This dissertation argues that Renaissance conceptions of writing were inextricable from the more physical forms of literary production that multiplied and diversified after the invention of the printing press: binding, anthology-building, making pages into books. In analyses of works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Watson, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, and others, I show how the unsettled conventions of book and manuscript assembly fostered an idea of the literary text as interactive, and an idea of writing as compilation, modification, and enlargement. Scholars have long characterized Renaissance writers by their tendency to borrow, rearrange, and redeploy text, but "Compiling Culture" reveals that these discursive strategies of imitation and appropriation were rooted in concrete ways of engaging with books. Using little-known primary sources such as library shelf-lists and intact collections from the period, I uncover surprising juxtapositions of texts that provide a material basis for reading across traditional genres: Shakespeare's Lucrece bound with religious texts Spenser's Shepheardes Calender compiled into an encyclopedia or an almanac Ovid's narrative poems collected and continued with handwritten sonnets. Bringing this more fluid, malleable idea of the book to bear on the discursive strategies of Renaissance writers, I recast concepts of intertextuality and citationality as physical habits at the center of pre-modern literary production, opening new avenues for historically grounded interpretation of these works.
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