Owners and collectors of the printed books of the early modern Lord Mayors' Shows

Hill, T (2014) 'Owners and collectors of the printed books of the early modern Lord Mayors' Shows.' Library and Information History, 30 (3). pp. 151-171. ISSN 1758-3489

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1758348914Z.00000000061

Abstract

The annual London Lord Mayor’s Show, which saw its heyday in the early modern period, exists in printed form from 1585. These books stand as permanent witnesses to an ephemeral event. Until quite recently they have not been subject to any thoroughgoing bibliographical study, however. This article explores the evidence that remains of readers’ ownership of and interactions with these works from the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Copies of these works were owned by collectors including Humphrey Dyson, Robert Burton, Anthony Wood, and John Philip Kemble. Through an exploration of handlists and annotations, one can discover how these books were collected and categorized. Such an analysis reveals not just the original cultural meaning of these works but also the ways in which owners and collectors identified them in generic terms, thus suggesting their changing value to readers.

Item Type: Article
Keywords: provenance, pageantry, book owners, Humphrey Dyson, Robert Burton, John Philip Kemble, Richard Smith, Anthony Wood, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, London
Subjects: D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain
P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1179/1758348914Z.00000000061
Date Deposited: 03 Sep 2014 10:09
Last Modified: 15 Aug 2021 09:38
URI / Page ID: https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/4572
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