Rebecca Bullard

Signs of the Times? Reading Signatures in Two Late Seventeenth-Century Secret Histories

Which parts of a printed text did early modern readers seek to interpret? Over past decades, research into the ‘material texts’ of the early modern period has made it clear that readers read and analysed more than just the words on the page. Such research has demonstrated that the intellectual content of a text is often inseparable from, or at least strongly reinforced by, its physical manifestation as book, pamphlet or roadside.1 The size and format of books has long been recognised as one of the means by which authors, booksellers and printers indicated something about the contents of texts to potential readers. Elements of mise-en-page, including choice of typeface(s) and printers’ ornaments as well as the ratio of black ink to white space, have proved fruitful areas of scholarly analysis.2 The dialogue between the physical margins of a text and its body has attracted critical scrutiny, whether those margins are filled with printed or handwritten annotations or are left conspicuously blank.3 A broad range of paratexts — among them, title pages, publishers’ imprints, colophons, engraved frontispieces, prefaces, prologues and other kinds of front matter, running titles, lists of errata, and even the terminal phrase, finis — have been considered and found significant.4 The work of scholars at the interface between analytical and descriptive bibliography and literary studies has fundamentally altered our understanding of early modern authorship, particularly of the relationship between early modern authors and the stationers who brought their books to the reading public.5

Gatherings in Exile: Interpreting the Bibliographical Structure of Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656)

This essay argues that the material, bibliographical structure—that is, the internal sequence of leaves and gatherings—of Margaret Cavendishs Natures Pictures (1656) is central to this volumes autobiographical function. Leaves and gatherings inserted late in the process of production testify not only to the authors lively mind and sometimes frantic working practices, but also to her political situation as an exile. The geographical and, therefore, temporal distance between Antwerp (the place where Cavendish was writing in 1656) and London (where she had Natures Pictures published) are registered in the material form of this text because of the particular qualities of the gatherings of which it is composed. The essay concludes by considering whether Cavendish did, or could have, intended the range of rhetorical effects that are produced by the bibliographical peculiarities of this volume.