A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World

by Lyons, Martyn

• ISBN13: 9780230001619
• ISBN10: 0230001610
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Offering a fresh history centred on the reactions and experiences of ordinary readers and writers, Lyons deals with key turning points that occurred throughout the centuries, such as the invention of the codex, the transition from scribal to print culture, the reading revolution and the industrialisation of the book. Tracing the major historical developments across Europe and North America which revolutionized our relationship with texts, this book provides an engaging and invaluable overview of the history of scribal and print culture.

Author Biography

MARTYN LYONS lectures at UNSW. He has held visiting positions at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Universidade Federal Fluminense at Niteri (Brazil). His areas of interest include French revolutionary and Napoleonic history and the history of the book.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Illustrations	p. vi
Abbreviations	p. vii
What is the history of reading and writing?	p. 1
Reading and writing in the ancient and medieval world	p. 12
Was there a printing revolution?	p. 26
Print and the Protestant Reformation	p. 43
renaissance books and humanist readers	p. 58
Print and popular culture	p. 73
The rise of literacy in the early modern West, c. 1600-c. 1800	p. 88
Censorship and the reading public in pre-revolutionary France	p. 105
The reading fever, 1750-1830	p. 119
The age of the mass reading public	p. 137
New readers and reading cultures	p. 153
The democratisation of writing, 1800 to the present	p. 171
Readers and writers in the digital age	p. 185
Notes	p. 201
Further reading	p. 226
Index	p. 234
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