2025/02/03 by Matthew Woodcock · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-229x.13447
openalex publication_date 2025/02/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
It is no exaggeration to say that researchers working on the history of reading and scholarship have been awaiting this book for over three decades. In the very first footnote of their seminal 1990 Past & Present article, ‘“Studied for action”: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton stated that this publication formed part of a larger research project undertaken by themselves and William H. Sherman investigating how ‘humanistically trained readers assimilated and responded to the classical heritage’ (p. 21). The book-length output envisaged by the authors never appeared in the form implied in the article. Nevertheless, using the example of Gabriel Harvey, Jardine and Grafton provided a revisionary account of how early modern professional readers read and annotated classical sources in order to extract transferable knowledge and precepts that were then employed as an intellectual resource by contemporary statesmen, courtiers, and those involved in military and colonial endeavours. The article emphasized the critical importance of reading marginalia in relation to the individual material texts in which they appeared and went on to inspire subsequent generations of scholarship devoted to investigating how particular readers – by no means solely early modern readers – read their copies of a given author. This important essay collection delivers on the promise made in 1990 and not only works as a reception history of Jardine and Grafton's article and the ideas it propounded but also extends the remit and application of the authors’ original methodology to use Harvey as a paradigmatic exemplar of how early modern goal-oriented reading represented a cornerstone of humanist practice. The book reprints Jardine and Grafton's 1990 article and contains a further four essays published previously, together with six new essays that offer original reflections on Harvey, annotation, book history, and the ideas and values that Jardine developed and promoted throughout her remarkable scholarly career. Framing and contextualizing the new and reprinted material are a series of introductions that celebrate Jardine's life and research, and her pioneering contribution to the history of reading. Of particular value is the editors’ reconstruction of the pre-history of ‘“Studied for action”’ and their examination of its legacy for intellectual historians, not least in the thirty plus essays published subsequently that signal their debt to Jardine and Grafton by re-using the formula ‘How X read (their) Y’. This collection itself contains several such essays, including those by Nicholas Popper and Arnoud Visser on how Harvey read Luca Gaurico and St Augustine, respectively. Little is added to the reprinted text of the 1990 article, save a comment in the first footnote stating modestly how the present volume realises some of the goals of Jardine, Grafton, and Sherman's original project. Thereafter, the editors include Jardine's 1986 essay on how Harvey read Quintilian and Cicero to form a model of Ramist education, and a new essay based on Jardine's drafts (revised here by Sherman following Jardine's passing in 2015), which reconstructs how Harvey was employed as a professional reader in the Earl of Leicester's entourage. Popper's previously published article on how Harvey read Gaurico as a way into understanding examples of ‘polytechnoscopy’ charts Harvey's career and practice following his relocation to London in the 1590s. Harvey's evolving interest in technological knowledge and mathematics is also the subject of a new collaborative contribution by Popper and Grafton that offers a superb analysis of Harvey's interactions with ‘mixed mathematics’ (quantitative methods used to produce knowledge about the natural world). Similar collaboration is found in Jardine and Sherman's reprinted 1994 essay, which situates scholarly services undertaken by Henry Wotton for the Earl of Essex alongside those of Harvey and John Dee. The collection contains three further new contributions reflecting on the methodology of book history. Earl Havens utilises insights gained from the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe project, and its digitization of Harvey and Dee's annotated books, to ask questions about the value of using marginalia as biographical evidence. (Havens also supplies an invaluable bibliography of Harvey's annotated books and their locations as an appendix to the collection.) Sara Miglietti, too, provides an important re-evaluation of marginalia as an authoritative form of writing in its own right, and not just as preparation for future work or activity. Frederic Clark examines how marginalia enabled early modern readers/annotators to memorialize their own experiences of reading, focusing predominantly on Dee's annotations. The book draws to a conclusion with Jardine's posthumously published 2016 revisitation of ‘“Studied for action’”, which reflects on what led her and Grafton to Harvey, and on the original essay's legacy for the study of marginalia. Grafton's epilogue follows a similar tack, looking back to earlier traditions of marginalia studies and glancing onwards to the future of the history of reading exemplified by the new essays on Harvey composed for this volume. There is insufficient space in this review to trace the arguments and unpack the riches of individual essays – both new and reprinted – or to do much more than gesture towards the significant implications of this volume's contents for the study of early modern book history. Both new and reprinted material work in concert effectively to provide a sustained, highly sophisticated contribution both to scholarship on Harvey and to the wider history of reading. The collection will be essential reading for anyone engaging with early modern bibliography, intellectual culture, and analyses of the role played by scholarship in sixteenth-century public life. Moreover, the example provided by Jardine and her co-contributors will continue to send scholars and students working in any historical period back to the archives and to the margins of the books therein. Taken as a whole, this book celebrates the act of reading readings and of engaging collaboratively with the written word. Harvey's annotations exhibit this wonderfully of course, but so too do the many instances of intellectual conversation and collaborative research and authorship that generated Jardine and Grafton's original article and project, and that can be found repeatedly within this book itself. As a further embodiment of the spirit of shared and open research encountered throughout the essay collection, it is entirely fitting that it is available in a free open-access version at www.uclpress.co.uk.