The Communion of the Book

Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading

David Williams

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780228014690
• eBook ISBN: 9780228015864
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The modern world was not created by the civilization of Renaissance Italy, the advent of the printing press, or the marriage restrictions imposed by the medieval church. Rather, it was widespread reading that brought about most of the cognitive, psychological, and social changes that we recognize as peculiarly modern.

David Williams combines book and communications history with readings of major works by Petrarch, Bruni, Valla, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Foxe, and Milton to argue that expanding literacy in the Renaissance was the impetus for modern civilization, turning a culture of arid logic and religious ceremonialism into a world of individual readers who discovered a new form of communion in the act of reading. It was not the theologians Luther and Calvin who first taught readers to become what they read, but the biblical philologist Erasmus, who encountered the divine presence on every page of the gospels. From this sacramental form of reading came other modes of humanist reading, particularly in law, history, and classics, leading to the birth of the nation-state. As literacy rates rose, readers of all backgrounds gained and embodied the distinctly modern values of liberty, free speech, toleration, individualism, self-determination, and democratic institutions. Communion and community were linked, performed in novel ways through revolutionary forms of reading.

In this conclusion to a quartet of books on media change, Williams makes a compelling case for readers and acts of reading as the true drivers of social, political, and cultural modernity – and for digital media as its looming nemesis.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prolegomenon to a History of Reading
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Archival Sources
• Introduction: The State as a Work of Art
• 1 A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution?
• 2 Bread, Blood, and Paper: The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis
• 3 Philological Reading: The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech
• 4 Sacramental Reading: Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel
• 5 Juridical Reading: John Lilburneand the Contradictions of English Law
• 6 Historiographical Reading: The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow
• 7 Classical Reading: Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy
• 8 The Communion of the Book: A Dialectic of Presence and Absence
• Works Cited
• Index