| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, editors. Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. ix, 363. $70.00.

This volume offers a collection of highly competent, sometimes fascinating essays, all bearing in some fashion on practices and habits of reading in England from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The historical arc of the book is a long one, casting its shadow over complex terrain in the sociology of texts given the coexistence of scribal and print media, the evolution in pedagogic practices, and the varied modes of literacy in the historical time frame. Editors Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker subtitle their introduction "discovering the Renaissance reader," begging the question at the outset of the relation between reading and writing in the courtly and humanist circles of the Henrician regime and the circumstances of publication that faced, say, Alexander Pope and his readers. The introduction itself is a call for "a true collaboration between case study and theory, between materiality and aesthetics, between social history and exegesis" (p. 3) that is interdisciplinary and takes as its focus not the singular authorial act, but the multiplicity of acts of reading. This eminently worthy call for action is embedded in an narrative that surveys methodological differences among literary critics, textual bibliographers, historians of the book and social historians, sets out topical and thematic lenses for the consideration of reading, and intermittently invokes a reader positioned at the end of the historical arc, certainly not "the Renaissance reader," but also neither the Romantic reader nor the contemporary reader in a nationally branded superstore, both of whom are invoked as the introduction rushes to its close.

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