In these early times, publishing and reading might have carried a health warning. Norton New York and London, 1995) shows that the authorities, fully in awe of the power of the word, worked themselves into frenzies about books, burning dummy tomes and imprisoning booksellers. Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (W.W. We can see where Cranmer was coming from: just like Carlo Ginzburg’s Mennochio the Miller, in The Cheese and the Worms (Routledge & Kegan Paul London, 1980), those who could read might develop critical, political views or levelling tendencies. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Cranmer had ‘proposed to confiscate heretical texts and prosecute bible readers’ and, as Rose informs us, ‘at least twenty people were burned for discussing heresy between 1539 to 1546’. For long periods, reading, like publishing, could be a dangerous business. The enormously energetic working-class reading cultures occupying the core of Jonathan Rose’s magnificent study grew up from rather unpromising roots.
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