abstract: In 1658, Charles de Rochefort published a description of Apalache, an Indigenous polity located in southeastern North America that had welcomed French and English refugees. Usually dismissed as a tall tale, Rochefort's account has never been thoroughly analyzed. The story demonstrates how Europeans in the early period of colonization understood America as a place of wonder and inspiration. In addition, one can learn how information (and misinformation) traveled across the Atlantic. Rochefort probably patched his tale together from various oral sources, including some that came from Indigenous Americans. As a result, Rochefort revealed a lost world of stories and shows the myriad ways Europeans tried to make sense of America. Abstract: In 1658, Charles de Rochefort published a description of Apalache, an Indigenous polity located in southeastern North America that had welcomed French and English refugees. Usually dismissed as a tall tale, Rochefort's account has never been thoroughly analyzed. The story demonstrates how Europeans in the early period of colonization understood America as a place of wonder and inspiration. In addition, one can learn how information (and misinformation) traveled across the Atlantic. Rochefort probably patched his tale together from various oral sources, including some that came from Indigenous Americans. As a result, Rochefort revealed a lost world of stories and showed the myriad ways Europeans tried to make sense of America.

ABSTRACT: Conjuring up potential or "virtual" error or ignorance was central to Robert Burns's handling of names in poetry. He replaces many names in his 1786 and 1787 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect with dashes, initials, or asterisks, extending habits from his letters and scribal verse, where he also omits names, anticipates non-recognition, and makes a show of identifying the missing referents for his recipients. While obscuring names is often understood as helping authors in print avoid libel charges, for Burns occluded names instead facilitated the social rituals traditionally associated with scribal or coterie circulation. Omitting names gave Burns opportunities to do added kindnesses of explication in poems already meant as gifts. To document the social dimensions of name suppression, this essay analyzes gift copies of his 1787 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect , in which Burns supplies by hand some of the omitted names. When Burns raises the possibility of not knowing in his letters, he seeks to compliment knowing readers as much as he assists unknowing ones. To frame his identifications and explanations as friendly favors and polite gestures, Burns needed readers to imagine uninformed others excluded from his circle.

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the evidence of reading in a sizeable rural book collection, assembled in the first four decades of the eighteenth century in Cumbria by a father and son, Old and Young Ben Browne. Their collection, perhaps the only one of its kind to survive, offers a remarkable insight into the intellectual habits of a middling farming family very far from the metropolitan elites who have dominated the history of reading. The library, containing a wide range of literary, historical, and religious works, provides a test case for the ways we think and talk about amateur readers and the marks they leave behind. The Brownes's books show some readerly habits of their time, traditions of textual improvement, and commonplacing. They also contain evidence of the indexing of works by theme, often in ways that might seem reductive or utilitarian. The article uses the material evidence of marginalia and inscription to interrogate the distinction between reading and misreading and asks what such a library might tell us about amateur domestic culture and the mixed literacies within a remote rural community.

ABSTRACT: This special issue reimagines textual error not as failure but as a generative force in literary history, textual transmission, and reading practice. Focusing on the period 1500 to 1800, the contributions investigate how mistakes—typographic, interpretive, or conceptual—shaped writing, printing, and reception. Rather than policing the boundaries of "good" reading, these essays embrace errant interpretation, tracing how authors anticipated, exploited, or resisted misreading, and how readers responded. The collection surveys primary manuscript and early printed materials, including errata sheets and personal library collections, sermons, satire, poetry, and marginalia. "Imperfect reading" focuses on two areas: an early modern reader's encounter with textual error, and what a flawed or faulty reader of a text might look like. The collection argues for a more capacious understanding of "imperfect reading," demonstrating that error served as a tool of wit, social commentary, and epistemological inquiry. In an era that prized accuracy yet teemed with textual instability, error emerges not only as evidence of disruption but as a strategy of meaning-making. This issue encourages a new vocabulary for understanding error, reframing it as a rich area for scholarly inquiry rather than a deficiency.

ABSTRACT: This article explores the evolution of panoramas (360° canvases) and dioramas (moving pictures) of India exhibited in London between 1830 and 1851. Beginning with Robert Burford’s 1830 panorama of Calcutta and moving chronologically through a number of case studies, it charts how ambulatory and moving pictures increasingly embraced the aesthetic and somatic limitations and possibilities of their painted landscape format. In contrast with texts and museum displays presenting colonial information about South Asia, panoramas and dioramas processed colonial information provided by those in the field in ways that prioritized aesthetic and corporeal experiences. These events were ambiguous in effect and medium, appealing to both body and mind, and providing both serious art and vicarious thrills to a significant metropolitan audience. The article argues that, in invoking these responses, panoramas and dioramas worked to shape imperial bodies and subjectivities at a time when Britain’s colonial territory in South Asia was under expansion.

ABSTRACT: Bare-knuckle boxing matches provided some of the most ambivalent experiences of spectatorship in late Georgian England. Brutally violent and banned by law, prizefights nonetheless enjoyed an ardent following. Artists attended bouts, reveling in the opportunity to study musclebound athletes who seemed to reincarnate classical perfection. Pugilists in turn borrowed the language of artistic display, terming their training grounds “academies” and their bouts “exhibitions.” They also inspired a proliferation of images, ranging from grand painted portraits to popular prints that both celebrated the boxer’s physique and documented his violent disfigurement. This essay takes seriously the boxing match’s status as an exhibition to argue that it provided a critical site for visual encounters with bodies understood to be racially and socially other.

abstract: This article studies colonial promotion in broadside ballads written in support of colonial endeavors or commissioned by joint-stock companies. Notably, these ballads target popular audiences, seeking investment from all members of society. The three case studies of ballads presented here (focusing on the Virginia colony, the Western Design, and the Darien scheme) demonstrate that colonial endeavors were pitched toward the common population, highlighting the importance placed on small-scale investments. Examining rhetoric and nontextual elements, such as musical tunes, this article analyzes the discourse of national and religious sympathies and the ballads' emphasis on material wealth, which provided motivation for investment.

ABSTRACT: Women’s news reading has often been overlooked by scholars of seventeenth-century news cultures. This article examines the manuscript newsletter collection of Lady Anne Pole, who received hundreds of newsletters in the 1690s and 1710s, to explore how she used her news reading as part of a process of ‘self-fashioning’ and as a form of political participation. It will also compare Pole’s collection to the manuscript newsletters of several other women, demonstrating that women can and should be seen as dedicated news consumers, and that they were able to maintain an active involvement in politics even when living far from London and when excluded from official political spaces and processes.

ABSTRACT: Although historical network research has been part of historical research for decades, the rise of the internet has raised awareness of the digital and quantitative possibilities of network analysis. The data and methods supplied and applied in the essays collected in this special issue show that these promises are now starting to be fulfilled. However, current research still struggles to move beyond case studies into large-scale assessments. Burdensome datafication will allow us to link data and critically assess our archives in descriptive modes, but is also a condition for the application of more analytical tools and artificial intelligence.

abstract: North's essay utilizes data derived from electronically searchable finding aids and first-line indexes to help us understand broad trends in the production of early modern manuscript verse miscellanies. Her primary sources are the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts compiled by Peter Beal and the Folger Shakespeare Library's Union First Line Index. She also consults manuscripts themselves to check the reliability of the data. North then uses this broad sketch of miscellany characteristics to highlight some of the relationships between material form, production method, and miscellany content. The focus is on early seventeenth-century English verse miscellanies, because there are enough extant manuscripts in this category to make generalizations very fruitful. Within the limits of this data, which provide information about formats, hands, construction, ownership, organization, and content, North is particularly interested in the divisions of labor, the contributions of professional or practiced hands, the balance of well-known authors and noncanonical work, the clustering of similar items, and the way in which miscellaneity emerges in this data as both an aesthetic and a practical goal for early manuscript compilers.