ABSTRACT
Manuscript and printed summaries claimed explicitly what was obvious to any observer: this Hieroglyphicall Watch of Prague was a prophecy, relating the fate slated to befall each year. As Mead's encounter with the Hieroglyphicall Watch suggests, some of the most interesting problems posed by early Stuart scribal texts relate to reception and to the history of reading. Prophecies like the Hieroglyphicall Watch belong to a class of what people might call problem texts. Problem texts, and the torturous reading practices they engendered, frustrate commonplace assumptions about political discourse. Historians of political thought and discourse rarely dwell on how the texts they study were read. This is partly because many of the theoretical models for understanding early modern political texts from speech act theory to political culture to the public sphere tend to treat texts as surrogates for speech and to assume that the paradigmatic function of speech is to cause a meeting of the minds between speaker and listener.
