This chapter concerns Lucian’s presentation of the contemporary display of literate knowledge and the practice of criticism and scholarship. That presentation is often obviously satirical, but Lucian’s tone and purpose also often remain elusive; Lucian’s voice is never easy to capture. Examples include Lucian’s account of the art of reading in On the Ignorant Book-Collector, and the posturing philosophers and ignorant grammarians of the Symposium; this latter case illustrates how Lucian’s concern with ‘the culture of criticism’ is always part of the ever-present negotiation with classical models which is a hallmark of his work, as of any major figure of the Second Sophistic. The same is true of the satire on Atticism in Lexiphanes. The final part of the chapter considers Lucian’s presentation of artistic technai, whether that be that art of writing history or the treatise on pantomime, On the Dance.

In its broadest sense, book history is concerned with all the media – electronic, printed, handwritten, oral – in which dictionaries have been preserved and circulated. Lexicography began at a particular point in the development of the book, and many topics in the global history of lexicography are book-historical topics. One of the most fundamental of these is the distinction, seen in western and non-western traditions alike, between dictionaries which are made to support ready reference, and dictionaries which are made to support slower, more thorough, study. Another is the distinction between the dictionary text as a single entity, and the body of lexicographical material as a repertoire from which different selections can be made on different occasions. Another is the dependence of the textual structure of the dictionary as we know it on the physical structure of the codex (as opposed to scrolls, clay or wooden tablets, and other media). These topics are of evident continuing relevance to the compilers, publishers, and users of dictionaries in electronic form.

This chapter examines how reading – and sharing and discussing and debating – libels brought early modern people together as publics. Following the conjoined careers of libels and talk about libels, it sketches the interpretive practices that characterized their circulation across manuscript, print, and performance. The chapter begins with a small but representative slice of the scribal archive to illustrate how libels spread and were read. Its sources include Francis Bacon’s government white papers, a poem by King James, and two libels bearing annotations – the first in the hand of Robert Cecil, the second by an anonymous copyist – that have received virtually no attention. The remainder of the chapter turns to a different kind of evidence: fictional representations of reading. It successively considers Leicester’s Commonwealth – an anonymous Catholic prose tract printed in 1584 – and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599). Both the pamphlet and the play self-reflexively train their audiences in the art of interpreting libels. Taken together, this chapter’s eclectic archive maps the networks of physical and discursive spaces that made up the early modern public sphere.

In addition to serving as instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, commonplace books helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. During the eighteenth century, they were a perfect tool for making reading truly “useful.” Inherently idiosyncratic, the evidence from commonplace books is difficult to generalize; nevertheless, they capture the moment when readers appropriated Enlightenment ideas to address their own concerns. This chapter focuses on Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books to track his thinking about race and slavery as well as religion. Initially motivated by the need to learn about plantation management, his reading expanded from planters manuals to works that both promoted and challenged theories of racial difference, urged reform of the institution of slavery, and contained dire warnings of slave rebellions. Thistlewood’s readings on religion combined a deep skepticism of Christian orthodoxy with anxieties about divine justice and a search for personal transcendence, which culminated in his enthusiastic approval of the deism expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.

Publications were the most important links to Enlightenment intellectual culture across the Atlantic World. Jamaicans acquired publications in quantity despite the difficulty and expense, challenging the colonial reputation of philistinism. The trade in books and periodicals was connected to a commercial revolution that brought a variety of cultural commodities—musical instruments, telescopes, globes, etc.—to colonial and metropolitan doorsteps. These objects helped assert their owners’ gentility: a wealthy planter might house his collection in a suitably dignified library, but a Kingston businessman could showcase his modest collection in a mahogany bookcase, and a merchant based in a small coastal town could increase his intellectual capital by borrowing reading material from neighbors and friends. Evidence drawn from a variety of sources—advertisements for books and book furnishings; book orders and library inventories; accounts of borrowing and lending—show that Jamaican readers could satisfy a desire for everything from the classics of Antiquity to now-canonical Enlightenment works, from sentimental and scurrilous novels to popularizing works of science and practical how-to treatises.

The approach to reading of Robert Long, brother of Edward Long, who authored The History of Jamaica (1774), was very different from Thomas Thistlewood’s, the subject of the preceding chapter. Yet Robert explored the same themes – race and slavery, religion – in his unpublished “Miscellaneous Reflections.” Like Thistlewood’s commonplace books, his reflections show that eighteenth-century readers were hardly passive vessels waiting to be filled with enlightened ideas. Their divergent readings of the widely influential Montesquieu prove that Caribbean colonists could read selectively, critically, sometimes opportunistically, even perversely. Robert’s manuscript notes also reveal an impatient and opinionated reader obsessed with the social dictates of “politeness.” Unlike Thistlewood, he primarily relied on his own experience as a planter to manage the enslaved workers on his Lucky Valley Estate, which also shaped his judgments of their intellectual and moral capacities. Like Thistlewood, he was critical of Christian orthodoxy, anxious for the fate of his soul in the face of divine justice, and restlessly sought personal transcendence.

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans had as much access to published materials as they desired whether through purchase from local merchants or metropolitan booksellers, orders through factors in England, or borrowing from friends. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

Part III, “Tristram Shandy in the Tropics: or, Reading Enlightenment in Jamaica,” begins with vignettes that demonstrate how acquiring publications was as important for Jamaicans as it was for British people of the metropole and North America and that they did so for similar reasons. Part III thus addresses a significant lacuna in the histories of the book and reading, vigorous fields in European and early American Enlightenment studies. As in Parts I and II, Part III shows the continuity in a colonial context of metropolitan intellectual practices and their adaptation by colonists to suit their needs, interests, and purposes. It begins with an impressionistic survey of reading on the island that explores what publications colonists secured and how they did so. It then delves into the meaning of reading for two Jamaicans, the ex-overseer Thomas Thistlewood and the planter Robert Long, by focusing on two themes: race and slavery, and religion. While the practices of these two readers cannot be generalized to all Jamaican readers, they demonstrate how colonial readers took possession of Enlightenment through reading and suggest how their reading was informed by personal experience, social status, intellectual, and even spiritual aspirations.

Giovanni Baptista Morgagni (1682–1771), Professor of Anatomy at Padua, produced the most important studies in the eighteenth century on the De Medicina of the Roman encyclopediast A. Cornelius Celsus.  Morgagni’s intensive reading of Celsus combined his own medical experience with philological emendation.  Morgagni contextualized Celsus’ text within a theoretical framework of an empirically ordered transhistorical investigation of the structure, function, and pathology of the human body.  Here ancient and modern disciplinary authorities engaged with the same evidence available to the senses.  Morgagni’s argument in part contrasted Celsus’ humoralist evidence that bladder stones originate in the substance of the urine with Friedrich Hoffmann’s (1660–1742) argument that bladder stones originate in the iatromechanist action of the kidneys.  Morgagni’s emendations continue to mark our own contemporary editions of Celsus’ Latin text.

Charles Lamb spent two periods working at the library of the British Museum, in 1804–1807 and 1826–1827, as preparation for a volume of extracts from old plays in the Garrick collection entitled Specimens of English Dramatick Poets (published 1808) and latterly a series of contributions based on the same collection that appeared in William Hone’s Table Book (1827). In the roughly twenty years separating these two periods both the library itself and Lamb’s working life changed significantly, Lamb having left the employment in the East India Office to become a ‘superannuated man’ in 1825. This chapter examines these changes in the context of the emergence of scientific and literary Institutions in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In tandem with the British Museum, the libraries of these Institutions facilitated the emergence of institutionalized reading or professional literary ‘research’, with long-term implications for the emerging literary field in the Romantic period. Lamb’s two sojourns working on the Garrick plays offer a perspective from which to gauge diversification in reading practices in the early nineteenth century, who could read in institutional contexts, and what, ultimately, such reading might be for.

Chapter 5 examines in the 1745 Jacobite Rising in the context of the expansion of the periodical press and the print marketplace in the mid-eighteenth century. Information about the events of the 1745 Rising was made available to readers in a more continuous and a more pervasive way than during the 1715 Rising. The chapter explores how this expanding circulation of information prompted greater concern not just about the trustworthiness of the genres of the newspaper and the political pamphlet but also about how citizens were consuming information. It next focuses on three genres of printed works produced after the Battle of Culloden (1746) that reworked newspaper reports into their narratives: accounts of the trials and executions of the rebels, “Chevalier” or “Pretender” narratives about the escape of Charles Edward Stuart, and popular histories. With their conscious and unconscious intertextual borrowings, these printed works, like those of the 1715 Rising, inscribe the cultural memory of the 1745 as a series of complicated knots of memory.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.