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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Reading History in Early Modern England. By Daniel Robert Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xvi + 360 pages.
The role of books in the changing social, political, and cultural circumstances of early modern England is an important subject that has received much attention from historians and has been approached from many different directions. Henry Stanley Bennett's famous trilogy on English Books and Readers 1475-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965-70) is justly famous, but it offered much more on the provision than on the consumption of the printed word; the subtitle made clear that this was, in fact, a history of the book trade. Louis Booker Wright's Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1935) was more balanced in that respect, though this author, too, in the end, defined his project chiefly in terms of what kinds of reading matter attracted Shakespeare's contemporaries. Quintessentially, this was a study of literary taste and the ways in which it was satisfied by the enormous expansion of both improving and recreational books in print. Unsurprisingly, in an age which witnessed the greatest religious upheavals since the coming of Christianity, the Bible and theology had undisputed pride of place in the reading matter which Wright surveyed. Religion in the Reformation era also functioned as probably the most important single dynamo in promoting the extension of basic literacy, a subject explored in many of Christopher Hill's writings and most recently in David Cressy's pathfinding book on Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980) and in Tessa Watts's masterly study of Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). Wright's Elizabethan citizen readers, however, also delighted in history books--he has a single chapter on "the utility of history"--as did their social inferiors, though usually in different forms, as Margaret Spufford's study of chapbooks has taught us to recognize (Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (London: Methuen, 1981). Many of these themes have been re-examined and extended in a recent study by Nigel Wheale--Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain, 1590-1660 (London: Routledge, 1999). Wheale places the politics of literacy at the center of his book and, in its crowded pages, the author demonstrates a complex chemistry that included such elements as status, gender, censorship, and sedition. Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999) by Cecile Jagodzinski is another study which, in different ways again, has usefully extended the scope of the history of the book. Reading, individualism, self-consciousness, and autonomy, she argues, were inextricably interconnected. "Readers in seventeenth-century England [she asserts] because they read began to develop a sense of the private self" and new representations of reading and readers were projected in devotional literature, conversion narratives, personal letters, drama and the novel. Renaissance self-fashioning was very obviously dependent on internalized reading practices.
None of these studies of books and book culture, wideranging though they are, can be described as expressly historiographical in nature. From that perspective the classic text, now nearly forty years old, is the American historian Frank Smith Fussner's The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1480-1640 (London: Routledge, 1962). In it he explored a wide range of issues: the changing context of historical studies at that time, the available sources, the...
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