engleski

Evidence of Reading in the Past

Since its beginning as the field of scholarly research, the history of reading has faced the problem of finding representative evidence of reading in the past. Sources that document the reading practices of historical readers are often obscure, scanty, fragmentary and scattered. This paper takes a look at the most important among them, both those that offer a good insight into the reading habits peculiar to individual readers and those that record reading practices shared by communities of readers in a given cultural context, showing the possibilities, difficulties and challenges of using them in writing a history of reading. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that although all of these sources are imperfect and only to some extent reliable they can be quite revealing if historians of reading know how to use and interpret them.

book history research, history of reading, evidence of reading, historical reader, historical sources

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