Handbooks

A wide variety of seventeenth-century prose publications—often bearing the title words ‘enchiridion’, ‘manual’, or ‘vade mecum’—identified themselves as books-for-the-hand. This chapter argues that ‘handbooks’ (to use what was an exclusively antiquarian term during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) constituted a distinctive print genre during the early modern period, notwithstanding the diversity of their themes and functions. The association of hands with books took various forms. The most common connotation was with compactness and portability. Manuals had a second set of associations, however, with the skilled or dexterous hand—with crafts, manual trades, professions, and recreations. This chapter emphasizes the innovations of design, format, and distribution made so often in this kind of publication and investigates how the prose they contain was determined by material form. Printed manuals provided the medium for a new genre of prose even more completely modern, perhaps, than that of the emerging novel.

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