The Rise of the Author: Delving into the Depths of the Library

I decided to look into the Rise of the Author before the 1700's because of what we've talked about in class concerning who really authored oral epics.  It was an interesting idea to me that an individual author hasn't always been the writer of a book, like a group of people who will write a autobiography for someone famous, or come up as a group with the idea for a book.  I thought it was interesting that those people to whom we attribute great epics might not have been the sole writers; it might have been a conglomeration of ideas, a hodge-podge of stories through generations.  And we don't even know who wrote Beowulf!

Well, I wanted this exploration into the print resources of the library for our bibliography requirement to be authentic, so I spent over two and a half hours walking up and down flights of stairs, sitting at computers, and then walking up and down more flights of stairs and rows of bookshelves until it was done!

The magnificent HBLL

I decided to look up sources pertaining to the "Rise of the Author before 1700," first because it sounds cool, and second because my desire to write a book and be an author is helping me to feel particularly kinship-y with this class of people.


After starting my search on the web, I stumbled upon "The Author's Empty Purse," and since that felt appropriate, began there.  While vainly browsing the shelves for another book, I stumbled upon "Museos de Bogota," which was not exactly what I was looking for, but I spent the summer in Colombia and got to see pictures of el Museo de Oro (Gold), which is one place I've visited, and that was heartening.

A picture from the inside of the Museum of Gold

Near by it, however, was a printed reference work that filled the requirement!  I looked over a lot of variations on the word "author," and eventually decided that it looks really funny.  Just keep looking at it, "author, author, author, author, author, author, author."  It's a weird word.

Then, I browsed the shelves of the fifth floor, and got "The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism."  Score.  From the foot notes, I found in the Periodicals, "Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny," which I hoped would take care of the journal/article requirement, but the periodical desk was closed, and when I ventured to press the button to move those electronic bookshelves, I found instead of my book, "The American Historical Register," printed in 1897, which included an article on dueling, but really didn't help for the assignment.

The hardest part was finding a physical copy of a periodical, but eventually I searched "Chaucer" in the BYU Library database and got my last source, at which point I began writing this blog entry.  Being in the library for so long reminded me of my mom's preference for physical dictionaries, instead of online dictionaries, because she likes seeing the interesting words that you find while looking for your word.  I appreciated being so in touch with these books, some of which were really cool; it made the search more personal, the old books to handle more meaningful.  There is a lot of treasure here.  And here's my annotated bib:

Bibliography: The Rise of the Author, pre-1700's

• Hepburn, James. The Author's Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent. Oxford University Press. 1968. Hepburn reveals the hardships authors faced before 1709 when the Copyright Statue allowed authors to own their work.  Most authors, including Chaucer, could not survive as authors alone, even though printing meant manuscripts now had commercial value and literacy rates were rising.  Authors, for a while, did not own the idea of what they had written, only the physical manuscript.  As we discuss authors, it is interesting to see authorship's shift to a commercial act, and the authors' finally owning what they've dreamed up. [I found this after searching on the library website in the library, and then climbing to the fifth floor.  I liked the title.] 

• Johnson, James D. Walter W. Skeat's Canterbury Tale. The Pennsylvania State University Press: 36/1. 2001.  This article discusses the Reverend Skeat, who translated many of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" into rhyming verses and cleared away the other works attributed to him.  Skeat himself wrote his own "Canterbury Tale," calling into question what fundamental rights Chaucer has to the original Canterbury Tales. [This was the article in a journal entry that took the longest to find; it involved travelings to and from the Periodicals, to children's fiction, and then to the computer to decide what I was actually doing.  I eventually ended up reading it, sitting cross-legged in an aisle in the Periodicals.] 

• Nauert, Charles. Humanists, Scientists and Pliny: Changing Approaches to a Classical Author. American Historical Review. American Historical Association. 1979. Nauert discusses the Humanists and their popularizing of older authors.  This was not a rediscovering of the old authors, Nauert believes, because "educated men during the Middle Ages" already knew about them.  This was applicable to my search on the rise of authors because it discusses Pliny, the attributed author of Natural History, which was consulted even during the early Roman times, showing that the rise of authorship did not begin solely in the printed age.  "Two hundred full or partial manuscript copies" of Pliny's work still survive today, revealing the popularity of his work. [I found this in the foot notes of "The Cambridge History," but unfortunately, where I thought it would be in the Periodicals it wasn't, so I checked out the online version.]

• Norton, Glyn P. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance. Cambridge University Press. 1999. Discusses the Inns of Court, where young men could go to learn, almost like a university, as we discussed in earlier classes.  In London, these people learned to imitate "classical verse satire" and created a place for intelligent exchange.  They cultivated "epigram, elegy, epistle, ode, and essay ...in discovering ways to be more intimate and formal."  Additionally, artisans in the 1500's began to write in the vernacular, instead of Latin.  This means that authorship was an available pursuit of the common man. [This was my browsing book, found on the fifth floor near "The Author's Empty Purse."]

• Whitney, William Dwight. The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language. The Century Co. 1902. Among the many entries near "author" in the Encyclopedia were "author," "authoress," "authorhood," "authorial," "authorisable," "authorism," "authorizer," "authorlet," authorly," and "authorship."  Now doesn't it look weird?  I found the entries for "author" especially intriguing.  In Scots law, an author is "one from whom a title to property is derived either by inheritance or otherwise."  It would be interesting to see if this meaning came about before or after our modern-day conception of the author. [This find occurred after "Museos de Bogota," also on the fifth floor.  It was a huge encyclopedia, and felt pretty authoritative.]