Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England

Citation

Gerard, D. (2000), "Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England", Library Review, Vol. 49 No. 8, pp. 404-415. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2000.49.8.404.1

A study of reading habits: Philip Larkin’s poem of that title comes irresistibly to mind, recalling that such study was once an intrinsic element in our professional examination syllabus. No doubt the subject has been expunged as just another historical curiosity. If so, it is like draining some of the life blood from our professional body. A knowledge, an understanding, of the reading habits of people past and present is surely librarianship’s essence. In the world of historians it is interesting to note that such a concern, part of the discipline known as l’histoire du livre, is now modish. The present work reveals how all‐inclusive that study is. It is the work of an historian specialising in the early seventeenth century who while pursuing other research came across the manuscript diary of Sir William Drake of Buckinghamshire, a Puritan, who recorded in detail his reading and how it shaped his experience and perception of events in the years that preceded the Civil War. The author, Kevin Sharpe, shows that Drake read to form his personality,

To learn how to behave prudently and to make his own behaviour conform to the rules he teased out of other texts, to decide what he thought about politics, religion and other vital areas of culture and society.

The study of this kind of evidence, so intimate and individual, the author believes can reconstitute the history of politics because it leads out into the wider questions: how texts were produced, distributed, received, written and read by their readers. It is a field full of suggestion and fascination, a new analytical tool to help us to a clearer view of our past.

Printed texts were identified with authority: increasingly by the seventeenth century they could issue not only from kings but from Parliament, and from any literate citizen who could turn out a tract or new sheet. Print, type, dedications, binding, all convey messages, disclose the state of play in a society at a given time, and no period was more critical to the birth of the modern world than the early seventeenth century in England. Sir William Drake’s diary in 60 volumes from the 1620s to the 1660s is an unusually rich collection of notes on reading, a massive testament to that silent recreation. Examining Drake’s reading and his comments on it prompts questions: how did he read his texts? What influence did it have on his ambitions as a politician? The staple literary fodder of a gentleman landowner of that time was classical (Greek and Latin) and scritpural, for that was the whole sum of learning, in philosophy, politics, physics, poetry and rhetoric. The Drake archive is supplemented with his commonplace books (extracts from favourite sources) and many annotated printed books whose extent is awesome: Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Johnson, Cowley, works on heraldry, husbandry, horticulture, Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Bacon, Camden, Erasmus, Cicero, Pliny, Tacitus and Virgil. And his purpose was always to extract lessons in axioms and useful adages. It was as if he was proving by his own practice the words of his near‐contemporary, Bacon: “Reading maketh a full man.”

Yet it was not done simply for its own sake: there was a worldly motive, the hope that, equipped with such wisdom, he might find the path to advancement and action in public life. A systematic understanding of human nature which could be discovered in established works of authorities might help gain status at court. Reading was a serious activity, not the casual exercise it so often is for us today when millions of copies of Reader’s Digest are profitably published each month. Books were heavy in all senses. Texts – it is worth remembering – represent language as used at a certain period, the product of the circumstances of the period, and readers cannot escape from the ethos which surrounds them: Drake reacts to his revered texts as a child of his age, as we do from within the culture of the twenty‐first century. He was remade in the image of his mentors from the classical past and the Renaissance, especially those concerned with statecraft, Tacitus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and he assimilates to their cynical world‐view, advocating intrigue, dissimulation, realpolitik. We become what we read, which in turn brings that comment of W.H. Auden’s to mind: “We don’t read books. Books read us.”

This book is strong meat. It is not for the cursory reader in a deckchair. It is an intensely academic treatise, though briskly written, by a professional historian with his fellow historians in mind, as the forest of footnotes prove on every page. Yet it should be on the reading lists of all library schools, not only for its intrinsic fascination as a piece of modern scholarship, but as a document central to our very function and purpose as librarians.