ABSTRACT
The early modern Sidneys were an unusually bookish family. Beginning with Sir Henry Sidney (1529-86), four generations of the Sidney family actively read, wrote, commented on, patronized the publication of, and collected books. They did so, furthermore, as a central element both of their personal identities and of their strongly developed sense of their family’s social and political roles. While some family members were quite scholarly, and all undoubtedly read to some extent for leisure, on the whole the Sidneys read for action. They used books to prepare themselves for service, to do things in the world by whatever means were available to them (different means, of course, for the women of the family than for the men). Many Sidneys were consequently multilingual, with a family tradition of strength in modern foreign languages: over the decades family members owned books in French, italian, Spanish, Portuguese, german, and Dutch as well as Latin and greek. in addition, for the Sidneys books were dynamic objects of social exchange: they urged reading lists on friends and family, copied manuscripts on request, and presented printed and manuscript books as gifts to people and to institutions. Few British families of this period display anything like the Sidneys’ sustained interest in and engagement with books-not only consistently down the generations, but widely within each generation as well.
