Prof. Alexander da Costa

Before I came to Cambridge, I was at Oxford as a Fixed-Term Fellow at St Hilda’s College, and before that as a Research Fellow and Tutor at Keble College. I studied English Literature at Oxford as an undergraduate, specialising in medieval literature through their 'Course 2', before going on to complete my Masters (2006) and DPhil (2009) there. My doctoral thesis was on the printed books that Syon Abbey printed in the turbulent 1530s, when the Church in England was threatened by both the spread of Lutheran heresy and Henry VIII's desire for greater ecclesiastical control. This became a book, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey's Defence of Orthodoxy 1524-1534 (OUP, 2012).

My second book Marketing English Books, 1476-1550: How Printers Changed Reading (OUP, 2020) is about how the earliest printers moulded demand and created new markets. Until the advent of print, the sale of books had been primarily a bespoke trade, but printers faced a new sales challenge: how to sell hundreds of identical books to individuals, who had many other demands on their purses. In this book I contend that this forced printers to think carefully about marketing and potential demand, for even if they sold through a middleman—as most did—that wholesaler, bookseller, or chapman needed to be convinced the books would attract customers. Marketing English Books sets out, therefore, to show how markets for a wide range of texts were cultivated by English printers between 1476 and 1550 within a wider, European context: devotional tracts; forbidden evangelical books; romances, gests, and bawdy tales; news; pilgrimage guides, souvenirs and advertisements; and household advice. Through close analysis of paratexts—including title-pages, prefaces, tables of contents, envoys, colophons, and images—the book reveals the cultural impact of printers in this often overlooked period. It argues that while print and manuscript continued alongside each other, developments in the marketing of printed texts began to change what readers read and the place of reading in their lives on a larger scale and at a faster pace than had occurred before, shaping their expectations, tastes, and even their practices and beliefs.

Most recently, I've published an edition of Richard Whitford's Work for Householders, which was a runaway ‘bestseller’ in the early sixteenth-century. First published in 1530, it was the earliest printed English book to direct itself specifically to a middling sort of lay reader: ‘householders…or them that have the guiding or governance of any company’. 

I'm currently working on a monograph about Reading Forbidden Books, which explores how reading was altered by a consciousness of censure and censorship in the early sixteenth-century (under review by OUP).