Reading and politics in early modern England by Geoff Baker

Author:Geoff Baker [Baker, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Renaissance
ISBN: 9781847797544
Google: dWW5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2013-07-19T03:35:39+00:00

IV

Recent work on the history of reading has challenged the view that readers passively accepted the arguments of the material they read. Challenges against this ‘receptive fallacy’ have come from all periods of historical study. For instance, in his work on British working-class readers from the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, Jonathan Rose has shown that ‘Even when literature was deliberately written as propaganda, it often had no appreciable impact on the politics of the reader – or an impact entirely different from what the author or publisher intended’.141 Certainly, this was the case in the early modern period. Seventeenth-century readers actively interpreted the texts they read, projecting on to them their own opinions and viewpoints, reinventing them to suit their needs. As Stephen Zwicker has argued, ‘just as books shaped readers, so we must also acknowledge that early modern readers shaped the books they read’.142

Readers approached their texts with a specific purpose or purposes in mind, which had an impact on the way in which they appropriated the material they read. Thus, in the early seventeenth century the scholar Gabriel Harvey read with a view to ensuring the continued patronage of his employers, extracting from books material that would be of benefit to the position that they found themselves in at a given time, reading Roman history ‘in a way directly applicable to contemporary affairs of state’.143 In his analysis of the commonplace books and notebooks of William Drake, a landowner based in Buckinghamshire who lived from 1606 to 1669, Sharpe has shown that Drake read for efficacy, mining texts for information that could offer personal instruction for the particular moment in which he found himself.144 Drake often rejected the preferred reading of a text, twisting the meaning of literature to suit his own purpose, even building ideas that ‘we or other contemporaries would consider against the grain of the text, let alone the authorial intention’.145 This approach was not exclusive to scholars or gentlemen who had the time for such engagements. Seaver has shown that the Puritan turner Nehemiah Wallington read and recorded information from a range of sources throughout the mid-seventeenth century. His interpretation of texts was incorporated into a large corpus of material in which Wallington meticulously examined his life, providing him with an insight on living well and methods to glorify God.146 Work on female reading practices in the early modern period has shown how women negotiated traditional power structures in their appropriation of texts, ‘finding meaning and inspiration for themselves even in apparently conventional “patriarchal” writings’.147 In her study of Ann Bowyer’s early seventeenthcentury commonplace book, Victoria Burke argues that reading and the compilation of private commonplaces ‘could be the means for creative expression in a society which in general did not value women’s writing’.148 This approach has been identified also outside England, most notably in Carlo Ginzburg’s seminal study of the reading practices of Menocchio, an Italian miller accused of heresy in the late sixteenth century. Inquisition records provide an insight into his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.