"Gentyll reader ye shall understande": practical books and the making of an English reading public, 1400–1600
Creators: name: Reynolds, Melissa Buckner
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2019

description: This dissertation examines the composition, use, and reuse of practical manuscripts and early printed practical books in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. I locate the origins of an English “reading public” in the everyday interactions men and women had with late medieval almanacs, prognostications, and collections of craft, medical, and agricultural knowledge. I argue that from around 1400, non-elite English men and women became accustomed to interacting with the written word thanks to the proliferation of these utilitarian manuscripts. These pragmatic texts remained largely unchanged and immensely popular well into the sixteenth-century, transferring easily into print. Drawing from the methodologies of the history of the book, I compare 120 practical manuscripts with over 180 editions of printed practical books. This comparison reveals how incremental changes to the presentation and circulation of mundane knowledge transformed how English people saw themselves as readers, writers, and consumers of knowledge. Thus, this study contributes to a narrative that posits the printing press as an agent of change, even as it also reveals the continuity of everyday concerns that structured English life over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period of seismic social, political, religious, and cultural change.Chapter one offers a brief synthesis of scholarship on manuscript culture in England prior to 1400, as well as a survey of patterns of book ownership, literacy, and manuscript production in fifteenth-century England. Chapter two explores how late medieval readers interpreted icons and symbols in manuscript almanacs comprised almost wholly of pictures, and then examines how and why this visual language collapsed in a culture in print. Chapter three asks how readers understood the collection of useful knowledge in manuscript, and then follows the commercialization of this same practical knowledge in print. I argue that printers’ marketing techniques convinced readers of the novelty of centuries-old recipes, thereby encouraging them to search for new knowledge in the world. Finally, chapter four demonstrates that the margins of medieval practical manuscripts were ideal locations for early modern writers to experiment with informal scribal practices. I locate the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century men and women who left signatures, records, and bits of correspondence in their practical manuscripts and argue that these reader marks illustrate how the non-elite became accustomed to wielding the pen, and with it, the authority of the written word.Through the study of everyday habits of reading, writing, and collecting knowledge, this dissertation contributes to scholarly debates on the Reformation, the rise of the New Sciences, and the growth of the public sphere. It offers a timely early modern perspective on a question roiling our present-day politics: how is a society transformed when its citizens access the same old information in entirely new ways?