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"From the sixteenth century forward, the volume of paper in Britain grew enormously. Cheaper than parchment, it allowed statesmen of the time to record drafts, memoranda, and other ephemera that might have otherwise been lost to a wax tablet. And as the volume of original paperwork ballooned, the number of copies grew still further: secretaries took down version after version of letters, records, policy proposals, and more. There was no longer a singular source of records, but many archives-and the proliferation of paper transformed political dynamics. Access to particular written material became a means to establish authority and solidify networks of power. The broad availability and use of paper amounted to an early modern media revolution. Focusing on two of early modern England's primary political archives, the Tower of London Record Office and the State Paper Office, Nicholas Popper traces the circulation of their materials through government and the broader public sphere. In this early media-saturated society, many of the same issues that we face today arose: who shapes the archive? Can we trust the picture of the past and the present that it shows us? How do we decide what to preserve, what to copy and disseminate, and what to toss? And, in a more politically urgent vein: Does a huge volume of information promote political polarization and extremism?"--

Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton's seminal 'Studied for Action' (1990), a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods and ambitions of Harvey's encounters with his books ignited the History of Reading, an interdisciplinary field which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world's libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations in turn illuminate past worlds.

Three decades on, Harvey's example and Jardine's work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the History of Reading. By uniting 'Studied for Action' with published and unpublished studies on Harvey by Jardine, Grafton and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton's original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading.