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  • Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600–1750: Studies in Social Rank and Communication by Elspeth Jajdelska
  • Erin Keating (bio)
Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600–1750: Studies in Social Rank and Communication by Elspeth Jajdelska
London: Routledge, 2016.
xxiv+238pp. US$149.95. ISBN 978-1-4724-6725-6.

In Speech, Print and Decorum, Elspeth Jajdelska challenges us to think about how we conceptualize a text. She argues that those preconceptions can hinder our attempts to understand how readers at other historical moments understood not merely the contents of the books they were reading, but what exactly those books were. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, Jajdelska deftly traces the changing relationships between texts, authors, and audiences through the lens of how those authors and readers understood the relationship between the text they were writing/reading/hearing and speech. To make this argument, she draws on the work of anthropologist Richard Bauman, whose theorization [End Page 464] of performativity emphasizes text as fundamentally a performance that needs to be understood and evaluated within a particular social context.

Jajdelska draws from a wide variety of print genres in making this argument, including sermons, devotional works, educational tracts, novels, business letters, private correspondence, diaries, and various practical print genres. The research brought together in Speech, Print and Decorum draws on and nicely complements other critical works on early modern reading practices that emphasize the socially oriented and performative aspects of reading at the time, without retreading the same primary material. Her careful reading of paratexts forms an essential part of her argument and aligns with the resurgence of interest in paratextual material during the last few years in both early modern and eighteenth-century criticism. Jajdelska's use of Bauman's performativity to explore an early modern period that, she argues, approached texts primarily as records of authorial speech offers an original and persuasive account of reading and authorship during the years covered by her study. Crucially, it is this link between speech and text that enmeshes early modern print genres in the rules of social decorum and that constitutes the most intriguing aspect of Jajdelska's argument, which holds that a key change in textual reception near the end of the period covered by her book was the loosening of "the belief that spoken decorum should apply to print" (xvi).

The book does not attempt to trace a neat, teleological picture of the changing conceptions of printed texts and the relationships that governed reading—a major strength of Jajdelska's work is her rejection of teleology in favour of nuance and her emphasis on the specificities of how different audiences read. Rather than trying to create a neat picture of an abstract, ideal reader, Jajdelska pays close attention to the multiple ways of reading available to early modern Britons. Even so, there is a pattern of reception based on evaluation that can be traced throughout the book. Jajdelska uses Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) to demonstrate that, as a performance, Sidney's text had two audiences—the noblewomen for whom it was written as an act of chivalry and other male courtiers who would have evaluated that chivalric performance. While evaluation ties all of the reading models together in the text, who the evaluators are and how they go about that process change throughout the years covered.

Two of the main examples used to discuss texts from the seventeenth century—Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn—are such staples of criticism of the period that one might wonder what new material they could possibly offer; yet, Jajdelska's interpretation of Pepys's reading and Evelyn's authorship deftly demonstrates the ways in which the rules of decorum serve as an essential mode of evaluation for both these men and [End Page 465] manages to feel fresh despite the familiarity of these diarists to any critic working within the Restoration period. Placing texts firmly within rules of social decorum opens new ways of understanding Restoration approaches to genre and performance. If text is approached as recorded speech, then the relative social positions of the author and the addressees of a printed work necessarily enter into the evaluation of the...

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