Brayman Hackel 2005

Brayman Hackel, Heidi. Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Towards a material history of reading

"This study attends instead to the constructiosn and practices of less extraordinary readers, who often remain visible in the historical record only because of their occasional traces in books. For it is these readers, not the celebrated poets or career scholars, whose entry into the print marketplace provoked debate and changed the definition of literacy in early modern Enland. By telling their stories, Reading Material displaces both the singular 'ideal' or transhistorical reader and the extraordinary male reader." (8)

"This book seeks to historicize, rather than idealize or merely theorize, the various experiences of early modern readers." (8)

"This study examines the intellectual and material activities on both sides of the early modern printing press in order to reconstruct both the strategies recommended to readers and the practices in which they they engaged." (8)

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

single most widely-used prop on Tudor-Stuart stage: letters, included in more than 400 contemporary stage directions, books in roughly 130 (19)

• "By the 1630s, as large private libraries are becoming increasingly common among the aristocracy, a new level of materiality shows up in the representations of book collections on the English stage. Bookish characters, denounced by their fellows as 'booke-wormes,' surround themselves with the tools and products of their bibliophilia." (20)

"In traversing an alien linguistic terrain where 'scribbling' might signify prolific printing and where on emight 'speak in print,' scholars must be alert to the overlapping categories central to an understanding of early modern reading as distinct from, though contiguous with, modern habits of reading: manuscript and print, private and public, aural and visual, reading and writing and speaking. These categories circumscribe the material objects, physical spaces, and practical forms of reading in the period, and they help define what it meant to be a reader during this transitional moment in the history of literacy. The unfamiliar fluidity of these categories begins to suggest the variousness of reading and the varieties of readers in early modern England." (25)

" Carleton, Burges, and Puttenham all connect 'scribbling' to a broadening popular production and reception of texts. Burges's and Carleton's expression, which echoes the concerns of many of their contemporaries, places printed books at the center of their definition of the gae, but tellingly it does so in the language of manuscript practices. Indeed, the early modern period is in many ways distinguished by such contradictios and by radical changes in the production, distribution, and reception of texts." (26)