How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare's England

Just as computers have spawned new descriptive language today, then-new book technologies helped build previously unheard-of metaphorical worlds in early modern England. Drawing on thousands of examples, Jonathan P. Lamb shows how writers from Shakespeare to Cavendish used the language of books to shape their reality.

Human beings build their worlds using metaphors. Just as computer technology has inaugurated a massive metaphorical transformation in the present era, in which we can 'reboot' social causes or 'program' human behaviour, books spawned new metaphorical worlds in the newly print-savvy early modern England. Pamphleteers appealed to books to stage political attacks, preachers formulated theological claims using metaphors of page and binding, and scientists claimed to leaf through the 'Book of Nature'. Jonathan P. Lamb shows how, far from offering a mere a linguistic tool, this astonishingly broad lexicon did no less than teach entire cultures how to imagine, giving early modern writers – from Shakespeare to Cavendish, and from the famous to the anonymous – the language to describe and reshape the worlds around them. He reveals how, at a scale beyond anything scholars have imagined, bookish language shaped religious, political, racial, scientific, and literary questions that remain alive today.