Reading History in Early Modern England

Citation

Gerard, D. (2001), "Reading History in Early Modern England", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 4, pp. 210-210. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.4.210.11

The branch of learning known as l’histoire du livre has a lot to answer for. Since the appearance of Fèbvre and Martin’s L’Apparition du Livre (The Coming of the Book) in 1958 the study of the physical book in its social and cultural setting has proliferated. The economics of distribution and storage, and more recently studies of the “receivers” of texts – the readers – have multiplied spectacularly. The literature is today of awesome proportions, as the present volume abundantly testifies. The lavish footnotes to every page are like the solid foundations of a temple supporting the textual edifice above.

Dr Woolf’s investigation inserts its tentacular arms into every nook and cranny of the discipline; its reach into present and past scholarship is decisive, and thoroughly updated, the most recent citations from 1999. It has the conversational quality that typifies most recent transatlantic scholarly texts while maintaining rigorous control of its materials. The work is designed to be a history of the history of the book, in the author’s words an attempt “to combine historiography with the history of books, readers and libraries … how those books were distributed and marketed, who were collecting them, how they were stored and how readers made sense of them.” After summarising in his first chapter the demise of the old‐fashioned mediaeval “chronicle” he devotes the following five chapters to: the contexts in which history reading was done; the ownership of historical works; borrowing and lending; conditions of publication; and finally, the marketing of history.

The breadth and depth of the author’s own reading is manifestly extensive, to judge by his references: one wonders how he managed to digest and then reconstruct the disparate materials into a coherent narrative. There are few precedents to this study, little about the history of the history book. One is tempted to ask if academics aren’t guilty of scraping the barrel in search of new fields. Still, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and this is a substantial repast, a pioneering work applying the methods of earlier pioneers to this single category of literature.

The history of books, of reading, of private collections and of libraries has been reconfigured, moving away from the former bibliographic emphasis and into a wider context of social “communications”, involving all the agents in the complex process of getting a printed book into the hands of a reader. Woolf traces the increasing complexity of the book trade, the sophistication of the historians and the educated and ever widening public during the 250 years covered by his detailed survey. By “early modern” is meant the period from the Tudors to 1730.

The overall pattern of this study owes everything to that established by the scholars mentioned earlier in this review, namely the generalised statement of a theme, say, marketing conditions or borrowing and lending practices, followed by a succession of book titles in illustration of the topic in question. It is a very familiar pattern and makes criticism difficult, since it would entail reading equivalent to that exhibited by the author. Hence, one can simply highlight the range of learning, the authorities, the original texts excavated by the author, the numerous graphs and tables of statistics, the many facsimile illustrations, and above all the comfortable idiom – one might say the easy scholarly vernacular – in which all this is conveyed. Come, all you who have an interest in this fascinating arm of scholarship, open these pages, chew, digest, and be recharged and refreshed.