Earle Havens
Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of German & Romance Languages & Literatures at Johns Hopkins
I work on the material and cultural history of texts as they circulated in printed and scribal forms during the early modern period. My approach attends to traditional “outliers” who resisted mainstream trajectories of textual production, circulation, and consumption, including underground printing and book smuggling, literary forgery, the imaginative literature of women religious, and extremely rare or unique single-sheet ephemera. I also work on scribal practices that endured long after the invention of print, particularly through the excavation of manuscript marginalia in printed books, modes of “scribal publication” and coterie manuscript circulation. My next article, “The ‘True’ Inventors of Print: Patriotic Mythology, Proto-Industrial Espionage, and Popular Culture,” will appear in a 2023 essay collection on forgery edited by Andrea Combini and Sandro La Barbera.