual, and even spiritual aspirations.

This introductory chapter contends that reprints are special sites of interpretation, illumination, and reinvention, and introduces the artists and works that this book will be about. It also uses debates about readership – among authors like F. R. Leavis and Virginia Woolf – and changes in publishing practices—in book clubs, larger print runs, and wood-engraved illustrations – to set the stage for the ways in which the legacy of the nineteenth-century novel was crafted for and by twentieth-century readers.

This article discusses the transitional nature of early Mesoamerican codices and their evolving status within the field of colonial Latin American literary studies. It does so by (1) exploring the physical and intellectual journeys of the original texts, a process characterized by historically conditioned forms of visual and textual literacy and by the often-divergent interests and goals of the individuals and institutions who came into contact with them; and (2) interrogating the displacements introduced by historical attempts at reproducing them in other formats and media and expanding the corpus through falsification. This chapter’s discussion allows for a revaluation of the way through which these texts came to occupy a place in the contemporary understanding of the colonial literary canon and the role they play in defining a field in transition.

This collection brings together an international group of scholars to address an expansive range of small things, paying close attention, for the first time, to the rich interaction between scale and the body. Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how entangled small things, such as mugs, buttons, and buckles, were with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small objects, such as tiny books, ceramic trinkets, toothpick cases, and patch boxes, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users, and also at the same time signaling the limits of the body’s adeptness or the hand’s dexterity. The volume also explores the mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry into circumscribed spaces political, philosophical, and cultural concepts; and how small items, tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants for example, were shaped by empire and contributed to Enlightenment systems of knowledge production. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, small things negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global colonial goods.

The preface to a mid-seventeenth century edition of Verbum Sempiternum declares that “though the Volume and the Work be smal, / Yet it containes the sum of All in All.” A miniaturized devotional work, it uses its size to frame a tension between human and divine scale, and in doing so, it demonstrates the way in which all kinds of miniature texts of the eighteenth century played with the idea of a large subject in small form. This chapter uses examples of a series of miniature books published across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explore questions of materiality, utility, scale, and legibility. Miniature books worked on the premise of totality made accessible through compression. We might see them as a kind of epistemological comfort blanket, the promise of a world of knowledge and information that their readers could own, wear, display. And in the virtuosity of their execution, their acts of precision engraving, typesetting, and binding, they offered fine examples of human ingenuity. But at the same time, in reducing the most important documents of Western faith and civilization into compact form, they also raised questions about their own credibility.

The defining feature of the medieval manuscript, the book that was used across Europe before the introduction of printing, is that its contents have been written by hand. A compelling feature of written text from the medieval period is that it produces two kinds of meaning: the meaning of the words themselves, the primary reason for consulting a manuscript, then and now; and more concealed meaning hidden within the shape of the letters. As medieval scribes copied a text, they included information about themselves and their surroundings in their handwriting. How the individual letters were formed depended, for example, on the location and moment of the book’s production, the institution in which the scribe was trained, and even with how much care a text was copied. This is the enigma of the medieval manuscript, that a wealth of historical information is embedded in the appearance of letters – if the code can be deciphered. What methods are available to untangle this enigma? What knowledge hidden in plain sight can be gleaned if we are successful? Why is looking at an old book as useful as reading it?

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

This chapter addresses the work of Jean Mabillon and Jean Hardouin. Mabillon, a Benedictine scholar, created a new field, paleography (the field that teaches how to date and authenticate handwritten texts) with the publication in 1681 of his On Diplomatics. Defending the authenticity of the documents he and his order were charged with curating, Mabillon set out criteria for determining authenticity. The handwriting in question, the location where the manuscript was produced, and dating formulas: these aspects and more came into play. The book succeeded, not least because Mabillon published exact replicas of the documents in question. Printing had evolved into a tool that could build trust in books as truth-bearing instruments. By contrast, Jean Hardouin came to create a wild conspiracy theory: that all of ancient literature save for a few authors was forged, as were the records of the Church Councils and even the work of Church Fathers like Saint Augustine. All of it was invented – in Hardouin’s view – by medieval theologians seeking to give themselves a backstory for their logic-chopping, sometimes heretical work. How could one know? Hardouin claimed that printing was the cause: now that so many books were printed and easily available, it was easier to compare them and thus easier to “prove” forgery.

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

In recent decades, book historians have become more aware of the social contexts in which books were made and used, and social and cultural historians have furthered the study of the lives and achievements of women during the Renaissance. This book aims to examine the interface between these two fields of study. It makes use of Robert Darnton’s communications circuit, envisaged for print culture, and develops it by applying the concept of the circulation of texts also to manuscript culture. These circuits provide the framework for the three chapters.

Focusing on a pocket-size edition of Whitman’s poems from the early twentieth century provides an opportunity for thinking about what happens to poems we think we know well when they’re read in different published contexts. Building on the central insight from book historical studies about the inextricability of publication form and literary content, this chapter also engages aspects of the history of sexuality that likewise take shape through the practices of reading and writing. The Little Blue Book edition at this chapter’s heart juxtaposes Whitman’s poems with the writings of another figure in the long US history of sexual liberation: feminist and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Reading Whitman alongside Sanger as the edition urges us to do uncovers unexpected intersections, and sometimes contradictions, at the sites of gender normativity, progressive political reform, and socialism, as well as the backlash against the progressive reforms to which Whitman and Sanger dedicated themselves.