Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading

Abstract

First paragraph: In her book Literacy and Orality: Composition, Performance and Transmission (2018) the cultural anthropologist Ruth Finnegan challenges the idea that ‘literary forms [are] sometimes said to go with particular forms of society’, and she associates the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong with an essentialist ‘binary typology’ dependent upon preserving a fundamental historical distinction between ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’. Jennifer Richards’ new book, with its insistence upon ‘voices’ and subtitled ‘A New History of Reading’ takes to heart Finnegan’s observation that the two categories of speaking and writing are fundamentally trans-historical and have always been ‘mixed’ in practice. This is substantially, though not entirely, the view that cultural anthropologist Jack Goody subscribes to in part, although his suggestion that ‘a new means of communication does not replace the earlier (except in certain limited spheres); it adds to it and alters it’, (Myth, Ritual and The Oral (2010) p.155) offers a crucial modification.