A book? O rare one!
Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment
Nobler than that it covers: let thy effects
So follow, to be most unlike our courtiers,
As good as promise.
Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 5.4.
A beggar’s book
Outworths a noble’s blood.
Shakespeare, Henry VIII, 1.1.
- 1 This paper is an exploratory preface to a research project based on an enduring interest in books a (...)
- 2 The coincidence and opposition between essence and appearance are alternatively invoked/assumed in (...)
- 3 Charles Knox Pooler, editor of the Arden First Series Henry VIII, glosses: “A beggarly scholar has (...)
- 4 This obvious perception runs throughout the centuries. As Brian Cummings writes, “[t]he conceptual (...)
1The epigraphs above both refer to one aspect of the book which I would like to recall at the outset of these reflections on unexpected or “uncommon” readers of literary texts in early modernity, and on what microhistory as a critical lens, in Carlo Ginzburg’s acceptation and practice, and taking its implications to their utmost consequences, can contribute to my approach to the history of the book.1 The congruence invoked in Cymbeline between the richesse of the book’s outer aspect and its content, revealing the anxiety of a possible discrepancy between appearance (the book as object) and essence (the argument and ideas of the text), shows an awareness that, when dealing with book-objects, we are always dealing with more than just material items.2 The acknowledgment in Henry VIII that the worth of a book is higher than the worth of “a noble’s blood” similarly proves that “book” is not to be understood as the material item alone.3 The “effects” mentioned in one quote and the reference to “beggar” and “noble” in the other are evidence that the value and preciousness of a book lie in the outcomes of its encounter with readers. The awareness of the complexity of the book-object in Shakespeare’s lines is by no means exclusive to the early modern period. In states of emergency at the heart of Europe in more recent times, even when books were seen as paper just good for burning, their textual and ideal dimensions could hardly be suppressed. In Le rose di Sarajevo, his latest play, Erri De Luca reports how, in late twentieth-century Sarajevo, the poet Izet Sarajilic chose to burn books from his library in order to get through the cold winters of the Bosnian war. However precious to their owner, the books were turned into a warming bonfire for survival. Yet their ideal being resisted annihilation by fire: during the first winter of war, Sarajilic decided to burn the books of philosophers but saved Montaigne. He burned novels during the second winter, and drama during the third, saving however Chekhov and a few others. He left poetry for last. Luckily there was no other winter of war and the books of the poets were spared, De Luca reports. The example from Shakespeare’s literary space and De Luca’s anecdote about Sarajilic are evidence that the worth of book-objects is inseparable from their being texts and ideas as well.4 As texts, they exist in their encounter with readers, and with this in mind, I would like to reflect on how Ginzburg’s practice of history-making can be an interpretive tool in early modern book history, one that may lead to new findings and visions in our knowledge of the early modern period.
- 5 For Grafton (142), Ginzburg’s focus on the act of reading “emphasize[s] the reader’s freedom to fin (...)
2The study of the material aspects of books has been ongoing for more than sixty years now, if we consider as its starting point Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’Apparition du livre (1958), translated into English as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (1976), in which they claimed changes in “habits of thought” were linked to the changes in the “working conditions of secular and religious scholars” brought about by print. Over the years, researchers have addressed the making of books, their circulation and reception, combining studies in print culture and the history of reading, social history and literary studies, anthropology and cultural studies. Their distinctive characteristic – and programmatic feature (Darnton) – has been interdisciplinarity. In approach and focus, the history of books resonates with microhistory, as has sometimes been acknowledged. Passing references to microhistory, though not in-depth critical engagement with it, can be found in Darnton, Grafton, Andersen and Sauer, and Brown. It may not be coincidental that Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms was first published in 19765 and that, around the same time, interest in the book as object was turning into a proper field of academic research: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change was published in 1979.
3In Ginzburg’s words, microhistory is “the minute analysis of a circumscribed documentation, tied to a person who was otherwise unknown” (1993, 22). In his practice of history-making, “micro” refers to the analytical perspective on an event placed as if “under the lens of a microscope” (2021). In The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg opened up a new horizon for the study of history, one he detected in the words reportedly pronounced by the sixteenth-century miller Menocchio during his trials for heresy, an encounter between pre-modern ideas and the culture contained in the books Menocchio read. Ginzburg showed how the study of unique events (provided there are extant documents reporting them) can be central to an understanding of culture, ideas and mentalities at given times, even lead to refiguring our knowledge of them. Menocchio believed that God was nothing but earth, water and air, and was sentenced to death for his beliefs. He held very personal views on, among others, the creation of the world – it emerged from chaos, then coagulated into cheese laced with worms – and he denied the virginity of Mary. His trial documents reveal that he had read extensively, including books which would not have been read by the majority of workers or millers of his times – Sir John Mandeville’s Travels and the Quran (possibly referred to by Menocchio as a “most beautiful book”) in Italian translations. He had also read, among others, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Bible in vernacular, a medieval Catalan chronicle in an Italian translation, and developed original views on these and other books. Ginzburg figured out Menocchio’s ideas by going through Inquisitorial reports, and considered his views to be the result of a pre-Christian rural culture, “a screen that he [Menocchio] unconsciously placed between himself and the printed page: a filter that […] continually leads us back to a culture that is very different from the one expressed on the printed page” (1980, 33). Ginzburg’s study dealt with the mainly (un)common readings of an anonymous Friuli miller, and in the relevance assigned to individual, original interpretations of books, I see the importance of microhistory, as practised in The Cheese and the Worms, for a history of the book keeping the reader in the picture.
- 6 The unusual circulation of texts especially from one nation and culture to another can be linked to (...)
- 7 In her recent study of herbals and the book trade, Sarah Neville points to the role of “common read (...)
- 8 The project involves researching library catalogues as evidence of early modern readers’ responses (...)
4My research takes as its starting point the circulation of books as objects, and the “bookscapes” they trace when they get from one place or person to another.6 My viewpoint is that of the literary critic with a curiosity about early modern singular, chance readings, and about the reception and interpretation of (mainly but not exclusively) literary texts. I am interested first in discovering by what unusual routes books may have reached improbable readers – which, if accomplished, may also be significant for what we know of the early modern circulation of books. I am also interested in unearthing testimonies of outside-the-box readings which may have ensued from such unusual circulation of book-objects. The uncommon bookscapes that may emerge from it are the space, at once literal and metaphorical, created by the unusual circulation of, as well as the response to, specific book-objects. I am also interested in (un)common readings of texts that allow perusal at different levels – such as texts combining images and writing. Literary texts and herbaria are two different forms of texts whose possibly unusual routes as book-objects I intend to explore. They are of interest because they both solicit, in different ways, creative acts of reading. If the figurative language of literary texts appeals to the imagination, scientific or pseudo-scientific texts such as early modern illustrated herbaria may have allowed different forms of perusal because of the combination of images and words. For example, what kind of response may illustrated books of plants in Latin have elicited from someone who could not read Latin? Are there traces of their interpretations?7 If there are and if found, do they align with the knowledge/mentality/ideas of the time (with what we know of them), or do they, like Menocchio’s interpretations, reveal something different about early modernity?8
- 9 Critical views differ on economic inequality and the difference it made to the early modern circula (...)
- 10 On Shakespearean texts as matter for readers, see Kastan. My choice to conduct research on uncommon (...)
5In the early modern English cultural space, books as objects may have taken improbable and unusual routes, not only from one country to another but, more anonymously, from one owner or reader to another within the same country, region, city or village. By travelling locally, books may have reached elite and non-elite readers in more ways than those studied so far, and may have encountered unexpected or improbable readers. Could these encounters be relevant to the history of ideas? Although I am well aware reading is a practice “that rarely leaves traces” (Chartier 1992, 50), my starting questions nonetheless concern the existence of written testimonies of possible interpretations or references to books ensuing from chance readings which may as yet remain undisclosed. I am also interested in the way these chance encounters were reported, if at all, in contemporary or near contemporary accounts. Ginzburg has shown that it was indeed possible for some people to peruse books that would normally have been out of their reach on account of their value or as a consequence of economic inequality.9 Are there early modern English “common” or rather “uncommon” readers made so by unexpected encounters with the books of, for example, Milton, Donne or Shakespeare, or even illustrated herbaria?10 Would they – or, depending on their degree of literacy, others in their stead – have left written accounts of their encounters?
- 11 As Frederick S. Boas commented in 1923, “Has there ever been a stranger episode in stage-history th (...)
6In the related art of theatre, Shakespeare offers a good example of the unexpected ways texts may travel and of what critics, later, may make of unusual events. Hamlet was allegedly staged in 1607 on board the Red Dragon, off the shore of Sierra Leone, for a special audience made up of officers and an African dignitary. Many scholars doubt the episode ever took place,11 but Graham Holderness, who believes it did, argues against a certain normalisation of the event, especially in post-colonial or imperialist narratives, which present it as part of what was to become England’s imperial history.
We can cleverly draw analogies between the planks of a ship and the boards of theatre, but that does not make it any easier to imagine how these plays can in practice have been put on by such men, in such conditions, and before such an audience. In other words the encounter between Shakespeare and Africa should not, in my view, be regarded as a natural embodiment of Shakespeare’s future global destiny, and a precursor of things to come; it should be regarded as a bizarre, outlandish freak of theatrical history, occasioned most probably by the accidental penchant of the captain for the drama, and a personal attachment to the work of Shakespeare. It was a collision between objects and forces that met one another in an unpredictable concatenation of random and arbitrary conditions. Once the collision had occurred, it manifestly began to generate both new particles and new energies, forging a link that had not previously existed between Shakespeare and the peripheral, forbidding, offshore world of the incipient colonial subject. (Holderness 31)
- 12 Holderness examines scholarly approaches that in some respects resonate with what Ginzburg calls th (...)
- 13 The possible existence of uncommon readings of literary texts and written records of them in the ea (...)
Holderness revises the received version of the event, resulting from what he calls “historical anachronism”: “the cosmopolitan present looks back to an alien past, minimises historical difference, privileges the detail that most nearly concurs with its own ideology, and normalises what must at the time have been, and should still be recognisable now, as unusual, extraordinary, and strange” (30).12 The uncommon readers I would like to identify along with the accounts of their readings, while not being so far removed from the “centre,” would have a similarly “ex-centric” status as that proposed by Holderness for the Red Dragon Shakespeare.13
7Let me first recall the double, mediated origin of the definition “uncommon readers.” One is of course Virginia Woolf’s very short essay “The Common Reader.” Woolf takes up Dr Johnson’s reference to “the common reader” as one who, “uncorrupted by literary prejudices,” concurs to deciding “all claim to poetical honours” (qtd in Woolf 1). Then Woolf half-modestly introduces her own writings on literature as “a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result” (Woolf 2). The other is George Steiner’s “The Uncommon Reader,” which also starts by referring to another text, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s painting Le Philosophe lisant (1734). In the sartorial elegance of Chardin’s reader, Steiner detects the importance ascribed to the private act of reading:
The reader does not meet the book casually or in disarray. He is dressed for the occasion, and this directs our attention to the construct of values and sensibility which includes both ‘vestment’ and ‘investment’ ” and underlines the idea that the “encounter” with the book has a “numinous character.” (Steiner 1-2)
Steiner’s is a fascinating description of the sacredness of the act of reading which, represented in the painting and belonging to the past, is opposed to a more prosaic way of engaging with books in the present. For Steiner book-binding, the material aspect of the book-object, plays a relevant part in the difference between the past and the present. Inspiring as these essays are, I distance myself from them in my use of “uncommon reader.” Woolf, in simulating a report of the ideas of the common readers, places herself among them. Steiner, in his suggestive idea of reading, posits the “uncommon reader” as one who has access to a privileged act of reading, thus resonating with Woolf’s use of “common” reader as referring to herself. Unlike Woolf and Steiner, I intend to look for a different sort of “uncommon readers,” readers involved in chance encounters with books. The act of reading I am interested in, and which may contribute to unveil new bookscapes in early modernity, is not one that is enabled by class privilege but one that rather defies it.
8Early modernity is a time for which the historians’ narrative about the widening reading public coexists with the factual truth, also reported by cultural historians, that getting hold of book-objects was still for many a matter of chance encounters. The idea that reading was becoming a widespread activity in early modern Europe was already expressed in the seventeenth century, as in Gregorio Leti’s impressions of the Italian city of Bologna:
- 14 “[I]n Bologna […] non solamente si veggono bene spesso i Sarti, i Calzolai, & altri Artiggiani lasc (...)
Not only does one very frequently see tailors, cobblers, and other artisans leave their manual work, by which they earn their daily bread, to read some book of history or poetry, but even the peasants in the provinces around the city mainly talk about poetry and history, and frequently with some intelligence. (qtd in Harms et al. 18)14
Those readers must have looked “uncommon” to Leti and therefore worth mentioning. Accounts of their readings, if extant, would therefore be of great interest. Did their own interpretations of what they read match the learned interpretations of contemporary literate elites? Uncovering such accounts could lead to a reassessment of questions such as the nature of dominant ideas. What do scholars leave out of the history of ideas and why? Are there “minor” ideas which may have sprung from chance encounters between readers and books? Should we reassess the role of what is considered “minor” in culture? Gramsci and Raymond Williams, as well as Deleuze and Guattari could offer relevant theoretical frameworks here. Were some acts of reading deemed more radical than others in times of censorship? Are there any records of them? If they were recorded at all, I would also be interested in how they, and the views they generated, were accounted for, especially if they resulted from chance encounters between books and readers? The bookscapes I hope to trace may bring to light untold stories that could also contribute to a reassessment of what we know about the circulation of ideas.
9This, of course, raises a question of method. How can we learn today about the unusual ways in which books and uncommon readers may have come together? There are indeed accounts of the uses of books by “common” readers, but they often serve only to mock them. John Taylor (1578-1653), “arguably England’s first self-taught successful author” (Wheale 91), describes such “common” uses of Shakespeare’s texts, as critics often note. In his Divers crabtree lectures Expressing the severall languages that shrews read to their husbands (1639), Taylor reports how a man used Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and other texts he had read to woo his beloved. Sasha Roberts conjectures the man may have been “from the ‘middling’ and ‘lower’ sorts,” perhaps an artisan or a tradesman (Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems 82). In a chapter entitled “Of two young Virgins talking of their Sweet-hearts and Sueters,” Taylor writes about two unmarried girls talking about their respective tiresome wooers, one of whom is said to have recited lines from a poem of Venus and Adonis which he pretended was his own creation, but which the girl recognized from a book she had read to be by some poet, presumably Shakespeare.
- 15 The passage, however, is from a diatribe against women, whose full title is Divers crabtree lecture (...)
- 16 There is a sense that the act of reading is a means of empowerment both for the suitor, whatever us (...)
10Taylor reports the reaction of the girl to the lies of the suitor but gives no quote from the recited text. In reporting the girl’s response, he ridiculed the man’s deceitful claim.15 If Roberts’s conjecture that the man may have been an artisan or a tradesman is right, the narrative of what use members of these groups made of their readings is hardly flattering.16 Taylor’s account is about uses of reading which may actually have been made by some of his contemporaries – “equipment for living” more than “aesthetic experience,” one might say, drawing on what Charles Whitney writes about early responses to Renaissance drama (Whitney 8, 10). But in view considering Taylor’s misogynist agenda, however, there is a bias to his account which further archival research could counter.
- 17 The definition of “microhistory” comes from the debate following the publication of Ginzburg’s The (...)
11Following one of the lessons of microhistory, I believe in the relevance of seemingly minor texts or singular cases. “Even meager, scattered, and obscure documentation can be put to good use,” Ginzburg notes (1980, xvii). Microhistory includes among its objects of investigation those rare events which went unseen and unreported by historical narratives, but may, if brought to light, reveal something new and potentially radical about their cultural moments.17 Therefore it is improbable or accidental readers who could be aligned with the sixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio that I set out to look for.
- 18 There is substantial corpus of research on written testimonies of early modern readings. Marginalia (...)
12To go back to methodological issues: traces of uncommon readings may be found in marginalia or annotations, letters, diaries and commonplace books. These have been sites of investigation for some time now,18 and I hope to bring to light new references to texts which have famously survived oblivion – Shakespeare and others as well as books of herbs – and therefore enable comparison with their known reception. At the same time, references to “minor” texts could also emerge to enlarge our current knowledge of early modernity.
- 19 For a history of the origin and use of the etic/emic difference in anthropology and the human scien (...)
13For Ginzburg, not just repetitive events should be taken into account: “[t]o select as a cognitive object only what is repetitive, and therefore capable of being serialized, signifies paying a very high price in cognitive terms” (1993, 21). To place, “against the undifferentiated notion of ‘collective mentality’, the importance of the development of specific beliefs on the part of single individuals” is a major tenet of microhistory that I take up (1993, 22). Also relevant is Ginzburg’s idea of the practice of historians as being always “comparative history.” Ginzburg rephrases Benedetto Croce’s “All history is contemporary history” as “All history is comparative history” (2022, 13’30”; 2023), because for him Croce only takes into account the set questions that usually prompt historical investigation, not the possibility to correct those questions. For this reason, Croce’s assumption is liable to what Ginzburg calls “the ventriloquism of historians” who often lend their own, contemporary terminology – and, one may explicitly add, their own vision of the past and present world – to the actors, i.e. the documents from the past under scrutiny. Thus historians find in documents what they expect and already know. But “to find what one looks for is not enough” (Ginzburg 2022, 14’ca). In Ginzburg’s “comparative” history, comparison therefore is between our questions and their answers (what is found in extant documents from the past).19 Intrinsic in history is a discordance which historians should always be aware of:
[O]bservers (including historians) ask etic questions which are either anachronistic or ethnocentric, or both, in order to retrieve, through a long and sometimes difficult trajectory, emic answers – the categories and voices of the actors. […] [H]istorians […] should engage in a sustained dialogue between the two dimensions, etic and emic. (Ginzburg 2016, 35)
If the questions of historians are necessarily anachronistic with respect to the period under scrutiny, their answers must be as accurate and non-anachronistic as possible. Ginzburg borrows the terms etic and emic from the linguist and anthropologist Kenneth Lee Pike and, as their coexistence is inevitable in research in the human sciences, he proposes a dialogue between them. I think that, in the study of literary or diversely imaginative texts from the past (e.g. illustrated herbaria), the dialogue of etic and emic is equally to be wished (albeit complex to establish). To look for evidence of uncommon readers and their interpretations of texts seems to be one way of giving voice to the emic and let it emerge more forcefully in the relationship with our etic questions. New findings may prompt a revision of assumptions about the cultural period.
14By way of conclusion, here are two examples of how this could be achieved. The first comes from the early modern reception of Shakespeare’s Othello. In A Short View of Tragedy (1693), Thomas Rymer famously condemned Othello for not being a proper tragedy. In his well-known commentary, he attacked the play, revealing that Shakespeare was perhaps too much for certain educated men. The Moor as a tragic character drew audiences but he may have been too radical for the learned:
With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor. (Rymer 91-92)
Othello could only be an “improbable and absurd” fable (Rymer 92). Sasha Roberts, however, has pointed to how “early modern readings of Othello have little to say about race and ethnicity and insist instead on pathos” (Roberts 2003a, 120). She reminds us that the derogatory allusions to Othello’s race found in the Folio version are absent from Q1, and that the account (in Latin!) of a performance of Othello by a member of the audience, Henry Jackson, makes no reference to Othello’s race. One may wonder about the reasons for remaining silent on something that was there for the eyes to see. Likewise, in The Play-House, A Satyr (1689), Robert Gould makes no mention of Othello’s race in his detailed account of reading the play:
Whene’r I Hamlet, or Othello read,
My Hair starts up, and my Nerues shrink with dread:
Pity and fear raise my concern still higher,
Till, betwixt both, I’m ready to expire!
When cursed Iago, cruelly, I see
Work up the noble Moore to Jealousie,
How counningly the Villain weaves his sin,
And how the other takes the poison in; […]
When these and other such-like Scenes I scan,
’Tis then, great Soul, I think thee [Shakespeare] more than Man! (Roberts 2003a, 123)
The brief note on the play by Anglican priest Abraham Wright (1611-1690) in his commonplace book (manuscript stored in the British Library) similarly makes no mention of Othello’s race:
A uery good play both for lines and plot, but especially ye plot. Iago for a rogue and Othello for a iealous husband 2 parts well pend. Act: 3 hye scene beetwixt Iago and Othello, and ye I see: of ye 4 Act beetween ye same shew admirably ye uillanous humour of Iago when hee p[er]suades Othello to his iealousy. (Kirsch 257; Roberts 2003a, 122-23)
- 20 Even issues such as the question of race, its perception and representations in the early modern pe (...)
The difference between Rymer’s, Jackson’s and Wright’s perceptions of the play confirms the extent to which looking for written and as yet undiscovered accounts of (un)common readings of texts may help us refigure the early modern culture in significant ways.20
15Another example I would like to mention is John Gerard’s Herball, or generall historie of plantes, first published in 1597, for which Gerard took almost complete credit, but which may actually have been based on a translation of Stirpium historiae pemptades sex (1583) by the Flemish botanist Rembertus Dodoens. Included in the volume are more than 1,800 woodcuts of which apparently only 16 were by Gerard, the others being reproduced from Jacob Theodorus Tabernaemontanus’ Eicones plantarum seu stirpium (1590). The practice of silently appropriating what was in other book was in vogue among writers as well as readers. The 1636 edition of Gerard’s Herball, published in London, however contains an interesting Letter to the Reader, advancing the idea that glory is available to any man and not just to those of high birth:
Open is the Campe of glory and honour for all men, saith the younger Pliny, not onely men of great birth and dignitie, or men of office endued with publique charge and titles, are seene therein, and haue the garland of praise and preferment waiting to crowne their merits, but euen the common Souldier likewise: so as he whose Name and note was erst obscure, may by egregious acts of valour obtaine a place amongst the Noble. The schoole of Science keepeth semblable proportion: whose amplitude, as not alwaies, nor onely, men of great titles and degrees labor to illustrate; so whosoeuer doth, may confidently account of, at least, his name to be immortall. What is he then that will deny his voice of gratious commendation to the Authors of this Booke […]. (My emphasis)
- 21 On the anonymity of authors, see North.
16Recalling Pliny (61-c.113), this Letter begins “To the well affected Reader and Peruser of this Booke, St. Bredwell Physician, greeting.” There is in this address something rarely found in texts, i.e. the reference to a specific quality or aspect of the writers of the book, the anonymity of some authors (“he whose Name […] was erst obscure”). Anonymity is more likely to be a quality proper to readers than to authors;21 but because this is a book of plants based, as were many others, on previous herbaria, the name of the author Gerard is in fact the name of the compiler. Indeed the frontispiece, reading “The Herball or general historie of plantes Gathered by John Gerarde of London Master in Chirurgerie Very much enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson Citizen and Apothecarye of London...” does justice to the previous anonymous authors.
17I find this Letter interesting first because it shows how books could disseminate certain ideas – in this case, the idea that ‘greatness’ and recognition may be the aspiration of all – even when it was not their main purpose in the first place. I also wonder if some readers, in reading this Letter, would not have also thought of themselves as anonymous readers. Might they have been led, through the lens of Pliny, to think of their own anonymity as readers? If some of them did, would the empowerment resulting from this awareness (transferring to readers the idea that anonymity can turn into fame) have an effect for them on the act of reading this specific book and on the act of reading in general? And so on.
18In her essay on early modern readings of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Roberts notes that extant readings of Shakespeare pointing to its challenging aspects are less numerous than those which frame it within an orthodoxy of sorts, and she asks:
What are we to make of the paucity of contemporary commentary deploying the ideological challenges posed by Shakespearean drama versus the (comparative) plenty turning it to more orthodox ends? (Roberts 2003a, 130)
Perhaps, among as yet unearthed accounts of early modern “uncommon” readings of Shakespeare and others by anonymous yet exceptional readers like Ginzburg’s Menocchio, there lie texts that rebalance the scales. Like Steiner’s philosophical reader, we, as scholars reading books from the past, may allow ourselves to be guided by “the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books” (Steiner 3). Among them there may sit accounts of uncommon readings of other books, their emic answers waiting to come to their new life in our readings.
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