In this book Valentin Groebner addresses the notions and practices of gift giving in late medieval and early modern Europe between 1400 and 1550. Focusing on the prosperous cities of the Upper Rhine, it explores the uses of gifts in political ritual and the different functions of these donations. Contemporaries spoke of these gifts--sometimes wine, sometimes coins or other precious metals--as liquid; indeed, the same German word was used for giving a present or pouring a fluid. These gifts were integral parts of an economy of information marking complex differences and dependencies in...

This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. In recent years, French literary scholars have been exploring the interpretive possibilities of textual history, turning manuscript study into a recognized form of literary criticism. They have clearly demonstrated that manuscripts can be used for purposes other than establishing an accurate text of a work.

Although its raw material is a writer's manuscripts, genetic criticism owes more to structuralist and poststructuralist notions of textuality than to...

Copyright and intellectual property issues are intricately woven into any written work, but the precise nature of this relationship has plagued authors, printers, and booksellers for centuries. What does it mean to own the products of our intellectual labors in our own time? And what was the meaning three centuries ago, when copyright laws were first put into place?

Jody Greene argues that while "owning" one's book is critical to the development of modern notions of authorship, studies of authorial property rights have in fact lost sight of the most critical valence of owning in early...

"The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825" reconstructs how eighteenth-century British readers invented further adventures for beloved characters, including Gulliver, Falstaff, Pamela, and Tristram Shandy. Far from being close-ended and self-contained, the novels and plays in which these characters first appeared were treated by many as merely a starting point, a collective reference perpetually inviting augmentation through an astonishing wealth of unauthorized sequels. Characters became an inexhaustible form of common property, despite their patent authorship. Readers endowed them with...

The history of early modern travel is captured in its volatile and evolving literature. From the middle of the 1400s, what had been for centuries a travel literature of pilgrimage to the Holy Land underwent two "modernizations" in rapid succession. The first, in the wake of Gutenberg, was the casting or recasting of pilgrims' accounts in the new medium of print. By the waning of the fifteenth century, such printed literature had reconfirmed and enhanced long-distance pilgrimage as the primary narrative of European travel. The second, forged by the great discoveries and reformations of the...