She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book, Reading Practice, happens to coincide with the end of the introduction to my fourth chapter, which follows natural knowledge that had once circulated in manuscript into print. On that page, I explain that the first printed medical recipe collections, almanacs, and agricultural manuals in England were filled with texts that were quite old, many of which had circulated in manuscript for centuries. I explain that printers who were working to stay afloat in a competitive, commercial print market developed strategies to sell these old texts and argue that these marketing techniques ended up shaping how readers thought about the authority and validity of natural knowledge.Visit Melissa Reynolds's website.
Amazingly, page 99 is a pretty excellent sampling of what readers can find in my book. It captures a central focus of Reading Practice, which is to track readers’ changing attitudes toward books filled with seemingly mundane knowledge as a means of understanding the broader development of a critical attitude toward authority and a curiosity about nature in early modern England.
If an interested reader were to look beyond page 99, they would find that Reading Practice explores how ordinary people living more than 500 years ago grew to accept the premise that books were useful tools within their daily lives. We take that premise for granted, but when books were expensive and written mostly in Latin, such a thought was impossible for most. I begin my examining the books that changed readers’ minds: “practical manuscripts” that circulated in England in the late 1300s and 1400s, containing medical recipes, agricultural directions, herbal knowledge, and the like, written in English for the first time. I show how readers’ interactions with these manuscripts helped them to trust not only books, but their own expertise, too. Then, I trace what happened when this knowledge was commercialized in print. I show that readers became central to the information economy of early modern England, as printers catered to their interests, and as readers in turn recognized their ability to evaluate knowledge for sale in English bookshops. Reading Practice illustrates how, for people living 500 years ago, engagement and analysis of mundane knowledge in quotidian books generated new attitudes toward authorities and toward the natural world.
--Marshal Zeringue
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