**This event, as with all the lectures in our annual series, is free and open to the public! Registration is requested. Rescheduled from April 26th.**
Abstract: Current knowledge of the problems faced during production of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in the printing house of John Day, the Elizabethan printer, is based upon the pioneering research of Julian Roberts, with revision and expansion by John N. King, Elizabeth Evenden, and Thomas S. Freeman. This lecture responds to these scholars by focusing upon Day’s approach to the correction of error, especially through his use of slip-cancels, tiny scraps of paper which are intended for pasting over erroneous text, as well as his use of stop-press correction and the labeling of the book’s well-known woodcuts. I will suggest ways in which the bibliographical nature of successive editions of Foxe’s book overseen by Day is even more complex than previously described, and I will demonstrate in particular the nature of Day’s commitment to producing an accurate text. The argument adds to scholarly understanding of the goals and methodologies of both Foxe and Day. Bibliographical fluidity associated with John Day’s approach to error during production points toward the better understanding of textual fluidity within successive editions of Foxe’s work.
Bio: Dr. Mark Rankin regularly teaches and has published widely on Tudor literature, English Reformation literature and culture, and the early English Bible. He is contributing editor of Sermons at Paul's Cross, 1521-1642 (Oxford, 2017) and co-editor of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge, 2009). He is currently completing a new census of surviving copies of the first four editions of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, and his critical edition of William Tyndale's The Practice of Prelates (1530) is under contract with Catholic University of America Press.
He is the Principal Investigator of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, 2016-19, on “The Independent Works of William Tyndale,” and has co-directed NEH Summer Seminars for College and University Teachers on "Tudor Books and Readers: 1485-1603" and "The Formation and Re-formation of the Book: 1450-1650.” He has held short-term research fellowships at the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and was Faculty Member in Residence for JMU's Semester in London Program during the autumn of 2013.
His articles have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Erasmus Studies, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, The Library, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Reformation, Studies in English Literature, The Yearbook of English Studies, and The Sixteenth Century Journal. He regularly offers presentations at the Renaissance Society of America's annual meeting, and at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. He is a member of the Bibliographical Society and the Renaissance English Text Society.
