“studied for action”

Jardine, Lisa and Anthony Grafton. “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy.” Past and Present: 129 (Nov. 1990): 30-78. Available through JSTOR (subscription required):

This essay forms part of a larger, book-length project, which is intended to contribute to the historical understanding of the ways in which humanistically trained readers assimilated and responded to the classical heritage. But it seeks to go beyond the traditional, textual definition of this field to reconstruct the social, professional and personal contexts in which reading took place. Although the present study deals with a topic historians tend to label as “high culture,” it will be clear that we also intend it to be in dialogue with a body of recent publications on the history of reading and of the book. That work, although by no means homogeneous, broadly concerns itself with the production and circulation of printed texts, and with setting the activity of reading in its historical and cultural contexts, as well as with some of the social implications that result from a particular locating of reading in history.

Many thanks to Ian for the recommendation.

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