Miniature Books - The Format and Function of Tiny Religious Texts - Kristina Myrvold

Miniature Books - The Format and Function of Tiny Religious Texts - Kristina Myrvold

Words in a Nutshell: Miniaturizing Texts in Early Modern England

Miniature Books - The Format and Function of Tiny Religious Texts - Kristina Myrvold

Lucy Razzall [+-]
University College London
Dr Lucy Razzall is a Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University College London. Her research focuses on literature and material culture in early modern England.

Description

After Philemon Holland’s influential English translation of Pliny’s Natural History was first published in 1601, the Iliad-in-a-nutshell mentioned by Pliny became a commonplace motif of virtuosic compression in early modern England. Engaging with the popularity of this image, this chapter will explore its implications in early modern print culture. Although the frequently-appearing Iliad-in-a-nutshell might seem but a convenient rhetorical flourish, this chapter proposes that closer attention to it in the context of the small or miniature might help us to consider broader questions about the intertwining of physical and literary scale in early modern printed books as both texts and material objects. It argues that the miniature book, and more general desires to condense large works such as the Bible into smaller volumes, are not merely frivolous, but a manifestation of a wider anxiety about the relationship between physical size and literary weightiness.

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Citation

Razzall, Lucy. Words in a Nutshell: Miniaturizing Texts in Early Modern England. Miniature Books - The Format and Function of Tiny Religious Texts. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 45-54 Sep 2019. ISBN 9781781798614. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=37762. Date accessed: 10 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.37762. Sep 2019

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