Alexandra da Costa is a Senior University Lecturer at the Faculty of English in Cambridge. Her research primarily focuses on early printed books meant for an English readership and late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century religious culture. Her previous book, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey's Defence of Orthodoxy 1524-1535 (OUP, 2012) examined the printed books that Syon Abbey sponsored in the turbulent 1530s, when the Church in England was threatened by both the spread of Lutheran heresy and Henry VIII's desire for greater ecclesiastical control.

Da Costa's erudite, impeccably documented, and wide-ranging study convincingly argues for the active agency of printers in creating a reading market for their books in order to survive in the largely untested business of bookselling. With impressive scholarship she has skilfully negotiated the difficulties presented by the patchiness of extant material evidence within the highly complex religious and social environment of the early sixteenth century.

• Introduction Devotional Reading 1: Sweet consolation: catechetical and contemplative guides 2: Dangerous fruit: selling forbidden books Worldly Reading 3: A taste for trifles: romances, scurrilous tales and merry gests 4: A hunger for news: pamphlets and broadsheets Practical Reading 5: Wide-ranging appetites: pilgrimage guides, advertisements and souvenirs 6: For the reader's digest: books for the householder, husband and housewife Afterword

Alexandra da Costa is a Senior University Lecturer at the Faculty of English in Cambridge. Her research primarily focuses on early printed books meant for an English readership and late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century religious culture. Her previous book, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey's Defence of Orthodoxy 1524-1535 (OUP, 2012) examined the printed books that Syon Abbey sponsored in the turbulent 1530s, when the Church in England was threatened by both the spread of Lutheran heresy and Henry VIII's desire for greater ecclesiastical control.

Da Costa's erudite, impeccably documented, and wide-ranging study convincingly argues for the active agency of printers in creating a reading market for their books in order to survive in the largely untested business of bookselling. With impressive scholarship she has skilfully negotiated the difficulties presented by the patchiness of extant material evidence within the highly complex religious and social environment of the early sixteenth century.

• Introduction Devotional Reading 1: Sweet consolation: catechetical and contemplative guides 2: Dangerous fruit: selling forbidden books Worldly Reading 3: A taste for trifles: romances, scurrilous tales and merry gests 4: A hunger for news: pamphlets and broadsheets Practical Reading 5: Wide-ranging appetites: pilgrimage guides, advertisements and souvenirs 6: For the reader's digest: books for the householder, husband and housewife Afterword