Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England

by Edited by Kevin Sharpe , Steven N. Zwicker

• ISBN13: 9780521168519
• ISBN10: 0521168511
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This study ranges over private and public reading in a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities. It locates and charts specific historical moments of change in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts. Reputable contributors cover topics that include the processes of book production and distribution, audiences and markets, the material text, the relationship of print to performance, and the politics of acts of reception.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader Kevin Sharpe

The Material Text:

Errata: print, politics, and poetry in early modern England

Abandoning the capital in eighteenth-century London

Reading as Politics:

'Boasting of silence': women readers and the patriarchal state

Reading revelations: prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain

Print, Politics and Performance:

Performances and playbooks: the closing of the theatres and the politics of drama

Irrational, impractical and unprofitable: reading the news in seventeenth-century

Reading Physiologies:

Reading bodies

Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society

Reading Texts in Time:

Martial, Jonson and the assertion of plagiarism

The constitution of opinion and the pacification of reading

Cato's retreat: fabula, historia and the question of constitutionalism in Mr Locke's anonymous Essay on Government

Index

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