Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2020 European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) award for Literatures in the English Language.

Overview

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. Indeed, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.

Full Product Details

9780192882240

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Reviews

This is a wide-ranging, intriguing study that, by its very focus on the seemingly irrecoverable voices of the past, demonstrates the vital importance of early modern literature to the present time ... Voices and Books in the English Renaissance picks up on a still vital discussion, and, more importantly, transforms it in doing so. * Per Sivefors, The Spenser Review * Highly commended by the DeLong Book History Prize: Richards takes the reader on an intriguing journey in search of the voice within the text, hunting for vocal cues and instances of shared readings which turned books into performance events. Her fascinating and highly original study of the textual soundscapes of the English Reformation and Renaissance remind us that print is not exclusively a visual medium ... After Richards, book historians can no longer neglect the persistent presence of the voice within the culture of print. We have often misheard Renaissance printed books, Jennifer Richards writes in the introduction to Voices and Books in English Renaissance: A New History of Reading, and the achievement of her superb book is to show us how we might learn to listen. ... Richards has written a remarkably erudite, keenly perceptive, and compellingly argued history of voice and experience, one that will teach even the most veteran student of early modern print culture to see the field in a new way. * Samuel Fallon, Style * The principles of vocal delivery and the attention to what printed books can tell us about that can greatly enhance both the reading pleasure of early modern books and our understanding of literate culture of the time. * Margaret J. Oakes, Seventeenth-Century News * Richards' extraordinarily resourceful book, the wealth of examples she draws on, and the detailed attention she gives to the presence of 'vocality' that they demonstrate, makes it a very important intervention in the advancement of our understanding of the history of early modern reading practices. Her approach stretches across a range of disciplines, and her arguments, developed in an admirably collegiate tone, throw down a gauntlet to those historians of the book who do not progress much beyond historical description. Jennifer Richards' book will be indispensable for anyone interested in the history of early modern reading, and the controversies she launches will occupy scholars for some time to come. * John Drakakis, Notes and Queries * Voices and Books is a valuable work not just because of its important intervention in the longstanding commonplace that Tudor England accelerated a cultural transition from orality to literacy via print [...]. The case that Richards mounts across her thematic chapters and case studies is also compelling, and lends weight to her argument that, across a range of texts and in a broad span of milieus, 'the oral-aural context of reading in this period produced voice- or performance-aware silent readers as well as readers who literally animated the page with their breath. * Edward Smith, The Year's Work in English Studies * Jennifer Richards' new study is a belated but most welcome intervention into a discussion initiated in the twentieth century through ground-breaking studies by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong on concepts like 'orality' and 'print culture'... Voices and Books in the English Renaissance picks up on a still vital discussion, and, more importantly, transforms it in doing so. * Per Sivefors, Spenser Review * Jennifer Richards's excellent Voices and Books in the English Renaissance challenges the view of early modern books as objects for quiet use...Richards shows conclusively the centrality of the voice to Renaissance education. * Irina Dumitrescu, London Review of Books * Voices and Books is a deeply learned, wide-ranging, and imaginative book that should shift the way we not only read but hear early modern texts. * Elizabeth Hanson, Review of English Studies * Richards sees the need to develop a new history of reading altogether, one that will revolutionise how we teach and think about Renaissance literature and its relevance to the present day. The central message that Voices and Books successfully communicates is that the emerging print culture of the English Renaissance did not silence readers but in fact facilitated oral reading. * Penelope Gouk, Renaissance Studies *

Author Information

Jennifer Richards is the Joseph Cowen Chair of English Literature, Newcastle University and the Director of Newcastle University's Humanities Research Institute. She is the author of several books and many articles, including Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (2003) and Rhetoric: A New Critical Idiom (2007). She is a General Editor of The Complete Work of Thomas Nashe and the lead on The Thomas Nashe Project.

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