Reading revelations: prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain

The histories of reading and the book have largely been written in two, very different, ways. Early research concentrated on the long durée of publications and reading habits – on the shift in the quantities, materials and genres of books over several centuries, and on the move from the intensive study of a few titles to the extensive reading of a myriad of print. Changes in habits of reading, that is, have been viewed as changes in the types and availability of books: we write of reading revolutions effected by print, the penny pamphlet or the novel. Alternatively, specialized case studies have focused on the reading habits of particular individuals who brought to the often familiar books of their culture a radical new hermeneutics which was sometimes personal, as with Menocchio the Friulian miller of Carlo Ginzburg's study, and sometimes, as with Jean Ranson, the mark of shifting cultural sensibilities, in this case what we characterize as Romanticism. What neither approach offers is an understanding of how books with a continuous history were read, interpreted and deployed in different communities and in a variety of very different and changing circumstances over long historical periods. What, in other words, did it mean to read the same texts – the classics, Scripture, legal treatise or fable – through the upheavals of Reformation, Civil War, Hanoverian Succession, Scientific Revolution and Romantic movement?