The Durham Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Learning Centre

This module introduces the church court records of early modern England. The first lecture provides a broad orientation, explaining the jurisdiction of the church courts, the main categories of case they handled, and the key archives and finding aids. The second lecture extends this forward in time, exploring how the courts changed after the Restoration of 1660, and introducing some of the surprisingly rich material that survives from the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

These two lectures take you inside the printed book, starting with the title-page, which often carries crucial information about the production of the book: who had printed it, who had published it, and how booksellers or prospective customers could get hold of copies.

These two lectures teach you how to collate a printed book, and why this is useful: e.g. how it can help you compare multiple copies of the same book and look for differences between them. Lecture 6 presents some examples of books that were altered or revised after printing.

Lecture 7 looks at the history of the Stationers’ Company, the trade organisation that regulated printing and the book trade in early modern London. Lecture 8 looks at some books that evaded the normal process of regulation, often by giving misleading information about where and when they were printed.

These two lectures explore what we can learn from the physical history of early printed books: not just what they contain, but what has happened to them over the centuries since they were made. Lecture 9 looks at provenance: how individual copies passed from owner to owner. Lecture 10 turns to bindings, showing how even the plainest binding can contain hidden evidence connecting individual books to the wider history of the book trade and the people who read and owned them.