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Arizona Book History Group

A collaborative research group


Creative encounters with special collections

The Arizona Book History Group (AZBHG) aims to understand, publicize, and make accessible, books and other materials held in collections and libraries in Arizona. Based in the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at ASU, we share the Center’s commitment to open-access to scholarship, and the materials of history.

AZBHG works collaboratively with scholars, book historians, bibliographers, book artists, writers, librarians, and anyone interested in studying (or just enjoying!) materials from any period held in special collections in Arizona. We have particularly strong relationships with the libraries of Arizona State University and the Phoenix Public Library. 

We are committed to collaborating with undergraduate and graduate students to further their studies in all aspects of book history, bibliography, library science, archival research, and creative projects.

Founded by Brandi K. Adams and Jonathan Hope, AZBHG also aims to create opportunities for visiting scholars, artists, and writers (AZBHG Fellows) to work with special collections material without a specific agenda as they think along with books, manuscripts and other materials. As part of their work, AZBHG Fellows will share their ideas, findings, or creative work at public events and in classrooms at the Phoenix Public Library and ASU. 

AZBHG founders and leaders

Brandi K. Adams is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University and a member of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her essays and reviews have been published in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare, Shakespeare SurveyCahiers Élisabéthains, and Early Theatre, and in collections including Shakespeare/Text, The Oxford Handbook for the History of the BookArden of Faversham: A Critical Reader, and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. She is currently editing Merry Wives of Windsor with Jonathan Hope for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions, and she is working on her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English drama (1580-1640).

Jonathan Hope is the Publisher and Managing Editor of ACMRS Press at Arizona State University, where he is also a professor in the Department of English. He previously worked in the UK, at Newcastle, Leeds, Middlesex, and Strathclyde Universities. Hope’s research lies at the intersection of literature and linguistics, with a focus on Shakespeare, Early Modern texts, and computational text analysis. He has a strong side interest in modern experimental writing and explorations of the book as a physical object. Hope has published widely on Shakespeare’s language and the history of the English language: his book, Shakespeare and Language: reason, eloquence and artifice in the Renaissance (2010), seeks to reconstruct the linguistic world of Shakespeare’s England and measure its distance from our own. Hope’s recent work addresses the false, but persistent, myth that Shakespeare invented thousands of words, and the question of Shakespeare’s response to the revolutionary astronomical theories of his time.

AZBHG Fellows

Claire M. L. Bourne 
Penn State University

Zachary Lesser
University of Pennsylvania

Tara Lyons
Illinois State University

Aaron T. Pratt
University of Texas at Austin

Learn more about Milton's Holinshed

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"The hand of Milton" published in the Times Literary Supplement, May 17, 2024, written by Claire M. L. Bourne, Aaron T. Pratt and Jason Scott-Warren.

"The recognition of Milton’s copy of the Chronicles , following hard on the heels of the rediscovery of his Shakespeare Folio, suggests that much more remains to be found. And that our search for Milton’s books must include smaller, less well-known collections."

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"It was mid-morning, March 1, and Pratt, the Pforzheimer Curator at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center, was one of four visiting scholars perusing the Alfred Knight Collection in the Rare Book Room of the Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix."

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"For the second time in five years, Claire M.L. Bourne, associate professor of English at Penn State, is part of a team of scholars responsible for identifying a book that they said almost certainly belonged to 17th century English literary giant John Milton."

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"Milton’s handwriting has been identified in two volumes of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587) belonging to the Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix, Arizona.

The discovery makes this one of only three known books to preserve Milton’s handwritten reading notes, and one of only nine books to have survived from his library."

Learn more

Reach out to Brandi K. Adams (brandi.adams.1@asu.edu) and Jonathan Hope (jrhope1@asu.edu) with questions and inquiries.