Jardine & Grafton 1990

Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton. ""Studied for Action": How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy." Past & Present 129 (Nov. 1990), 30-78. Web.

• foundational for history of reading practices and marginalia studies: Jackson 2001, Knight 2013, Knight 2015, Stallybrass 2002, Sherman 2010, St Clair 2004, Blair 2010, Chartier 1994, further development of Grafton 1980
  • Note its remit: scholarly reading; classical reception; evidence of marginalia; case study
• 30 intervention: "reconstruct[ing] the social, professional and personal contexts in which reading took place."
• ["the activity of reading"]...EM readers did not passively receive but rather actively reinterpreted their texts, and so do we. But we intend to take that notion of activity in a strong senseL not just the energy which must be acknowledged as accompanying the intervention of the scholar/reader with his text, nor the cerebral effort involved in making the text the reader's own, but reading as intended to give rise to something else. We argue that scholarly reading...was always goal-oriented - an active, rather than a passive pursuit. It was conducted under conditions of strenuous attentiveness; it employed job-related equipment (both machinery [31] and techniques) designed for efficient absorption and processing of the matter read; it was normally carried out in the company of a colleague or student; and it was a public performance, rather than a private meditation, in its aims and character.
• 32 [summarizing how they build on Darnton 1982 and Chartier 1994] They have shown that factors as diverse as the typographical layout of a text, the physical circumstances under which it is read and the process by which the reader obtains it have a powerful effect on the reader's experience of the text itself.
• 33 secretaries (as Earl of Essex's) retained as a member of the household to read with his employer
• 35 Here we suggest that some Elizabethan great houses supported a recognizable class of scholar who performed exactly this function, acting less as advisers in the modern sense than as facilitators easing the difficult negotiations between modern needs and ancient texts.
  • how might these sociable reading practices have carried over into the office of Household Words? The parlor of GH Lewes and George Eliot?
• 36 Harvey's Livy: folio in sixes, Basle, 1555 (densely annotated during successive readings over more than 20 years)
  • Livy: Roman historian, his History of Rome covers early legends through to Augustus (he wrote during his reign)
  • this edition (copy?) seems to be a sammelbande, or perhaps just a scholarly edition: flanked by commentaries, instructions for reading history, etc.
• 37 Here [in a marginal note by Harvey] is an extremely precise reference. Just these three books, read through by Harvey and [Philip] Sidney, tete-a-tete, with an eye to political analysis, and "shortly before his embassy to Emperor Rudolph II." They were particularly interested in types of republic, in the protagonists' character and circumstances, and in the types of action. They deliberately ignored - as men of action perhaps should - the humanist commentaries.
• 40 [affordance of cross-referencing marginalia with more standard documents of history] Here we may note how the chance opportunity to collate the marginal notes of an individual known only as a reader (and thus labelled politically non-participant by later scholars) with a "letter of advice" from an individual known to be politically and diplomatically active seems to sharpen up "reading" into potential "advice", and provide a link between the absorption of information (as we tend to judge reading) and public practice.
• 41 These distinguished Elizabethans used Livy - and Harvey - to work out anew in debate the Roman relationship between morals and action - law and military engagement.
• 46 book wheel
• 48 The book-wheel and the centrifugal mode of reading it made possible amounted to an effective form of information retrieval - and that in a society where books were seen as offering powerful knowledge, and the reader who could focus the largest number of books on a problem or opportunity found therefor appear to have the advantage.
• 52 ...Harvey treats the relationship between university political theory and court political practices as reciprocal[.]
• 56 Harvey's methods not sui generis
• 59 There seems to be an interesting tension here, between the aspiration to find advice on tactics and strategems in such episodes, and Harvey's very evidence attraction to the stylistic and affective in such a speech. Once again, this contributes to our sense of the reader, Harvey, as an intermediary between text and its effect in practice: style and affectiveness are textual catalysts; the occasions for their recall may be those on which oratory does indeed provoke, and alters the course of events.
  • so poetry might not make anything happen, but classical history does
  • 60 "virtuouso oratory as an integral part of strategy" (confirming Machiavelli in practice)
• 74 Harvey's mode of reading, in fact, was precisely the sort of serious political discourse that his authoritative contemporaries esteemed (and employed university men for). And we suggest that though H did not succeed as completely as he hoped, his humanism was not at fault.
• 75 Harvey's Livy and its companions on the wheel seem to show, when considered together, a coherent programme to master the whole world of learning and make it readily usable in political action. This is no coincidence or aberration; Harvey's intellectual ambitions in fact embraced the mapping of the whole intellectual landscape of his time[.]