"Habits of Reading in Early Modern England" will make reading in all its facets the subject of intensive study and exploration. Working with the rich Folger collections and surveying the now substantial body of scholarship on the subject, the institute will consider the full range of intellectual and affective transactions between readers and their books. The institute will address the ways that the printing and distribution of books shaped texts; the relations between the practices of reading and the formation of collections and libraries; the inflection of politics by print; and the aesthetic and intellectual consequences of consorship, regulation, clientage, and patronage. The institute will, in other words, be concerned with all the ways we can trace Renaissance readers and their experience and, in turn, with the conclusions we might then draw about early modern authors and their embrace of those readers.
Faculty: Peter W.M. Blayney, Margaret J.M. Ezell, Anthony Grafton, Richard Helgerson, David Scott Kastan, Michael Mendle, Kevin Sharpe, William Sherman, Evelyn Tribble, and Laetitia Yeandle.
Enrollment in "Habits of Reading" is largely limited to full-time faculty members in any of the humanities disciplines at US institutions. NEH support will include a stipend, an allowance for travel and lodging, and a contribution to food expenses.
Application Deadline: 1 March 1997. For further information and application forms, e-mail institute@folger.edu
