New book examines how ‘bookish’ language of Shakespeare’s England influenced today’s society
LAWRENCE — Turn over a new leaf. On the same page. Judge a book by its cover. Read someone’s mind.
These “bookish” phrases and many more routinely appear in everyday life. But it wasn’t until the 16th and 17th centuries that they rose to prominence.
“The way we talk about a new technology such as the printing press or printed books also has a lot to do with its influence on a culture,” said Jonathan P. Lamb, professor of English at the University of Kansas.
In his new book titled “How the World Became a Book in Shakespeare’s England,” Lamb shows how this broad lexicon in a newly print-savvy era taught cultures how to think, contemplate and describe the world. Such language influenced religious, political, racial, scientific and, of course, literary concepts that remain alive today.
The book is published by Cambridge University Press.
“Our whole way of thinking about what it means to know something into the 21st century has been shaped by books,” Lamb said.
“We often think of knowledge as something purely rational, coherent, sequenced, orderly. The whole modern scientific method, which spawned in the 17th century and which I write about in the chapter on the ‘book of nature,’ arises from the notion that the natural world makes itself known to us as a book. For early modern scientists, reading a book functioned as a metaphor for how the scientific method apprehends the world as knowable and distinct.”
While William Shakespeare is cited in the book’s title and gets a lot of attention throughout all seven chapters, Lamb cites hundreds of the Bard’s contemporaries who used the language of books.
“The famous poet and preacher John Donne, for instance, used bookish language all the time,” Lamb said. “He was a sexy bad boy in his youth — he wrote erotic poetry — but then he became a member of the clergy and eventually dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In his poems and sermons, he constantly appealed to the language of books, talking about how the heart is a book or God’s love is a book and on and on. I almost wrote a whole chapter just on John Donne.”
Lamb estimated he found “about 5,000 examples” of book-related phrases during his research. Of the myriad instances, he most enjoys “turning over a new leaf.”
“Many people think it means a leaf from a tree,” he said. “But it actually refers to a page in a book. Turning over a new leaf became popular in Shakespeare’s time because it offered a way to talk about repentance and personal reformation without necessarily going against the Christian God’s sovereign choice.”
To gather 5,000 examples from libraries and digital repositories, Lamb worked with several KU student research assistants. Many of these students folded their interests into the project.
“One graduate student was interested in Native American print culture, so they searched for ‘red letters’ as a keyword,” Lamb said.
Although they found scant early evidence of those terms to describe Native Americans, they did discover the use of “red letter man” as a 17th century insult. Protestant Christians used it as a way of making fun of Catholics. The phrase originated with almanacs displaying in red letters the feast days Roman Catholics celebrate but Protestants don’t.
Lamb said, “Once I saw the examples my student was collecting involving red letters, I knew this topic was going to make it into the book. We kept finding more examples of all the different ways people used technologies of the book to talk about themselves and their environment.”
So the world became a book. But is the world still a book?
“The world has shifted,” he said.
“We’ve begun to see a disruption in the way people imagine the world due to the transformative effects of digital media. Many book words have lost their evident bookishness in a digital age.”
Now in his 15th year at KU, Lamb’s research explores 16th and 17th century English literature, theater and book history. His previous book also explored this era: “Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words” (2017, Cambridge University Press).
“It’s so easy to think of the past as foreign to us and as therefore unnecessary and irrelevant,” Lamb said.
“But how we talk about our technologies influences the way reality appears to us. The world became a book, but as I show in this book, the language of books also shaped what human beings make of the world.”