Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print

Through portraits of readers and their responses to texts, Reading Practice reconstructs the contours of the knowledge economy that shaped medicine and science in early modern England.

Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read wh...