Recent Studies in Early Modern Reading

Abstract

This essay surveys selected scholarship of early modern reading from 1971 through early 2012 by both literary scholars and historians. It includes studies of reading literacy, as well as examinations of the practices and implications of reading religious, historical, literary, practical, and scientific texts in print and manuscript cultures in early modern England. The bibliography includes work that approaches historical reading practices and male and female readers both through the representation of reading in literary texts and through the archive of reading created by marginalia, commonplace books, inventories, and other handwritten documents. The political dynamics of reading have merited substantial attention, as have its more private, subjective, and physiological outcomes. (E. S.)