More on Censorship

After posting my annotated bibliography on my initial research into censorship I kept thinking about part of the story I didn't share. So in a spare moment today I looked further into the idea and this is what I found. (yes these are all online resources, but that's what you get for asking a child of the digital age!)

The Story (Part 2):

So as I was researching and flipping through books about censorship I kept thinking about a book that I had read in the 9th grade, which I was told had a central theme of censorship, Fahrenheit 451. To be sure I had the right book I checked in out on Wikipedia, where I found this:

Annotated Bibliography: English Censorship (before 1700)

This is one of my least favorite kinds of posts. I call this type "the assignment" post. Unique to a course based blog, this type of post is generally lacking flavor, swag, personality, d all of the above. However, despite my personal feelings about this post I am going to do it anyways for my grade and because someone out there might appreciate it. So here goes nothing. For more information on the assignment itself check here. Basically what follows is an annotated bibliography on the topic of censorship before 1700. The tale of how I found all of these books can be found at the bottom of the post, if you're here for entertainment value, or to grade, start there. The links lead to the GoodReads page for each book. (Which can also be a good starting place for research!) 

Reform Movements brought about by Print

First of all, I'd like to apologize for not posting last week. I realized too late that being out of town would mean no internet connection.

I loved visiting the library and perusing the shelves for books on these reform movements. As Blaine said in his post about printing presses, I loved how the books are grouped by subject. A library is much more convenient than Google in this respect. Online search engines may be fast and easily accessible, but you have to sift through a lot of fluff to really get down to the real scholarly materials; whereas in the library, if you find one good book nearby will be more. My favorite part about this was actually handling the books. An online article may say the same thing, but there is something about handling the leather-bound pages of a book that makes the information inside seem more real, more reliable. A couple of the areas I had difficulty finding any books in the library, including the online databases, so I had to turn to Google books. After handling the "real" references, it sort of felt like a betrayal.

Before the break in class we talked about the Catholic Church and the changes that were brought about by the printing press. One subject I found especially interesting was the different reform movements. Seen as heresy by the Catholic Church, these movements believed not just different doctrine (or the explanation of dogma), but different dogma itself (the immovable parts of a belief system). The different reforms were as follows:

Print and Religion

As I started to look for books that had to do with the topic of the Protestant reformation, I found many printed resources about the change of religion in general so that is what I decided to focus my research on. My plan was to first check out the library to see what it had to offer. Once I had found the section where print was discussed, I discovered that there were A LOT of books. I picked up a few because their titles described what I was in search of, and a few I chose just because the covers were so old that I had to read it! Reading these books, I am a little sad that I just have to give a brief overview of them. I would have liked to quote some of the books because a few of the authors had personality oozing out of their writing! Especially Amy Cruse. Her style of writing was informative, yet entertaining.

The art of binding

When I did a simple search on bookbinding, I found many titles referring to bookbinding as an “art”. I had never considered bookbinding as this but as I looked more into the art of making codex I understood more about the art of book making. The way that I went about finding this category was through ScholarSearch on the Harold B. Lee Library website which allows one to refine published works by type (book, journal, article) or even by subject. The website even shows where to find the book in the HBLL.