Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Reviews 219 At a time w h e n university studies are undergoing considerable change, and our very concept of education and its value is in the melting pot, this impressive w o r k on seeds of knowledge and virtue has implications beyond its immediate historical argument. Barry Collett Department ofHistory University of Melbourne Jagodzinski, Cecile M., Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeent Century England, Charlottesville and London, University Press of Virginia, 1999; cloth; pp. 218; 2 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. US$45.00. Cecile Jagodzinski's Privacy and Print is an interesting addition to of the conceptualisation of privacy and the private self in the Early Modem period, following on from texts such as Anne Ferry's The 'Inward' Language (1983) and Katharine Eisaman Maus's Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (1995). Jagodzinski argues that the publication and reading of books in seventeenth-century England w a s intimately connected with the emergence of the private self; readers, for w h o m a wide range of printed material had become accessible, acquired independence by means of their reading, which led in turn to the development of 'a n e w sense of personal autonomy, a n e w consciousness of the self'(p.l). In the introductory chapter to Privacy and Print, Jagodzinski explores the notion of privacy, differentiating it from current connotations in the late twentieth century. Privacy, she argues, was often negatively inflected, not cherished as an individual right as it is in the Western world today. She cites John Evelyn's suspicion of solitude and the contemplative private life as instigators of vice and political conspiracy, and notes that Evelyn associates solitude with reading books, rather than men: 'to read men, and converse with living Libraries, is . . . the most useful and profitab of Studies.' (p. 3). O n e could add well k n o w n dramatic examples of a similarly ambivalent suspicion in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost and even The Tempest. 'If privacy as w e think of it existed at all', she writes, ' i t was regarded as negative—as the absence of station, of authority, of 220 Reviews the divinely bestowed right or ability to lead a nation. Being a public person, on the other hand, seemed automatically to confer these qualities on individual persons . . . . Only gradually did the meaning of privacy become more neutral, even positive and humanising' (pp. 23-24). Women, of course, were generally denied public status, and Jagodzinski argues that the association of w o m e n with private life delayed acceptance of the value of privacy and the private self. The book then goes on to explore the impact of print on the conceptualisation of privacy in five chapters that look at the representation of reading and readers across a variety of generic forms. In the first chapter, Jagodzinski makes a strong case for the role of religious suppression in shifting the locus of control from the church to the individual, the 'private spirit'. She argues that this is non-sectarian, not just a shift brought about by Protestantism; the various suppressions of Catholic and Protestant, Anglican and Puritan (after the Reformation, and during the Civil War/interregnum) led each group to increase their reliance on the printed word and to focus on interiority supported by private prayer. This interiority is explored further, in the second chapter, in relation to four conversion narratives, which are discussed in two pairs in terms of their potential outcomes for the reader. The first pair, the autobiographical narratives of Sarah Wight and John Bunyan, lead the reader inward towards self-examination and back out to public confession and acceptance of the religious authority inscribed in the book. The second pair, the tales of Eve Cohan (a Jew converted to Christianity) and A n n Ketelbey (a Protestant converted to Catholicism), lead the reader towards escape from the self that is finally self-centred, that 'frees the reader from obedience to any authority' (p. 52), religious or familial, and internalises the power to judge. Chapter Three goes on to consider the ramifications of two cases of unauthorised printing of personal letters...