'The Meane Peoples Capacite': Writing Readers In

‗The meane peoples capacite‘: Writing Readers in Early Print Michael Wheare Queen Mary, University of London Thesis submitted for PhD Degree 1 I declare that the material presented in this thesis is my own work ......................................................................................................... 2 Abstract This thesis examines constructions of what we might call popular readerships in early print. Focusing mainly on the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it explores the ways in which a constituency of readers variously imagined as, for example, ‗mean‘, ‗common‘, or ‗simple‘ are represented, instructed and discussed. As such, it is less an attempt to recover the reading habits of a particular social grouping, as rather an effort to trace contemporary attitudes towards that group‘s engagement with textual productions, and, more particularly, the anxieties that the perception of that engagement provoked. In doing so, I discuss the treatment of books and reading in an early printed conduct book, trace the attitudes of two particularly influential humanist writers, Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives to reading, concentrating on their engagement with Bible-reading and women‘s reading respectively, before examining the importance of real and imagined ‗common‘ readers in the religious disputes surrounding the production of vernacular Scripture. Here, I focus on the polemical disputations between English reformists-in-exile, and their conservative opponents, through the analysis of texts by Thomas More, William Tyndale, and, particularly, William Roye and Jerome Barlowe. 3 Contents Intoduction: Writing Readers 7 Chapter 1: Conduct of Reading 16 Chapter 2: Humanist Readings 37 Chapter 3: Erasmus, the Bible and the People 102 Chapter 4: Reformed Readers and Wrong Readings 120 Chapter 5: Reformed Writers and Mean Readers 162 Conclusion: 220 Bibliography: 225 4 Notes The Abbreviation STC is used throughout to refer A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books printed abroad, 1475-1640 , first compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, 2nd edn begun by W.A. Jackson and F.S. Ferguson, and completed by Katherine F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-91). Where medieval and early modern sources are reproduced, original spellings have been retained whenever possible, although I have silently modernized contractions and archaic characters throughout. 5 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose generous grant enabled me to undertake this study, and to my supervisor, Professor Julia Boffey, without whose advice, support, expertise and, above all, patience, I would have been unable to complete it. 6 Introduction: Writing Readers In ‗Reading Matter and Popular Reading‘, Roger Chartier outlines the difficulties inherent in any attempt to recover ‗the unrecorded reading styles of anonymous readers‘, and enumerates some of the dangers involved: One, for example, is to take representations for actual practices; another is to restrict the category of ‗popular‘ to an overly narrow social sense; a third is to reinscribe the construction of meaning within the text alone (and the object that bears the text), even after postulating its autonomy. All these are reefs that are not easy to avoid when sources are few and we take insufficient precautions.1 Chartier‘s admonitions, and in particular the first amongst them, are of particular relevance to this thesis. In it, I aim to use just the sorts of ‗representations‘ of reading about which Chartier counsels caution to examine not so much the practices of ‗popular‘ reading, but rather contemporary attitudes towards – and constructions of – popular readers and the sorts of texts that it was suggested that they were reading, should be reading, or should avoid, over the half- century or so following William Caxton‘s introduction of the printing-press to England in 1475 or 1476. In responding to Chartier‘s challenge, I will be drawing upon the large volume of scholarly work which, over the last two decades or so, has been engaged in attempts to construct both a ‗history of the book‘ and a ‗history of reading.‘2 Intrinsic to much of the work within these emerging and, to some extent, convergent disciplines has been a deconstructivist reading of texts which, Kevin Sharpe and Stephen N. Zwicker argue, ‗by permanently discrediting simply 1 Roger Chartier, ‗Reading Matter and ‗Popular‘ Reading‘, in A History of Reading in the West, ed. by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. by Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 283. 2 A useful survey of some of the most important writers and texts in this developing field is to be found in The Book History Reader, ed. by David Finklestein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002); For a more historically specific survey, see Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, ‗Current Trends in the History of Reading‘, Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002), pp. 1-22. 7 positivist notions of meaning, authority and authorship, has foregrounded the reader as a central subject of study.‘3 In refiguring the site where meaning is made in the moment of ‗consumption‘ rather than production, much of the most influential research has focused on particular case studies in which evidence for habits of reading and interpretation have been left by readers themselves. In particular, work which has focused on readers‘ marginalia has appeared to offer relatively unmediated interior access to the reader in the very moment of reading and interpreting. 4 But, compelling as these reconstructions are, they necessarily tend to focus on very particular, discrete classifications of readers. As Heidi Brayman Hackel notes, ‗as readers‘ marginalia have emerged as a central archive for the history of reading in early modern England, that history has focused on goal-oriented, professional and contestory readings, and it has largely elided women readers.‘5 That elision, as Hackel expands, exposes some of the fundamental methodological limitations in using marginalia as evidence of reading habits, since its use will ‗leave many early modern readers invisible: those whose books have not survived, those who never owned books, those who could read but not write, those who simply never felt inclined to annotate their books, and indeed those who read their books to pieces.‘6 And to that list we might usefully add those whose reading was confined to the more ephemeral ballads and broadsides, those who shared books without ever owning them, and the seemingly oxymoronic ‗readers who 3 Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, ‗Introduction: Discovering the Renaissance Reader‘, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.1-37 (pp.1-2). 4 See, for example, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‗ ―Studied for Action‖: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy‘, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30-78; H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001);William Sherman, ‘What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?‘, Books and Readers in Early Modern England, pp.119-37; Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). 5 Heidi Brayman Hackel, ‗ ―Boasting of Silence‖: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State‘, in Sharpe and Zwicker, Reading, pp. 101-121 (p.101). 6 Hackel, p.107. 8 could not read‘, for, as Adam Fox‘s exhaustive and exhilarating exploration of the complex interrelationships between oral and literate cultures in early modern England has shown, vernacular culture of the period was, at all levels, profoundly influenced and even moulded by textual sources: England in this period was already a society profoundly influenced by the written word at every social level, not merely in legal and administrative contexts but down to the very fabric of its forms of entertainment and imaginative expression. Even those people who could not read the handwritten or printed word for themselves traded in forms which were derived from such sources. They, too, lived within an environment structured and fashioned by text.7 The consequence, then, of these methodological limitations, is that the fascinating body of evidence which has been accrued by studies of individuals and their marginalia, is, of necessity, largely a history of a very distinct group of readers: male, educated, and literate to the extent that they were possessed of the confidence to engage in physical debate with the books that they were wealthy enough to own. Moreover, the act of making marks or notes within or beside a text can hardly be argued to be an unconscious one; readers‘ apparent deliberations are nothing but deliberate. How then might we otherwise usefully ‗foreground‘ the vast majority of early modern readers who are themselves marginalized to the point of exsection by these approaches? For Naomi Conn Liebler, reader-response theory and its theoretical progeny offer a method for conceptualisation: ‗Modern and postmodern critical intervention, in recognizing that the reader of text makes its meaning, perhaps unexpectedly has given us a way to project, to imagine, how early modern readers of the working classes – who left no diaries, marginalia, catalogues,

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