Voices and Books in Early Modern England, 1500-1800

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The aim of this project is to establish a network of early modern scholars (1500-1800) and partners to explore new approaches to the history of reading that take account of how books were voiced and heard. We want to establish the ubiquity of this practice, and in order to do so will explore together the kind of evidence and research methods that might serve this end. Our aims are also interpretive. We will explore how reading aloud relates to other kinds of orality, what it can tell us about the civic life of the book in early modern culture (and in our own time too), and how awareness of performance might inform our reading of early modern writing today. We will work with non-HEI Partners who are committed to the benefits of Reading Aloud today with a view to enhancing their practice, adding a historical dimension to this activity and also increasing knowledge of early modern writings in the community, while also enhancing our understanding of the experience of reading aloud and listening. We are committed to exploring collaborative ways of working that will sustain the network into the future, after the completion of scheduled activities. There is burgeoning interest in 'reading aloud' especially among literary historians of the eighteenth century. Although it is often acknowledged that Renaissance books were routinely read aloud too, we know relatively little about this. Oral reading is not embedded as an assumption in existing scholarship. On the contrary, over the last two decades it is the studious and usually silent male reader, pen in hand, who has been placed centre stage. At the same time, 'reading aloud' is usually understood rather narrowly, to involve the speaking voice only whereas we include 'singing' from books too. Plus, the history of reading has developed to date with lone scholars working, very often, on a specific period and in their discipline. So the history of reading *aloud* in the sixteenth / seventeenth centuries and the eighteenth century is developing differently. There hasn't been the pooling of disciplinary expertise to establish the evidence and methods needed to generate a confident research area. This is despite the fact that we understand that this was the common experience of the book, 1500-1800.This project sets out to address all of these issues, encouraging scholars to share methods, resources and histories. It will explore singing from books as a form of reading aloud, helping musicologists to understand how the interpretation of early modern musical texts belongs to the history of reading; it will help literary scholars and historians to use musical resources to explore the sociability of non-musical as well as musical performance; it will help literary scholars and musicologists to work with and understand the methods being developed by linguists to recover the historical voice. It will also bring scholars from all of these disciplines into contact with the recent research of anthropologists working on non-European oral cultures, and with non-HEI partners who have an interest in and commitment to the benefits of 'shared reading' or 'public reading'. We will explore together with our non-HEI partners ways of valuing and making meaningful today texts that were written to be read aloud many centuries ago. We will consider how awareness of this reading experience, then and now, might inform, say, scholarly editing for future generations, as well as the the way we read all kinds of earlier literatures as scholarly as well as simply interested readers.