Popular Reading in English, c. 1400–1600.by Elisabeth Salter(review) (review)

Over the past decades, “regular” readers have found their place in academic study. With their now-seminal studies of the British working class and American romance enthusiasts, for example, Jonathan Rose and Janice Radway have led the way in confirming the value of continued scholarly attention to actual—rather than ideal or imagined—readers and the popular texts they consume. In Popular Reading in England, c. 1400–1600, Elisabeth Salter adds her voice to this increasingly visible and interdisciplinary field and importantly moves these often post-nineteenth-century discussions back to a time when reading as we know it was first occurring on a large scale.

Salter’s study opens with a dense theoretical introduction; she draws on foundational (and, for students of book history and readership, quite familiar) names such as Roger Chartier, Michel de Certeau, and D. F. McKenzie to set up her consideration of the sociohistorical contexts for readership and the important links between a text’s material form and the reader who “makes” its meaning. Throughout the chapters that follow, Salter moves beyond the history of readership and grounds her work within several overlapping and interdisciplinary critical conversations, including the development and evolution of various literary genres, the place of the vernacular in English life and culture, and the impact of the Reformation on reading and book culture (and vice versa). The concerns and practices of medieval readers, we learn, also were inextricably connected to the complex transitions from manuscript to print culture and from orality to written literacy.

Despite the study’s comprehensive and useful critical reach, however, the bulk of Salter’s book brings us to a much more intimate micro level. The four chapters that follow her introduction are individual case studies of select and specific representatives of popular reading during this time. Salter’s examples come from the four popular medieval genres—religious texts, moral texts, practical texts, and fictional literature—and are at times recognizable and oft published (Gesta Romanorum and treatises by Wynkyn de Worde, for example) and at others ephemeral and little known even to medievalists (a treatise called The Planting and Grafting of Trees, for example, or John Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry). Together, the case studies illustrate several patterns and intersections as well as many incongruencies and contradictions; as a group, these wide-ranging texts were read by many kinds of medieval readers, exist in both manuscript and printed formats of various sizes, have numerous historical and literary sources, and offer a broad scope of cultural and social associations. The case studies thus encourage us once again to view the period and its texts as anything but homogenous and static.

The case study methodology also allows Salter to shine as a literary scholar and researcher. One of the strengths of Salter’s book is her extensive and admirably detailed close readings of the materiality of each of the selected texts in its various extant copies (including bibliographic details of the manuscripts, current location, and subsequent reprints). Popular Reading in English includes five color plates (found between pages 118 and 119) and five other black-and-white images (found at various points in the case studies). We are witness firsthand to the value—and necessity—of extensive archival work and the wealth of information that remains to be discovered in libraries across the world.

Through her intentionally focused (yet at the same time far-reaching) methodology, Salter is thus able to highlight and reiterate the most significant feature of popular reading during this period: the striking fluidity and overlap of reading practices, books and meaning making, and ideologies. Salter’s book is both a helpful foundation for future studies of popular reading in medieval Britain and a needed reminder of the holes that remain in the fields of readership and popular reading and even book history more largely. Moreover, near the end of her book Slater helpfully reminds us of the implications of her study for current reading practices in...