Innovations in Cultural Research

Catherine Armstrong is a historian working at Manchester Metropolitan University in – you guessed it – Manchester. She has research interests in the history of print and what it can tell us about the colonial enterprise in North America. Below she gives us the lowdown on print and literacy in the early modern period, and sheds some light on some of the issues around historical methods and interpretation in historical research. The discussion also touches on early censorship and copyright, and the parallels between early modern print and contemporary digital literacy:

- You’re based at Manchester Met right now. Can you tell us first off about what you teach there? I understand you have been developing some courses there.

A: I teach American history. Although my specialist area is colonial America I end up teaching anything and everything from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The students especially love the modern era. I have just designed a unit called Prohibition to the Swinging Sixties looking at the cultural history of the US from 1918-1969, including topics such as gangsters, music, drugs, the media and radicalism and the students have signed up for that in droves!

- Your PhD was at Warwick. What was your PhD about?

A: My PhD looked at the different ways that the landscape, climate and flora and fauna of North America were represented in printed and manuscript accounts of travel to the New World during the period 1607-1660. It contrasted representations in different genres of print and also charted the ebb and flow of optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of American landscape.

- Could you tell us something about how the distinction between historiography and history works? I’ve always been uncertain as to whether this kind of research is concerned with or addresses the distinction between the analysis of historical texts per se, and accounts of what those texts indicate about understandings and social meanings in circulation at the time those texts were produced. Is this a distinction which can be put into operation? Is there, or should there be, any concern about the reliability of textual analysis in terms of indicating people’s understandings of the New World at the time?

A: As a simple answer, and one that I use with students who are having trouble grappling with definitions, historiography is the study of how people write history while history is the study of what happened in the past based on the evidenciary record.As you say it is incredibly difficult to access the meanings of texts to people in the past because of the paucity of reader-response data available, especially for my period of expertise, the 17th and 18th centuries. Hints are offered to the historian by the existence of marginalia or notes about books in diaries or commonplace books but there really is very little. A common challenge for book historians is that they might know that a book was purchased by an individual, an institution or a library, but they have no way of knowing whether it was ever read or not.
It definitely is a concern that the way I interpret a text is very different from the way an early modern person would. One way round this dilemma is to work with concepts such as intertextuality, so tracing the understanding of a reader when they become an author themselves. Just as scholars do today, EM readers borrowed significantly from the texts they read, and tools such as the Early English Books Online database allow us to do full text searches of Early Modern printed books to see what interested Author B when he read Book A.

- You have a monograph (Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century) and, if I remember rightly, a couple of co-edited collection (Worlds of Print: Diversity in the Book Trade, and Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade 1740-1914) in print. Perhaps you could summarise briefly how these books came into being and what they’re about.

A: My monograph emerged directly from my PhD thesis. I approached several publishers looking for interest soon after my PhD viva and Ashgate responded most favourably. The co-edited collections are part of the Print Networks series of volumes of which I have recently retired as co-editor and am now convenor of their conference series. Print Networks runs an annual 3-day conference focussing on the history of the British Book Trade and a number of papers are selected each year for publication. The volumes are an eclectic mix of chronologies and approaches that reveal the vibrancy of the field of book history today.

- Are you interested in the political and social purposes to which these texts were put in terms of the colonial project? Is it sensible to isolate the political and the social in this regard?

A: Yes I am interested in these purposes, but in my mind I don’t separate the political from the social. I think these concepts are useful teaching tools when helping students to understand large themes and definitions of historical change, but when I look at EM actors and readers and their ‘self-fashioning’, they don’t separate their political self from their social self, everything is political. I follow Habermas in placing the emergence of a separate public and private sphere later in the enlightened, proto-capitalist 18th century.

- What do you think about the notion that we can’t or should not discuss previous historical periods with references to the moral and political conceptions in operation today? Do you think it is acceptable, for instance, to make critiques of the texts of previous eras grounded in feminist or Marxist approaches? Is history, or should it be, ‘neutral’ in this regard? If it is not, does it import a covert model of ‘progress’? Some sociologists feel themselves to be caught between relativism and absolutism when using historical materials, are there similar concerns for historians?

A: I don’t know if it’s acceptable, but I think it’s inevitable that our own ideological leanings, however subtly we wear them, taint our work. As long as we acknowledge this publically and don’t claim a pretended objectivity this is fine with me. I personally find Marxist and feminist approaches anachronistic to my period of study: I don’t think those ideologies have anything relevant to say about the EM political consciousness. But for late 18th century historians Marxism has had a great deal to say, an example being E.P.Thompson who has been hugely influential on the way that many of us write history today. As for feminism, in our field this seems to have been mostly superceded by gender history, so the study of men behaving in a gendered way is just as valid as trying to put women back into history (or, yuck, ‘herstory’!)
The issue of progress is very interesting, it’s certainly difficult to move students away from the idea that developed countries are somehow ahead of other countries/cultures in civilisation. But if you look at a cross cultural, multi chronological theme like persecution you realise that the idea of linear progress is redundant, there’s no beginning and end, persecution simply morphs into a different form.

- What kind of ‘raw materials’ constitute the data you work with? Are there ‘gaps’ on the basis of what people thought pertinent to record and what they omitted to record, and if so, what do we do about those gaps? From the other side I suppose the same question can be put – how do we know our use of the historical record is not merely an artefact of our own preoccupations?

A: The raw materials historians work with are always flawed. I work with the printed texts themselves in editions produced in the EM period, often now viewed digitally via the Early English Books Online database. I also use the letters, diaries, family archives of people who wrote or read these books. So, in my period the nature of these archives excludes the story of the illiterate masses. However, this isn’t black and white: despite functional illiteracy many people would have absorbed the knowledge and ideas contained in books via oral transmission or communal reading. But yes, the survival of old documents is a problem. We only have access to what family members, archivists, earlier historians thought it worthwhile to save. So, for example, hundreds of ballads were destroyed because of over-use and because they were not designed to be saved for posterity. If it wasn’t for the great collectors of ballads such as Samuel Pepys we would know very little about this popular literary form. Values of preservation were very different in the past compared to today. In the 17th century printed books were bound using Medieval MS that today would be considered priceless but then were considered scrap paper.
The historical record is entirely an artefact of our own preoccupations (I love that phrase, may I borrow it?!) and must be acknowledged as such. But there are always subtle ways of rescuing lost voices.

- In what way did perceptions of the colonial project in North America differ from those of Australasia? How do the distinctions look as regards Africa and South America?

A: I know little about the colonial projects in Australia and Africa but my limited understanding indicates that little was learned from the earlier American case in terms of, say, the treatment of the natives. But in comparing North America with South America, which of course was settled by whites first, some fascinating points emerge. The Spanish and Portuguese did things differently: they were Catholic and so their understanding of the relationship between their religion and Natives’ religion was very different to that of the New England Puritans for example. Also slavery developed differently, large plantations with incredibly high mortality rates predominanted in South America and the Caribbean, and in consequence cultural links with Africa were maintained more strongly than in the North. Many historians now see the value of studying the Atlantic world (i.e. North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe an Africa) as a holistic entity during the 16-19th centuries.

- Within anthropology there is now a kind of reflexive tradition of concern about the textual production of ‘the other’. Do you think the historical texts you have researched can be said to ‘produce’ indigenous populations for their audiences, and if so, how do they do this? Was there selective, and perhaps politically motivated representation going on?

A: The other in my case, the Native Americans, certainly were produced in text for Europeans. In fact I argue that the whole of North America itself was constructed in text. In terms of the ‘other’, there are two sides to the representations: the fearsome cannibalistic savage and the friendly noble savage. The two representations varied in power and potency depending on the vulnerability or confidence of the author. For example in Virginia in 1622, one third of the English settlers were massacred by Opecancanough’s tribe. Far from making the English subdued and frightened of the natives this spurned an aggressive outpouring of hate-literature that encouraged the English to see the natives as a legitimate target for massacre themselves.
Because of the paucity of evidence of authentic native voices and their constantly having to be mediated through English texts it is challenging to access their story or their side of the story. Native historians today such as Don Fixico try to do this but this opens up a whole new can of worms. Is a native historian’s view of the native past more valid simply because he is native himself? If we allow that, does that mean that men can’t write the history of women, that white men can’t write the history of slavery?

- Is there a historical interest in copyright and censorship around the material produced during this period? Presumably one can track the historical emergence of copyright as a regime. Did religion play a part in this?

A: Copyright and censorship are hugely important to historians of the book and textual historians. During my period author copyright doesn’t really exist, authors pinch material from one another at will with no acknowledgement of the source. Authorship as a concept is less important than it is today, witness the layout of a modern title page and compare it with an EM book. In the 17th century the author’s name is not displayed prominently on the title page. Rogue or ‘false’ imprints of other publishers’ work appeared frequently, little concrete was done to prevent this until 1710.
Censorship is fascinating. During the EM period the Stationers’ Company controlled the output of printed material but self-censorship also worked. If an author couldn’t find a sponsor to pay for the publication of his book it didn’t get published. For example, William Strachey on the history of Virginia in 1612 didn’t get published because the Virginia Company wanted to suppress his account, as it detailed mutinous feelings among the gentlemen explorers in the New World. The censorship regime was also highly political of course, especially during the late 17th century under the tory Royalist, Roger L’Estrange.

- Do you see overlaps at different times between the distribution of novel media forms and the impacts of these media forms? That is, for the period you research, are there witnessable concerns about the impacts texts were having, or does this fluctuate depending on other features of the context?

A: During my period and on into the early 18th century, there were concerns about print as a medium both as regards its suitability as a vessel for serious knowledge and its effect on the minds of readers. Some poets for example didn’t want their poems distributed in print; they preferred to rely on older forms of manuscript publishing (ie where a scribe would make a number of copies) which would then be given to friends and family.
When it was new print was thought to be especially corrupting because readers woulnd’t understand its conventions. However, the use of print for significant texts such as the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer helped link print with religious devotion in the minds of the English.
There was serious concern about the impact critics of North America were having on the enterprise, but far from causing suppression of texts it caused a flurry of others to defend the project.

- When you think of the history of print media and of media in general, do you as a historian consider this development to be a kind of continuum, or are there significant ruptures? How would we know such a rupture when we saw one?

A: Both. The coming of print revolutionised the distribution of knowledge in so many ways but it also fed off the textual and distributional techniques used in the manuscript era. A different example might be in 1695 with the lapse of the Licensing Act, not well known outside circles of historical scholarship perhaps, but nevertheless hugely significant, as it opened up printing in the English provinces and led to the creation of local newspapers. This was a very important moment, but initially these local papers mirrored the output of the London press.
The most radical changes in the media seem to happen in the later 19th century onwards such as the expansion of literacy, telephony, moving image and so on. But I am sure that historians who are expert in those periods would also see strong evidence of a continuum as well as radical change. I think the point is that we would not know a ‘rupture’ until we were able to view it with hindsight.

- In terms of print, the circulation of printed materials, and the contents of the material so circulated, were there significant differences according to location within the UK, and again comparing the UK with North America? If so, is it fair to say that these differences can be mapped in relation to literacy, income, and class?

A: The circulation of printed materials was certainly based on income and class, until very recently (late 19th century) a book was a luxury item. Even unbound in the EM period, a large book would cost several shillings putting it far outside the realms of possibility for the working man or woman. However, smaller pamphlets and single sheet ballads might cost only a few pence and would be bought by all from the poor to the very wealthy. The circulation of print depended on three strands: book fairs to which the wealthiest members of the elite went (held in places in England such as Cambridge but the biggest was in Frankfurt) to stock up on books for their private libraries; book shops and stalls around the country by the end of the 16th century, but centred on St. Paul’s churchyard in London, these were patronised by people of all classes; and thirdly pedlars who took very cheap print artefacts with them around the country on their traditional routes. For example, a pedlar in Shropshire sold Virginian tobacco alongside pamphlets on the North American enterprise in the early 17th century.
Book distribution in North America was slower to take off. Many wealthy Americans bought their books directly from England right up until the Revolution, despite the presence of a number of book shops and libraries in Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston and other cities. Printing was limited to New England for nearly the first century of white settlement. Virginia’s governor William Berkeley was especially scathing about the book trade: “I thank God, we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both!” For many 17th century Americans the only books they had were the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. But later on as America’s wealth grew and her elites wished to emulate the elites of London and Paris, books became a status symbol there too.

- Do you think the current discussion about the digital divide mirrors previous concerns about print literacy, or is that an unfair comparison? Do you think the historical record provides us with any insights into issues of access and literacy as they are playing out currently?

A: Yes, I think there are certain comparisons to be drawn between lack of literacy in the past (or even the present) and lack of digital access. But, as I said earlier, the distinction between the haves and the have-nots in the past was not a black and white one. Oral culture in the EM period went a considerable way to bridging the gap. So, for example, a broadside (the equivalent to a modern day poster or notice) would be pinned to a church door announcing that a ship was leaving for Virginia and those interested in travelling should get in touch with the Company. Perhaps only 20% of the people in that village could read, but those that could read would explain its contents to those that couldn’t. Obvious really. And anyway, literacy indicators are the subject of huge controversy among historians … some people could read but not write because they left school before writing was taught. Some people could sign their name and so are defined by some as literate, yet they couldn’t read at all. Others would have been able to read simple texts, yet others could read manuscript not print, while still more could read italic but not gothic script or vice versa. I know less about digital access but I am sure the issues there are as nuanced as with the literacy discussion, especially close is the parallel of shared, communal access to the internet in the developing world.

- What are you working on at the moment? I think there are a couple of forthcoming articles, are these part of a larger project?

A: I have several projects on the go at the moment. My next big project is my work on my second monograph, which will be an exploration of the representations of American landscape in print for the period 1660-1745. That is in the research stages at the moment. I am also working on Indian captivity narratives and the ways that captives use their story of travel through a hostile landscape to depict their identity as an American. I have a couple of pieces in edited collections coming out this year about the contrasting depictions of native and white cannibalism in the New World and about the 1622 Virginia Massacre.