Edinburgh History of Reading

Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at University of Southampton. She is a senior member of the management group of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘The Reading Experience Database, 1800-1945’. She is the author of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: A Cultural Life, 1860-2012 (Ashgate, 2015) and Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914 (Ashgate, 2006). She is also the co-editor of three books, including, Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book Hstory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Taken together, the four volumes of The Edinburgh History of Reading constitute a fascinating compendium of research on readers and reading. […] The volumes successfully demonstrate the diversity of their subjects’ encounters with texts of all kinds, and highlight the importance of reading as both shared cultural practice and intensely individual experience.

• List of ContributorsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Mary HammondChapter 1. The Move Toward Literacy Among Confucian Scholars in Ancient China, Liqing Tao and David Reinking Chapter 2. Reading for Rule: Emperor Taizong of Tang and Qunshu zhiyao, Fan WangChapter 3. Medieval Women Writers and What They Read, c. 1200 to c. 1500, Martha W. DriverChapter 4. Mi ritrovai per un poema sacro: The Ideological Reading Subject in Dante’s Inferno 5, Glenn A. SteinbergChapter 5. The Unreadable Book of Margery Kempe, Ashley OttChapter 6. Between Reading and Doing: the Case of Medieval Manuscript Books of Practical Medicine, Faith WallisChapter 7. Visual Form and Reading Communities: The Example of Early Modern Broadside Elegies, Katherine AchesonChapter 8. Ottomans Reading Persian Classics: Readers and Reading in the Ottoman Empire, 1500–1700, Murat Umut InanChapter 9. Books, Readers, and Reading Experiences in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, 16th-18th Century, Pedro M. Guibovich PérezChapter 10. ‘Read it o’re and o’re’: Eikon Basilike and Sacramental Reading in the Seventeenth Century, Kyle Sebastian VitaleChapter 11. Plurilingual poetry and the hinterland of intertextuality: Europeanising reading culture in the early modern Iberian world, Maya Feile TomesChapter 12. Printed Private Library Catalogues as a Source for the History of Reading in 17th-18th century Europe, Helwi Blom, Rindert Jagersma, and Juliette ReboulChapter 13. Reading, Visual Literacy, and the Illustrated Literary Text in 18th-century Britain, Sandro JungChapter 14. Reading Aloud, Past and Present, W. R. OwensBibliography of works cited and suggested further readingIndex of Methods and SourcesGeneral Index