The Emergence of a Tradition: Technical Writing in the English Renaissance 1475-1640 by Elizabeth Tebeaux

Elizabeth Tebeaux's book The Emergence of a Tradition: Technical Writing in the English Renaissance 1475-1640 demonstrates that technical writing as a kind of text, as one type of social means for the distribution of information, has a rich history. Tebeaux presents the early modern ancestors of today's "how to" guides, medical manuals, and plant identification guides. Teachers and students of technical writing, working in a discipline that may sometimes feel like a continually emerging discipline, will likely appreciate Tebeaux's work, as she writes technical writing and its scholars into an historical continuum, reinscribing both practitioners and the discipline itself. But such appreciative readers might wish, too, for the insights that would have been provided had Tebeaux situated her discussion of the sociality of the texts and the emergence of technical writing more firmly in current ongoing discussions of the sociality of texts and their formal, situated constraints. Tenebeaux indicates that her book is a response to Michael Moran's challenging claim: "the history of technical writing has not been written" (Moran, 1986, p. 25). Tebeaux offers such a history, at least for the technical writing occurring in England between 1475 and 1640. The texts she examines occupy a significant and highly varied spectrum of English history, from Caxton's printing press to the beginning of the English civil wars between Royalists and supporters of the Commonwealth. She tracks the evolution of technical writing as it keeps step with the evolution and acceleration of text dispersal by means of printing technologies. Tebeaux's overarching finding seems to be that the accelerating move from orality to literacy fostered by the printing press and the social realities that generated it were transformative of text, of text type, of society. In her words: