Throughout the course of the semester I have been able to cover many aspects of my book titled, Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters of such true saintes and holy martyrs of God, as in the late bloodye persecution here within this realme, gaue their lyues for the defence of Christes holy gospel: written in the tyme of theyr affliction and cruell imprysonment. Each week I was able to dive deeper into my book by discovering who I think it was made for and the way it was used, as well as looking into the fine details of the physical book itself. Today, I will look deeper into how my book has stayed alive and relevant over a very long period of time.
The first remediation of my book that I want to point out is on an academic website titled Early English Books Online. This website provided a facsimile of my book that became very helpful when working on my blog posts from home without having the copy of the book in front of me. Every single page of this book was copied over perfectly onto this website in black and white. With that being said, I feel as if using a digital facsimile of the book makes you lose out on a great connection that you get from physically having the book in front of you. For starters, these digital remediations do not include the covers of the book which had interesting yet simplistic designs that made sense for a religious text. For example, without having the actual book in front of me it would have been nearly impossible to do the first blog post that had us describe everything about the book including the physical features of it. Another example of this is the ad as well as bookplates left on the inside cover of the book. These small details helped me learn a whole lot about my book regarding who owned it, when they owned it and presumably why they owned it.
When looking for my book online I noticed that sites like google books and hathitrust did not have copies of it to download or read. I did find it interesting that google books had another book that used the title of my book as a reference point when talking about religion. Hathitrust on the other hand had a handful of books that were written by my author (Myles Coverdale) but not my specific book in their library.
After looking through several different sites known for having remediated texts I was unable to find a copy of my book. At that point I decided to throw the title of my book into a regular google search to see what would come up. The first link on the page is from Michigan University but it actually linked me back to the Early English Books Online website that I have been using this whole time. This is when I realized that copies of my book are relatively scarce and that this may be the only site with a facsimile of my book.
Overall, I enjoyed getting to work with my chosen religious text throughout the course of the semester. I got to learn a lot about the content of the book itself but the physical aspect of the book as well. It would have been possible to fully work with an online text for this assignment but I truly believe the best connection is made when you have a hard, physical copy in front of you to navigate.