We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The preface to a mid-seventeenth century edition of Verbum Sempiternum declares that “though the Volume and the Work be smal, / Yet it containes the sum of All in All.” A miniaturized devotional work, it uses its size to frame a tension between human and divine scale, and in doing so, it demonstrates the way in which all kinds of miniature texts of the eighteenth century played with the idea of a large subject in small form. This chapter uses examples of a series of miniature books published across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explore questions of materiality, utility, scale, and legibility. Miniature books worked on the premise of totality made accessible through compression. We might see them as a kind of epistemological comfort blanket, the promise of a world of knowledge and information that their readers could own, wear, display. And in the virtuosity of their execution, their acts of precision engraving, typesetting, and binding, they offered fine examples of human ingenuity. But at the same time, in reducing the most important documents of Western faith and civilization into compact form, they also raised questions about their own credibility.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.