222 Reviews attempt to recover the responses of its firstreaders; she uses an intertextual critique of its anecdote about Cato the Younger to argue that, notwithstanding its subsequent reputation as a 'founding text of modern constitutionalism', the text should be read as 'oscillating' between the factual and the fictional in the manner of Utopia (pp. 319, 328). By contrast, Sharpe's decision to concentrate on a supremely canonical text, the Book of Revelation, gives him access to a wealth of evidence about how this text was read between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; here, the marginalia come not from the pen but the printing press. In fact, contributors are often less interested in the elusive experience of reading than in the ways texts were presented to readers. Richard Wendorf provides an intricate survey of how, in the mid-eighteenth century, pervasive capitalization and italics gave way to more modern typographical practices. Seth Lerer turns his attention to Tudor errata sheets, which he shows to have been more than mere lists of typos: they were used by Thomas More to correct (and to be seen to correct) doctrinal errors, and by Thomas Elyot to advertise a narrative of submission to royal power. Zwicker notes the appearance in Restoration England of texts that effectively did people's reading for them?indices, abstracts, literary periodicals?as well as the decline of the commonplace book, and suggests that increasingly passive (and politically nonthreatening ) habits of reading were emerging. David Scott Kastan similarly links a change in the way literature was consumed to a defusing of its political charge. After the closure of the theatres in 1642, Parliament made no attempt to censor printed plays, even when their sympathies were explicitly Royalist: apparently, 'their reading was not thought to be of any political consequence' (p. 178). The movement from public playing to private reading is reversed in Adrian Johns's detailed account of the reading practices of the Royal Society: rather than relying upon the authority of ancient texts, the Society's Boylean conventions demanded experiments that were 'evident, carried out before witnesses, and integrated into an endless sequence of conversations, writings and readings' (p. 261). The contributors to this book occasionally chafe at the narrowness of their remit. Joseph Loewenstein finds it 'impossible to obey the editors' injunction to stay on the reader's side of literary history' (pp. 277-78): refusing to treat Ben Jonson simply as a reader of Martial, he goes on to produce a revealing account of Jonson's debt to him, particularly in his conception of the book's status in the market place. Michael Schoenfeldt switches ratherabruptly froma discussion ofhow books were imagined as interacting with early modern bodies to a discussion ofthe corporeal metaphor in poli? tical discourse. But the diversity ofthe contributions adds to the appeal ofthis weighty and fascinating book; and the factthat it brings into circulation a large body of manu? script material will make it particularly invaluable to furtherstudents ofthe topic. London South Bank University Tom Rutter The Cambridge History ofEarly Modern English Literature. Ed. by David Loewen? stein and Janel Mueller. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xi+i038pp. ?100; $140. ISBN 0-521-63156-4. In this handsome volume, editors David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller aim to pro? vide 'basic information about [. . .] [early modern] writing [. . .] while exemplifying fresh approaches to the [. . .] writing of literary history' (p. 1). The principal 'fresh approach' they seek to enact is the familiar notion, often linked to New Historicism, that 'literature is at once an agent and a product of its culture, simultaneously giving expression to and taking expression from' its contexts (p. 1). The volume sets out to 'dissolve' the 'restrictive [. . .] distinction between "text" and "context"' (p. 1) in order 'to [. . .] challenge monolithic views of power and representation' (p. 8). MLR, ioi.i, 2006 223 Undoubtedly, in terms of disseminating that 'basic information', the volume is a success: with the publication of this collection, a foundation stone has been set down. The volume divides into five sections: a consideration of the material conditions of writing, reading, and publishing, and then four chronological slices from the Tudor era until the Common wealth. Within...