This day-long workshop engages with Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press) by Melissa Reynolds, Perkins-Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. The manuscript explores how ordinary early modern English readers embraced new roles as consumers, purveyors, and adjudicators of medical and scientific knowledge in everyday encounters with ordinary practical books like recipe collections, almanacs, prognostications, or craft treatises. Through analysis of nearly 200 fifteenth-century manuscripts and over 500 editions of printed how-to books, the book shows that ordinary English readers, just as much as famous experimenters and natural philosophers, shaped a culture of intellectual exchange and inquiry befitting a scientific revolution.

Workshop attendees include professors Leah DeVun (Rutgers University), Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins University), Anthony Grafton (Princeton) Elaine Leong (University College London) and Hannah Marcus (Harvard University),