READING.

The question "Who read what—and how?" is fundamental to intellectual history. No idea can have a history until someone reads it somewhere, and its impact on society will depend on the readings of individual readers. It was inevitable, then, that the historiography of ideas would turn toward the historiography of reading. That trend picked up momentum in the 1980s, when postmodern critics raised provocative theoretical questions about canon formation, the indeterminacy of texts, and the role of the reader in making meaning. Those critics, however, mostly failed to produce empirical studies of actual readers in history. That gap would be filled by scholars working in the emerging field of "book history," taking their inspiration from Robert Darnton's 1986 manifesto "First Steps Toward a History of Reading."

How Historians Study Reading

How can the historian recover something so private, so evanescent as the inner experience of the reader? Darnton conceded that documentary evidence was hard to come by, but he did not consider the problem insurmountable. In fact, since 1986 innovative historians of reading have located and used a broad range of primary sources, including memoirs, diaries, personal correspondence, library borrowing registers, wills (which often list books owned), booksellers' ledgers, reports filed by book peddlers and salesmen, minutes kept by literary societies, authors' fan mail, oral interviews, sociological surveys, marginalia, and iconography (the portrayal of readers in medieval manuscripts can be remarkably illuminating). Especially for the nineteenth century, when many newspapers were largely reader-written, one can look to published letters to the editor (and, more revealing, letters that were never published). Exceptionally valuable are the records of inquisitors and secret policemen, who obligingly asked precisely the questions that intellectual historians want to ask—questions about how individuals select, obtain, interpret, share, and discuss books. In The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg used the proceedings of the Inquisition to investigate the reading habits of Mennochio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller.

Mennochio was a strikingly idiosyncratic reader. Somehow he acquired a vernacular Bible, Giovanni Boccaccio's (1313–1375) Decameron, travel books, and perhaps the Koran. From these texts he drew highly independent conclusions about metaphysics, religion, the origins of the universe, social equality, and the economic basis of the Catholic Church. This is what Roger Chartier has called appropriation : the tendency of readers to interpret and adapt texts to serve their own interests and uses. Other historians of reading, along similar lines, make use of Erving Goffman's "frame analysis," where a frame is defined as a set of interpretive ground rules adopted by the reader. Either approach recognizes reading as a creative act rather than the passive absorption of the author's intended message. Thus the general thrust of the historiography of reading has been very different from Frankfurt School, Marxist, semiotic, and feminist criticism, which tended to treat the common reader as the passive victim of mass culture, capitalism, or patriarchal discourses.

Historians of reading inevitably take into account the influence of race, class, and gender, but often with unexpected results. Female readers are more likely than male readers to choose and identify with female authors: that appears to be a broad tendency, which cuts across time and culture. But beyond that, most recent studies have revealed that men and women read less differently than many researchers imagined. In Victorian Britain prison inmates devoured sentimental fiction, while Kate Flint found middle-class women who were tackling philosophy, politics, and the hard sciences. In the fan letters received by middlebrow Canadian novelists, Clarence Karr discovered that men as well as women were moved to tears, and women as well as men were inspired to rational critical analysis. After a generation of critics dismissed the traditional literary canon as elitist, Jonathan Rose revealed a large and passionate audience for the classics among the British working classes, and Elizabeth McHenry recovered a tradition of African-American literary clubs that discussed established white authors as well as new black authors. Priya Joshi found that readers in colonial India enthusiastically embraced the English novel, though the novel as a genre was not indigenous to the subcontinent. This was not a matter of the colonized slavishly mimicking the colonizer: Indian readers selectively read novelists that resonated with them, including some (notably G. W. M. Reynolds) that metropolitan critics considered hopelessly trashy.

Some historians of reading, such as Carlo Ginzburg, intensively study the experiences of a single reader. Others reconstruct the literary life of entire communities, as Christine Pawley did for Osage, Iowa, in the 1890s, or as William J. Gilmore did for a corner of rural Vermont in the early American republic. Still others show how print communicates the information needed to negotiate urban life (see David M. Henkin's City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York and Peter Fritzsche's Reading Berlin 1900 ). Historians of literacy once merely measured whether people could read; more recently David Vincent has explored the actual uses of reading skills in nineteenth-century England. Ronald Zboray explained how reading habits in antebellum America were transformed by a vibrant market economy, which called into existence new methods of printing, illumination, transportation, marketing, book distribution, and literacy education. On the other hand, Stephen Lovell has described the very different impact of a command economy on reading choices in the Soviet Union, explaining why it created an extraordinary demand for classic literature.

"Reception histories" track the critical responses to individual texts or authors, a method particularly useful for historians of ideas. James Secord's Victorian Sensation treated the controversy surrounding Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a popular precursor of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. John Rodden reconstructed the intellectual history of the Cold War through responses to George Orwell, showing how liberals, conservatives, neoconservatives, Marxists, social democrats, anarchists, New Leftists, Jews, Catholics, Germans, and Russians variously appropriated his work.

Some Models

Many historians have used Jürgen Habermas's (1929–) model of the "public sphere" to explain the dissemination of ideas among eighteenth-century readers. The vast body of research on this subject has been synthesized by James Van Horn Melton in The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. The general assumption behind these studies is that only Western societies with mature printing industries could develop true public spheres, but C. A. Bayly questions that. In Empire and Information, Bayly argues that eighteenth-century North India nurtured what he calls an ecumene, similar to what Habermas observed in Europe, except that it arose in a preprint culture. Relying on circulated manuscripts and oral performances, Indian readers were able to follow and participate in public debates about politics, religion, law, society, literature, history, and aesthetics.

In addition to borrowing historical models, historians of reading have invented some of their own. In 1974 Rolf Engelsing argued that a "reading revolution" (Leserevolution ) swept through the North Atlantic world around 1800. This involved a threefold shift: from reading aloud to private reading, from predominantly religious reading to predominantly secular reading, and from "intensive reading" (close and repeated study of a few canonical texts, such as the Bible or Pilgrim's Progress ) to "extensive reading" (rapid and continuous consumption of a large intake of ephemeral texts, mainly newspapers, magazines, and novels).

Engelsing's hypothesis is still widely debated. Though the shift to private reading clearly did take place, it has come to appear much more drawn out than he suggested. Cecile Jagodzinski contends that in England reading became more private during (and as a result of) the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century, and reading aloud was still common in working-class households as late as 1900. Nevertheless, it may be that the "reading revolution" may be treated as researchers have learned to treat the Industrial Revolution: as a rough generalization about a ragged and uneven process, a concept that has some usefulness as long as it is borne in mind that reading habits (like industrialization) evolved along different paths in different societies.

But What Exactly Is Reading?

That question raises some intriguing anthropological issues. One could say that reading is retrieving information encoded by making marks on a material base, but that begs yet another question. As Germaine Warkentin has noted, some indigenous peoples of North America seem to have recorded information on wampum belts, birch-bark scrolls, stone cliffs, and (among the Git'ksan of British Columbia) ceremonial cloaks. But linguists cannot read these texts (if indeed they are texts) as they might decipher and read Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the glyphs on a Mayan stela. In some cases they must be read—or, more accurately, performed—by an authorized member of the native nation. And different native "readers" may read different significances into the same inscription. One might conclude that a Git'ksan cloak is more like a work of abstract expressionist art than a document: it is supposed to be suggestive rather than precise. Yet a member of the Git'ksan nation will probably insist that the cloak is "written," not "painted." True, its meaning is radically indeterminate, but a generation of postmodern critics have argued that all texts are wide open to interpretation. Given all that, can one truly "read" a cloak?

One way of coping with this quandary is to go back to the original meaning of the word. Laurel Amtower makes the point that in Old English, raedan could refer to any kind of "interpretation and glossing of signs in a world in which all was text." It might involve reading a boc (an Anglo-Saxon term that included all sorts of documents, not just books per se ). But one could also read things that were not (strictly speaking) documents, for example "Ic raede swefn" (I read dreams) (Amtower, ch. 2). That wider meaning survives in colloquial English in the early twenty-first century, as in "How do you read this situation?" A new methodology, "audience history," treats reading in that expansive sense, reconstructing (as far as possible) the entire cultural diet of a given group of individuals. Thus The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes considers not only how workers read books, magazines, newspapers, and advertising bills, but also how they "read" films, radio programs, musical performances, and school lessons.

Broadly, then, the history of reading has become the history of interpretation. Historians have become all too aware of the epistemological questions they encounter whenever they try to make sense of texts, and some of them have concluded that the most fruitful approach to those questions is a historiography of reading, which asks how readers in the past made sense of texts. The importance of the subject is clear: wars have been fought over different readings of treaties, scriptures, and intelligence reports. If, as Erving Goffman put it, people are always "reading" the sensory data that showers in on them, always asking themselves "What is it that's going on here?" then cultural historians must inevitably address "reading" widely defined.

See also Education ; Language, Linguistics, and Literacy ; Literature ; Oral Traditions .

bibliography

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Bayly, C. A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Darnton, Robert. "First Steps Toward a History of Reading." In his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader 1837–1914. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.

Fritzsche, Peter. Reading Berlin 1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Gilmore, William J. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Henkin, David M. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Jagodzinski, Cecile M. Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth Century England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Karr, Clarence. Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000.

Lovell, Stephen. The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.

McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Pawley, Christine. Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

Rodden, John. George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002.

Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2001.

Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Warkentin, Germaine. "In Search of 'The Word of the Other': Aboriginal Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada." Book History (1999): 1–27.

Zboray, Ronald J. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Jonathan Rose