Early Modern Reading and the Imagined Self

Early modern humanist traditions and practices are generally associated with the rediscovery of the classics, which was made possible by a fresh impulse to search the archives for ancient manuscripts and by the sustained effort to transcribe, edit and annotate them for dissemination through the new medium of print. Accounts of this momentous shift towards more confidently secular models of education, statecraft and literary production have only recently begun to look beyond the exclusive elitism of the republic of white, European men of letters that it seemingly supported. Olson makes a pivotal intervention in this direction by drawing our attention to the ways in which the earliest printed Tudor editions of classical or classically informed texts, ranging from More’s Utopia to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, were in fact ‘upfront’ about the need to ‘recognize a wider reading public’ and took ‘seriously the task of seeing new readers’. Olson’s book is not only an important contribution to recent revisionary histories that aim to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum but also a timely and urgent appeal addressed to modern editors to emulate the efforts of their Tudor predecessors by challenging the ‘status of editing as a gate-keeping practice’. -- Sonia Massai, Sapienza, University of Rome