engleski

Examining the Evidence of Reading in the Past

Since its beginning as a field of scholarly research, the history of reading has faced the problem of finding representative evidence about the reading practices of historical readers. The sources for its first question “who” read “what” are rather easily identified. However, the sources for more interesting, but also more challenging questions of “how” and “why” people read are more difficult to detect since the evidence on the act of reading is often obscure, scanty, fragmentary and scattered. The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the most important among them (diaries and memoirs, proceedings of the Inquisition and police records, commonplace books, marginalia, correspondence, fan letters, even visual representations of reading (documentary photographs and paintings), etc.), those that offer a good insight into how readers responded to what they read and into the social and cultural context of reading in the past. The paper ends with the conclusion that although all of these sources are imperfect and only to some extent reliable, they can be quite revealing if historians of reading know how to use and interpret them.

book history research, history of reading, evidence of reading, historical reader, historical sources

nije evidentirano