These words have rather haunted the writing of this essay. Revisiting some of Gillespie's essays on reading I have felt again the pleasure of encountering them for the first time and been refreshed by the extraordinary range and depth of his knowledge. I am afraid that the muddy steps I take here to explore the experience of reading in the early decades of the Reformation cannot do justice to the intellectual inspiration he has always offered. Nevertheless, this essay takes up the invitation of ‘Lukynge in haly bukes: Lectio in some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies’ to consider how the ‘horizon of expectation’ for English readers shifted in the earliest decades of the Reformation. As vernacular translations of the Bible found their way to more and more readers, some could be expected to possess ‘the conspectus and concordance-like knowledge of the Scriptures that came with the practice of the Divine Office in its fullest form’ that was missing among vernacular readers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, the increasing use of tables of contents and brief summaries in evangelical printing supplied this knowledge even to readers less diligent in biblical studies. Gillespie observed that in the late medieval period, ‘as new modes of use and academic techniques for handling books were applied to vernacular texts, the process of “lukynge in haly bukes” became more sophisticated’. This chapter considers the tensions that this could create between long-established habits of lay reading that were ‘more random and less systematic […] than lectio divina’ and the practices that humanist and evangelical writers now advocated for the reading of the Bible. As Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker remind us, an individual might belong to a ‘multiplicity of reading communities […] at any time’ and have ‘shifting affiliations and associations formed and reformed by the book’, which in turn would exert ‘contending’ forces ‘in forming reading habits and hermeneutic principles’.