Elspeth Jajdelska boldly reconstructs a history of reading, arguing that seventeenth-century readers approached written and printed texts not as utterances existing independent of speech, but as representations of speech: scripts for future speech, records of past speech, or proxies for the author’s speech. In underscoring the centrality of oral performance culture to Renaissance reading practices, this is a valuable revision of Walter Ong’s influential yet flawed paradigm of orality and literacy as discontinuous, opposing technologies. Countering the present-day assumption that written and printed texts are objects in their own right, Jajdelska historicizes the concept of a text by discussing “unspoken assumptions about speech, writing and performance” (xvii).

Tacit beliefs are difficult to confirm, as Jajdelska admits in her introduction, and the uneven evidence she offers supports her claims with varying degrees of success. Anthropologist Richard Bauman’s theory of performativity, based on the study of verbal art as performance in folklore contexts, underpins the book’s hypothesis that Renaissance readers viewed written and printed texts as “traces, props or records of [oral] performances” (xi). This idea is developed in chapter 1 through the analysis of four disparate pieces of textual evidence, some of which derive entirely from secondary literature, including the work of William H. Sherman and Heidi Brayman Hackel. Jajdelska argues that much as African message beads are repositories for oral texts, Renaissance writing and printing may be viewed as beginning the process of “entextualization; extracting the text from one interactional setting and freezing it in preparation for adaptation to, and reuse in, another” (8). Readers’ practices of commonplacing and annotation not only decontextualize by removing “deictic elements—linguistic features which locate the speaker in space and time,” but also prepare the text for entextualization, for performance in a future context (11). This theoretical framework suggests new ways to understand the function of Renaissance writing and print, showing “how far reading was the servant of speech, and how far new written texts were simply the records of or scripts for that speech” (18).

The grand narrative that Jajdelska tells is that of the gradual division of print decorum and speech decorum through the seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century. Key to this history is the idea that during the seventeenth century, due to small urban populations and intense social stratification, written or printed texts primarily circulated in small, face-to-face networks. Thus authors were as concerned with the willful misreading of potential enemies and competitors as they were with the response of stranger readers. Rank and social hierarchy guided print decorum as much as they guided speech decorum. In chapter 2, Jajdelska rightly shows that contrary to the overwhelming scholarly interest in the “erosion, evasion, breach or modification” of social rules regarding rank and speech during the early modern period, such rules were in fact much more likely to be observed and continued (35). Chapters 3 and 4 pursue this proposition by showing how seventeenth-century readers like Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn used “spoken propriety” as a criterion to evaluate written and printed texts (76), and how authors, especially women authors, used paratextual remarks to navigate social rules about rank, genre, and audience. In the final three chapters, Jajdelska argues that despite the weakening force of social network ties, rank continued to influence the experience of reading in the first half of the eighteenth century. To reveal how “disparate ranks across the nation may have had distinct reader identities,” in chapter 6 Jajdelska examines different reader responses to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (147). In the final chapter, she posits that, as an answer to more open networks and the divorce of print from speech norms, eighteenth-century readers and writers created “an [implicit] model context for text comprehension, one in which authors were performers to a notional ‘common’ reader, while an expert critic reader observed them” (177).

In theorizing about model contexts and tacit assumptions, Jajdelska’s argumentation occasionally depends on conjecture and qualifying statements; at times, one can’t help but wish for more substantial bodies of evidence. Still, this book presents a new, exciting framework for understanding the meaning of texts in the period, and should be of interest to not only Renaissance scholars, but also historians of reading, communication, and media.