An accessible exploration of the methodology of the history of reading.

Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s seminal “Studied for Action,” a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods, and ambitions of Harvey’s encounters with his books ignited a new interdisciplinary field, the history of reading, which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world’s libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected, and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations, in turn, illuminate past worlds.

Three decades on, Harvey’s example and Jardine’s work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the history of reading. By uniting “Studied for Action” with new studies on Gabriel Harvey, some of which are published here for the first time, by Jardine, Grafton, and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual, and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton’s original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading.
 

An exploration of the proliferation of paper in early modern Britain and its far-reaching effects on politics and society.
 
We are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive, Nicholas Popper shows that earlier eras had to grapple with the same problem—how to deal with too much information at their fingertips.
 
He reveals that early modern Britain was a society newly drowning in paper, a light and durable technology whose spread allowed statesmen to record drafts, memoranda, and other ephemera that might otherwise have been lost, and also made it possible for ordinary people to collect political texts. As original paperwork and copies alike flooded the government, information management became the core of politics. Focusing on two of the primary political archives of early modern England, the Tower of London Record Office and the State Paper Office, Popper traces the circulation of their materials through the government and the broader public sphere. In this early media-saturated society, we find the origins of many issues we face today: Who shapes the archive? Can we trust the pictures of the past and the present that it shows us? And, in a more politically urgent vein: Does a huge volume of widely available information (not all of it accurate) risk contributing to polarization and extremism?