Early Modern "How-To" Books: Impractical Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World

• Published in: Journal for early modern cultural studies 2009-04, Vol.9 (1), p.123-146
• Main Author: Mylander, Jennifer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agricultural land; American literature; British literature; Christianity; Colonial literature; Cultural identity; Cultural studies; Cultural values; Discourse functions; Early Modern literature; Essays; Ideology; Language culture relationship; Libraries; Literary history; Medicine; Physicians; Renaissance literature; Self concept; Seventeenth century literature; Titles; United States history
• ISSN: 1531-0485; 1553-3786; 1553-3786
• DOI: 10.1353/jem.0.0019

Even though the difficulty of transporting books across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century limited collecting, surviving records indicate that certain titles ofhusbandry and medicine appeared in many English American colonial libraries. This article examines the circulation of texts by Gervase Markham and Nicholas Culpeper to illuminate the function of English imprints as valuable markers of identity in the unfamiliarity of the "New World." Driven by fear of degeneration due to exposure to "savage" lands and peoples, colonists sought to fix a stable, invulnerable English identity, and book ownership became instrumental for colonists determined to self-identify as English. By setting these manuals within the context of English land use, medicine, and ethnography, this article recovers the ideological work these "practical" books performed for early colonists. Exploration of the apparent mismatch between the predominant economic and agricultural practices of the English Atlantic world and the manuals' contents highlights the importance of discourses of self-sufficiency promoted by Markham and Culpeper.