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Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England

2000; Iter Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.33137/rr.v36i3.8647

2293-7374

Kevin Sharpe, John Considine,

Scottish History and National Identity

Sir William Drake was not one of the more spectacular figures of his day.He inherited land, acquired a baronetcy, and sat in the Long Parliament; during the Commonwealth he spent some time abroad; after the Restoration he sat in Parliament again; he endowed almshouses, and is commemorated by a large funerary monument in his local church.One thing, however, makes him extraordinary.Thirty-seven of his commonplace books, fifteen of which are holographs and the rest written by amanuenses, survive in a single collection, now at University College, London, together with seventeen other miscellaneous volumes of his; other commonplace books, a journal, and some of his annotated printed books are to be found elsewhere in England and the United States.This may well be, as Kevin Sharpe says, "the greatest archival resource we have to chart how an early modern English gentleman read, and how reading shaped his mental universe" (p.73).The three central chapters of Reading Revolutions constitute an account of Drake's reading and thinking, based on this archive.In order to understand Drake before Sharpe's book, one would have had not only to visit five repositories on two continents, but also to read manuscript books whose chronological relation to each other is not always clear, and whose internal structure is fragmentary.The reproductions here suggest that they are not always written in a clear or pleasant hand.The richly detailed picture which Sharpe presents is, then, the result of a monumental labour of reading and synthesis.The labour was worthwhile: Drake's intellectual life, as presented in this book, is of the highest interest.He can be seen reading and re-reading an enormous variety of texts, from antiquity to his own century, with particular attention to wisdom-compilations and historical writing: from Tacitus to the Koran, from Bacon to Aesop, with a particularly important interest in Machiavelli.Sharpe shows how he formed and developed his own understanding of the nature of humankind and of political life on the basis of these readings, and comments in particular on the radicalism of some of his thought, and on his anticipations of the language and ideas of Thomas Hobbes.Drake's attention to current affairs was as intense and sustained, and as interesting, as his engagement with books and abstract ideas.It is, he wrote, "more profitable for a civil life to read the discourses that attend upon history than any philosophy whatsoever, as those of Machiavel, Polybius, Comines, Guicciardini and the rest" (p.123), and the emphasis on reading as profitable for "civil" -the sense here is of course "civic," or political -life is fundamental.This is all fascinating.Drake's archive was known but more or less unexplored before Sharpe, and Drake himself seemed like a very minor historical figure.Henceforward, historians and literary scholars concerned with seventeenth-century England will ignore Drake, and this book, at their peril.The distinction which I have just made between historians and literary scholars is a problematic one, and it accounts for the first and last chapters of Reading Revolutions.Sharpe is a historian of considerable eminence, who has