Print and Continuity in Reading Practice

By Grace Murray

As the market for printed practical books in England expanded in the first half of the sixteenth century, a host of titles promised their readers something new. From herbals to husbandry manuals, these books advertised their novelty, promising not only ‘new matters’ but also new translations, additions, and corrections to previous editions. But as Melissa Reynolds shows in Reading Practice, with meticulous attention to multiple editions of long-running titles, these claims of novelty were initially much more about how old knowledge was organised for eager readers. In fact, many of these early titles were hardly new at all, and derived their content from the fifteenth-century manuscripts that occupy the first half of Reading Practice, which were themselves ‘read and reread well into the era of print’ (p. 175). In the 1520s, even as books like Richard Banckes’ herbal indexed and organised medieval medical recipes for ease of consultation, they hardly touched the recipes themselves.

The title page of the 1552 edition of Banckes’ herbal. Courtesy of the U. S. National Library of Medicine.
The title page of the 1552 edition of Banckes’ herbal. Courtesy of the U. S. National Library of Medicine.

Spanning over two centuries from 1375 to 1601, Reading Practice returns printed practical books to the ‘textual tradition’ (p. 199) of natural knowledge to which they belonged, making it possible to see continuity as well as change.

The tradition from which English practical books developed was at once local and transnational in scope, borrowing as readily from Middle English manuscripts as from continental sources. Reynolds’ database of 475 editions of printed practical books published in England between 1475 and 1600, which accompanies Reading Practice as an open-access digital appendix, will be of enormous value to anyone looking for trends and patterns in this sprawling genre. Chief among these is perhaps the change effected by the Stationers’ Company’s establishment of a system of licensure in 1557, which granted members of the guild rights to the printing of a text. The new system ‘made space for new and exciting knowledge to gain a foothold in a market no longer glutted with reprints of the same old material’ (p. 120), and yet it also pushed English printers to disavow older repositories of natural knowledge in favour of texts that promised that their advice had been ‘proved’ for modern readers.

The Copernican universe, in a later edition of Thomas Digges’ version of his father’s Prognostication Everlasting (1605). Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
The Copernican universe, in a later edition of Thomas Digges’ version of his father’s Prognostication Everlasting (1605). Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

At the same time, older genres continued to offer a safe veneer to test more radical ideas, as in the case of Thomas Digges’ 1576 edition of his father’s prognostication, in which diagrams of the Copernican and geocentric models of the universe sat side-by-side. As Reynolds argues, ‘English readers would make the final judgement about what to believe’ (p. 148).

Nowhere is this readerly responsibility more apparent than in the genre of ‘books of secrets’, which owed its popularity to Master Alexis of Piedmont’s Secreti, printed in Venice in 1555 and quickly translated for English readers in 1558. In England as in Italy, these books were often implied to draw from the unwritten oral traditions of poorer, illiterate women, tantalising their male readers with the danger of forbidden feminine secrets while at the same time sanitising that knowledge by drawing it into an orderly printed book. Reynolds reveals that ‘neither secrecy nor women’s knowledge were particularly stable categories’ (p. 162); it was up to readers to distinguish between them. Here, too, Reynolds observes a distinction between secrets in print and manuscript, as the latter became increasingly suspect post-Reformation in the context of witchcraft allegations and a distaste for superstition. And yet, all along, readers continued to engage with the centuries-old manuscripts that had once been the first port of call for understanding the world – even if it was only to obscure or obliterate recipes related to reproduction and fertility, as attested by several older manuscripts Reynolds examined that contain the marks of early modern readers.

These marks are a window into the personal relationship between reader and text. The final chapter of Reading Practice turns to several early modern readers of earlier manuscripts, among them Henry Dyngley, a Worcestershire gentleman of the mid-sixteenth century. A copious annotator of both printed books and manuscripts, Dyngley’s collection included British Library Royal MS 17 A.xxxii, a fifteenth-century medical text into which he copied some verses from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments for his children, ending with the couplet, ‘I leave you here a little book to look upon / to see your fathers face when he is dead and gone’ (p. 185). What Reynolds does so well is to place Dyngley into a history of reading practical texts in manuscript and print that bridges generations, looking back to the distant past as well as anticipating the rhetoric of ownership and control of nature that characterised England’s nascent imperialism. As he prepared to bequeath his collection to his children, and with it the textual bedrock of English natural knowledge, Dyngley registered that the long tradition of writing and reading practical books had come to shape how the English understood, interpreted, and sought to cultivate the world around them.

Grace Murray is a Lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, specialising in the history of reading in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is working on a monograph adapted from her PhD research at the University of York, which examines how early modern printed ‘how-to’ books anticipated and mitigated misreading. Following a doctoral fellowship on marginalia in the horticultural collections at the British Library and National Trust, she has also consulted on garden history for the Trust, and continues to research the relationship between reading and gardening in the early modern period.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Amanda Herbert (February 23, 2025). Print and Continuity in Reading Practice. The Recipes Project. Retrieved March 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13cy8


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