Salter, Elisabeth. Popular Reading in English, c. 1400-1600. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. x + 260 pp. ISBN 978-0-7190-7799-9. $110 cloth.
This is a timely and ambitious study that contributes to the growing body of work in recent years seeking to invigorate the study of the history of reading in the medieval and early modern periods by focusing on popular readers. It participates in a growing trend to shift the emphasis from trained readers to those whom Heidi Brayman Hackel—in her Reading Material in Early Modern England—terms “less extraordinary.” In Popular Reading in English c. 1400-1600, Salter seeks “to uncover evidence for the reading practices and experiences of real, rather than ideal, readers using evidence that is found within the material of book and manuscript itself, or within the structure of a specific genre of literature” (1). But where her work departs from many recent studies of “real” readers is that it does not particularly concern itself with readers’ marks and marginalia. Instead, she proposes an expansive and flexible approach to the subject which centers on comparative analysis of texts across formats and time, and is sensitive to the material object; in the many small case studies that the book comprises, the layout and contents of the texts dictate the terms of analysis. This is a welcome attempt to move beyond the often quite restrictive established paradigms of the history of reading. However, Salter engages only very lightly with scholarship on book history and the materiality of reading, so the analyses of reading practices and experiences often appear rather slight and speculative. I am also not convinced that this methodology does recover evidence of “real” reading, as it claims: the material text offers constructions of readers and reading, and there is, throughout, a tendency to refer generally to “the reader” or, even on occasion, “the common reader,” which seems at odds with an approach that insists it is recovering actual practices.
Popular Reading in English, c. 1400-1600 contains a set of encounters with four kinds of texts—religious, moral, practical, and fictional—across the two centuries, ranging from manuscripts to early printed books. The breadth of reading matter, Salter explains, requires a fluid approach to the modes of analysis employed, and the rest of the book works through a series of models for conceptualizing fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reading from the material text and its contents. The wide chronological and generic reach of the study is both its greatest weakness and its greatest strength. It would be a near-impossible task to cover sufficient critical ground in a book of such wide scope, but since the methodology is placed firmly in dialogue with the methods of book history, I think that greater attention should be paid to recent work in this field. Salter states repeatedly that the novelty of her approach lies in her attention to the material features of the page and the indications we can draw about readers from these. She terms this “the aesthetics of the page” (24). However, she doesn’t acknowledge that an attention to mise en page is common in studies of medieval and early modern reading and is, therefore, not an innovation here. Often, readings lack the technical vocabulary of bibliographical analysis, as when, in a discussion of sixteenth-century printed editions of Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry, she states that they are “all similarly sized and very small volumes, less than the size of my hands, and able to easily fit into a pocket” (152). There are also several places, especially in chapters three and four, in which manuscripts, book-objects, and their contents are described at great length and then only a sentence or two of analysis is offered afterwards; a more careful consideration of, for example, format, font, and other paratextual features would round out discussions. On occasion, there is a problematic implicit tendency to view fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reading as continuous, particularly in the discussions of the Gesta Romanorum collection in Chapter Three and the Brogyntyn manuscript in Chapter Five, both of which rely on the idea that readers would be finely attuned to adjoining texts.
The introduction (or Chapter One, as it is here) sets up a number of methods and terms employed in readings throughout the study. It concentrates in particular on defining a vocabulary to discuss reading practice and experience, and on approaches to assessing the nature of the evidence accumulated. There is also some attention to the thorny definition of “popularity” to which the discussion returns in Chapter Five. Four further chapters follow, each containing a number of short interrelated case studies centering on particular manuscripts or clusters of early printed editions. Salter notes that these chapters can be read in any order since they contain such diverse material and forms of analysis. The second chapter, on religious reading, focuses on primers and prayer books. The first case study presents a synchronic approach to reading practices encoded in a fifteenth-century manuscript prayer book; this then opens out to a consideration of the uses of Latin and English in religious material across the Reformation and their implications for questions of popular literacy. In particular, it traces the use of the vernacular in devotional literature back in time from the 1530s to revise scholarly arguments that the rise of English in religious texts was a feature of the Reformation, and suggests a greater continuity of practice than is generally acknowledged.
The third chapter centers on moral reading in the form of the collection, the Gesta Romanorum, particularly evidence for its circulation and the ways in which reading strategies are suggested by the individual stories of the collection. There is a short section on the varying relevance of woodcuts to the individual stories in Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of 1510, suggesting that the recycling of woodcuts by printers—where some were only tenuously linked to the tale they accompanied—provided an opportunity for the reader to reflect on the abstract relevance of the story, and were also a form of marketing strategy for de Worde, advertising the work as moralizing rather than devotional. This is followed by a section on “textuality” in the stories, particularly the use of inscription in its various forms and its relation to the ways in which readers encountered text in their everyday surroundings, which then leads to a consideration of stories with contemporary social relevance.
The fourth chapter focuses on practical manuals of farming and husbandry, in a series of comparative studies across manuscript collections and printed texts; it engages with scribal hands, binding, annotations, indications—and disputes—of ownership, and illustration, in order to imagine a broader reach beyond those seeking practical instruction in husbandry to a readership “buying into a world of textually transmitted knowledge” (156). The remainder of the chapter examines the contents of different husbandry editions and the ways in which instruction is framed by, for example, dedicatory epistles, chapter themes, rhymed verses, and proverbs. The fifth chapter concentrates on Gawain narratives, excluding Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The various chivalric romance editions provide, first of all, a means of considering what is meant by “popular,” and the discussion ranges across questions of ephemerality, disjunctions between courtly or aristocratic themes and the lives of the readers, collective reading and orality, and “writerly sophistication,” to challenge the idea that the oral form implies simplicity. It then moves to a case study of the manuscript context of a particular tale, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle. Salter claims that Daniel Huws’ discovery of sixteen scribal hands in the Brogyntyn 2.1 manuscript is inaccurate and suggests instead that there were fewer scribes, based on her analysis of the “production aesthetics” rather than style of hand. The chapter concludes with an assertion that emphases on orality, worldliness, and the carol shape the manuscript and point to the particular interests of a scribe-reader or two scribe-readers, and suggests that the juxtaposition of certain texts mediates a reader’s reading of them.
The numerous short case studies—some of them only around two pages—cover a vast amount of ground very quickly and while they are very suggestive, I think they would benefit from more unpacking; large, complex ideas are introduced but not always given room to breathe, and when Salter intends for each compact case study to generate its own frames of discussion, these need to be pursued in more detail. The tendency to recap and write interim and chapter conclusions to the very short studies also lends a slightly repetitive quality to the individual chapters.
Scholars of late medieval and early modern reading will find a wealth of interesting material in this book and, along the way, Salter poses many very useful questions about modes of interpreting fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, particularly on the subjects of the relationship between orality and literacy, and manuscript and print. Her book will no doubt, as the author wishes, inspire further work on the subject.
Louise Wilson
University of St Andrews
43.2.39
Comments
You must log in to comment.