ABSTRACT
Publication by scholars at the early modern universities in England was a complicated activity, particularly when they decided to publish in the vernacular. These scholars were the fi rst to comment on the impact of printing on their production of literature and on their academic reputations. Although the act of publication offered an opportunity to win preferment and advance a career, university authors who chose to have their work printed discussed the act with ambivalence, articulating their concerns about how publication might compromise their scholarly seriousness and threaten their right to belong to the academic élite. By imagining that their university colleagues would perceive their participation in commercial literary production as indecorous, these publishing scholars offer valuable perspectives on how printing was regarded at the early modern universities. Two of the most eloquent commentators on contemporary print culture were Gabriel Harvey, Cambridge rhetorician and would-be courtier of the 1570s and 1580s, and Robert Burton, Oxford polymath and author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (fi rst published in 1621). These writers explored the role and reception of the publishing scholar in sharply differing ways, but shared an interest in the commercial forces behind the growth of print and in the more nebulous forces of decorum and scholarly status that specifi cally affected the academic writer.
