ABSTRACT
Gabriel Harvey, the Tudor humanist and teacher, has been revealed as Livy’s adept and enormously well-informed admirer. Indeed for the early modern period it has proved possible to exploit handwritten additions to printed books so as to shed unprecedented light upon the inner thoughts of several English readers. Horace Walpole reading seems to have focused in particular upon what he interpreted as Lord Hailes’s cravenness and credulity, political deficiency that he viewed not merely as incidental but actually as a worryingly characteristic feature of Scottish authorship in general. Yet the practice actually reveals more than merely willing involvement of readers, as Charles Lamb suggested, in a private conversation with the author. It also provides clear proof of utter determination of some readers either to exploit or to subvert the authority of printed text for their own purposes.
