2/24 Richard Johnson's Seven Champions

My apologies for the late posting:

1)

“The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.” --Edward Said Orientalism

Does Said’s statement seem like an apt description of the racial lines that get drawn in Johnson’s text. Why or why not?

2)

One of the few critics to write on this text, Jennifer Fellows, has argued that the George of the 7 Champions is a nationalist folk hero than a conventional religious figure, and that a deep Protestant suspicion of all the Catholic veneration of saints lies behind his portrayal.

Do you see evidence of this in the treatment of him? Does he appropriate the Catholic connotations of medieval romance while capturing its cultural authority and deploying it for decidedly nationalist, Protestant ends?

Finding Moxon reading on EEBO

Hi all, I'm having trouble finding the Joseph Moxon selection on EEBO and I was wondering if one of our resident experts might be able to help me out. There are plenty of copies of Mechanick Exercises, or, the Doctrine of Handy-works applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry and Turning, but I can't seem to find the Whole of the Art of Printing.

2/10 Cheap Print and the Appearance of Text

I am going to lob a broad question at you and invite you to make it specific and relevant to your own investment with print culture as a stream of literary studies.

1) Why, to paraphrase Mark Bland, should the "appearance" of text matter to us as modern critics of Renaissance literature? What can it tell us?


2) Some of you may have seen the fairly recent excellent documentary on Helvetica font. Feel free to speculate on how the history of black letter might be an equal study in the development of the early modern world as Helvetica is to the modern.



3) Why, do you think, Sidney's *Arcadia* was published in pica roman when all the other romances of the late 1580s were in black letter?