Kevin Sharpe, Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. x + 363 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-82434-7.
Reviewed by Angela J. McShane Jones (Department of History, University of Warwick)
Published on H-Albion (April, 2004)
Reading as the Agent of Change
Reading as the Agent of Change
A new volume of essays edited by those virtuosi of the form Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker is bound to be a treat and indeed this collection does not disappoint. As promised in the foreword, the essayists here certainly do reflect a "team of experts" working on what the editors describe as "our new history of reading" (p. 3), an interdisciplinary study which combines theory with case study. The interpretation of "politics" in the title is broad: we encounter the politics of court, king, and coffee-house, of theater and doctor, of patriarchy and pulpit, and of academia. However, despite the suggestion that social history is one of the disciplines informing the book, the range of "society," the "who" of actual readers, is more restricted. Though the editors argue that reading was an agent of democracy and emancipation through the individual interpretation of texts, we only have access here to the intellectual elites who, reading and writing in their private closets, were able to tell us what those interpretations were.
A major premise in this volume is, "we are what we read. And not only what but how" (p. 23). Just as "our ways of reading ... constitute our practices as critics and historians" (p. 24) we must make the same assumption about the centrality of the "how" and "what" of reading in the past. Through their introduction and individual essays, the editors set out a narrative in which humanist reading practices suffered "hermeneutic fracture" (p. 21) through the trauma of civil war. This led to "contestative" modes of reading (p. 301). Impassioned readers annotated texts aggressively for political rather than aesthetic purposes. The desire to find a "right reading" of the past that would bring a single truth to the fore was still operating by the 1690s, as Kirstie McClure shows. She demonstrates that Locke's writings were informed by humanist modes of reading, and that Locke was more concerned with a "right reading" of the past than with a new vision of the future. However, Zwicker argues that despite party division which sought to appropriate aesthetic forms, by the turn of the century new genres such as the novel emerged, which required different reading practices: private sensibility rather than passionate polemic. This led to a "pacification of reading" and a means to self-fashioning: an acceptance that difference of opinion was not a threat, and that reading could be an individual delight, not always a political act.
A further contention is that the material text and the market are crucial to any history of reading. The inclusion of Richard Wendorf's wonderful piece on typography and Seth Lerer's equally delightful essay on errata sheets demonstrates the value of bringing work on publication and product together with more familiar textual analysis and consideration of reader and writer roles.[1] Lerer's essay discusses the political implications of printed error at the court of Henry VIII, and textual correction as both a moral and typographical process. We see, for example, the ever paradoxical Thomas More using an errata sheet not only as a means of correcting what appeared to be doctrinal errors but as a means of indicating his own deficiencies. Wendorf explains changes in the use of capitals and italics as part of a process of refinement, which increasingly required conformity to European cultural pressures. Ultimately this drove publishers towards uniformity and regularity of typography and calendar. However, as he traces the continuing irregularity of typography throughout the eighteenth century he argues that the point of submission to conformity was much later than "the great divide" of 1750 and depended on which print market sector writers aimed their publications at. Both these essays discuss the interaction of modes of transmission. Wendorf sees interaction between market-conscious writers, producers, and readers, and older modes of transmission--typographical, oral, and scribal. Lerer's discussion of Thomas Wyatt's "Defence" uncovers a mutuality of relationship between manuscript and print--each method of production discoursing in terms of the other.
The physicality of reading is another strong feature of this collection. Joad Raymond's carefully modulated essay investigates the affective responses of readers to early modern newsbooks. He combines contemporary discourses of the dangers of reading for body and soul--stirring up harmful passions, clouding reason, and impeding virtue--with "real readers encountering texts" (p. 189) by using marginalia, diaries, and commonplace books. Michael Schoenfeldt's brilliant "Reading Bodies" effectively problematizes the much used and abused concept of "the body politic" by reading it against the medical debates within Galenic medicine and the newly emerging ideas of Paracelcus.
In their introduction, the editors suggest that Protestantism was the catalyst of hermeneutic change because its "capacity for dissent" and encouragement of individual reading created a reading nation and "ultimately democratis(ed) the word" (pp. 4, 9, 13). Catholic reading practices, they argue, were different--more communal and more successful in controlling textual authority. However, Adrian Johns shows in his essay that newly developing modes of debate were not a Protestant monopoly. The reading and reviewing techniques of the Royal Society were already to be found in Richelieu's France (surely a reading nation?) while Lorenzini's Osservazioni were sent to the Royal Society for perusal and review by the Grand Duke of Tuscany. For Johns, reputation and authority were at issue, not confession. Neither Robert Hooke nor Isaac Newton was convinced by the Royal Society's procedures. Newton relied upon his own reputation as "scientific hero" and tried to control the "correct reading" of his work by appointing his own "apostles" (pp. 261-263).[2] It was only after much persuasion that Newton registered the Principia with the Society, thus increasing the authority of the register rather than the other way around.
David Scott Kastan and Heidi Brayman Hackel do most to bring a greater sense of "society" to this volume, although Hackel's piece about "silent" women readers is, ironically, the shortest essay in the book. Kastan demonstrates the preservative powers of print as the closure of the theaters in interregnum London led to a new market for printed plays. He suggests that the interregnum authorities banned the gathering of people at a play because they constituted a political threat. However, he argues, the publication of plays in books raised plays to the level of literature and changed both the manner of reading and market appeal--it led to individual, private, and largely female reading. Hackel's illuminating essay discusses elite women readers whose silence was due both to discourses that discouraged female writing and a difference in education which had not taught humanist techniques of annotation or commonplacing of their reading. This has led to a rather pessimistic view of female reading and Hackel suggests (but does not attempt) an analysis of book ownership as one method of further investigation.
"Silent reading" was not limited to elite women however. The majority of readers were not taught to annotate and comment upon the texts that they read. As Margaret Spufford has argued, they were not taught to write at all.[3] If, in this new history of reading, readers must also be writers, the majority of reader experience is ignored. Joseph Loewenstein raises this dilemma in his examination of Ben Jonson's appropriation of Martial's concerns about plagiarism. Pointing out the vulnerability of libraries such as Jonson's to fire and poverty, he is forced to do things "the old fashioned way, and to infer Jonson's reading habits from his writing habits" (p. 277). He found it "impossible to stay on the reader's" side as instructed by the editors since "writing [was] a response to the contingency of reading" (p. 278). Though Wendorf's essay touches upon a more optimistic discussion of literacy, the editors and other contributors do not share his optimism. City comedies, we are told, celebrated the newly literate middle orders, but were performed to a "largely illiterate commonalty" (p. 17). The many depictions of women reading are "puzzling" in view of "low levels of female literacy" (p. 16). Raymond suggests that marginalia on news books was limited due to the absence of manuals on how to read (and thus annotate) news (p. 191).
Sharpe's essay makes the point. A fascinating hall of mirrors in which writers contesting the "right reading" of the Book of Revelation are read and written about by other writers--all of whom are in their turn read by readers of whom so far we know nothing. Tracing these disputes, Sharpe argues, reveals "ambivalencies and anxieties which take us to the heart of early modern society and the early modern psyche" (p. 154). However, without considering a greater range of readers, the cost and sale of these works in the market, or the ubiquity of these discourses in other genres, can we really know what the impact and scope of such a hermeneutic was?
Many challenging claims for reading as an agent of change are made in this valuable collection. Is it the case that "any full telling of progress from patriarchy to female emancipation must ... be a narrative of literacy ... [and relations] between practices and experiences of reading" (p. 14)? How much did "the shift from a world of endless reformations and revolutions to the relative peace of Hanoverian Britain" really owe to changes in modes of reading (p. 23)? Are historians today fearful of "textual instability" and seeking a "univocal master narrative" (p. 25)? Recent work by Bernard Capp, Adam Fox, Garthene Walker, Peter Lake, Eamonn Duffy, Laura Gowing, Steve Hindle, Alexandra Walsham, Michael Braddick, John Walter, or Phil Withington comes to mind in which sensitive and delicately nuanced investigations of negotiated power, based on texts of all kinds, appear. Does their work simply amount to a mere toleration of the unstable text or has it given silent and unknown consumers of discourse their turn to write history?
Notes
[1]. Contributors Joad Raymond and Adrian Johns are both noted for their similar approach to material culture in J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and A. Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[2]. Johns's position on the issue of a confessional divide is laid out both in The Nature of the Book and in his debate with Elizabeth Eisenstein; see "How Revolutionary Was the Printing Revolution?" American Historical Review 107 (2002).
[3]. See Margaret Spufford, "First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Autobiographers," Social History 4 (1979); and Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-albion.
Citation:
Angela J. McShane Jones. Review of Sharpe, Kevin; Zwicker, Steven N., eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9182
Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.