Chapter 1

Introduction

Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell

What more learning have we need of, but that experience will teach us without booke? We can learne to plough and harrow, sow and reape, plant and prune, thrash and fanne, winnow and grinde, brue and bake, and all without booke; and these are our chiefe businesse in the Country: except we be Jury-men to hang a theefe, or speake truth in a mans right, which conscience & experience wil teach us with a little learning, then what should we study for, except it were to talke with the man in the Moone about the course of the Starres?1

I believe by a too eager thirst after knowledge I have oftentimes, to gratify that insatiable humour, been at too great an expense in buying books and spending rather too much time in reading for it seems to be the only diversion that I have any appetite for.2

This book is born out of our common interest in didactic books and our shared curiosity about how to write their history. Despite the pre-eminence of how-to and self-help books in modern best-seller lists, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the long roots of this attachment to texts which purport to educate. Having embarked independently on research into culinary texts and merchant advice materials of the early modern period, we encountered similar difficulties and realized that although individual studies of certain texts had been undertaken, the study of didactic texts as a whole lacked thorough and critically sophisticated treatment.3 This can partly be explained by various material circumstances, not least the inevitable attrition rates among such cheap and often heavily used texts, but perhaps also at stake are academic judgements of what constitutes a valid text for study. In cultural histories of the early modern period the ‘literary’ text has tended to assume an ascendancy over those texts that had practical applications.4 Nevertheless, didactic texts have been employed in certain approaches: for example, as a medium through which to trace the development of the novel. To this end, Paul Hunter argues that ‘a recognition of just how basic the cultural devotion to didacticism was at the dawn of the modern era’ is crucial in understanding the shaping of the novel in the eighteenth century.5

Whilst we are convinced of the importance of these texts in this history, we are also determined to clarify the parts played by didactic literature in other phenomena historiographically controversial and important to scholars of early modern culture, such as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, consumption practices and the socio-cultural extension of literacy.6 Although histories of reading practices and the book have increasingly attracted scholarly attention, didactic texts and their uses have often been marginalized, if not overlooked.7 These texts require treatment in their own right, and this book seeks to establish some of the questions that will open up a long-needed debate on the significance and roles of didactic texts in early modern society.

What, though, do we mean by ‘didactic literature’? It can be argued that every text in the early modern period had the potential to be viewed as didactic. Indeed, when Sir Philip Sidney conceived of reading of any sort as the best grounding for ‘the Trade of our Lives’, he was far from alone in his commitment to this catholic interpretation.8 Although we acknowledge the employment of didactic modes in a wide range of textual genres, including sermons and histories,9 we have chosen in this volume to concentrate mainly on those texts which were explicitly framed to instruct through the material they contained: amongst these are what we might today label as ‘how-to’ books. Such books made their claims to educate and inspire from the outset, and were constructed both textually and physically, to achieve those goals: the ideal didactic text of this sort was ideally ‘a Manual, that shall neither burden the hands to hold, the Eyes in reading, nor the Mind in conceiving.’10

From this (admittedly arbitrary) categorization we exclude conduct literature, primarily because this is one of the few fields of didactic material that has received coverage.11 Conduct and etiquette literature certainly shares many characteristics with those texts discussed in the following essays, and our hope is that new insights into this particular field may be gained from examining the wider category to which conduct literature belongs. The study of didactic texts provides an important route into considering early modern constructions of practical knowledge. It also allows us to explore contemporary structures of learning, and the categorization and hierarchies of types of knowledge, subjects that have long been the preserve of historians of education, but which have begun to be explored more sociologically by Steven Shapin and others.12 Moreover, just as all early modern texts might be conceived of as didactic, we also recognize that explicitly didactic texts might serve many other ends than simply the narrowly pedagogic. The diverse uses to which a didactic text might be put is suggested by two British Library copies of Thomas Blundeville, The foure chiefest offices belonging to horsemanship (first published c. 1565-6), a handbook containing directions how to breed, train, diet and treat horses. One copy of the 1597 edition was owned by John Jodrell of Moorehouse, Staffordshire, who signed his name on the title page, added copious manuscript recipes for treating equine diseases and also listed the births of his three sons on the final page. The other volume, a copy of the 1580 edition, was owned by Gabriel Harvey who annotated the text extensively, emphasising fine turns of phrase as well as pieces of good advice; in his summary written in the front of the book, Harvey praised the book, not for its practicality but for its celebration of the chivalry of the warrior.13

Desirable though it would be to establish the quantitative presence of didactic literature as a publishing genre across the early modern period, the means to do this effectively are only now beginning to be available, through the various counts of titles published in the early modern period.14 No-one has yet undertaken to use these figures to survey particular types of literature systematically, in order to investigate particular trends within the larger aggregate movements. However, initial investigations of culinary texts and merchants’ manuals suggest that the publication patterns of these books mirrored the general trends.15 Without similar ‘counts’ for other types of didactic and non-didactic material, however, these findings do not allow us to argue that didactic material was an increasing proportion of published material across the period. But there are grounds to suggest that, even using our narrow definition of what constituted ‘didactic’ literature, these books (as new editions, and as subsequent editions of existing texts), made up a substantial proportion of material published across this period, and especially after 1650.

Even if we cannot quantify output with any accuracy, evidence from the libraries of men and women show the prevalence of didactic material on their shelves. Thomas Teackle’s 1697 inventory of his Virginia estate reveals the wide reading tastes of a wealthy Anglican cleric: his library included numerous medical books, like ‘Platerus Golden practice of physick &c by plater Cole and Culpeper’ and ‘Vademecum companion for a Chirurgion &c’, and financial texts such as ‘Arithmeticall Questions &c calculated by R. W.’.16 The book lists that Ann, Countess of Coventry compiled in 1702, contain not only classical and spiritual works, but also volumes entitled ‘The Compleat Gardiner’, ‘Art of Drawing’, ‘Queens Closet’, and ‘Harvy’s Physitian’.’17 Unlike Coventry – a woman, who in Ruth Perry’s words, ‘could afford to buy what pleased her’ – the maidservant Polly Atkins, who ordered a copy of William Leybourn’s ready reckoner Panarithmologia from a Warwickshire bookshop in 1770, probably purchased few other books.18 These people may have stood socially and geographically far apart, but their mutual interest in buying didactic works emphasizes the importance of this type of publication throughout the Atlantic world, across the social spectrum and the sexes. This importance was sufficiently accepted by contemporaries, as to be registered in fictional reading practices; thus we have the ‘Lady Leonora’, whom Addison wished had been guided by ‘such books that have a tendency to enlighten the understanding and rectify the passions’, as well as the romances that influenced her landscape redesign.19

Of course, ownership of books does not imply their owners read them; as Addison observes, several of the volumes in Lady Leonora’s library are there solely because ‘she had heard them praised or because she had seen the authors of them’.20 Likewise, books did not need to be owned by their readers to be read, and several didactic texts – on surgery and physic, French grammars, and writing – are listed in the catalogue of books available in the library of St John’s church, Bedford, ‘for the use of the present and all future Contributors and Benefactors.’21

The development of literacy in the early modern period – a literacy that was often based on the ability to read, and for many individuals, the ability to read only the printed word – encouraged, and was furthered, by such universal interests in these texts.22 Many didactic texts required, and some claimed to teach or improve, basic textual familiarity, as well as numerical and visual literacy. In the preface to his handwriting manual John Ayres stressed that ‘my design is not to tickle the Ear with Notions concerning Writing, but to present it to the Eye for your Imitation, to shew you what it is.’23 Readers of a navigational text such as John Aspley’s Speculum nauticum (London, 1624) were expected to acquire and apply well-developed numeracy, as well as literacy skills, to deal with the mathematical-astronomical tables essential for navigation.24

The publications that fall into our ‘didactic’ category comprised a not insignificant proportion of the stock of booksellers and stationers in this period. As many booksellers specialized in certain types of publication, so we find George Conyers stocking his shops at Ludgate Hill and later Little Britain in the late seventeenth century with ‘cheap practical manuals on every conceivable subject’.25 The bookbuyer controlled to some degree the amount spent, in exercising choice over binding. Indeed, didactic texts increasingly belonged to those categories of popular books, along with catechisms, reference books and classical texts, which bookbinders might have kept readybound in standardized simple bindings for purchase.26

Although didactic books were published in formats ranging from flimsy pamphlets to elegant folio volumes, size did matter in the perception of such texts. Recalling Eliza Smith’s claim that her cookery book should be no ‘burden to the hands to hold’, the portability of books advertising themselves as ‘pocket books’ was not an empty selling point.27 There are also didactic ‘books’ amongst the cheapest and most ephemeral texts that survive from this period: the ‘Penny Merriments’ and chapbooks that Pepys collected so avidly. Amongst the examples that survive in the Pepys Library are a handful of cookery pamphlets, for example The Compleat Cookmaid: or, A Collection of most useful Dishes in Ciry or Country (London, 1684);28 although none carries a price, it is unlikely that any of these sold for more than sixpence. These pamphlets, as well as the more robust, bound texts, were still destined for shorter life spans than other genres, simply because they were (at least superficially) intended to be used, and used in situations that did not guarantee preservation. A notable example of this is explicidy stated in a loose advertisement pasted into a copy of Ayres’ Tradesman’s Copy-Book, detailing

A Royal Sheet of Paper fill of Variety of the Clerks Hands, with Breaks of the Exemplifying Court Letters, and 166 Words abbreviated in Court-Hand, and fairly written at length in the Modish Engrossing Set-Hand (price 2s 6d) so contrived, as to be cut in parts, and rolled up in a Pen-Case.29

It is indeed an irony of book history that the volumes of didactic material that survive today were those that were often little used or carefully preserved in libraries or closets.

In looking at didactic texts historically, as a medium of knowledge construction and knowledge communication, we come up against the enduring debates over hierarchies of, and access to, knowledge. Any expansion in popular education, or demotic access to ‘more’ knowledge (whatever that knowledge is), is often accompanied by fears that established hierarchies are at risk.30 Yet the period that stretches from the expansion of vernacular printing in the mid-sixteenth century to the expansion of basic education in the early nineteenth century, was arguably an era in which ‘practical’, ‘sensual’ empirical knowledge assumed an unprecedented prominence, altering conceptions of what it was possible to know, and who could be permitted to know it.

Central to this development were those who invoked novel pedagogical and epistemological philosophies. Francis Bacon’s declaration that ‘the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge’, and that that knowledge was not the preserve alone of sovereigns and their authority, underpinned a desire to establish ‘improvement’ as a cultural prerogative. This aim is a consistent thread through humanistic prescriptions in the early sixteenth centuries, to the encyclopaedic visions of Enlightenment philosophes.31 This trope of improvement, deriving from contemporary agrarian discourse, as an effect to be achieved in other ‘fields’ of potential profit, underpins not only Tudor pedagogies, but also the proposed Baconian and Hartlibian colleges and the later efflorescence of circulating libraries, ‘learned’ clubs and journals during the eighteenth century.32

These ventures promised an alternative (and by implication, better) conception of human activity to the traditional structures of scholastic learning. In support of a venture to achieve a comprehensive history of trades, William Petty argued:

Boyes instead of reading hard Hebrew words in the Bible … or parratlike repeating heteroclitus nouns, and verbs, might read and hear the History of Faculties expounded, … As it would be more profitable to Boyes, to spend ten or twelve years in the study of Things, and of this Book of Faculties, then in a rabble of words[.]33

Although Petty focused on the input (through learning) of empirical knowledge, the value of such texts lay in their potential output. Terms like industry, use and improvement pepper the prefaces of didactic texts, acknowledging that, as texts of prescription, they lacked utility until put into practice. Thus the anonymous author of England’s Happiness Improv’d: or, an Infallible way to get Riches, Increase Plenty and Promote Pleasure (London, 1697), a small book of wine, preserving and confectionery recipes, believed the text could not ‘but prove advantageous to all, and exceedingly so to those, who by industry will put in practice what is set down for their good improvement in knowledge.’34

A rhetoric of utility went hand in hand with a conception of the authors of these texts as equipped with the expertise to dispense appropriate knowledge. The decline of guild controls over certain trades, and the slow decrease in absolute numbers of apprentices across the long eighteenth century provided one of the information ‘gaps’ into which a didactic text might be introduced as a substitute for oral, face-to-face educative relationships.35 Moreover, the growth of trades and ‘skills’, ranging from surveying to japanning, that were not governed by existing organizational or institutional structures providled new territories for textual explication. The didactic text was arguably a substitute for communal dissemination, at times or in places when it was not available.

Moreover, expertise was to be understood not only as knowledge of a skill but also as experience of that knowledge. Curricula vitae were an important part of prefatory commentary, in which real (or idealized) authors set down their credentials for knowing of what they wrote. A sense of expertise was also rooted in the perspective the ‘expert’ provided on other texts. The effective didactic text was one that successfully controlled much wider fields of information that otherwise threatened to become unbounded and unwieldy, without further digestion. Indeed, the author/fabricator of a didactic text in the late seventeenth century was doing for a much wider audience, with much more diffuse and provisionally active aims, what Gabriel Harvey was doing for his patrons and peers at the end of the sixteenth century: facilitating information retrieval and re-organization.36

The rhetorical premise of many didactic texts was thus one of judicious excerpting and summary. Readers were presented with the ‘readiest route’ through knowledge ‘thickets’, to ease consumption and ultimately use. In addition to comprehensive coverage, authors promised (if they did not always deliver) clarity. Hushcraft Stephens assured that in his bookkeeping text, ‘every thing [is] represented in a clear Light, free from the many Contraindications, Insignificant Forms, and obscure Terms, under which it has been so long.’37 This assertion of clarity was often accompanied by condemnations of rival texts for their inaccessibility. Eliza Smith’s put-down of her (male) competitors reveals the key touchstones of practicality, plainness (both in language and scope), and experience upon which a didactic text should rely:

There are indeed already in the world various books that treat on this subject, and which bear great names … but [I] found myself deceived in my expectations: for many of them to us are impracticable, others whimsical, others unpalatable … and recommended without … the Copiers ever having had any experience of the Palatableness.38

The territories of knowledge that didactic authors ventured to explore and explain for their readers were treacherous when it came to justifying what was excluded as well as what was included in texts purporting to be ‘complete’ or ‘useful’. The boundary between delivering useful knowledge, stripped bare of what was impracticable for the general reader, and over-simplification, was indeed a narrow one, and it could be argued that true experts would have found little to enlighten them in many didactic texts. Imperatives of completeness were also complicated by the incentive to present current, rather than merely re-current, knowledge. Readers as voracious as Thomas Turner, the East Sussex shopkeeper, desired his <y’ery Useful Manuals’ (to use Lawrence Klein’s phrase) to be novel and yet also familiar.39 Publishers accommodated this through numerous strategies, not the least of which were the ‘updating’ of an unchanging core text with additions of ‘new’ chapters, alternative illustrations or finding aids, such as an index; and conversely the retention of an unchanging title applied to a changing text over many editions. Eliza Smith’s Compleat Housewife, for example, exhibits a number of these features over the eighteen editions published between 1727 and 1773.40

Indeed, ‘completeness’ was a concern of ‘authors’ and publishers, who parried criticisms of the scope of their texts as part of the rhetorical stallsetting undertaken in numerous prefaces. On the one hand, books like Smith’s trumpeted their comprehensiveness. Yet this desire to demystify was not necessarily universal. William Rabisha, a cook who published The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, Taught and fully manifested in 1661, was adamant that the skills he imparted could only be acquired by the intellectually (and practically) predisposed: ‘[the fraternity of cooks] are mistaken that think a Tract of this kind can be very beneficial unto any, but such as have been in some measure Practitioners’. This qualification rehearses the anxieties felt by those – practitioners, proprietors and politicians amongst many – who argued a place for ‘secrets’ as a necessary guarantee of knowledge hierarchies. The consequences of levelling the playing field, and providing information in a readily digestible form, to every ‘Kitchen-wench and such as never served their times’ were clearly not to be countenanced.41 So the notion of ‘compleat’ was tailored to circumstance and need, dependent on who was seen to deserve the knowledge contained within the text.

Didactic books could, however, work to undermine proprietorial attitudes to particular areas of knowledge, exposing how the relationships through which expertise was constructed were exclusively maintained. In medicine in particular, the tensions of contested monopolies allowed vernacular didactic texts, like Nicolas Culpeper’s translations of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, to bring to new audiences practical information otherwise not available to them. Such acts of vernacularization constituted a radical move towards wider information dissemination, and may have helped to forge links between potential users and knowledge previously construed as ‘secret’.42

Of course, the proclaimed aims of many didactic texts – to be plain, useful, ‘compleat’ and essential – fell short, or were subverted, in their reading and in use. John Jodrell’s recipe additions to Blundeville’s text suggest that ‘completeness’ was indeed an unrealistic goal in a world in which not only print, but diversifying communication, education facilities and locations for sociability encouraged more information exchange. Indeed, we do these books a disservice if we judge them simply on what their titles promise and prefaces purport. Didactic texts, in their format, content and impact, embodied not only early modern debates about pedagogy and qualities of knowledge, but also other relationships.

We find Natalie Zemon Davis’ suggestion that print can be viewed as a carrier of relationships helpful.43 Relationships of status and honour were evident with many texts growing out of a particular environment of patronage and dependency, and carried their marks as a crucial identifier.44 John Evelyn inscribed a copy of his translation of Gabriel Naude’s book detailing the creation of a library and gave it to Pepys, and although Pepys found the book ‘above my reach’ he described the dedication to Clarendon as ‘a very fine piece’.45 Indeed dedications enabled readers distant from the (occasionally real) relationships that produced these books, to have a guarantee of the reliability of the experience that was therein presented: associations with the genteel, if not the aristocratic, were the (often-formulaic) foundation of many early modern didactic manuals.46

Didactic texts likewise carried meanings that involved not only their status value as books, but also the other elements that combine to make an object meaningful beyond its immediate purpose. A 1747 edition of Nathaniel Colson’s The Mariner’s New Kalendar (London) carries two inscriptions. The first is by Silas Blaque, recording his ship’s position in the West Indies in 1748 and evidence of the book’s use as its publishers may have intended. By 1755, however, the book had become a prized possession in the Blaque family, being given to Joseph Blaque by his ‘honoured mother Mary Blaque’.47 Like other books, didactic texts also helped establish and maintain relationships – intellectual, neighbourly and others – between individuals and communities, by being borrowed and lent. Samuel Jeake the elder lent a local Rye apothecary, Mr Waylet, his library copy of Lazarus Riverius, The Practice of Physick in seventeen several bookes (London, 1655).48

Such books might establish relationships between readers and the material objects mentioned in their pages. Medicinal self-help texts were renowned for what we might now call product placement, while booksellers and other merchants could advertise books alongside the preparations or gadgets recommended in them. At the turn of the seventeenth century, John Houghton, always one to take advantage of an opportunity for financial gain, carried an advertisement for over a year in his weekly newspaper which declared ‘I have the Compleat Horse-Man, or Parfait Mareschal, by the Sieur de Sollrysel, translated by Sir William Hope. I can furnish Gentlemen with Medicines therein mentioned.’49 In March 1663 Pepys purchased a type of slide rule from the mathematical instrument maker John Brown, as well as a copy of his Description and use of the carpenters-rule (London, 1662). Pepys’ enthusiasm for his new apparatus also took him beyond the pages of Brown. In June 1663 he recorded that he ‘spent most of the morning upon my measuring Ruler; and with great pleasure I have found out some things myself of great despatch, more then my book teaches me, which pleases me mightily.’ Later that summer Pepys designed his own ‘Measuring Rule’ and commissioned Brown to make it.50

The most visible relationships embodied within the didactic text, however, were all evocative of the people who might stand in the place of the text: not simply the educator, but those who in early modern England assumed the roles of educator, master/mistress, father/mother, lord/lady – in sum the person of skills, knowledge and experience. The popularity of dialogue and question and answer formats in these books might be seen as a textual approximation of what the manual ‘stood’ for: a conversation between the ‘expert’ and the reader. The inventory of books and periodicals read and/or owned by Thomas Turner, of East Hoathly, Sussex, reflects the practical pedagogic needs of his position, as shopkeeper, sometime schoolteacher and local official in several capacities, with texts on elementary geography and geometry, surveying and parish offices and their duties.51 In a small community where experts in each field did not abound, these books represented a substitute authoritative resource for Turner.

The shift from personal facilitator to textual facilitator was of course by no means absolute, since didactic books did not simply supplant oral and face-to-face experiences of education once and for all. Writing handbooks and accounting texts, for example, were often produced as textbooks for use in the classroom, as well as at home. George Shelley’s Alphabets in all the hands with Great variety of Capital and Small letters Done for the use of the Wriling School of Christ-Hospital London (London, [1710?]), clearly a school textbook, also carries at its end a lengthy advertisement for related books published by the same bookseller, Henry Overton, concluding with ‘Great Variety of Sheet and Half Sheet Flourish’d Pieces, for School Boys to Write in’.52 Similarly Edward Kidder’s students at his London confectionery school may have begged him for the digest of lessons and recipes which was published as E. Kidder’s Receipts of Pastry and Cookery, for the Use of his Scholars (London, c. 1710).53

The question of whether readers followed prescriptions related in texts is crucial, not least because of the recent interest in readership practices among book historians. As James Parkinson wrote in the preface to his medical manual published at the end of our period:

Should any one obstinately put to sea without a compass to steer by, and without any knowledge respecting the navigating of a ship; but what he picks up during his voyage, by reference to some treatise on navigation, it would not be sufficient, merely to endeavour to dissuade him from making the rash attempt.54

Certainly, we must recognize that there were huge variations in the relationship between text and response, and partly, as Parkinson implies, the nature of the relationship might depend on the area under consideration. Evidence survives which suggests that readers might follow their didactic text almost to the letter. Samuel Jeake, the Rye merchant, records the day – 1 January 1680 – when he ‘began to keep my Accompts in a Liedger after the method set down in Chamberlain’s Accomptants’ Guide’; we can see him sat at his ledger with Chamberlain’s text open alongside him, the steps being followed scrupulously.55 Yet we also know that such books might be read only partially, the reader selecting out items of interest, be they pictures, phrases or practices; the Sheffield apprentice, Joseph Hunter’s record of his reading experiences in 1798 bear testimony to his highly selective readings from the ‘moral and miscellaneous’ section of his local subscription book club.56

A book that was portable, indeed pocketable, allowed peripatetic learning of the most obvious kind. Thus we have Pepys, the enthusiastic reader and musician, on 22 March 1667: ‘dined and then by water down to Greenwich and thence walked to Woolwich, all the way reading Playfords Introduction to Musique, where are some things very pretty.’57 But we also have Pepys using Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical/Musicke (London, 1597 and many subsequent editions), ‘a very good but inmethodical book’ by his reckoning, when he is feeling sick with a cold and retreats to bed: the book here becomes a means of escape from prevailing circumstances.58

Indeed many readers recorded the sheer pleasure they experienced from reading. In Thomas Turner’s own words, the balm he gained from reading was infinite: ‘reading and study (might I be allowed the phrase) would … be both meat and drink to me, were my circumstances but independent.’59 Similarly, Henry Prescott writes that on 6 December 1718 he returned to his ‘chamber, and over my pint supper recreate in the Compleat Geographer.’60 As well as realizing and complicating new relationships between varieties of practical knowledge and intellectual knowledge, these texts enabled readers to participate in the pleasures to be had from vicarious learning and ‘social voyeurism’.61

Prescott’s choice of the verb ‘recreate’ implies not only his pleasure in reading, but also highlights how reading could, to some extent, re-create the text. Part of this process might involve manuscript annotation. To a copy of The Clergyman’s Companion in visiting the Sick one reader embraced a wider ministry with the addition of two prayers on the endpapers, one ‘for a condemn’d Person’ and the other ‘for a condemn’d Person not confessing’.62 Readers might also re-format a text, by binding it with other texts, or by making additions, such as the creation of an index.63

These circumstances – the book read constructively, the book read for interest within an active life, the book read contemplatively – all reflect the possibilities inherent in didactic texts for readers, possibilities that were sometimes unimagined by authors and publishers. This volume pays more attention to intent and content than it does to the realities of consumption, but all the contributors acknowledge that the didactic ‘experience’ could diverge significantly from the received formulae and formats that they discuss.

Indeed, we begin with examinations of texts that, on the one hand, exemplify the arbitrary definition of the didactic that we have provided above, and on the other hand, arguably lie well beyond it, to suggest the omnipresence of the didactic impetus in the early modern period. Scott Mandelbrote discusses a text that one might argue was the didactic resource par excellence of this and other periods, and yet one which is often treated by modern scholars in isolation from other didactic literature: the Bible. He considers how contemporary changes in approaches to reading itself, as well as the writings of churchmen, influenced how the Bible was used as a didactic resource, particularly by nonconformists. While approaches that emphasized close readings of particular biblical passages continued throughout the period, more overarching narrative treatments of the Bible as an historical form signalled important alternative reading strategies.

Music manuals may stand as an archetype of the early modern ‘how-to’ text. Susan Forscher Weiss’ discussion of Thomas Morley’s phenomenally successful book, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, places it in a chronology that shows its roots in more arcane texts, but also its importance as an accessible, credible text written by a professional musician. In considering a musical text, Weiss also examines the status of such knowledge and contemporary debates over access to it. Musical accomplishment was highly valued in genteel and aristocratic circles and texts like Morley’s, that supplied vernacular means to attain such accomplishment, are significant in refining our understanding of how changes in social status might be effected (or simply affected). The fact that Pepys was still reading and enjoying Morley’s book sixty years after its first publication is testament to the longevity of certain didactic material.

Randall Ingram’s essay is a necessary counterpoint to such explorations of ‘explicit’ or paradigmatic didactic texts. In exploring the ways in which a reader read John Donne with ‘didactic’, rather than simply ‘literary’, intent, and the ways in which ‘poesy’ verses printed in didactic texts for engravers, needlewomen and the like, were literarily construed, Ingram neatly problematizes the categorization of texts as either ‘literary’ or ‘didactic’. By exploring the mechanisms of how one might read texts as a guide to how to write well, Ingram examines not only the organizational features of didactic reading but also what he calls the ‘powerfully appropriative’ processes at work, in using such texts for ends other than those claimed by the text itself.

Both Mandelbrote’s and Ingram’s essays consider the routes, idealized and practical, taken to knowledge acquisition. This subject is amplified in Anna Marie Roos’ study of late seventeenth-century texts on astronomy. The all-too simple historiographical divide between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ knowledges is critiqued by way of contemporary debates over what was acceptable to communicate and disseminate, to whom, and in what form. Using material from periodicals such as John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, Roos argues that the format of such texts – notably the question-and-answer model – gave momentum to debates about what was being ‘taught’ through the texts: the agency of readers, both real and imagined, was an important component in testing and rejecting the ‘knowledge’ on offer in didactic texts. The discussion of ‘new’ categories of astronomical knowledge such as Copernicanism and the questioning of established theses also illuminates the location of these texts in a wider field of knowledge resources, alongside coffeehouse lectures, debating clubs and cabinets of curiosity.

The promotion of particular textual formats for conveying knowledge went hand in hand with the extension of the fields of knowledge that could be rendered textually. Recipes, dialogues, grammars, glossaries, lexicons – such organizing features were often more important in shaping the impact of a text than the quality of the contents.64 Michèle Cohen’s study shows how the differing formats of texts for language learning – in this case, French – exhibit significant variations according to the gender of the imagined readership. The masculinization of the language grammar (contrasting so clearly with the emasculation of the dialogue as a means of language learning) also carried consequences for the very languages themselves, and how well they could be organized within particular didactic formats. Cultural legitimization of particular types of language learning, and thus languages learnt, also shaped what was constructed as polite learning as opposed to purposeful learning.

Formatting of a different kind occupies Rebecca Bushnell, whose research into horticultural didactic texts focuses on the visual imagery deployed in conjunction with the written text. The relationship between woodcuts and engravings, the positioning of images, and the language used around them combine to make the books ‘speak of their subject’. This integration of text and image with the knowledge conveyed suggests a sophisticated conception of these texts often not allowed to their authors and publishers. Bushnell also reiterates our need to look to a multi-faceted ‘literacy’ – visual and spatial as well as verbal – to attain a greater appreciation of the design and impact of these texts.

The contexts of conception, publication and reception are similarly raised by Christoph Heyl in his discussion of what superficially might seem an innocuous early-modern cosmetics treatise, Artificiall Embellishments, or Arts best directions how to preserve beauty or procure it (Oxford, 1665). By unravelling the particularities of production and audience, Heyl reveals the precise, culturallyspecific and subversive implications of this little handbook. In doing so, he suggests that attention to the language, allusions and modes adopted in such texts can take us beyond titular intentions, to attain more incendiary readings.65

Purpose and perspective also concern the final two papers in the volume. Richard Steadman-Jones’ exploration of Urdu grammars published towards the end of the eighteenth century also looks to civilizing and familiarization as organizational features of these primarily practical texts. Designed to aid the growing ranks of English civil and military servants in the Indian subcontinent, these texts also shaped moral attitudes that strengthened colonial government. Through format and manipulation of what was included and excluded, and also the mismatch between authorial conceptions of readers’ requirements and readers’ own preferences, he illuminates how such grammars were indeed vital instruments of representation in the ‘colonial encounter’.

As tools with which to understand and ‘visit’ other cultures, grammars like those studied by Steadman-Janes could also feed the minds of those who were unlikely ever to travel beyond the bounds of Britain, let alone Europe. By naming parts – be they lexical, through grammars, geographical, through encyclopaedias and maps, or cultural and economic, explored in the merchants’ manuals of Phyllis Whitman Hunter’s essay – didactic texts contributed to a gazetteer of the expanding globe. Associations between knowledge acquisition and the control and maintenance of power are also investigated by Whitman Hunter, as she discusses the intersection of manuals teaching accounting and bookkeeping, with newspaper advertisements that testified to an ever more infinite world of potential commodities and trade.

This collection of essays demonstrates the pleasures and profits of looking at the didactic character of early modern texts. Insights into musical manuals, gardening books, cosmetic treatises – a few case studies in an enormous field – take us across disciplinary boundaries and suggest some ways in which we might challenge the established scholarly canon to explore the common ground that surely lies between genres of texts. The types of expertise constructed in these texts illuminate the scope of knowledges and skills in circulation in the early modern world. The figure of the ‘expert’, be it the author, the protagonist, or the reader, speaks to us of the desire, to tell, to know and to control this universe of knowledge, as well as the cultural weight attached to its mastery, and to its consequent pleasures and profits.


The authors would like to thank the contributors to the volume and Ian Gadd for their comments upon earlier versions of this chapter.

3 Sara Pennell, ‘The material culture of food in early modern England, circa 1650-1750’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1997), Chapter 3; Natasha Glaisyer, ‘The culture of commerce in England, 1660-1720’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge (1999), Chapter 6.