Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (review)

Just as many novelists write about writers, so do many critics focus on the reading process, not without justification or success. Perhaps because of its obvious self-reflexiveness, reading as a subject of academy inquiry has been explored seriously and from multiple perspectives for many years and has been documented in many fine studies (e.g., by J. Raven, H. Small, and N. Tadman; Eugene R. Kintgen; Kevin Sharpe; and J. Anderson and E. Sauer). The nine articles in this volume dedicated to the history of reading and literacy in Western Europe (primarily England) between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries ably address and extend this field of study. Most of the essays were first presented as papers at joint meetings of two conferences in Arizona in 2002, evidently transformed and brought to print with admirable speed and care.

The volume opens with a brief introduction by the editor, which mentions most memorably the surprising levels of illiteracy in the world today, including the astonishing figure of 63% of adults in Miami being 'functionally illiterate' (p. x). Despite these statistics and the catchy opening concerning Odysseus's illiteracy and Socrates's wariness of writing, the introduction is disappointingly brief, under-theorised, and overly general. Unlike the articles in the volume, it fails to engage meaningfully with the large body of literature on literacy and reading practices, and presents naïve allusions to reader response theories, reinterpretation, and even semantics. After a cursory glance at these subjects, the introduction more usefully presents accurate digests of the foci and methods of the studies that follow.

The articles themselves, all of which are substantial and well-focussed, present a cohesive examination of literacy from a variety of viewpoints: manuscript and printed book; text and marginalia; prose, verse, and drama; public and private reading; male and female reading; and revision and translation. As a group, they concentrate on what texts and books themselves tell us about reading practices during the late medieval and early modern periods.

The first paper, by Martha Dana Rust, treats a specific fifteenth-century allegorical poem, 'Revertere', which is edited as an appendix. Rust argues that the briar bush which dominates the narrative of this verse functions symbolically as the need for reflective reading. Similarly, the second study, by Burt Kimmelman, makes a connection between reading and self-reflection, through an overview of fourteenth-century reading practices. He makes the point that reading became more autonomous from the fourteenth century as textuality became more self-conscious. The next two papers in the collection both examine the reinterpretation of medieval texts in the Renaissance: Michael Illyot treats the linguistic modification of texts by Chaucer and Lydgate in the Renaissance (making a good case for the canonical status of Chaucer indicated by the lesser amount of tinkering with his language), and A. Coldiron shows the huge social and literary influence of French verse through English translations of the sixteenth century. Both papers make trenchant remarks about the consciously selective nature of the construction of the English canon.

In the sole non-English focussed essay, Brian Richardson treats the typography and marginalia of sixteenth-century Italian printed texts as evidence for the history of reading, arguing for 'multiple roles for the book in the history of the written culture of the Renaissance' (p. 104). Kathryn Dezur makes more prominent the socially determined nature of reading practices in her study of seventeenth-century women's reading and textual reworkings. Dezur touches briefly on the interesting ideas of the self-conscious construction of a contested reading position and the ability of some female readers to practice their 'agency of desire' (p. 117) in their appropriation of erotic texts.

Two papers treat dramatic reading: Frederick Kiefer looks at the comparative uses of the staged reading of love poetry in Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, arguing...