ABSTRACT
If God had inscribed the world, ‘reading’ was inseparable from Reformation. Evangelical preachers enjoined their congregations to read the printed Word of God before the hearth, in the workshop, daily, enlivening the ties of kinship and labour. In their widely disseminated autobiographies, themselves texts for reading, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola narrated nding models of piety through reading the lives of saints. ‘Reading’ encompassed many relationships between texts and persons. Psalters, books of hours, liturgies, bibles, treatises, explications, paraphrases, commentaries, sermons and dialogues circulated as printed codices, each materially structured, many containing textual directives as to the particular way that codex was to be used. Earlier practices abided. Virginia Reinburg has detailed a complex interplay between books of hours and their readers: reading anchored in the annual, weekly and daily rhythms of the liturgy, which in that temporal setting became prayer – words read and repeated within the temporal cycles of divine revelation and holy lives, binding object, person and God in words murmured with bent head.6 As with missals, breviaries and antiphonies – ancient liturgical texts – the reader entered the text at a place determined by the time of year, week and day, liturgy setting not simply the time of reading and the text, but also the cadence. Walter Melion has explicated many dierent engagements with the printed page and printed words, from the Catenae, which lead the eye in a meditative chain of words rendered visually as a curling line on a page, to the layered interplay of printed word and engraved representation of Mary.7 Many books in the sixteenth century were thus not read from front to back, cover to cover. With many, the printed object was a site organized by time more than space – they provided on their own pages the link to a temporal structure outside the text, embedding their readings in liturgical cycles.
