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Alexandra da Costa
I'm an Associate Professor at the Faculty of English. Before I came to Cambridge, I was at Oxford as a Fixed-Term Fellow at St Hilda’s College, and before that as a Research Fellow and Tutor at Keble College. I studied English Literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, specialising in medieval literature through their 'Course 2', before going on to complete my Masters and DPhil there. My doctoral thesis was on the printed books that Syon Abbey printed in the turbulent 1530s, when the Church in England was threatened by both the spread of Lutheran heresy and Henry VIII's desire for greater ecclesiastical control. This has since become a book, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey's Defence of Orthodoxy 1524-1534 (OUP, 2012).
My most recent book Marketing English Books, 1476-1550: How Printers Changed Reading (OUP, 2020) is about how the earliest printers moulded demand and created new markets. Until the advent of print, the sale of books had been primarily a bespoke trade, but printers faced a new sales challenge: how to sell hundreds of identical books to individuals, who had many other demands on their purses. In this book I contend that this forced printers to think carefully about marketing and potential demand, for even if they sold through a middleman—as most did—that wholesaler, bookseller, or chapman needed to be convinced the books would attract customers. Marketing English Books sets out, therefore, to show how markets for a wide range of texts were cultivated by English printers between 1476 and 1550 within a wider, European context: devotional tracts; forbidden evangelical books; romances, gests, and bawdy tales; news; pilgrimage guides, souvenirs and advertisements; and household advice. Through close analysis of paratexts—including title-pages, prefaces, tables of contents, envoys, colophons, and images—the book reveals the cultural impact of printers in this often overlooked period. It argues that while print and manuscript continued alongside each other, developments in the marketing of printed texts began to change what readers read and the place of reading in their lives on a larger scale and at a faster pace than had occurred before, shaping their expectations, tastes, and even their practices and beliefs. (You can order online at www.oup.com/academic with promo code AAFLYG6 to save 30%)
Address: Faculty of English, Cambridge University, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP
My most recent book Marketing English Books, 1476-1550: How Printers Changed Reading (OUP, 2020) is about how the earliest printers moulded demand and created new markets. Until the advent of print, the sale of books had been primarily a bespoke trade, but printers faced a new sales challenge: how to sell hundreds of identical books to individuals, who had many other demands on their purses. In this book I contend that this forced printers to think carefully about marketing and potential demand, for even if they sold through a middleman—as most did—that wholesaler, bookseller, or chapman needed to be convinced the books would attract customers. Marketing English Books sets out, therefore, to show how markets for a wide range of texts were cultivated by English printers between 1476 and 1550 within a wider, European context: devotional tracts; forbidden evangelical books; romances, gests, and bawdy tales; news; pilgrimage guides, souvenirs and advertisements; and household advice. Through close analysis of paratexts—including title-pages, prefaces, tables of contents, envoys, colophons, and images—the book reveals the cultural impact of printers in this often overlooked period. It argues that while print and manuscript continued alongside each other, developments in the marketing of printed texts began to change what readers read and the place of reading in their lives on a larger scale and at a faster pace than had occurred before, shaping their expectations, tastes, and even their practices and beliefs. (You can order online at www.oup.com/academic with promo code AAFLYG6 to save 30%)
Address: Faculty of English, Cambridge University, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP
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The article builds on R.N. Swanson’s article published in JEBS in 2011, which began to illuminate the ways in which religious foundations used regional agents to advertise their indulgences and fraternal benefits.
My lorde, accordyngly vnto your desyre: I haue translated your boke 7 put it into our natyue 7 mother tongue as my simple wit and power lernyng wold suffer me (+2r, STC 14553)
This is not a literary device meant to give authority to the Mirror, but a statement of fact. The Mirror is a very close translation of Ulrich Pinder’s Speculum passionis Domini nostri, probably written in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and printed on Pinder’s own Nuremberg press by Friedrich Peypus in 1507 and 1519. All of the Mirror after this letter is translated from Pinder’s Latin text. This means that, while Fewterer was responsible for providing ‘English readers [with] the kind of doctrinal teaching and structured devotional application previously restricted to Latin readers’, it was Pinder who originally drew this teaching together from sources that included Jordan of Quedlinburg’s Articuli passionis cum theorematibus et documentis and Ludolf of Saxony’s Vita Christi. Allan Westphall usefully described Fewterer’s Mirror as part of a ‘peripheral’ group of pseudo-Bonaventuran texts in the Middle English tradition and this description can equally be applied to Pinder’s Speculum. That is, it is not an adaptation of the Meditationes vitae Christi or the Meditationes de passione Christi, nor an adaptation of the Stimulus Amoris, but part of a ‘significant peripheral corpus’ that uses ‘excerpts from the Latin Meditationes’. In the Middle English tradition this group includes Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, Book to a Mother, and some individual cycle dramas, as well as Fewterer’s Mirror. Yet while Pinder’s and Fewterer’s texts are not the sole members of this ‘peripheral corpus’, we need to recognise that in them there is ‘a movement away from the [affective and imaginative] tendencies of the mainstream late-medieval Passion meditation, perhaps best illustrated in the pseudo-Bonaventuran corpus.’ This essay explores in more depth Pinder’s and Fewterer’s debt to the Passion meditation tradition and how the compilation was positioned in relation to other pseudo-Bonaventuran works.
The article builds on R.N. Swanson’s article published in JEBS in 2011, which began to illuminate the ways in which religious foundations used regional agents to advertise their indulgences and fraternal benefits.
My lorde, accordyngly vnto your desyre: I haue translated your boke 7 put it into our natyue 7 mother tongue as my simple wit and power lernyng wold suffer me (+2r, STC 14553)
This is not a literary device meant to give authority to the Mirror, but a statement of fact. The Mirror is a very close translation of Ulrich Pinder’s Speculum passionis Domini nostri, probably written in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and printed on Pinder’s own Nuremberg press by Friedrich Peypus in 1507 and 1519. All of the Mirror after this letter is translated from Pinder’s Latin text. This means that, while Fewterer was responsible for providing ‘English readers [with] the kind of doctrinal teaching and structured devotional application previously restricted to Latin readers’, it was Pinder who originally drew this teaching together from sources that included Jordan of Quedlinburg’s Articuli passionis cum theorematibus et documentis and Ludolf of Saxony’s Vita Christi. Allan Westphall usefully described Fewterer’s Mirror as part of a ‘peripheral’ group of pseudo-Bonaventuran texts in the Middle English tradition and this description can equally be applied to Pinder’s Speculum. That is, it is not an adaptation of the Meditationes vitae Christi or the Meditationes de passione Christi, nor an adaptation of the Stimulus Amoris, but part of a ‘significant peripheral corpus’ that uses ‘excerpts from the Latin Meditationes’. In the Middle English tradition this group includes Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, Book to a Mother, and some individual cycle dramas, as well as Fewterer’s Mirror. Yet while Pinder’s and Fewterer’s texts are not the sole members of this ‘peripheral corpus’, we need to recognise that in them there is ‘a movement away from the [affective and imaginative] tendencies of the mainstream late-medieval Passion meditation, perhaps best illustrated in the pseudo-Bonaventuran corpus.’ This essay explores in more depth Pinder’s and Fewterer’s debt to the Passion meditation tradition and how the compilation was positioned in relation to other pseudo-Bonaventuran works.