Penmanship in print: English copy-books and their makers, 1570-1763

Starting in the 1570s, printed penmanship manuals promised to teach Englishpeople speedy, legible, even beautiful writing through textual instruction and illustrated specimens. Based upon an extensive survey of extant writing-books, this dissertation contends that writing-masters developed and deployed a range of strategies to establish their authority over their subject, their command over their art. As such, despite their fundamentally commonplace material (the accepted forms of the letters of the alphabet), their books could serve as proprietary proxies for their hands, bodies, and voices. By studying the construction of authorial expertise within functional, non-literary books circulating in a crowded, competitive market, this study argues for broader understandings of authorship beyond its inscription in canonical textual works. Examining a dispute between two late-sixteenth-century writing-masters, William Panke and Peter Bales, about creating letterforms through individual strokes, Chapter 1 shows why their common hybrid script-and-print method was an early revolution in the search for ways to successfully teach writing in absentia. An Interchapter exploring the early shift from relief to intaglio methods in printing English writing-books establishes the importance of illustrative technologies in the creation of successful calligraphical specimens. Chapter 2 captures how seventeenth-century writing-master Edward Cocker marketed himself, through an exceptionally large, innovative corpus and through verbal and visual rhetoric, as an instructor, artisan, and author-figure. As a counterpoint, Chapter 3 investigates the two-way trade in content between attributable and unattributed writing-books, and the motivations of the stationers who published them, to promulgate anonymity as an alternative model of authority. A second Interchapter traces the advent of an unembellished round hand, starting in the 1660s, placing the move toward uniformity in writing within the context of England\u27s increasingly mercantile culture. Chapter 4 consolidates late-seventeenth century writing-masters\u27 affinity for flourishes, drawings, and ornament into an aesthetics of excess that directly responded to the new emphasis on legibility and pragmatism in writing. Finally, Chapter 5 analyzes the emergence of a retrospective, curatorial impulse among eighteenth-century writing-masters, who, through visual anthologies and textual histories of domestic writing-books, depicted Britain\u27s economic power as a function of a national tradition in literacy