Introducing new sources of evidence into the history of reading

2011

Collections of essays never come into existence without collaboration and cooperation. e editors wish to unreservedly acknowledge the contribution of Siobhán Collins to this volume of essays and to the conferences from which it emerges. Siobhán is a founding member of Making Books, Shaping Readers and, at an earlier stage, was part of the editorial team of this book, and we thank her wholeheartedly for her input and expertise. Credit is also due to our publishers, Pickering and Chatto, and especially to Mark Pollard, Publishing Director at Pickering and Chatto, along with series editor Ann Hawkins, and Stephina Clarke, copy editor, for their trust in and assistance with this project. We thank also the external reader, whose comments and suggestions guided us in re ning the focus and concerns of this book. We were, too, fortunate to have the keen eye of Liam Lenihan, who provided invaluable feedback on our introductory remarks. We are, of course, grateful to our essayists: they are a remarkable group of scholars, unfailingly professional, good humoured and generous, and exceedingly patient. We feel privileged that they chose our conferences and our volume as the places in which they would share their work with the wider scholarly community. We especially thank those who acted as keynote speakers at our meetings: Nora Crook, Alistair McCleery and John ompson, and also Bill Bell, keynote speaker at our rst conference, whose paper was promised elsewhere. e conferences from which this book emerges were held at University College Cork's School of English under the auspices of the Making Books, Shaping Readers project. We acknowledge the excellent contributions of the speakers and delegates at each conference: together they cultivated a collegial and friendly atmosphere which initiated discussion, exchange and the creation of new ventures. e support received from the School of English was key to the success of both conferences, and we sincerely thank Colbert Kearney and Anne Fitzgerald for their generosity and advice, along with our colleagues in the School for continuing to provide a supportive and friendly environment in which to work. e conferences received nancial assistance from the School of English, the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Science at University College Cork; the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections and Fáilte Ireland.

2013

Author(s): Mäkinen, Ilkka Title: Leselust, Goût de la Lecture, Love of Reading: Patterns in the Discourse on Reading in Europe from the 17th until the 19th Century Main work: Good Book, Good Library, Good Reading : Studies in the history of the book, libraries and reading from the network HIBOLIRE and its friends Editor(s): Navickien , Aušra; Mäkinen, Ilkka; Torstensson, Magnus; Dyrbye, Martin; Reimo, Tiiu Year: 2013 Pages: 261-285 ISBN: 978-951-44-9142-9 Publisher: Tampere University Press Discipline: Media and communications; History and archaeology; Other humanities School /Other Unit: School of Information Sciences Item Type: Article in Compiled Work Language: en URN: URN:NBN:fi:uta-201404021299

1999

This catalog deals with an exhibition of historical reading materials used in the United States-old primers, spellers, and readers-which contained mostly items from privately owned collections. The catalog is divided into the following chronological sections: (1) Following in the Footsteps of Our English Forebears: The Alphabet Method Reigns Supreme (1640-1826); (2) The.Great Period of Experimentation in Introductory Reading Instruction (1826 1883); (3) Literature First: Sentence and Story Methods (1883-1925); and (4) The Influence of Scientific Investigations into Reading (1914-1940). (Contains a 45-item list of resources for further reading.

This essay presents, against the background of contemporary views on reading in dedicatory and prefatory letters, medical treatises and fictional sources, a typology of early modern readers.

Critical Survey, 2002

Literacy, in the sixteenth century, was construed as multiple, variable, subject to redefinition by edict from above and by practices from below. The importance of regulating changes in skills and behaviors, in particular, increased reading of the Bible, was hotly debated as the Reformation got underway. In England, the Tudor state intervened erratically, first encouraging the reading of the English Bible for all, then forbidding its reading to all but a privileged few. In 1538, every parish church was required by a royal injunction to purchase an English Bible and place it in the choir. 1 The Great Bible, published in 1540 with a new preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, stressed the ideal of an England peopled by 'all manner' of readers of Scripture in the vernacular: 'Here may all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, rich, poor, priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants, and mean men, virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition soever they be, may in this book learn all things'. 2 Only three years later, however, in 1543, the selfvauntingly named Act for the Advancement of True Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary attempted to undo that opening of the floodgates by lowering them again to allow for only a trickle of elite readers to have access to Scripture. Reading the Bible in English was prohibited outright for women, artificers, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeoman and under, husbandmen and laborers; noblewomen and gentlewomen could read the Bible silently; only noblemen, gentlemen, and merchants were permitted to read it aloud to others. 3 The contradictions of that early effort to police reading and writing, the contentitiousness of it signaled by backtracking on earlier initiatives, provide a window onto the topic of this special issue of Critical Survey and its theme of literacies in early modern England.

Through emendation, nonlinear apprehension, materiality, and temporality, late-medieval readers in England enjoyed access to a diverse number of reading practices that invited and positioned their participation as central to the making of meaning. Suffusing these practices, medieval understandings of the body, of architecture, of mobility, and of space indicate a recognition of reading as an intellectual activity intensely physical, embodied in its practice. The materiality not only of the textual medium itself, but also of readers and the spaces they inhabited while reading, impacted reading experiences in profound ways. In explicitly inviting, modelling, or discouraging such practices, writers considered what it meant to be a reader even as their understanding of what it meant to be a writer underwent change influenced by altering notions of their own authority and, eventually, the printing press. They determined that readers could indeed participate in the creation of meaning, and guided their audiences towards the types of reading practices that did not require formal university education or universal literacy. To the writers who elicited and modelled interactive, participatory reading practice, reading and writing were not only viewed as complementary activities; they were also activities that could involve the same work, the same practices, although different in scale. Both writers and readers engaged in emendation; writers relied on nonlinear reading to construct the structure of their works; they inserted themselves into the narratives they composed even as they invited readers’ own participatory contributions. To be a reader in England of the late fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries was to be understood as acting like a writer.

, owned by notorious Renaissance polymath, John Dee. The details of the book's ownership are made clear through the inscription on the opening pages of the copy, in which the annotator includes a signature and location 'Joannes Dee Londinensis' 1 . The practice of marking and dating personal copies of books was not uncommon in the early modern period, and yet the motivations behind it extend beyond simply organisation or declaration of ownership. The inscriptions of dates and names found within a book's title page are traces of readership, and claims to any marginal notes found within. The desire to label individual copies reveals an early modern perception of books as participants in a wider network of reading and ownership, not limited to personal consumption but available for wider use. The possibility of public reception of books and therefore the annotations within them, affects the way in which early modern readership practice can be approached. The vocabulary cultivated by the critical orthodoxy of the twentieth century places disproportionate emphasis on the private and insular aspects of reading, which recent critics have begun to challenge through the discovery of collective and communal reading environments. By engaging a new vocabulary which asserts the centrality of communication in sixteenth century readership, the annotations of John Dee can be placed within their broader context, with the hope of tracing a variety of learning and reading practices. These varied methods can be separated for clarity into two distinct motivations: a force for public good through the distribution of knowledge and publication of information, and a more personal drive for social and political self-promotion, projecting a carefully crafted version of oneself within the margins, which become sites of manipulation and performance. In his study on marginalia, H. J. Jackson poses a series of questions, applicable to the study of any annotated book: "… were the books part of a family collection to which other people had access? Was the writer exchanging annotated books with friends? What were the norms of the day?' 2 . These questions, which become central to a more comprehensive understanding of annotational practice during the early modern period, seek to question and 1 Christ Church Library, Special Collections: Wb.5.12, title page. 2 H. J. Jackson, 'Marginalia And Authorship', Oxford Handbooks, (2016): n. pag. [accessed 15 Nov. 2016.] 1 challenge established critical assumptions, which have for most of the twentieth century misinterpreted reading as an 'essentially private activity' 3 , conducted under conditions which encourage inward looking, personal and secretive markings. Such assumptions have coloured the vocabulary applied to the period, in which the image of a 'lonely ascetic seeking the secrets of the universe' 4 in an 'oasis from public obligation' 5 becomes perpetuated. Jackson's attempts to change the method of approaching reader studies is rooted in the very language used: 'family collection', 'access' and 'exchange' emerge as crucial terms, as they move away from a lens which emphasises insularity and individualism, in preference of a more inclusive, outward looking perspective. Cormack and Mazzio's extensive research on the sixteenth century uses of books use the language of community to highlight a network of books and readers. Covering a wide range of examples they describe students 'using [a] text collectively' 6 , anatomy textbooks in hospitals for 'collective use' 7 and the 'collective form of use' 8 evidenced in the heavily annotated copy of Thomas Lodge's play. Such varied examples of the word 'collective' emphasises how fundamental the communal aspect of reading when approaching the period. This new vocabulary does not apply to reading alone, but also to the annotations which were being made in this collective space; and thus were fundamentally integrated within the public domain. A study of a single reader's annotations, such as John Dee, enables access to a wide range of stored information, including the social, political and literary practices of the day, which was in part written in order to communicate with a network of readers. Re-situating marginalia within a public and shared domain lends new possibilities to the ways in which it can be read. No longer secretive and private traces, the markings become 'repositories of reliable evidence' 9 of approaches to reading and study, as well as indicators of the social and political pressures of the day. With the possibility that these books might fall into the hands of others, bought or inherited by future readers, the marginal notes become socially and politically useful in conveying an impression that is carefully constructed by the 3 Jason Warren-Scott, '

Harvard Educational Review, 1977

In this article Daniel and Lauren Resnick bring an historical perspective to the present debate over reading achievement. From an historical examination of selected European and American models of literacy, they conclude that reading instruction has been aimed at attaining either a low level of literacy for a large number of people or a high level for an elite. Thus, the contemporary expectation—high levels of literacy for the entire population—represents a relatively recent development. From this stance the Resnicks argue that, contrary to the thrust of the "back to basics" movement, pedagogical practices from the past offer little remedy for reading problems as currently defined.

2012

This thesis examines the reading lives of eighteenth-century English men and women. Diaries of the middling sort and the gentry show that reading entwined daily routines and long-term aspirations. This life-writing also demonstrates that readers performed and contextualised reading within a specific cultural milieu. Finally, autobiographical accounts reveal that books could challenge or reinforce contemporary constructs of gender. These three strands of for work on marginalia. See D. Allan, Commonplace books and reading in Georgian England (Cambridge, 2010) and A. Moss, Printed commonplace-books and the structuring of renaissance thought (Oxford, 1996) for studies of commonplace books. 4 The published diary of Dudley Ryder alone provided sufficient evidence of reading habits for this project.