This book charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts in early modern England.

List of illustrations; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker; Part I. The Material Text: 1. Errata: print, politics, and poetry in early modern England Seth Lerer; 2. Abandoning the capital in eighteenth-century London Richard Wendorf; Part II. Reading as Politics: 3. 'Boasting of silence': women readers and the patriarchal state Heidi Brayman Hackel; 4. Reading revelations: prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain Kevin Sharpe; Part III. Print, Politics and Performance: 5. Performances and playbooks: the closing of the theatres and the politics of drama David Scott Kastan; 6. Irrational, impractical and unprofitable: reading the news in seventeenth-century Britain Joad Raymond; Part IV. Reading Physiologies: 7. Reading bodies Michael Shoenfeldt; 8. Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society Adrian Johns; Part V. Reading Texts in Time: 9. Martial, Jonson and the assertion of plagiarism Joseph Loewenstein; 10. The constitution of opinion and the pacification of reading Steven N. Zwicker; 11. Cato's retreat: fabula, historia and the question of constitutionalism in Mr Locke's anonymous Essay on Government Kirsie M. McClure; Index.