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This chapter returns to the theme of Morison's scholarly interests and briefly examines his international reputation as a humanist of some note. The main focus is Morison's collection of books. At over four hundred Greek and Latin volumes, it was one of the largest and most eclectic private collections of books in England at this time. The main themes and areas represented in the library—theology, history, language, philosophy, medicine, Greek—are analysed. The chapter also discusses the communal aspect of Morison's library; friends borrowed printed books and manuscripts on a regular basis, making Morison and his library of significance for our understanding of Tudor humanism more broadly.

Argues that during the early modern period in Europe living standards gradually rose not only because probate inventories reveal that people were acquiring more and better quality durable goods. They were also increasingly allocating resources to the acquisition of the skills of literacy. Partly, this human capital served to enhance their productivity and earning ability, but it also served for pleasure, edification and gaining status and to this extent it should be considered as a consumer durable too. A quantitative exercise tries to show that if this is factored into the more traditional ‘material consumption’ approach, it can lead to a significant reconsideration of the standard of living debate, in particular, as regards the eighteenth century.

This chapter examines book ownership and reading practices of individual readers of Augustine in sixteenth-century Europe. Case studies of private libraries in England and monastic collections in Italy reveal the reality of Augustine's dissemination to be far messier than a chronological account of the printing history would suggest. Manuscript reading marks in individual copies confirm the lively variety of ways in which Augustine was read, ranging from pragmatic underlining to emotional responses. These individual reading styles enabled readers to use the same texts for different ends, as is shown in a case study of three formative English theologians, Thomas Cranmer, Peter Martyr Vermigli and William Laud. Their techniques of classifying or historicizing quotations illuminate how readers, regardless of the aims of authors and editors, often pursued their own approach to Augustine in search of confirmation of their religious perspective.

This chapter surveys recent literature on lay religiosity in the early modern period, noting how it emphasizes resistance to these attempts, especially in the countryside. The chapter confirms that the pace of reform was quite slow in many areas of Germany but also argues that the recent literature has not done a good job of studying Protestant lay piety in its own right. It seeks to address this problem by focusing on burgher letters and autobiographies which provide rich insight into Protestant lay piety. These sources demonstrate that at least some early modern urban dwellers embraced the reformation of suffering that was promoted by their pastors, although these sources also show that burghers adapted the Protestant message about adversity to meet their own religious and emotional needs, part of burghers’ remarkable resourcefulness in the face of suffering. The chapter also examines evidence for book ownership among burghers and shows that lay people consoled clergy just as clergy consoled lay people.

This chapter examines the sources for the consolation literature of the later Lutheran Reformation. It shows how consolers continued to draw on Scripture as their main source but also how they looked to a number of other sources to support, inform, and legitimize their efforts: early reformers such as Luther, Rhegius, Bugenhagen, and others; ancient theologians such as Augustine; medieval theologians such as Anselm; and mystics such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Johannes Tauler, and the author of the German Theology. The chapter makes a special point of examining the influence of mystics on later Lutheran consolation literature, showing how the reintroduction of mystical language greatly enriched this literature. The chapter concludes by examining the training of Protestant pastors, along with their habits of book ownership.

This chapter examines the collection of books in seventeenth-century Rome. It explains how men from legal professions usually owned large volumes of books while women rarely owned books. It also mentions that libraries were a great fashion among the cultured elite during this period and that book ownership was correlated with the possession of other categories of goods such as musical and scientific instruments or natural curiosities. This chapter discusses the collection of domestic account books and family correspondence.

Disagreements among modern-day literary scholars as to the Clerk’s status and character—is he gentle or common, lay or clerical, admirable for his proficiency and moral virtue or open to criticism for his intellectual sterility and pride?—can be seen as mirroring the ambiguous status of the Clerk’s estate in the Middle Ages and in Chaucer’s treatment of him. Overall, however, the Clerk can be seen as a largely positive characterization of a distinct social category, the university scholar, a group that in late fourteenth-century England was confronting a crisis of decreasing access to social advancement owing to declining patronage and competition from educated laymen like Chaucer