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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 13, 2012
A well-written and intelligently skeptical examination of the history of reading and writing in the Western world. Lyons works to better contextualize the use of common evidence like the ability of people to sign legal documents and the numbers of vernacular Bibles in circulation. For example, he points out that since people learned to read before they learned to write (and many, especially women, never learned to write at all), using signatures as a sign of literacy ends up overestimating the number of people who could write and underestimates the number who could read.
Lyons also tries to show how over-simplified some historians' conclusions have been--Latin didn't disappear quite as rapidly as sometimes thought, nationalist feeling could be spread orally as well as in print, and print did not "stabilize" the text--this stability, when it came, was culturally produced by a community of writers, printers, etc.
For such a short work, he manages to examine and deconstruct a large number of myths, in addition to ones already mentioned that the coming of print was a "revolution," that print "caused" the Protestant Reformation, that readers moved from "intensive" to "extensive" styles of reading, etc.
Lyons also tries to show how over-simplified some historians' conclusions have been--Latin didn't disappear quite as rapidly as sometimes thought, nationalist feeling could be spread orally as well as in print, and print did not "stabilize" the text--this stability, when it came, was culturally produced by a community of writers, printers, etc.
For such a short work, he manages to examine and deconstruct a large number of myths, in addition to ones already mentioned that the coming of print was a "revolution," that print "caused" the Protestant Reformation, that readers moved from "intensive" to "extensive" styles of reading, etc.
October 22, 2012
Lyons offers an enjoyable and broad look at how reading and the culture of books developed in Europe with a particular focus on Britain, France and Germany. The scope is very broad for a fairly short book; there is not a lot of depth offered despite a variety of incident and detail. Would have appreciated a look beyond the three big nations or more detail on some periods. I was particularly looking for information about how these readers obtained their books and found this lacking. Still, an enjoyable overview with interesting details.
October 19, 2012
What a fantastic book!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews