Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies

Citation

Line, M.B. (2002), "Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 5, pp. 600-602. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.5.600.8

The history of the western world at least over the last 500 years is intimately bound up with the dissemination of books; the spread of printing changed civilisation. This book is one of a:

… series that explores cultural technologies of communication – books, manuscripts, scrolls, graffiti, the actor’s voice – with particular attention to the ways in which specific material forms affect meaning.

It consists of 12 essays by various scholars, an introduction by the editors, and an Afterword. All the contributors come from the USA except two (one British, one Canadian), and most are attached to university departments of English.

“Early modern England” is defined as England between 1580 and the English Revolution in 1685. This includes some of the most turbulent decades in English history, during which religious and political controversy was rife and some of the greatest literature appeared; the two elements are almost inseparably interwoven after 1630 (Milton, Marvell and Dryden alone testify to this). The upheavals revolutionised reading. The relationships of writers, readers, publishers and printers are therefore of special importance.

As the introductory chapter explains, the 12 essays:

… contribute to the rich interdisciplinary field of studies on early modern English interpretive practices and reading habits by demonstrating the effects of textual circulation on the larger social, cultural dynamic.

They:

… present discrete moments in the history of reading … to illustrate that the intensity and kinds of reading varied greatly over this period, but also to suggest that the sum of such moments is consequential for a broader perspective of historical trends.

The essays draw on a very wide range of sources, including prefaces, printer’s marks, library catalogues, tracts, auction catalogues and even bindings. The introduction is in itself a valuable survey of the contents of the book that sets them in an overall context and relates them to earlier work by Roger Chartier (one of the editors of the series), Elizabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton.

It is impossible here to go into every chapter in any detail. I can only give a flavour of them and pick out a few plums – enough, I hope, to give readers and libraries some idea of how far the book is likely to interest them.

Shakespeare, Kastan’s essay on “Plays into print” states, was the most published of all playwrights of the era, but (unlike Jonson) little interested in the publication of his plays – which goes some way to explaining why many of the printed texts are a mess. His printers were not interested in immortalising him, merely concerned with making a small profit.

Stallybrass’s article on “Books and scrolls” provides convincing evidence that Protestants read the Bible discontinuously; they “navigated” it in the same sort of way that we read non‐fiction now. He moreover views the invention of the codex as more important for reading than the invention of printing; discontinuous reading is virtually impossible with scrolls. (Similarly, electronic forms of and access to text must be changing our reading habits now.)

Grose explores the way Burton designed his extraordinary Anatomy of Melancholy, which deals inter alia with the religious melancholy of Puritan separatists – non‐judgementally, unlike Thomas Edwards, who, as Hughes explains, wrote his Gangraena soon after to aid the cause of a unified Protestant church by attacking sectarianism.

Sherman looks at what readers of the period wrote in their books, insofar as it is not indecipherable or unrelated to the books themselves, and while the essay itself does not tell us much there seems to be a rich field here ready for gleaning.

Hackel considers the contents of one personal library, that of the Countess of Bridgewater, and reveals it to be not only remarkably extensive and current but much wider in scope than her funeral sermon, which focused on her piety, suggested. Moreover, her annotations make it clear that she actually read the books.

That epigrammatists were preoccupied with readers is clear, says Ingram, from the frequency of such addresses to readers in the seventeenth century, based though they clearly are on Latin models such as Martial. As the author says, they tell us little about real readers, but quite a lot about what he calls “implied readers”, since they “serve as on‐the‐scene interpretations of readers’ habits and desires”. (They are also often entertaining: one of Herrick’s mentions the prospect that his poems might be used “to wipe (at need)/the place, where swelling piles do breed”.)

Lynch sees in different bindings of George Herbert’s collection of poems The Temple, one ornamental and the other plain, indications of “social, religious and economic motivation”. I am not wholly convinced, but she has many interesting things to say in her essay.

Mendel’s paper is on the collections of tracts that began to be made in the 1640s, which saw a great upsurge in their production. Polemical pamphlets were of course not new; what was new was the outburst of newssheets – literally ephemera, in that their news value lasted for only a day or so. Collecting began as early as the 1640s and became a hobby by the 1670s. The collectors, who are themselves of interest, did a great service to subsequent historians, for without them it is doubtful if more than a very few examples of the tracts would have survived.

The apparent conflict between Milton’s famous plea in Areopagitica for freedom of the press and his later position as a state licenser for the press can, Baron says, be reconciled if we see Milton as arguing for freedom for the reader and against licensing by religious authorities; he never believed in absolute freedom to print anything. Cable analyses a debate on the use of metaphor by nonconformists – Bishop Samuel Parker against (“gaudy”, “pompous and empty”, “wanton and lascivious”), Marvell for. Marvell and metaphor won.

The final essay, by Battigelli, examines the ambiguity of two of Dryden’s works – the play The Conquest of Granada and the famous satire Absalom and Achitophel – and the furious reactions they provoked among readers. These reactions could be in physical as well as written form: Dryden was once attacked and beaten up very badly (for a work falsely attributed to him, as it happened).

Orgel’s Afterword (“Records of culture”) is in effect a reasoned attempt to justify the volume, perhaps against the unspoken criticism that it deals with trivia as well as ephemera, and that the fields of research are merely playgrounds for academics who are not sure what else to do. He begins:

The revolution in modern bibliographical studies has in large measure been effected through a willingness to notice what had been unnoticeable, to find evidence in the hitherto irrelevant: so that, for example, habits of reading, marginalia, and traces of ownership become as central to the nature of the book as format and typography, watermarks and chain lines.

I think he makes his case. The contributions are in themselves minor, but all add to our knowledge, in a similar way to that in which scientific knowledge is built up by small discoveries and experiments.

I have one complaint about the book as a physical object: it is so tightly glued that it will not stay open unless firmly held – a special problem for reviewers, who need to have both hands free to use the keyboard. I am unaware of any research into the effects of tight binding on readership, but I do know that it makes the act of reading more difficult.

This is a book for scholars of English literature and social history rather than librarians, but it will be of interest to those who are concerned with the historical context of books and libraries, and of special interest to historical bibliographers.