8 - The Idle Readers of Piers Plowman in Print

Summary

Rules as concerning Reading.

In reading, first; Take heede what Booke thou doest read; that they be not leawd and wanton, nor needlesse and vnprofitable, not sauouring of Popish superstition. But either the holy Scriptures, or other sound and godly Authors. In reading of the Scriptures, read not heere, and there a Chapter, (except vpon some good occasion) but the Bible in order throughout […]

3 In reading of other good Bookes, read not heere a leafe of one, & a Chapter of an other (as idle Readers vse to do for nouelties sake) but make choyse of one or two sound and well pende Bookes; which reade againe and againe, for confirming of thy memorie, and directing of thy practise. 4 Before reading, pray vnto God to blesse thee in that action.

5 In reading, settle thy selfe to doe attention.

6 After reading, apply it to thy selfe for thy instruction, in thy practise and imitation.

Some rules are made to be broken. These rules from the seventeenthcentury religious handbook A Garden of Spirituall Flowers, though straightforward enough, are no exception. The idea that one should read good matter in a thorough and linear fashion, in dedicated and repeated stints, with eyes on ‘one or two’ books rather than distracted across many, has a history, of course. The emphasis on continuous attention reproduces an entire Protestant ideology of reading: unlike Catholics (especially medieval Catholics), who chopped up the Bible for liturgical and devotional convenience, Protestants read the Bible from start to finish, or so polemicists maintained. As these directions make clear, the same principle of continuous reading should be applied by extension to ‘other good Bookes’, which likewise require sustained attention for their lessons to be understood and applied in daily life.

But there are some wrinkles in these rules. Never mind that the evidence left by actual English Protestants almost always points to discontinuous Bible reading, as Peter Stallybrass has argued. Never mind that these directions themselves are borrowed, abridged, and shoehorned together with tracts by half a dozen other Elizabethan Protestant writers, ‘a leafe of one, & a Chapter of an other’ – that this call for continuous reading is transmitted in a book designed for discontinuous reading.