Brayman Hackel 2005 - Revision history

Wtrettien: /* Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries */

2013-05-30T20:09:00Z

Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:09, 30 May 2013
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	:"Contemporary portraits of early modern women typically depict closed books as props or mere decoration. Unlike subjects of analogous portraits of men, feamle sitters often do not even make physical contact with the books within the frame. Open books -- books in use -- are masculine; clasped books, like chaste women, are feminine." (211)		:"Contemporary portraits of early modern women typically depict closed books as props or mere decoration. Unlike subjects of analogous portraits of men, feamle sitters often do not even make physical contact with the books within the frame. Open books -- books in use -- are masculine; clasped books, like chaste women, are feminine." (211)

			:"Conduct books urged women to be silent, self-contained, 'solitarie and withdrawne.' While such admonitions most directly relate to women's interactions with their husbands and other men, they might also apply to women's ineractions with books." (212)

			:"The margins of early modern books were often not the private spaces we might suppose they were. As books circulated within households, the margins were actually a fairly public space, inviting the marks of many hands, but also putting those hands on display." (212)

			gendered prefaces of Lyly's Euphues; "Though Lyly asks both gentlewomen and gentlemen for their complicity as readers, masculine complicity produces collaborative corrections, whiel female complicity yields silence." (213)

			possibility hat early modern women kept their reading concealed, like an engraving inside a gold ring

			wives' wills make up less than 1% of total wills between 1558-1700

			Clifford, triptych portrait

			Rainbowe sermon, describing Clifford's sententiae on her wall; "In the division of labor described here, the scene might at first seem to maintain the dichotomy between masculine writing and feminine sewing, between penning and pinning, for it si the male 'Servants' who transcribe the sentences and the female 'Maids' who 'pin' them o the bed and hangings. Yet Clifford commands all this writing as she 'caus[es]' them to transcribe the sentences that she recalls from her reading. Even as the hierarchy of mistress and servant is announced in Clifford's direction of this scene, it gives way to the more communal access to and use of the 'Papers' as both servants, maids, and mistress 'make their descants on them.' The passage is significant too in its revelation of a combination of learning and domesticity: Clifford, now an old woman, seems to be merging the worlds of predestination and sleave-silk again, bringing the humanist model of the commonplace book into her bedchamber and performing there an activity more often assicated with the masculine realms of the university or study." (231)

			Nicholas Bacon, transformed a hall into a reading room in prep for visit from Queen Elizabeth; "walls of which were ecorated with sententiae ordered under commonplace-book headings" (231)

			:"Her act of surrounding herself with pages from books, a gesture that suggest an intense desire for learning, is cast in terms of household economy and service. Potentially an act of feverish acquisitiveness for knowledge and perhaps intellectual bossiness, Clifford's transformation of her bedchamber is praised for advancing her conversation skills and demonstrating her effectiveness as her servants' mistress." (232)

			members of household read to Clifford

			Ellesmere traveling library (242)

			contemporary special collections separate libraries; what can reconstructing them tell us about the history of reading?

			description of Lady Bridgewater's closet, describes richly embroidered cloths (246)

			:"The breadth of the Countess's library suggests a resistance to the expectations of publishers and authors for women's reading." (249)

			unlike Clifford, Lady Bridgewater "does not ripple the historical record with signs of curiosity, resistance, or exceptional intelligence" -- yet her library collection is interesting still in that "its existence deos not seem to have been considered worthy of remark. And if a woman's library of 241 volumes did not warrant attention in 1633, then we must expand our notions of early modern women as consumers of books." (253)

			:"The women whose traces i have tried to uncover in this book may seem to have been passive and silent if we assume that active reading requires a written record or response, but women often demonstrated otherwise that books played an important role in their lives. Many gentlewomen displayed the importance of their book ownership in material ways: in elaborate bindings, careful catalogues, commissioned portraits, gift exchanges, and final bequests." (254)

			:"For many women, perhaps, it was in their physical control of books -- what we might call their consumption -- that is, in their binding, organizing, cataloguing, and bestowal, that they demonstrated to others their engagement with the world of books. Books, after all, may have been accommodated more easily as household objects than as discursive texts. for the many women who collected, read, and shared their books, books were not mere ornaments; they were tools that enriched these women's lives and expanded the world they inhabited. Their books may have been closeted away or tumbled on a few shelves, but reading helped them define their lives." (254)

Wtrettien: /* Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries */

2013-05-30T19:41:45Z

Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:41, 30 May 2013
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	== Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries ==		== Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries ==

			history of reading has often elided women readers; "for the cultural and material practices that discouraged women from annotating their books have also made it difficult for modern scholars to write them into the emerging history of reading" (196)

			:"In concert with the urgings of conduct books, English laws provided little room for women's public performance of reading. The application of benefit of clergy in the 16 and 17c acknowledged and reward the oral performance of reading by men but not by women." (198)

			:"But not until 1691 could women claim this privilege for anything beyond petty theft." (198)

			Henry's 1543 Act repealed early in EVI's reign but "the gender distinction it codified persisted throughout th early modern period in both educational practices and conduct manual prescriptions" (199)

			''The Vanity of Thoughts Discovered'' (1637), "which rails against romances and playbooks as 'the curious needleworke of idle braines'" (205)

			Margaret Hoby, Mr Rhods reading to her while she embroiders (206)

			:"The imagined posture of lap reading not only made annotation unlikely, but also trivilized and eroticized women's reading." (207)

			:"In opposition to the reading of schoolbooks or devotional works, gentlewomen's secular reading was constructed as trivial and passive, though sometimes morally perilous. For the women depicted in these literary accounts, secular books were diversions, interchangeable with trifles, needlework, and lapdogs." (207)

			:"In a portrait that includes books, a male sitter typically demonstrates an active connection and engagement with the text; often seated in a study, he is frequently surrounded by books, many of them opened, and by other signs of learnedness, and he often marks his engagement by writing. Even in portraits of less scholarly men, the subject often fingers a book, keeping his place as he is interrupted by the gaze of the painter or viewer. This physical contact with the book visually defines the literate man, and it shows up in literary accounts as well." (210)

			:"Contemporary portraits of early modern women typically depict closed books as props or mere decoration. Unlike subjects of analogous portraits of men, feamle sitters often do not even make physical contact with the books within the frame. Open books -- books in use -- are masculine; clasped books, like chaste women, are feminine." (211)

Wtrettien: /* Noting readers of the Arcadia in marginalia and commonplace books */

2013-05-30T19:26:49Z

Noting readers of the Arcadia in marginalia and commonplace books

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 :"Much as a patron's name could vouch for a work, so the identification fo the sources supports the text. Like the gentle reader who complies with prefatory requests for a friendly reading, the gentle reader of the marginalia enters into a dialogue with the author, following the sources and influences that lead to the author's 'best' meaning." (134)
 == Noting readers of the ''Arcadia'' in marginalia and commonplace books ==
 == Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries ==

Wtrettien: /* Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins */

2013-05-30T18:51:58Z

Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins

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	Zoilus, Momus -- appear as cliches in prefaces (123)		Zoilus, Momus -- appear as cliches in prefaces (123)

			:"Though the letters often merely try to banish bad readers, some suggest new reading strategies to the Zoili, inviting them to read on without malice. Thus, even as prefaces continue to divide their audiences into stock categories -- learned and rude, noble and base, male and female -- the admonitory letters to the Zoili reveal a willingness to transform bad readers. In this new willingness, I believe, are the beginnings of the collapse of the rigid sex- and class-based distinctions of Henry VIII's proclamations that had restricted so many readers' access to books." (124-5)

			:"Printed marginalia continue the project of the preliminaries: they define the audience, forward the author's 'true' meaning, and promote a careful readin of the text." (125)

			some genres didn't elicit much marginalia, like the sonnet sequence, the essay or the drama (127)

			:"Printed marginalia, I will argue, played a mroe diverse and complicated role in the early modern period than the mere erasure of ambiguity. Marginalia served as well to define an audience, protect the author's meaning, and forward particular habits of reading. In doing so, however, the marginalia also made text vulnerable to different interpretations and less attentive habits of reading." (127)

			Tyler, printed marginalia alongside her preface "serve as a correction to Tyler's defense; while she may write the text, the printer has the final authority over its composition" (129)

			"A Divine Descant" (129)

			:"The contrast between main text and margins, between pleasure and profit, suggests the interdependence of text and paratext, and it highlights the ability of the margins to transform the reading experience. Attention to the margins,t hat is, encourages certain habits of reading and redeems what might otherwise seem to be frivolous pleasures." (131)

			:"While reliable polemics and highly politicized works may have the most dramatic marginalia, most early modern books were annotated much less aggressively. Unlike the highly charged marginalia that negotiate religious and political controversy, most early modern marginalia threaten to disappear in their own banality. The most common annotations seem purely functional and neutral in their obviousness: the ubiquitous finding notes, cross-references, and glosses of foreign words and classical names." (131-2)

			copy of Thomas Hyll's gardening book has been cut/folded so long marginalia can be ignored (132)

			:"Much as a patron's name could vouch for a work, so the identification fo the sources supports the text. Like the gentle reader who complies with prefatory requests for a friendly reading, the gentle reader of the marginalia enters into a dialogue with the author, following the sources and influences that lead to the author's 'best' meaning." (134)

			== Noting readers of the ''Arcadia'' in marginalia and commonplace books ==

			== Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs, and libraries ==

Wtrettien: /* Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins */

2013-05-30T18:38:47Z

Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins

@@ Line 111: / Line 111: @@
 :"While More and Vives and the elder Cary sought physical control over books and hence readers, Calvinist doctrine suggested that physical access alone would not make books available to some readers, for open books will be veiled from them." (85)
-:"Preliminaries, I will argue, initiate the work that is completed, in some books by printed marginalia." (86
+:"Preliminaries, I will argue, initiate the work that is completed, in some books by printed marginalia." (86)
 "prefaces often figured as gates, doors, porches, or entryways" (86)
@@ Line 120: / Line 120: @@
 :"Though the advent of print did not have the monumental and monolithic impact sometimes attributed to it, printing did change readers' reception of books in very material ways, and it heightened authors' concerns about the interpretation o their works by a whole new class of unseen readers. Of all the different paratextual materials introduced or refined during the early modern period -- title pages, frontispieces, preliminaries, illustrations, annotations, indexes, errata sheets -- prefatory letters and printed marginalia most clearly signal concerns about interpretation and most explicitly direct readers' experiences of a text." (88)

Wtrettien: /* Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins */

2013-05-30T18:15:29Z

Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:15, 30 May 2013
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	:"Preliminaries acknowledged the 'great Variety of readers' but, in the very act of stratifying those readers, pushed them towards a single reading posture of sympthy, pliability, and friendliness. Printed marginalia continued this project of narrowing meaning in many books, mapping for readers one reading path. Modern terminology for these parts of a book -- preliminaries, marginalia, apparatus, paratexts -- distinguishes them from the 'main text' and belies their critical function in early modern books; further, modern editors and publishing houses often omit, fragment, or otherwise misrepresent them." (69)		:"Preliminaries acknowledged the 'great Variety of readers' but, in the very act of stratifying those readers, pushed them towards a single reading posture of sympthy, pliability, and friendliness. Printed marginalia continued this project of narrowing meaning in many books, mapping for readers one reading path. Modern terminology for these parts of a book -- preliminaries, marginalia, apparatus, paratexts -- distinguishes them from the 'main text' and belies their critical function in early modern books; further, modern editors and publishing houses often omit, fragment, or otherwise misrepresent them." (69)

			1604, ''Daiphantus'', epistle satirizes hornbook genre and dedicatory epistles (70)

			:"Once largely the domain of the social and intellectual elites, reading and book ownership were becoming activities avilable to a 'great Variety' of early modern English people, includin shepherds, servants, chambermaids, laundresses, and merchants' daughters, in the seventeenth century." (71)

			"anxiety about the handling of books by anonymous consumers" (73)

			''Pseudo-Martyr'', advertisement to reader at the end shows "conflicting definitions of the reader" (74)

			fear of reproduction (75)

			Dorothy Leigh, ''The Mothers Blessing'' (1616)

			:"At the center of this anxiety is the customer or reader, who paradoxically is both in danger and a danger in early modern discussions of reading." (77)

			:"Digby locates the danger in the text; Jonson, in the reader. Like Una and Redcrosse, early modern readers need both reliable guides and sound judgment to escape the reading process unscathed." (78)

			''Arte of Rhetorique'' (1585), Thomas Wilson, "insists upon the deceptive strength of the reading process"
			* "Exposed to danger and corruption,t he unwary reader is transformed into that very corruption. For Wilson, reading bad books results in a form of physical monstrousness as the careless reader is likened to someone burned by the sun or covered in tar." (78)

			"spectacularly powerful and dangerous readers": Archimago, Propsero, Faustus

			:"Most prefaces maintain that the diversity of interpretations rests not in the text with its singular 'true meaning,' but in the multiplicity of readers. Early in the period, transgressive readings were aligned predominantly with specific types of people; class, sex, and religion all might predispose a reader to a particular interpretation." (79)

			:"While the book itself may be dangerous, it si the reader who must negotiate any potential hazards by framing his or her mind appropriately. The new and 'great Variety' of readers, of course, increased the possibility of unsupervised readers approaching books with ill-disposed minds." (79)

			Henry Fitzgeffrey asks his bookbinder to choose the smallest size for his book so it won't be used in a pipe or as toilet paper (81)

			Thomas More, plan to screen owners of vernacular bibles through bishops (82); "More's plan acknowledged at once the potential power and the vulnerability of every reader." (82)

			Act for the Advancement of True Religion, 1543, restricted bible reading; "The Act is revealing in its equation of habits of reading with social status, assigning 'naughtie and erronyous' reading with the lower rangers; further, it foregrounds gender over class in grouping all women tegheter despite its careful gradations of rank for men. Like More's proposal, the king's efforts to control access to the Bible depended upon the transparency of every reader's disposition and the assumption that reading was determined by factors external to the reading process itself. In this view, who one was and how one read were considered one and the same: identity, that is, determined interpretation." (83)

			Vives, "advocated the occasional physical removal of inappropriate and even godly books from women's possession" (84)

			:"While More and Vives and the elder Cary sought physical control over books and hence readers, Calvinist doctrine suggested that physical access alone would not make books available to some readers, for open books will be veiled from them." (85)

			:"Preliminaries, I will argue, initiate the work that is completed, in some books by printed marginalia." (86

			"prefaces often figured as gates, doors, porches, or entryways" (86)

			:"The language of early modern prefaces aligns notions of the printed book with acts of circulation, divulgation, and publication." (87)

			:"To make a text into a book is to make it public, to allow it to circulate, and to prepare it, therefore, for a variety of readers." (88)

			:"Though the advent of print did not have the monumental and monolithic impact sometimes attributed to it, printing did change readers' reception of books in very material ways, and it heightened authors' concerns about the interpretation o their works by a whole new class of unseen readers. Of all the different paratextual materials introduced or refined during the early modern period -- title pages, frontispieces, preliminaries, illustrations, annotations, indexes, errata sheets -- prefatory letters and printed marginalia most clearly signal concerns about interpretation and most explicitly direct readers' experiences of a text." (88)

Wtrettien at 01:02, 28 May 2013

2013-05-28T01:02:55Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:02, 28 May 2013
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	== Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins ==		== Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins ==

			:"Preliminaries acknowledged the 'great Variety of readers' but, in the very act of stratifying those readers, pushed them towards a single reading posture of sympthy, pliability, and friendliness. Printed marginalia continued this project of narrowing meaning in many books, mapping for readers one reading path. Modern terminology for these parts of a book -- preliminaries, marginalia, apparatus, paratexts -- distinguishes them from the 'main text' and belies their critical function in early modern books; further, modern editors and publishing houses often omit, fragment, or otherwise misrepresent them." (69)

Wtrettien: /* Impressions from a 'scribbling age': Gestures and habits of reading */

2013-05-27T20:38:36Z

Impressions from a 'scribbling age': Gestures and habits of reading

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:38, 27 May 2013
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	''Most Easie Instructions for Reading, Specially Penned for the Good of those Who Are Come to Yeares'' (1610)		''Most Easie Instructions for Reading, Specially Penned for the Good of those Who Are Come to Yeares'' (1610)

			:"Reading on its own is a historically invisible skill: readers who did not sign loyalty oaths or 'set downe common prises aat Markets, write a Letter, and make a bond' seem to vanish from the archives. Yet many early modern people, especially women and laborers (who keep company at the bottom of Cressy's tables), read without being able to write." (61)

			:"The inability to 'take Note' -- or annotate a book by writing -- did not, therefore, preclude a reader's 'taking notice.' And, indeed, even a reader unable to write might still 'take Note' by following the suggestions in contemporary treatises to make a 'pinprick' or an impression with a fingernail nex to difficult or notable passage. Reading was a 'much more socially diffused skill than writing,' largely because reading was taught before writing both in petty schools and in informal arrangements, and the demands of family economy often interrupted a child's education." (62)

			trenchers -- alternatives to hornbooks; non-paper writing surfaces used to teach letters (67)

			== Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins ==

Wtrettien: /* Impressions from a 'scribbling age': Gestures and habits of reading */

2013-05-27T18:12:00Z

Impressions from a 'scribbling age': Gestures and habits of reading

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:12, 27 May 2013
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	:"Early modern women especially published primarily in genres that relied explicitly on their readings of other texts: translations, compilations, refutations, and editions. Projects, like Mary Sidney's translations and Rachel Speght's polemic, thatm ight otherwise seem extraordinarily different in terms of genre and tone emerge as dindred enterprises when considered in the context of writing cast as reading." (55)		:"Early modern women especially published primarily in genres that relied explicitly on their readings of other texts: translations, compilations, refutations, and editions. Projects, like Mary Sidney's translations and Rachel Speght's polemic, thatm ight otherwise seem extraordinarily different in terms of genre and tone emerge as dindred enterprises when considered in the context of writing cast as reading." (55)

			multiple literacies: "In a period with a profusion of scripts and typefaces, proficiency in one did not guarantee competence in another." (59)

			''Most Easie Instructions for Reading, Specially Penned for the Good of those Who Are Come to Yeares'' (1610)

Wtrettien: /* Impressions from a 'scribbling age': Gestures and habits of reading */

2013-05-27T17:16:54Z

Impressions from a 'scribbling age': Gestures and habits of reading

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:16, 27 May 2013
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	:"As early as the 1550s, English gentlewomen had their own book closets. By the seventeenth century, ladies' closets may have een fairly common in great households." (41)		:"As early as the 1550s, English gentlewomen had their own book closets. By the seventeenth century, ladies' closets may have een fairly common in great households." (41)

			:"Peyton's description of the 'Ladies Closets' is, in part, a voyeuristic fantasy in which he grants himself free access to these women's closets, plants a book, and then watches the ladies' eager or coy handling of 'that Huge Tome of wit.' Such a fantasy depends at once upon the possibility and the difficulty of such access." (42)

			vocalized reading, communal reading aloud disrupted paradigm of silent, solitary reading (44)

			:"Beginning perhaps as early as the seventh century in monasteries and on a large scale in the eleventh century in cathedral schools, silent reading was required by university libraries (if not by Alma) in the early fourteenth century and practiced widely among the nobility and professions by the fifteenth century in England." (45)

			:"Except for readers who 'can but spell,' most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers would have been able to read silently. Yet many still read aloud. for some, reading aloud was a way to expand the circle of literacy and share the written or printed word with their listeners." (46)

			example of woman who couldn't read but carried book with her so when she met someone who could they could read aloud to her (46)

			:"Communal reading as a social practice was not merely a popular response to illiteracy. As the closet has been (mis)taken as emblematic of private reading, the tavern and town square would seem to be the sites of aural reading. But classrooms, churches, courts, great halls, and even closets were also spaces for aural reading." (47)

			:"Evidence of the overlapping of visual and aural reading appears in the blurring of eyes and ears in contemporary addresses to readers." (48)

			:"Reading, that is, might stimulate the senses of sight and hearing equally." (49)

			:"The aurality of reading for many, if not all, early modern people challenges what we mean by a 'reader' and necessitates a consideration of the role of an audience. When Anne Clifford's servant reads the ''Arcadia'' aloud to her, which of them should be designated the 'reader': the paid servant who performs the cognitive task of converting written to spoken language, or the gentlewoman ho owns and selects the book for reading and who, on occasion, dictates marginal annotations?" (51)

			:"The scene of Anne Clifford alternately reading by herself, listening to others, dictating annotations, and scribbling in the margins of a single volume suggests the intimate connections between reading, writing, and speaking in early modern England. Humanist education and literary imitation placed reading at the center of early modern conceptions of writing; at the level of sophisticated literary production, reading and writing were thus inextricably bound." (52)

			:"In Erasmus' model, reading begets writing begets speaking. Yet as contemporary examples show, this trio of activities had multiple configurations int he commonplace book. A remark in conversation might be recorded in a commonplace book and then recopied as a formulaic phrase in a letter; a passage from a printed book might be committed to memory and then dictated later into a version of a commonplace book." (53)

			:"Throughout the period, educational theorists and religious polemicists pressed for constraints on women's reading; much of this discussion assumed an equivalence between reading, writing, and speaking." (53)

			Thomas Powell, ''Tom of All Trades'' (1631), mentions gentleman's daughters should read instead of write (53-4)

			only 58 printed books listed as dedicated to various generic categories of Ladies, Gentlewomen, Women, Maids, Widdows, Doxies and others in Williams' ''Index'' (54n143)

			:"Early modern women especially published primarily in genres that relied explicitly on their readings of other texts: translations, compilations, refutations, and editions. Projects, like Mary Sidney's translations and Rachel Speght's polemic, thatm ight otherwise seem extraordinarily different in terms of genre and tone emerge as dindred enterprises when considered in the context of writing cast as reading." (55)