European University Institute Library

Reading, society, and politics in early modern England, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker

eng

index present

non fiction

Reading, society, and politics in early modern England

electronic resource

dictionaries

770009140

edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker

Cambridge Social Sciences eBooks

This book ranges over private and public reading, and over a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities to locate acts of reading in specific historical moments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It also charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts during the period. A team of expert contributors cover topics including the processes of book production and distribution, audiences and markets, the material text, the relation of print to performance, and the politics of acts of reception. In addition, the volume emphasises the independence of early modern readers and their role in making meaning in an age in which increased literacy equaled social enfranchisement and interpretation was power. Meaning was not simply an authorial act but the work of many hands and processes, from editing, printing, and proofing, to reproducing, distributing, and finally reading.--, Provided by publisher

Errata: print, politics and poetry in early modern England -- Abandoning the capital in eighteenth-century London -- 'Boasting of silence': women readers in a patriarchal state -- Reading revelations: prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain -- Performances and playbooks: the closing of the theatres and the politics of drama -- Irrational, impractical and unprofitable: reading the news in seventeenth-century Britain -- Reading bodies -- Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society -- Martial, Jonson and the assertion of plagiarism -- The constitution of opinion and the pacification of reading -- Cato's retreat: fabula, historia and the question of constitutionalism in Mr. Locke's anonymous Essay on government

Reading, Society & Politics in Early Modern England