Reading in London in 1501: A Micro-Study

Abstract

Assessments of reading in history have tended, in general terms, to fall into two categories: the large-scale survey that draws on empirical data about such matters as publication patterns, print runs, sales figures, and other statistics, and the individual reader-centered study that aims to reconstruct specific libraries and specific reading habits, often working from annotation or from other traces that appear to record engagement with a particular book or document.¹ This has not always been a crude division, of course: studies like The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzberg, 1980) or the volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (e.g., Hellinga and Trapp, 1999; Morgan and Thomson, 2008) have attempted in different ways to hold the two approaches in synthesis; and exponents of the history of reading, drawing on the energies currently fueling study of the history of the book, have explored a variety of refinements to the methodologies outlined above. Approaches that theorize the history of reading have held special attraction, and a number of studies have developed ways of accommodating reading in theoretical models, with Michel de Certeau’s notion of reading as poaching offering what is evidently a particularly stimulating lead.² Alongside investigations of appropriate theorizations of reading, work on new forms of searchable databases has presented enhanced empirical opportunities. In the United Kingdom, the Reading Experience Database 1450–1945 amasses details of individual accounts of reading from diaries, court records, and marginalia: its records for the medieval period are sparse, but it includes some details of reading activities that can be located in specific places at specific dates.³