Click here to pre-order Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (coming August 2024) from The University of Chicago Press.

Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print tells the story of how ordinary English people grew comfortable acting as adjudicators of natural knowledge through interactions with hundreds of manuscripts and printed books: almanacs, medical recipe collections, herbals, and prognostications. These were the books English people read from around the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century when they wanted to attend to their health, manage the unpredictability of illness, or understand their place in the divinely-created universe. Before 1375 or so, this corpus of natural knowledge had largely circulated among monks or university clerics who could read the Latin in which most medieval medicine and science was written. To be sure, ordinary people outside the church tended wounds and watched the stars just as often as did learned monks, but their knowledge (though we would call it experiential or observational) was afforded very little status within medieval culture. Around the year 1400, however, manuscripts steadily got less expensive just as valued medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English. What resulted was a wholesale transformation in how the English laity accessed and experienced knowledge about the natural world.

Over the course of the fifteenth century, the English created hundreds of manuscripts filled with texts that guided them through the practices of healing, tending crops, making medicines, or forecasting the weather. These “practical manuscripts,” as I call them, invited English readers into a very old and learned conversation. In these books, Hippocrates and Galen weren’t distant authorities whose word was law; they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered when it suited a manuscript compiler or printer’s needs. English readers grew confident assessing and critiquing this ancient knowledge in the margins of fifteenth-century manuscript remedy collections. After William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476, English printers eagerly mined fifteenth-century manuscript collections for popular medical recipes or herbal remedies that they would publish, over and over again, throughout the sixteenth century. Whereas printers in France or Germany or Italy published more Latin books than vernacular ones in the early decades of print, the opposite was the case in England. English printers’ preference for the vernacular (to include vernacular medicine and science) kept England on the periphery of learned European medical culture, but at the same time, it put non-elite readers at the center of debates about the body, health, and the natural world within England. In the sixteenth-century bookshops around St. Paul’s Cathedral, English readers made choices about which of the dozens of almanacs, recipe books, herbals, or prognostications to purchase and read. Here, too, they were assessing and evaluating knowledge claims: some of them ancient, some of them newly invented by savvy publishers hoping to sell more books.

Reading Practice argues that English readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge, gradually, in everyday interactions with run-of-the-mill books. When truly innovative, world-changing natural knowledge did begin to appear in Elizabethan bookshops–in books that revealed the remarkable diversity of plant species across the globe, in diagrams that offered a glimpse of the interior of the human body, or in simple illustrations that altered the shape of the universe—-English readers were primed to train their analytical acumen on those practical books, too. But so, too, did centuries of interactions with English books and manuscripts bolster a rising tide of nationalistic sentiment among these same readers.

Reading Practice argues that in the everyday practices of reading, editing, amending, and even censoring practical books, English people developed the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for the emergence of the phenomenon we now call the scientific revolution.