The Emergence of a Tradition

Technical Writing in the English Renaissance, 1475-1640

Elizabeth Tebeaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351841269
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Examining books on different topics as these appeared during the Renaissance allows us to see developments in the use of graphics, the shift from orality to textuality, the expansion of knowledge, and rise of literacy, particularly among middle-class women readers, who were an important audience for many of these books. Changes in English Renaissance technical books provide a new, and as yet largely unexplored means of viewing the Renaissance and the dramatic changes that emerged during the 1475-1640 period, the first years of English printing.

CHAPTER 1

In Search of Our Past

In 1985, Michael Moran wrote that “the history of technical writing has not been written” [1, p. 25]. Adhering to good technical writing practice—to state my primary objective plainly—this book attempts to begin to fill that void. This study will show that technical writing existed in the English Renaissance, that it matured significantly throughout the period primarily as a result of the expansion of knowledge and the rise of print technology, and that the characteristics of the first published English technical books foreshadow characteristics and issues intrinsic to modem technical writing:

•The importance of designing books with readers’ comprehension levels in mind.

•The importance of designing books and pages that would be easy to access based on the context in which the reader would use the text.

•The emergence of a structure and a style that would enhance readability and usability of these technical books.

•The development and incorporation of visual aids and the shift from oral to verbal to verbal/visual presentation in the development of technical description as we know it today.

•The triumph of textuality over orality. Throughout the Renaissance, technical writing increasingly textualized oral knowledge. These texts became a means by which knowledge could be generated with greater precision and breadth than oral dissemination allowed.

•The growth of knowledge. Changes in technical writing on a variety of subjects—like medicine, agriculture, and cooking—allow us to see the development of knowledge and the development of the discourse that captured it.

Tracking in broad outline the emergence of these basic concepts so inextricably linked to modern technical writing teaching, research, and practice helps illuminate the history of these concerns and the practical concerns that first spurred their emergence. In short, much of what we today call technical communication theory had practical rationale in the sixteenth century.

In attempting to present technical writing as it emerged in the first century of printing in England, I have described much of it with excerpts from the works themselves. My goal in using many examples is to enable readers to see what early English technical books looked like and that these works did indeed lay the foundation for technical writing as we know it today.

My long-range purpose is to show that technical writing not only has a history but also a rich and honorable one shared by the great English Renaissance literary, religious, and philosophical works. For that reason, technical writing, like literature, history, and philosophy, is worthy of study in its own right. Like modern technical writing, Renaissance technical writing differs from other forms of writing not in its cultural or its intellectual origins but in its purpose, the aims of its discourse. It was this purpose, as it shaped content, that gave English Renaissance technical writing its character and made it as valuable to English Renaissance readers as literary, devotional, leisure, and historical reading published throughout the period.

Understanding technical writing of this particular period and any other period provides readers who are teachers and scholars of language a broader understanding of the characteristics of a period than literary or historical studies alone will afford. The English Renaissance was not simply a world of courtiers, drama, political intrigue, political and theological polemic, military and geographical conquests, love poems, catechisms, sermons, and worship aids. It was a world of action and change in medicine, in home and estate management, in agriculture, in business. Understanding the characteristics of technical writing as it existed and changed during the English Renaissance shows us more clearly how people outside the literati and political circles, the majority of English people, lived.

Studies of English Renaissance literature have long focused on great authors, their works, and descriptions of the splendid imaginative, philosophical, and religious prose and poetry that have come to characterize this period. General studies of the English Renaissance have focused on the reigns of the great Tudor monarchs; the social and economic emergence of England as a world power; the emergence of English language, literature, art, and architecture; and the ways in which printing changed the character of England during the sixteenth century. These studies, while focusing on major religious, political, historical, and literary documents, have largely ignored the large body of writing which may be called “technical” writing—how-to books or procedure manuals on a variety of topics: farming, gardening, animal husbandry, surveying, navigation, military science, accounting, recreation, estate management, household management, cooking, medicine, beekeeping, and silkworm production, to name a few of the major topics covered in how-to books.

If as David Dobrin has suggested, “technical writing adapts technology to the user” [2, p. 247], then these works help define many of the “technologies” used in England during the Renaissance and explain how they were to be implemented in daily living. F. S. Ferguson, in 1913, in recognizing these books, recognized that their aim was “not to speculate, or discuss, or describe, but to give directions how to do something, how to produce something tangible, a practical result for human use or convenience” [3, p. 145]. In short, technical writing was a specific form of instructional discourse that existed in abundance in the English Renaissance and grew in popularity throughout the period.

To teachers, researchers, and practitioners of modern forms of technical writing, my broader goal is to provide a segment of the historical foundation for several basic issues that characterize modern technical writing. Rather than being frequently apologetic for our dealing with a kind of writing that bears the taint of the marketplace and the non-academic world, we can begin to see that technical writing is as much a philosophical product of the Renaissance as is Dante’s Divine Comedy or Giotto’s “The Last Judgment.” As the works discussed throughout this study will show, technical writing is a basic form of humanistic expression. It stands as testimony to the Renaissance belief in the power of literacy to transform human existence. With its purpose of helping the individual to perform specific tasks in daily life and work, to live well, to prosper physically and financially, and to acquire knowledge by reading, it asserts the worth and the power of the individual to control human destiny.

Because science in the English Renaissance, particularly astronomy, was only beginning to emerge, I have sought to focus on works that are how-to books about practical topics rather than treatises on causation and the nature of the universe. Because what we might call “science” in the sixteenth century was not even remotely a group of developed fields, books that would today be called science books—books about plant identification, books on anatomy and medical diagnosis, books about pharmaceutical preparation—were how-to books in the English Renaissance. These books, written to help individuals correctly perform processes, anticipate modern scientific works with their emphasis on method and procedure. Many Renaissance technical books can be seen as the first printed English science books. As such, they form the basis of another study, which I challenge someone to pursue—the emergence of English Renaissance scientific discourse. Technical writing in the English Renaissance was, as it is today, writing for the world of work, except that daily life and work in the Renaissance were of one piece.

Thus we can see, through technical books, what tasks were important in English life, how this work was performed, what constituted “work,” and why specific tasks were valued. Elizabeth Einstein, in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, noted that the effect of printing has not been measured:

It is one thing to describe how methods of book production changed after the mid-fifteenth century or to estimate rates of increased output…. It is quite another thing to describe how access to a greater abundance or variety of written records affected ways of learning, thinking, and perceiving [4, p. 8].

While the answer to this question—the consequences of printing—is not the focus of my efforts here, I suggest that the steady, increasing numbers of books published and the increasing sophistication of the content of these books—my focus here—allow us to infer that advancing knowledge and literacy were changing people’s ways of learning, thinking, and perceiving.

Pollard and Redgrave’s A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England … 1475–1640, provides the best, most accessible record of the prevalence and popularity of technical books [5]. While religious works—sermons, admonitions, polemics, prayerbooks, aids to worship, meditations, homilies, for example—were clearly the most popular works published in the Renaissance, many technical books were also popular. As Bennett [6], Wright [7], and Hirsch [8] have all pointed out, printing as a business was still in its infancy during most of the Renaissance. Printers could not afford to print what would not sell. As Louis Wright noted,

One has only to scan the titles of the Short-Title Catalogue to gain some idea of the extent and variety of works produced for the literate public in England between the introduction of printing and 1640. This huge outpouring of books could not have been printed if there had not been an enormous demand from the generality of citizens. The publishers of Elizabethan England could no more live by the custom of learned and aristocratic readers alone than can modern followers of their trade [7, pp. 82–83].

Thus, the substantial numbers of technical books published in England during the 1475–1640 period provide clear testimony to their popularity to readers clearly dedicated to scripture and religious works.

My decision to focus this study on English Renaissance technical writing stems from the importance that printing had on textuality and the rapid replacement of oral transmission with printed transmission of knowledge during the English Renaissance. Printing in England is inextricably linked to the larger concept of “Renaissance” as it occurred in England. Thus, the 1475–1640 period, which begins with the Caxton and ends with the beginning of the English Civil Wars, offers an ideal crucible for studying the emergence of technical writing. Technical writing definitely existed before printing, but printing empowered all forms of written discourse—biblical, philosophical, historical, popular, and technical—in ways that were impossible when knowledge was confined to manuscript.

All writing, not just technical writing, drew nourishment from the availability of affordable books and the concomitant rise of literacy. First, expanding literacy created a demand for books in the vernacular, particularly information and instructional books that allowed newly literate readers a means of self-education. Second, population growth and proliferation of knowledge through the printed word meant that knowledge no longer needed to be transmitted solely by oral means or to depend on the oral context to help give meaning to the printed word. Third, in disciplines such as medicine, expanding knowledge became too cumbersome to be passed on orally. Increasing knowledge, empowered by the capabilities offered by improving print technology, transformed the means by which knowledge was communicated and ultimately the readers of this textualized knowledge.

To many earlier studies that have captured glimpses of technical writing’s rich and global history as well as the problems inherent in exploring the history of technical writing, I am indebted. Jim Zappen’s 1987 analysis of studies focusing on major rhetorical and philosophical issues emphasizes the intellectual depth that a study of the history of scientific and technical discourse yields [9]. Earlier, John Brockmann, in his 1983 article, recognized the major problem in existing studies of technical writing history: “The central problem is that historical research in technical writing has too often been focused only on celebrated authors or scientists as technical writers” [10, p. 155]. Brockmann recognized that examining a “broad spectrum of writers,” many of them “uncelebrated,” would be “immensely more accurate and meaningful” [10, p. 156]. The approach that focuses on the common man “is a much more accurate gage of historical events because it reveals the day-to-day life of a period or place beneath the flash generalizations and theoretical conceptualizations” [10, pp. 155–156].

Echoing Brockmann, Michael Moran, in his 1985 assessment of published studies in “The History of Technical and Scientific Writing,” begins by pointing out that “we have only scattered pieces of scholarship that, when fitted together, do not yet make up a complete picture.” Moran urged that his study

raise questions about why technical and scientific writing changes and develops over time and why individual writers are motivated to write. Finally, it should ask who is the audience for this writing and how audience expectations influence its function and development [1, p. 25].

My method of exploring English Renaissance technical writing has been developed with the persp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface by Michael Moran
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 In Search of Our Past
• Chapter 2 The Rise of Technical Writing in the English Renaissance
• Chapter 3 Format and Page Design in English Renaissance Technical Books: Early Recognition of Reader Context and Literacy Level
• Chapter 4 Renaissance Technical Books and Their Audiences: Writers Respond to Readers
• Chapter 5 English Renaissance Technical Writing and the Emergence of Plain Style: Toward a New Theory of the Development of Modern English Prose
• Chapter 6 From Orality to Textuality: Technical Description and the Emergence of Visual and Verbal Presentation
• Chapter 7 The Legacy of English Renaissance Technical Writing: New Perspectives on Basic Rhetorical Issues