Christopher Brennan's Reading

A little more than a decade ago, in a lecture to the Bibliographical Society of America, Anthony Grafton underlined the fact that the history of reading had become, in his word, 'hot'. Yet, for all its trendiness, the subject was 'not new at all - at least in the world of manuscript scholarship'. As a student of the classical philology of the Renaissance, Grafton was well aware of the paradox. It is a contradiction that is inherent in the case of Brennan. Trying to set the evidence for the Australian's reading practices in their context involves confronting these difficulties and taking account of the research fashions of recent decades in the wider field of book history. Consequently a brief and schematic view of the ways in which the exploration of book use has evolved must precede a characterization of the various approaches adopted by the author of Poems (1913) in dealing with material in his own library or in others' collections. If, in the process, it becomes apparent that Brennan studies had some lessons - entirely unheeded - for book historians in the other hemisphere, that will need to be put down to a universal disinclination to pursue meaningful comparisons across languages and cultures even when they are pertinent.