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'This is the kind of survey that scholars have been needing since reading emerged as the subject of a new kind of history in the 1980s. Stretching from ancient China to modern Britain, these essays successfully convey the variety and vitality of our encounters with texts; written, printed and spoken.' Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century reading brain, the 4 volumes of the Edinburgh History of Reading demonstrate that reading is a deeply imbricated, socio-political practice, at once personal and public, defiant and obedient. It is often materially ephemeral, but it can also be emotionally and intellectually enduring. Early Readers presents a number of innovative ways through which we might capture or infer traces of readers in cultures where most evidence has been lost. It begins by investigating what a close analysis of extant texts from 6th-century BCE China can tell us about contemporary reading practices, explores the reading of medieval European women and their male medical practitioner counterparts, traces readers across New Spain, Peru, the Ottoman Empire and the Iberian world between 1500 and 1800, and ends with an analysis of the surprisingly enduring practice of reading aloud. Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at the University of Southampton.
List of contents
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Introduction:
Mary Hammond
Chapter 1. The Move Toward Literacy Among Confucian Scholars in Ancient China,
Liqing Tao and David Reinking Chapter 2. Reading for Rule: Emperor Taizong of Tang and Qunshu zhiyao,
Fan Wang
Chapter 3. Medieval Women Writers and What They Read, c. 1200 to c. 1500,
Martha W. Driver
Chapter 4. Mi ritrovai per un poema sacro: The Ideological Reading Subject in Dante's Inferno 5,
Glenn A. Steinberg
Chapter 5. The Unreadable Book of Margery Kempe,
Ashley Ott
Chapter 6. Between Reading and Doing: the Case of Medieval Manuscript Books of Practical Medicine,
Faith Wallis
Chapter 7. Visual Form and Reading Communities: The Example of Early Modern Broadside Elegies,
Katherine Acheson
Chapter 8. Ottomans Reading Persian Classics: Readers and Reading in the Ottoman Empire, 1500-1700,
Murat Umut Inan
Chapter 9. Books, Readers, and Reading Experiences in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, 16th-18th Century,
Pedro M. Guibovich Pérez
Chapter 10. 'Read it o're and o're': Eikon Basilike and Sacramental Reading in the Seventeenth Century,
Kyle Sebastian Vitale
Chapter 11. Plurilingual poetry and the hinterland of intertextuality: Europeanising reading culture in the early modern Iberian world,
Maya Feile Tomes
Chapter 12. Printed Private Library Catalogues as a Source for the History of Reading in 17th-18th century Europe,
Helwi Blom, Rindert Jagersma, and Juliette Reboul
Chapter 13. Reading, Visual Literacy, and the Illustrated Literary Text in 18th-century Britain,
Sandro Jung
Chapter 14. Reading Aloud, Past and Present,
W. R. Owens
Bibliography of works cited and suggested further reading
Index of Methods and Sources
General Index
About the author
Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at University of Southampton. She is a senior member of the management group of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, 'The Reading Experience Database, 1800-1945'. She is the author of
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: A Cultural Life, 1860-2012 (Ashgate, 2015) and
Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914 (Ashgate, 2006). She is also the co-editor of three books, including,
Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book Hstory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Summary
Early Readers presents a number of innovative ways through which we might capture or infer traces of readers in cultures where most evidence has been lost.
