Mary Ann Lund
I thought not that any man might well and properly be called a Reader, till he were come to the end of the Booke.
(Donne 1610, sig. ¶1r)
John Donne (1572–1631) defines the reader of his polemical work Pseudo‐Martyr (1610) by experience. In the “Advertisement to the Reader” prefacing the text, he claims that he had originally planned “not to speake any thing to the Reader, otherwise then by way of Epilogue in the end of the Booke.” By this time, the reader would become the Reader, qualified as such. Donne changed his mind because “both he, and I, may suffer some disadvantages, if he should not be fore‐possessed, and warned in some things” (1610, sig. ¶1r). Instead Donne pursued the more conventional course of prologue, not epilogue. Donne’s address pictures a collaborative and reciprocal relationship between author and reader: if his imagined reader is well prepared for the text, then he will have an enhanced experience of reading it – by understanding its purpose and design more clearly – and this will reflect favorably on the author. A better reader makes for a better‐read text:
For his owne good therefore (in which I am also interessed) I must first intreat him, that he will be pleased, before hee reade, to amend with his pen, some of the most important errors, which are hereafter noted to have passed in the printing. Because in the Reading, he will not perchance suspect nor spy them, and so he may runne a danger, of being either deceived, or scandalized.
(Donne 1610, sig. ¶1r)
Of the many rhetorical stances that Renaissance authors adopt towards their readers, this one of Donne’s is distinctive both for its acknowledgement of the mutual benefits to be accrued through careful perusal of the text, and for the link it forges between, on the one hand, the reader’s “good,” and on the other the practice of careful, active reading. It is fairly common for writers to ask for errata to be corrected in the main text, and there is some evidence of book owners who routinely made amendments. Yet Donne is further interested in the consequences of this process, and his list of errata shows all the signs of vigilant intervention in the printing process. There is a long list of corrections to words, but he leaves “literall and punctuall Errors” to the “discretion and favour of the Reader,” and even notes that there are “faults which are in the Margin by placing the Citations higher or lower” (Donne 1610, sig. ¶2v).
Donne’s “Advertisement” brings to the fore some of the major issues that have preoccupied historians and theorists of reading in the English Renaissance over the last half‐century. Who is “the reader,” and how is he or she defined and treated? How do paratexts shape the meaning of a text? How did Renaissance readers participate in making meaning from the text, what material evidence did they leave, and how can we interpret it? And how can reading be seen as a social experience, not merely a solitary one? In recent years, attention to the historical properties of reading and material culture has been the defining feature of scholarship on Renaissance reading, an indication of the wider influence of the history of the book discipline. Among the major preoccupations of scholarship on the English Renaissance, particular interest has been given to the practices of individual readers (Jardine and Grafton 1990; Sherman 1995; Sharpe 2000; Schurink 2008); the role of paratexts such as prefatory epistles and printed marginalia (Genette [1987] 1997; Slights 2001; Anderson 2002; Smith and Wilson 2011); reading, gender, and the recovery of evidence of female readership (Hackel 2005; Hackel and Kelly 2009); reading as a physiological and emotional process (Johns 1998; Craik 2007; Smith 2010); reading, authorship, and composition (Cave 1982; Chartier 1994; Dobranski 2005; Ettenhuber 2011); the book as gift (Davis 1983; Scott‐Warren 2001).
This chapter examines a few of the major approaches to reading in English Renaissance studies through the lens of one particular reader and writer: Robert Burton (1577–1640). A second son of minor gentry stock, Burton was born and raised in Leicestershire and studied first at Brasenose College, then Christ Church, Oxford. He proceeded MA in 1605 and BD in 1614; he remained a Student (that is, a college fellow) of Christ Church for the rest of his life. A clergyman, he was vicar of St Thomas’s, Oxford and held two external appointments, as well as administrative posts within the college and the city of Oxford (Bamborough 2004). He amassed a library of over 1700 books, most of which have been identified and catalogued, and which have been described as “one of the largest undispersed collections in England dating from the pre‐civil war period” (Kiessling 1988, xxvii; 1991; 1996). In his will he left most of his books to the Bodleian and Christ Church libraries, and Bodley’s librarian John Rous made a note of the 872 books they took in 1640; Burton’s habit of signing his name in books he owned further aids their identification (Kiessling 1988, vii–xxvi). We have, then, a remarkably detailed record of one lifetime’s reading, evidence enough perhaps to make him an interesting subject for study. What we also have, however, is The Anatomy of Melancholy, the major output of his adult life, first published in 1621 and expanded to nearly twice its length through five further editions. Burton’s library and this text exist in relationship with one another. The library gives important clues to the composition of the text, for which no manuscripts survive, and enriches our understanding of that most readerly of books: Burton’s Anatomy draws on a lifetime among books to categorize and probe the disease of melancholy from cause to cure. His identities as reader and author, in other words, are closely interlinked. My discussion of some material traces of Burton’s reading, and of the social relations inscribed in his library volumes and his own book, takes further my study of historicized reading in the Anatomy (Lund 2010).
Modern scholarship on reading draws from a number of disciplines and conceptual models – bibliography and textual criticism, social and political history, material culture, the history of the book – but has tended to define itself against the reader‐response theory that, to a certain extent, spawned it. Robert Darnton accused literary commentators of assuming “that seventeenth‐century English men read Milton and Bunyan as if they were twentieth‐century college professors” (1990, 181), critiquing a prevailing formalist trend during the 1960s and 1970s. The two figures squarely within his sights are Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, both of whom used Renaissance literature to elucidate their ideas on reader response, Iser (1974) writing on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progess, and Fish first on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1967) and later on Francis Bacon, John Donne, George Herbert, Burton, Bunyan, and Thomas Browne (1972; see also 1980). Their approaches place emphasis above all on the reader’s experience of a text as the central business of critics. Iser considers the role and function of the implied reader within the text, while Fish proposes the more radical thesis that the writers he discusses “seek to change the minds of their readers; they have designs on us; they are out to do us good; and they require our participation in what is, more often than not, the painful and exhausting process of self‐examination and self‐criticism” (1972, 371).
Fish’s work has been particularly influential on criticism of The Anatomy of Melancholy (see, e.g., Heusser 1987). Whatever the perceived shortcomings of Fish’s approach – its insistence on a disparate set of texts’ common purpose to “do us good,” its treatment of the reader as an undifferentiated figure, as someone largely acted on, and its failure to recognize the historically contingent nature of reading and the religious and political differences even within a given period – its lasting legacy has been to make us take seriously the attention that Renaissance writers pay to readers. The formalist model of the implied or ideal reader may have been abandoned, but it has brought to prominence the rhetorically dynamic nature of Renaissance texts, and focused concentration on previously underexamined aspects of texts such as prefatory epistles. The long preface to Burton’s Anatomy, for example, begins by placing the relationship between author and reader under close scrutiny:
Gentle Reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what Anticke or Personate Actor this is, that so insolently intrudes upon this common Theater, to the worlds view, arrogating another mans name, whence hee is, why he doth it, and what he hath to say? […] Seeke not after that which is hid, if the contents please thee, and be for thy use, suppose the Man in the Moone, or whom thou wilt to be the Author; I would not willingly be knowne.
(Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 1:1)
Although the “gentle reader” is a common opening gambit among early modern writers, Burton’s distinctive touch is not merely to imagine the reader, but to imagine the reader imagining him. He ends this first paragraph with the startlingly direct statement “Thou thy self art the subject of my Discourse” (1). Burton the writer comes to his task as a highly sophisticated reader, in an age when “the activities of reading and writing became virtually identified” through imitation (Cave 1979, 35). He thus implicates himself in his own enterprise. An unwilling‐to‐be‐known author addresses an unknown reader, both trying to color in one another’s features, and this relationship between them becomes his subject as much as the disease of melancholy.
While Fish and Iser were alert to the fundamentally rhetorical dimension of Renaissance writing, later critics have sought to contextualize that rhetoric and recognize, as Darnton influentially argued, that “Reading has a history. It was not always and everywhere the same” (1990, 187). Inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s study (1980) of the reading of a sixteenth‐century miller and heretic in the Venetian republic, critics have reconstructed the lives and reading habits of several named individuals, among them Gabriel Harvey (1552/3–1631) (Jardine and Grafton 1990), John Dee (1527–1609) (Sherman 1995), and Sir William Drake (Sharpe 2000). This emphasis on book use has increasingly refocused attention onto the means of knowledge production: the material evidence such as marginalia and readers’ marks, the way content was selected and appropriated, even the technology that facilitated reading such as the book wheel (Jardine and Grafton 1990, Sharpe 2000). It has, moreover, drawn attention to the significance of marks written in books that do not seem to bear relation to the printed text, but which show the role of the book in the social life of the owner (Sherman 2008, xiii; Richards and Schurink 2010, 345).
How can Burton be approached as a book user, and – despite “not willingly [being] known” – what material traces of his reading did he leave behind? Thanks to the efforts of his cataloguer, information on his personal library is easily accessible. As one would expect from an Oxford scholar in holy orders, Burton’s library consists of a large number of titles in theology, philosophy, and rhetoric, but the scope of his reading was far broader than was typical of English academics’ libraries in the period, with holdings in history and literature, travel, science, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, demonology, and marvels (Kiessling 1988, xxxi, 371–377). When he bought a book, he typically entered his signature or initials on the frontispiece, and a personal cipher made up of three “r”s in a triangular formation. Sometimes he also entered the date of purchase and the price, information that both gives a useful insight into the cost of books at specific points in the early seventeenth century, and shows a steady increase in Burton’s spending power: most of the more expensive folios were bought after the Anatomy was first published in 1621 (Kiessling 1988, xviii, xxx, 361–370). We know that he purchased books secondhand: one of his volumes (K99) lists at the back 46 titles bought as a job lot from the Oxford stationer John Crosley at the bargain price of 10 shillings, from the collection of a college fellow who had recently died (Kiessling 1988, xxix, Plates IV–VI, Appendix II).1 And a rare surviving letter, written in August 1605 to his brother William Burton, asked him to look out for second‐hand copies of the philosopher Seneca’s works, and let him know the price of the cheapest (Nochimson 1970, 327).
Although Burton did sometimes annotate his books, he was not an inveterate scribbler in the margins, confining most of his remarks to a single word and more commonly marking a significant passage with a line in the margin, or underlining the words themselves. He was certainly a “user” of books of the type described by Sherman (2008) and Cormack and Mazzio (2005). We find him supplying his own contents page to a collection of 11 books on diverse subjects that he had bound together in 1606 (Kiessling 1988, xxi, Plate 3), evidence that has allowed the discovery of titles that had been removed in subsequent rebinding. Like the cropping of marginal annotations or the once‐fashionable practice of removing readers’ notes in order to produce a “clean” (and more sellable) book, this instance reminds us that early modern readers’ traces do not come down to us unfiltered. In another volume, Johannes Garcaeus’ Astrologiae Methodus (Basel, 1576; K642), Burton used the front flyleaf to draw an astrological chart of the Duke of Brunswick, and also compiled a long list of what were in his opinion the best books and authors on judicial astrology (“Libri vel authores optimi de Astrologia iudiciaria quos om[n]es vidi etc,” K642, Kiessling 1988, Plate VII). The content of the book thus prompted a kind of extended use, related to Burton’s reading of the text but in an oblique fashion.
One fascinating instance of this practice can be seen in his copy of Thomas Dekker’s The Belman of London (1608; K441), where a blank leaf inserted after the title page contains a long handwritten list of “Pedlers Frenche w[hi]ch is halfe Englishe or ye Cantinge tong[u]e of Beggars taken out of Harman’s booke.” His dictionary of beggars’ cant and their English equivalents is written out in columns, with words such as “bouse” for “drincke” and “benship” for “verie good.” Some of these are taken from the volume itself, but they also derive from other volumes about the urban underworld such as Thomas Harman and Thomas Dekker’s O Per Se O (1612; K447), which Burton owned. We can picture Burton, then, in his study with several books open at once, compiling a personal word‐list. It is tempting to think that this interest in slang and cant was a hobby (he owned ten works by Dekker in all); one probably apocryphal story has it that Burton alleviated his melancholy by going to the bridge near Christ Church and listening to “the Barge‐men scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his Sides, and laugh most profusely” (Kennett 1728, 321). His interest, certainly, fed into the Anatomy, where in writing on poverty and want as causes of melancholy he has occasion to mention “counterfeit Crancks, and every villages almost will yeeld abundant testimonies amongst us, wee have Dummerers, Abraham men, &c.” (Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 1:353). A “dummerer” is a cant name for a beggar who pretends to be dumb and an “Abraham man” is one who feigns madness (OED Online); Burton would have found accounts of either in his copies of Dekker, or in the writings of Harman.
The notion of “book use” is one that thus clearly applies to Burton, and indeed his cataloguer has noted that Burton’s intent was “to form a working and reading library, and the condition of the book did not seem to matter” (Kiessling 1988, xxviii). Yet the emphasis in histories of Renaissance reading (e.g., Jardine and Grafton 1990, Sharpe 2000, Cormack and Mazzio 2005) on pragmatic readers – who mine their texts for useful material to be appropriated for their own purposes – and on reading in parts is not one that can be comfortably applied to Burton. Evidence from his marginal annotations does show how marked passages from his books make their way into the Anatomy: his copy of the Danish Lutheran Niels Hemmingsen’s Antidotum Adversus Pestem Desperationis (Rostock, 1599), for example, is heavily marked at passages which are quoted in the final section on the Anatomy, on religious despair (Lund 2010, 62–64; see also 82, 115). Yet it would be dangerous to conclude that his reading of any given text was “goal‐oriented.” He bought the copy of Hemmingsen’s Antidotum in 1601, 20 years before the first edition of the Anatomy, and his lines and annotations in this consolatory work may not have been made with composition in mind. More to the point, his own writing on a primarily medical subject, melancholy, treats reading as an activity with multiple and overlapping qualities and effects: he sees it as educational, reflective, therapeutic, entertaining, and at times disconcerting and even damaging (Lund 2010, 1–9). The active reader need not necessarily be engaged in the world of negotium, nor expect his or her reading to perform specific functions.
While the study of actual readers has eclipsed that of the ideal or implied reader, attention has also been paid to reading as a social, not merely a solitary, phenomenon (Davis 1983; Scott‐Warren 2001). Building on the notion of writing and reading as performative acts, this critical pathway has explored the significance of dedications to books, and the way that books “are conceived not as static receptacles of meaning, but as dynamic, transacted, and above all material objects” (Scott‐Warren 2001, 2). Burton’s library provides evidence of these transactions across a social circle that included colleagues at Christ Church, Oxford and beyond, and his family and friends, and at the same time demonstrates the breadth of his intellectual interests. He marked books that were given to him by the author, “ex dono authoris,” probably as gifts, although it is also possible that some of these were exchanges for his own book (Kiessling 1988, xxx–xxxi). Close to home, he received books from the clerical brothers Henry King (1592–1669) and John King (1595–1939), sons of the Bishop of London and both canons of Christ Church from 1624 (K920, 921), and, a little further afield, from the Magdalen‐trained Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) (K818, K1601).
Another fellow collegian was the mathematician Edmund Gunter (1581–1626), who gave him a copy of his The Description and Use of the Sector (1623) (Kiessling 1988, K731) after he had taken up the post of professor of astronomy at Gresham College in 1620. Burton and Gunter’s friendship was memorialized in a 1618 poem by Richard Corbett (1582–1635) on the appearance of a comet:
Burton to Gunter writes, and Burton heares
From Gunter, and th’ Exchange both tongue and eares
By Carriage.
(Corbett [1648] 1955, 64)
Nothing is known to survive from this exchange of letters, and so the poem, and the books, provide vital testimony to their relationship and to Burton’s interest in mathematics and geometry (he owned two further books by Gunter, possibly also gifts, K729 and 730). Yet this is not the only evidence of their friendship. Burton also paid homage to Gunter within the Anatomy. In the section of the second Partition on “Exercise Rectified,” Burton explores the cures for melancholy that are achieved through refreshment and diversion: physical exercises such as walking, fishing, and dancing, and also “recreations of the minde” ([1621–1651] 1989–2000, 2:84). Medicine, astronomy, new discoveries are all recommended:
Now what so pleasing can there be as the speculation of these things, to read and examine such experiments, or if a man be more mathematically given, to calculate, or peruse Napiers Logarithmes, or those tables of artificiall nSines and Tangentes, not long since set out by mine old Collegiate, good friend, and late fellow‐Student of Christ‐Church in Oxford, Mr oEdmund Gunter, which wil performe that by addition and subtraction onely, which heretofore Regiomontanus Tables did by Multiplication and Division, or those elaborate conclusions of his pSector, Quadrant and Crossestaffe.
(Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 2:94)
Burton’s printed marginalia give further detail both bibliographic and biographic: ‘nPrinted at London, Anno 1620’, ‘oLate Astronomy reader at Gresham Colledge’, ‘pPrinted at London by William Jones 1623’. Burton added the whole passage in the second edition of 1624, when a large amount of new material was incorporated into the book as a whole. This insertion may reflect in particular Gunter’s success in the years between the first edition (1621) of the Anatomy and the second: his pioneering publication The Description and Use of the Sector (1623) explained the instruments Gunter had designed, among them a sector that could be used for navigational purposes, and a cross‐staff designed as a logarithmic rule (Higton 2004). Burton’s recommended “exercises” for melancholy are thus not merely speculative but practical ones, introducing his readers to the newest approaches in mathematics while paying tribute to a friend. The nature of this act shifts subtly in its meaning, however, after Gunter’s death in 1626. Later editions (1628, 1632, 1638, 1651) retain the passage, but with a minor alteration: the 1624 edition had read “very good friend” (Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 2:327). The removal of “very” probably points not to the cooling of a friendship but to the passing of a moment: the more effusive compliment is for the eyes of the friend himself, while the tempered version stands as commemoration to Gunter in after years.
This memorialization of Gunter forms part of a wider strategy of inscribing personal relationships within Burton’s writing, and is linked to his distinctive authorial fashioning. He published The Anatomy of Melancholy under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, following in the steps of the laughing philosopher of ancient Greece, who sat in his garden at Abdera dissecting animals to find the source of madness and melancholy (Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 1:2–3, 33–34). Yet the book was widely known as both “Democritus Junior” and “Burtons Melancholy” (Lund 2010, 199). The author’s identity was hence no secret, and autobiographical clues are scattered throughout the work. It is the nature of these clues, and their placement, that is particularly interesting. In the first edition, Burton included “The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader” at the end of the work, with the declared purpose “to cut the strings of Democritus visor, to unmaske and shew him as he is” (1989–2000, 3:469) and he signed it “From my Studie in Christ‐Church Oxon. Decemb 5. 1620. ROBERT BURTON’ (3:473). He is explicit there about his debt to others:
It now remaines, that I make a thankefull remembrance of such friends, to whom I have beene beholden for their approbation, or troubled in perusing severall parts, or all of this Treatise. For I did impart it to some of our worthiest Physitians, whose approbations I had for matters of Physicke, and to some Divines, and others of better note in our University, as wel as to my more private Collegiate friends: whose censures when I had passed, and that with good encouragement to proceed, I was the bolder to hasten it, permissu superiorum, to the Presse.
(Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 3:472)
This passage is our only evidence of the Anatomy’s very earliest readers, those people in Burton’s circle who saw and advised on it in manuscript form. It gives the work as a whole a stamp of authority, rather in the way that an academic title’s “Acknowledgements” page is both explicitly a way of thanking those who have helped the work come to life and implicitly a means of establishing its intellectual credentials and situating the author within a professional network of named individuals. Burton’s readers have different specialisms – medicine, theology – and we assume that the majority were fellow‐academics at Oxford, but he adds that “I will name no man, or prefixe as the custome is any Encomiasticke verses, which I thanke my friends have beene offered, least if either whole or part should be misliked, I should prejudice their judgment, I acknowledge my selfe much beholding and bound to them” (Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 3:472–473). Burton hence gestures to the book’s sociable origins even as he rejects the traditional means of indicating them, withholding from readers the names of his friends and the paratextual devices for them to add their voices in support. (Thomas Coryat takes this to the other extreme in his Coryats Crudities (1611) with its 56 commendatory verses; see Craik 2007, 93–114).
After the first edition, Burton removed the “Conclusion” altogether and incorporated much of its content into the long preface “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” but he did not reuse the passage about consulting friends, nor did he anywhere “unmaske” and give his full name and location. Clues are instead more oblique, part of a game surrounding his identity that Burton initiates in the opening words of his preface (as we have seen). He is purposefully elusive to the reader in a gesture that simultaneously denies the importance of his identity – the work’s “contents,” not the author, should please us – and places the spotlight on himself as a mysterious, unknown figure who would not willingly be known. Yet very soon afterwards he gives us specific details about his own life: like Democritus, he says, he has lived a largely solitary life “to learne wisedome as he did,” “For I have beene brought up a Student in the most flourishing Colledge of Europe, Augustissimo collegio” (1:3) (a marginal note identifies this for unsure readers as “Christ‐Church in Oxford”). A little later he assures us that he has gained his experience on his subject through “melancholizing”: believe Robert the expert, “Experto crede ROBERTO” (1:8). Autobiographical evidence, then, is part of the persona he develops from the earliest stages of the text.
The highest concentration of references to friends, however, occurs in the second Partition (of three: the Anatomy is divided up into causes, symptoms, and prognostics of melancholy; cures; and the separate categories of Love and Religious Melancholy). In writing on the healthful properties of a good climate and situation in “Ayre Rectified,” Burton mentions that Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire, where he was at grammar school, stands “in an excellent ayre,” and continues,
cWadley in Barkshire is situate in a vale, though not so fertill a soyle as some Vales afford, yet a most commodious site, wholsome, in a elitious ayre, a rich and pleasant seat. So Segrave in Leicestershire (which Towne dI am now bound to remember) is sited in a Champian, at the edge of the Wolds, and more barren than the villages about it, yet no place likely yeelds a better aire. […] The best building for health, according to [the fourth/fifth‐century writer on agriculture Cassianus Bassus], is in high places, & in an excellent prospect, like that of Cuddeston in Oxfordshire (which place I must honoris ergô mention) is lately and fairly kbuilt in a good aire, good prospect, good soile, both for profit and pleasure, not so easily to be matched.
(Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 2:61–62)
Once again, the marginalia fill in the biographical detail: “cThe seat of George Purefey Esquire” (a kinsman of Burton on both his mother’s and his father’s side); “dFor I am now Incumbent of that Rectory, presented thereto by my right honourable Patron the Lord Berkly”; “kBy John Bancroft Dr. of Divinity my quondam tutor in Christ‐church Oxon, now the Right Reverend Lord Bishop Oxon, who build this house for himself and his successors.” The sentence about Seagrave, added to the fifth edition in 1638, reflects Burton’s induction into the living there in June 1632, perhaps as a reward from George, Baron Berkeley (1601–1658), for the dedication of the Anatomy to him. The final sentence quoted, on Cuddesdon, was added in the sixth edition in 1651; Bancroft (1574–1641) was not only Burton’s former tutor, but also from 1632 his bishop, since Burton was vicar of St Thomas’s church, Oxford. There are other commendatory remarks on places connected to his birthplace, Lindley in Leicestershire, and the home towns and villages of many more friends and relations nearby (see Burton [1621–1651] 1989–2000, 2:60).
The topographical discussion thus allows Burton to establish and assert his personal networks publicly on the printed page, adding to it in order to acknowledge more recent benefactions and pay homage to friends in higher places. Yet his strategy also keeps this material away from the more prominent and conventional site for compliment: the prefatory epistles. The tributes, embedded within “Ayre Rectified,” add to the variety of his discourse (they follow the “Digression of Ayre” in which the author takes a fantasy flight around the world) and strike a note that is both personal and local. He is not just an Oxford scholar but a Leicestershire man, whose loyalty to his birthplace remains (he signed books he owned as Robert Burton “Lecestrensis” (of Leicester) as well as “ex ÆDE Christi” (of Christ Church), e.g., K780). The inscribing of friends within his work thus pays compliments to particular readers, establishes the biographical (and unnamed) author within a circle of (named) individuals, and creates a regional identity that sits alongside his university and patronage network. Moreover, it implies not only that these friends and kin will be reading his work, but that they will be reading it thoroughly, beyond the preliminaries where compliments are usually paid.
The example of Robert Burton has demonstrated a few of the prevailing and emerging models of reading. What next for the history of reading in the Renaissance? Two scholars have recently called for further models that “understand the cultural and social impact of manuscript and print and the ‘use’ of books, while still taking account of the text read” (Richards and Schurink 2010, 355). While innovative approaches are revealing more than ever about the material evidence of book use, there has also been a renewed emphasis on textuality and a rebalance towards a careful, contextualized approach to literary texts‐as‐read. The evidence of actual readers’ responses is fragmented, open to diverse interpretations, and sometimes gives little away about what a reader of the text thought and felt about it, but it can also illuminate the sometimes significantly different responses to Renaissance texts from our own (Schurink 2008). Some of the best recent work has revealed a wide spectrum of reading strategies at work among texts and readers: even seemingly straightforward advice in a medical manual, for example, may be designed for rumination by the reader, not for instant application and re‐use but to encourage a process of critical engagement (Richards 2012). If the language of use has dominated the critical terrain for the last two decades, there are signs of a renewed attention to the more reflective aspects of reading, and this may provide one – among many – new pathways for the flourishing study of Renaissance reading.
Dobranski (2005); Richards and Schurink (2010); Sharpe (2000); Sherman (2008); Spiller (2011).