BiblioVault - Books about Reading

Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading

Essays by Lisa Jardine and others

Edited by Anthony Grafton, Nicholas Popper, and William H. Sherman

University College London, 2024

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.

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Gandhi’s Printing Press

Experiments in Slow Reading

Isabel Hofmeyr

Harvard University Press, 2013

At the same time that Gandhi, as a young lawyer in South Africa, began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper. Gandhi’s Printing Press is an account of how this project, an apparent footnote to a titanic career, shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma. Pioneering publisher, experimental editor, ethical anthologist—these roles reveal a Gandhi developing the qualities and talents that would later define him.

Isabel Hofmeyr presents a detailed study of Gandhi’s work in South Africa (1893–1914), when he was the some-time proprietor of a printing press and launched the periodical Indian Opinion. The skills Gandhi honed as a newspaperman—distilling stories from numerous sources, circumventing shortages of type—influenced his spare prose style. Operating out of the colonized Indian Ocean world, Gandhi saw firsthand how a global empire depended on the rapid transmission of information over vast distances. He sensed that communication in an industrialized age was becoming calibrated to technological tempos.

But he responded by slowing the pace, experimenting with modes of reading and writing focused on bodily, not mechanical, rhythms. Favoring the use of hand-operated presses, he produced a newspaper to contemplate rather than scan, one more likely to excerpt Thoreau than feature easily glossed headlines. Gandhi’s Printing Press illuminates how the concentration and self-discipline inculcated by slow reading, imbuing the self with knowledge and ethical values, evolved into satyagraha, truth-force, the cornerstone of Gandhi’s revolutionary idea of nonviolent resistance.

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Gender, Reading, and Truth in the Twelfth Century

The Woman in the Mirror

Morgan Powell

Arc Humanities Press, 2020

The twelfth century witnessed the birth of modern Western European literary tradition: major narrative works appeared in both French and in German, founding a literary culture independent of the Latin tradition of the Church and Roman Antiquity. But what gave rise to the sudden interest in and legitimization of literature in these “vulgar tongues"? Until now, the answer has centred on the somewhat nebulous role of new female vernacular readers. Powell argues that a different appraisal of the same evidence offers a window onto something more momentous: not “women readers” but instead a reading act conceived of as female lies behind the polysemic identification of women as the audience of new media in the twelfth century. This woman is at the centre of a re-conception of Christian knowing, a veritable revolution in the mediation of knowledge and truth. By following this figure through detailed readings of key early works, Powell unveils a surprise, a new poetics of the body meant to embrace the capacities of new audiences and viewers of medieval literature and visual art.

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Getting at the Author

Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism

Barbara Hochman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2009

Throughout the nineteenth century, American readers and reviewers assumed that a book revealed its author's individuality, that the experience of reading was a kind of conversation with the writer. Yet as Barbara Hochman shows in this illuminating study, the emergence of literary realism at the turn of the century called such assumptions into question. The realist aesthetic of narrative "objectivity" challenged the notion that a literary text reflects its author's personality.

But reading practices were slow to change; many resisted the effort to reconceptualize the relationship among writers, readers, and books. Even the most consistent advocates of "impartial" narration found it difficult to imagine a book without an author or to dissociate the experience of reading from the idea of a reciprocal human transaction.

In analyzing the battle over realism and the gradual shift in conventional reading practices, Hochman draws on a rich array of sources, including popular works, advertisements, and letters. She combines traditional modes of literary inquiry with methods adapted from the new historicism, cultural studies, and book history. By elucidating the realists' ambivalence about their own aesthetic criteria, she shows how a late nineteenth century conflict about reading practices reflected pressing tensions in American culture, and how that conflict shaped criteria of literary value for most of the twentieth century.

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God and the Natural Law

Reading of Thomas Aquinas

Fulvio Di Blasi

St. Augustine's Press, 2006