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The history of structuring and reading books is surveyed in the Greek 3rd century and the Latin 1st century BC. Many illustrations of papyri are given. Papyri are seen to show ways of reading that relate juxtaposed items and pursue sequences; the composition of the interconnected book is linked with readers' private active creation of personal collections (anthologies). Intense and scholarly modes of reading are available, and attested by marginalia and abundant commentaries, etc. The differences in reading Greek, older Latin, and contemporary Latin poetry are shown. The environments and circumstances of reading in the late Republic are explored (including libraries).

The Introduction reviews the critical controversies after Dickens's death about his representative Englishness and influence on readers. It defines the book's focus on theories of serial memory in Enlightenment psychology, nineteenth-century pedagogy, and accounts by Victorian literary critics about the effects of reading serial fiction. The book argues that Dickens's serial novels taught shared reading practices based in associationist theories of memory that transformed Dickens's popularity into an inclusive and participatory cultural politics and ultimately a mission for literature within democratic education. The “pleasures of memory” involve the common experience of memory's coherence through novel reading and the shared reception of popular serial genres.

In seventeenth‐century England, masques inhabited two media, their dramatic occasions consistently delivered into a public culture of reading. This chapter details masques' material circulation in print culture: print and scribal reproduction, provenance, annotations, rights and reprints, marketing as sheet music. While bibliographic attention is crucial, it offers a starting point rather than a terminus for exploring masques' (or any texts') position in their culture. The chapter explores ways that scriptors address readers in the prefaces and margins, drawing examples from masques of Jonson, Campion, Daniel, Chapman, Shirley, William Browne, Thomas Jordan, Middleton/Rowley, and Heywood. It analyzes the hermeneutics of reading in two seventeenth‐century accounts: legal documents surrounding the prosecution of William Prynne, and an essay on the book trade by Newcastle bookseller William London, testing Habermas's theories of the public sphere against these early modern accounts.

The Introduction situates Donne on Augustine in its main disciplinary contexts: the history of religion and the history of reading. The chapter argues for the importance of attending to the theological heritage of early modern thought: Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was heavily indebted to the patristic tradition. Among the Fathers, Augustine's influence was paramount, but his doctrinal legacy could be construed in multiple and complex ways. For the preacher and poet John Donne, Augustine's most significant contribution lay in his theory of interpretation. Reading, to Augustine, was more than a simple scholarly technique: it offered an intellectual method, spiritual discipline, and even a form of philosophy. Donne's engagement with Augustinian models of interpretation calls attention to a neglected aspect of Renaissance reading culture, and uncovers a tradition of theological reading that has been obscured, to some extent, by the current scholarly focus on humanist reading practices.

This chapter introduces the reader to Augustine of Hippo and his varied reception in the long sixteenth century. It explains the aims, scope, and organization of the book and situates its main arguments in the context of recent research in the fields of Reformation history (including the confessionalization paradigm, the concept of Augustinianism and recent studies of the reception of the Church fathers), Renaissance Humanism, and the history of reading.

By the 1650s, the London booksellers’ shelves were packed with printed recipe collections. With titles like A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets (1653), The Marrow of Physicke, or A Learned Discourse of the Severall Parts of a Mans Body (1640), or simply A Pretious Treasury, these books offered English readers hundreds upon hundreds of recipes. This chapter explores the intersections, commonalities, and differences between the manuscript and printed recipe collections of the period. Through analyzing traces of reading and writing, it emphasizes the significant crossovers between these two media. The media of communication, it contends, crucially shaped the kinds of knowledge transferred.

This introduction positions the book in relation to past work in the history of reading, introduces the materials and methods used, and lays out brief overviews of the five chapters. The history of reading has an established large-scale narrative which offers little detail on the reading of vernacular poetry in later-medieval England. Readers’ own marginal comments on Middle English verse cannot supply this missing detail, as they are rare at this time, and so mark their writers out as atypical. A combination of methods is proposed for examining a broader range of evidence instead, including close reading and detailed manuscript case studies, but also quantitative surveys inspired by continental European scholarship. Middle English verse does, it is suggested, constitute an identifiable topic. A working taxonomy of canonicity in Middle English poetry is offered, and widely successful anonymous religious instructional poems such as The Prick of Conscience are proposed as useful comparanda for canonical texts. The introduction closes by summarizing what follows.

Interview with Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. Topics include intellectual history; historiography; history of scholarship; historical chronology; Joseph Scaliger; and the history of reading.

This chapter, written by Karin Littau, addresses the media-transitional period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to show how aestho-physiological experiments in reading were linked to a variety of motion picture technologies. On the one hand such technologies were used to measure reading speeds; on the other, they profoundly affected how readers began to perceive the printed word: no longer as static marks on the page but giving ‘the impression of movement’, which in turn was conceived ‘in proportion’ to how it ‘moved’ the reader. By focusing on experiments by Vernon Lee, Gertrude Stein, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and her story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (itself an experiment in phantasmagoric reading), Littau shows how reading during this period bore the traces of cinematicity; to the extent that in the 1930s ‘movie-minded’ writers like Robert Carlton Brown proposed ‘reading machines’, which would bring outmoded reading practices into line with modern cinema-viewing.

This chapter argues for the variety and vitality of the reading of Middle English verse in the period c.1350–c.1500, drawing on evidence from poems themselves and from surviving evidence of their later-medieval ownership and transmission. Since some of the successful poems used as comparanda for canonical writers in this study might be less familiar to readers, the chapter briefly introduces The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, considering their origins, organization, and internal depictions of reading. It is argued that such long, anonymous poems display interesting variety, not homogeneity. Allusions, provenance evidence from manuscripts, and records in wills and inventories all show how these texts were read in combination with many other types of material, by all kinds of readers and throughout the period, in ways which modern literary history is not necessarily capable of predicting. These findings should, it is suggested, encourage caution in the extrapolation of reading tastes and habits from individual pieces of surviving evidence.

This chapter investigates manuscript evidence for readers’ attention to one particular aspect of form, rhyme. The chapter begins by examining occasions when scribes copied Middle English verse in unusual layouts with atypical lineation, because such occasions drove scribes to punctuate the structures of poems more explicitly. The resulting punctuation reveals that scribes often read, and expected other readers to read, cycles of rhyme, not individual lines, as the basic building-blocks of rhyming verse. The chapter then turns to the evidence of rhyme braces. Manuscript case-studies show that readers were usually adept and accurate when adding rhyme braces, but did not always choose to represent the actual rhyme. Their decisions reveal an aesthetic interest in balanced and unbalanced structures in rhyme, which helps to explain the effects and pleasures offered by some unbalanced stanza forms of the period, such as rhyme royal. A systematic quantitative survey of the braces in long poems written in couplets then shows how much care and labour was spent representing rhyme accurately even in copies of poems which modern scholarship has tended to regard as essentially utilitarian texts. Readers had, it is suggested, a strong formalist interest in rhyme in all kinds of rhyming verse. The evidence also demonstrates that different readers could pursue different kinds of formalism, and that poets did not always see eye to eye with the readers who eventually absorbed and transmitted poetry.

This Introduction shows how this book contributes to the emerging field of postcolonial book history and cultural historiography. By demonstrating its relevance to the capitalism and slavery thesis, it shows how books, too, were industrial goods capitalized by slave labor. It explains that early American proprietary subscription libraries were centers for revolutionary leadership development, and one location where colonials imbibed British political thought. In challenging the civic republicanism thesis of Caroline Robbins, J. G. A. Pocock, and Bernard Bailyn it argues that ownership of slaves was the proprietorship formative of the virtue of the republican citizen and that C. B. MacPherson’s theory of possessive individualism more accurately describes their citizenship. It maps the networks through which colonials purchased books, and gives a history of early American reading. The most popular genres among early Americans are documented, and anti-slavery is shown to be both a product of revolutionary thinking and an inspiration for it.

Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the language of magic and the Arabian Nights in order to communicate and make sense of their new, urban, industrial environments. Outlining the history of the arrival of the Arabian Nights in Europe and its remarkable propensity to proliferate, it establishes the temporal and structural openness of this story collection, which invites diverse application in multiple locations. In the case of nineteenth-century Britain, it argues, the tales were used to reflect and refract new materials and ideas, offering different ways for British readers to interpret and to frame their experiences. While engaging with questions of imperialism and Orientalism, the introduction draws recent scholarship on thing theory into the history of reading practices, in order to register the potentially transformative powers of reading in the context of the emotional, psychological and material relationships forged with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the more familiar narrative of its prevalence as material with which to manage the Orient, it points to moments of exchange, immersion and receptivity to the realm of the other, and to narratives shared and adapted across cultures.

This chapter explores navigation in the reading of later Middle English verse, examining how readers entered books of poetry and how they moved around within poems. The chapter explores the varying fates of the navigational apparatus in different poems, and discusses the use and, sometimes, creation by readers of summaries, tables of contents, and indexes to English poems. A quantitative survey of fixed bookmarks offers a new method for recovering readers’ movements. Finally, the chapter examines how navigation could obscure the distinctions between individual texts and whole books, and could sometimes be used by later-medieval readers to manipulate attribution and canonicity. Past discussions of navigation in reading have often used a distinction between continuous and ‘discontinuous’ (out of order) reading; this chapter concludes that considerably more fine-grained gradations are visible within these two categories.

The ‘Epilogue’ (2.7) picks up the discussion from the ‘Prologue’ (1.1) and extends it across a broader canvas in the history of the book and of reading. It asks how the case studies in previous chapters (including Pierre de L’Estoile), and new ones in this chapter of Bishop Camus, Pierre Charron, and Pierre Bayle, might revise the sketch of the Essais offered in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. I argue that the fundamental issue at stake in the early modern making and transmission of the Essais is the issue that is explicitly raised by Marie de Gournay in her preface of 1595, and, in a different style and context, by Charron’s use of Montaigne in De la sagesse (1601, 1604): how best to preserve and regulate the well-born individual’s natural liberté of judgement, their franchise or frankness, through reading and writing, in an age of moral corruption and confessional conflict.

This chapter explains the book’s methodologies in the history of reading and elaborates its theory of ‘removed’ reading. ‘Removed’ reading describes the acquisition of familiarity with an anterior text through the reading of a posterior text in which it is embedded, as Amadis is in Don Quixote. The political and cultural conditions that determined and inflected Anglo-Spanish relations across the relevant centuries are outlined, and their implications for the reading of romance explored, as is the long-standing function of French as an intermediary for translated Spanish works in English. The second half of the chapter addresses the act and function of allusion-making, and outlines the modes and strategies of reading romance that are deployed or advocated in different historical periods and social contexts, with a particular focus on gender and reading.

The Afterword discusses how the interlocking between forms of seriality in associationist theories of memory and the print medium of serial fiction demonstrates an extended historical development of the reciprocal linkage between mode of reception and material form in modern media. This recursiveness in turn articulates a model for understanding how early twenty-first century digital serial media may elicit new virtual and participatory forms of social relation.

The marginalia of Gabriel Harvey, a humanist famously eager for a political career, allow us to insert Hamlet in the contexts of late sixteenth-century political education, the discussion about the reason of state, and the culture of extracting sententiae from literary texts. This culture provides a formal link between tragedies and the focus on aphoristic formulations in Machiavelli’s sixteenth-century reception. To Harvey, reading tragedies meant making distinctions between moral or philosophical considerations and the principles of political action. A note in Harvey’s Chaucer implies a similarity between the utility of Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Hamlet, but it is in tragic drama that the tensions between religious–ethical and political norms and arguments become visible in the conflicting claims they make on dramatic characters and on readers.