Narrative and the Nature of Reading in John Bale’s Response to a Sixteenth-Century Reader of The Vocacyon of Johan Bale (1553)

Abstract

The bibliographical scholar John Bale’s reputation still suffers fromtendentious responses to his vituperative style. Such dismissal distorts our understanding of Bale’s importance, during the sixteenth century, to the development of the genre of polemic. Scholars ought not to reject Bale solely on the basis of nowdated aesthetic criteria. The present essay seeks to rehabilitate Bale: by examining one of his relatively unknown prose works, it demonstrates how Bale’s work can inform issues of central concern to studies of both the history of the book and the history of reading. Bale’s knowledge of books extended beyond their contents to an acute sense of how they functioned and what they could reveal about the skills and moral character of their readers. For Bale, reading is a material and metaphorical practice that helps him to define the nature of meaning and its role within religious and political controversy.