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Description
Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy By Heidi Brayman Hackel Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005
The history of reading practices is notably difficult to trace, for reading leaves no necessary marks, and the mere existence of a given material text provides no proof of its having been read, let alone how it might have been read. Much of the direct evidence for a history of reading practices is thus exceptional: it survives by chance, an exception to the ephemerality of most reading experiences; and/or, it survives by virtue of intensely bookish contexts and exceptional readers. Scholarly work on the "history of the book" over the last two decades has afforded much indirect evidence about reading and brought the question of reading practices to the forefront of inquiry. Heidi Brayman Hackel's book, Reading Material in Early Modern England, offers a well-organized, well-written, and comprehensive engagement with the current scholarship on reading practices and a pair of archival studies that makes an original contribution to that scholarship.
The brief Brayman Hackel sets for herself is to shift attention from "extraordinary readers" to more ordinary ones and "to historicize, rather than idealize or merely theorize, the various experiences of early modern readers" (8). The task is a daunting one, not least because... |
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