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)

"Thomas Milles's Custumers Apology (1599) demonstrates teh collaboration of print and manuscript possible, if not common, a century and a half after Gutenberg. Professionally hand finished, extant copies of this text have been supplied with marginal annotations and a virtuoso range of interlinear and marginal symbols: fists, paragraph markers, brackets, ruling. In the Huntington Library copy, many of these symbols are supplied in gilt or shimmering red. The folio is certainly more beautiful for these additions, but it would also be incomplete without the manuscript filling in of several blanks in the text." (30)

"bound manuscript volumes and printed books are not easily distinguished on a shelf" (33)

"If we take reading to be an increasingly solitary, silent, and private activity in the early modern period, it is essential to understand the material circumstances that permitted solitude and to acknowledge the unfamiliar ways in which privacy was figured. domestic reading spaces, especially the bedchamber and book closet, were critical sites of an emergent sense of privacy, but they were also frequently communal, even noisy, places. Women's reading was often confined to spaces within a household, so it is especially important to understand the range of reading experiences possible in this realm." (34-5)

"Two spaces for reading onstage figure prominently in discussions of privacy, domesticity, and interiority: the bedchamber and the book closet. ... The variety of readings reported in these two domestic spaces suggest the shifting of categories since the early modern period: private and public, solitary and communal. Onstage and in the historical record, the bedchamber and the book closet are often sites of textual and communal activity. As spaces for textual activity, they command attention in a history of reading; as spaces of communal activity, they provide oppotunities to recover 'forgotten' habits of the early modern period." (37-8)

"Clifford brings into her bedchamber the humanist model of the commonplace book, a meethod more often connected to the masculine realms of the university, study, or closet." (39) -- same practice mentioned in W. M.'s 'The Man in the Moone (1609)

"Even when studied as spaces of transgressive sextuality, closets are often bookish places, and this sexuality is insistently textual." (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)