Privacy and Print : Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-century England

Amidst the other religious, political and technological changes in 17th-century England, the ready availability of printed books was the most significant sign of the disappearance of old ways of thinking. The ability to read granted new independence as the interactions between reader, text and author moved from the public forums of church and court to the privacy and solitude of the home. This work proposes that the emergence of the concept of privacy as a personal right, as the very core of individuality, is connected in a complex fashion with the history of reading. The author attempts to recover the experience of readers past by examining representations of reading and readers (especially women) in five genres of 17th-century literature: devotional books, conversion narratives, personal letters, drama and the novel. The discussion ranges from the published letters of Charles I and John Donne to Aphra Behn's "Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister" and Margaret Cavendish's literary activities. The author examines how the resulting shifts in religious and literary practices due to the printed book influenced the development of the literary canon. She also addresses women's ambiguous roles in print culture, trying to pinpoint how privacy became gendered in the early modern period.