UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS
SCHOOL OF HISTORY


Ph.D Studentship

The School of History at the University of St Andrews is in a position to offer a fully funded AHRC Ph.D studentship for a suitably qualified candidate.  The Scholarship will cover full fees, and a maintenance grant at the standard AHRC rate. 


In addition the successful applicant will be able to apply for an additional St Andrews scholarship of £3000 per annum, which may be held in addition to the AHRC studentship.

This studentship forms part of an AHRC grant funding an ongoing bibliographical project under the direction of Professor Andrew Pettegree and Dr Malcolm Walsby. The successful applicant will be required to work on the Parisian book trade in the period 1500-1540.  They should therefore have serviceable French, and a willingness to work with Latin materials (additional tuition in French and/or Latin will be available if required in the first year of the studentship).  The successful applicant will be required to work in St Andrews for the first year of the studentship, and may expect to be based in Paris for some part of the three years of the grant.


The studentship is available for three years from 1 October 2007.


All enquiries should be directed to Dr Malcolm Walsby at mnw AT st-and.ac.uk (01334 462924).  The closing date for enquiries is 31 March 2007.  A longer description of the subject of study follows. 


University of St Andrews, School of History
Ph.D Studentship
Latin books published in Paris, 1500-1540


It is a commonplace of work on early printed books that the Reformation brought a transformation in the book world.  With the works of Luther and his contemporaries, authors and publishers reached out to a new audience in the literate laity, and popularized a new type of book, pamphlets or Flugschriften.

Yet examination of the statistics of book production suggests that the Reformation may have had much less overall impact than is commonly assumed.  An overview of the statistics of production suggest that Latin continued to dominate the output of most major publishing houses right up until the end of the 16th century.  In this respect the triumph of the vernacular, often seen as a direct consequence of Luther's engagement with a mass audience, was much more muted.  Despite the increased demand for religious polemic, and for other categories of vernacular literature (news books, royal edicts, almanacs), Latin continued to dominate output in many classes of learned and technical literature, and even in theology.

The project will investigate these issues through an examination of the Paris book world in the first four decades of the 16th century.  Paris was one of the major centres of book production in the whole of Europe.  Its printers worked closely with the local authorities to supply both the official bodies of the capital, and a growing reading public.  They were also the centre of an extended export trade for high quality and large format books that demanded a high level of expertise and capital investment.

Paris was pre-eminently a centre of learned print, with an established reputation in the fields of law, theology, and editions of classical authors.  This dissertation will examine, through a comprehensive analysis of the output of Paris publishing, how the new intellectual and religious movements of the first half of the sixteenth century impacted on this established and respected industry. 

This project will take as its starting point Brigitte Moreau's Inventaire chronologique des éditions Parisien du XVIe siècle, 1500-1540.  It will focus on the activities of a handful of representative printing houses, both houses well established in the trade in academic books, and those that found a specialist niche in other types of literature (medical, architectural, technical handbooks or music).  It will examine how each of these printers faced the temptations and opportunities of the vernacular trade, or whether this was resigned to younger, more entrepreneurial houses that seized this opportunity to make their way into the crowded and highly controlled Paris market.

This project will make use of the established analytical method of the St Andrews French Book project and introduce new criteria specific to Latin books.  That is, it will take an established, published but essentially flawed resource (Moreau) and refine it through the use of a vast repertoire of new information available through on-line catalogues. This dissertation can therefore be expected to increase substantially our knowledge of Parisian print in this era.