The Malleable Early Modern Reader

Abstract

Across early seventeenth-century Europe, the physical boundaries that had structured reading practices in institutional libraries from monasteries to universities suddenly dissolved. Where readers had previously encountered shelving units that projected out perpendicular from the wall to create secluded study spaces, they now found open rooms outlined by shelving along the perimeter walls. Readers thus seemed to have been given a new freedom to pursue idiosyncratic activities; yet the open reading room coincided with sharpened anxiety about the hazards of undisciplined reading. In The Malleable Early Modern Reader: Display and Discipline in the Open Reading Room, a case study of Oxford’s Bodleian Library together with contemporaneous notions of human perception, Kimberley Skelton argues that, paradoxically, the open reading room was an effective response to seventeenth-century concerns about reading because it molded the reader into the ideally studious scholar.