Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient ...

'In the midst of life we are in death' The words of the Book of Common Prayer have permeated deep into the English language all over the world. For nearly 500 years, and for countless people, it has provided a background fanfare for a marriage or a funeral march at a burial. Yet this familiarity also hides a violent and controversial history. When it was first produced the Book of Common Prayer provoked riots and rebellion, and it was banned before being translated into a host of global la...

'In the midst of life we are in death.' The words of the Book of Common Prayer have permeated deep into the English language all over the world. For nearly 500 years, and for countless people, it has provided a background fanfare for a marriage or a funeral march at a burial. Yet this familiarity also hides a violent and controversial history. When it was first produced the Book of Common Prayer provoked riots and rebellion, and it was banned before bei...

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. This volume shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied...

This stimulating volume explores how the memory of the Reformation has been remembered, forgotten, contested, and reinvented between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries.Remembering the Reformation traces how a complex, protracted, and unpredictable process came to be perceived, recorded, and commemorated as a transformative event. Exploring both local and global patterns of memory, the contributors examine the ways in which the Reformation embedded itself in the historical ima...

The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most influential books in history. First published in the reign of Edward VI, in 1549, it was a product of the English Reformation following the break with Rome. For nearly five centuries, it has formed the order of worship for established Christianity in England. More listeners have heard these prayers, it is said, than the soliloquies of Shakespeare. As British imperial ambitions spread, the Book of Common Prayer became the primar...

Bringing together scholars from literature and the history of ideas, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between cognitive and bodily models of emotion, and between different versions of the will as active or passive. In the process, it juxtaposes the historical formation of such ideas with contemporary philosophical debates. It frames a dialogue between rhetoric and medicine, politics and religion, in order to examine the relat...

Trapped by a Blizzard, Bound by Desire.When a winter storm strands famous country singer Peter Lexington at Kristina Cartwright's remote horse farm, neither expects the heat that ignites between them. She thinks he's delusional about being a star. He's never met a woman immune to his charm.As the snow piles up outside, so does the tension within. For Kristina, horses have always been enough—they never lie, cheat, or leave like the men in her life. For Peter...

Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone.Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media suc...