Hester Mulso Chapone and the Problem of the Individual Reader

Abstract

This essay closely reads Hester Mulso Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) to create a model of limited interpretive authority. This model of reading acknowledges Chapone's transgressive impulses in presenting women with an intellectually rigorous program of reading while insisting that we attend to the text's acquiescence to beliefs about gendered ways of reading and thinking. This model of limited interpretive authority, or compliance with established and traditional reading practices, allows those studying the history of reading to more productively describe and understand the submissive or compliant readers often overlooked in liberatory and oppositional accounts of reading practices.

Eve and Her Daughters in England’s Long Eighteenth Century. Review Essay by Laura Stevens

“…In 2007 Jonathan Sheehan's The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture laid to rest any claim that the Bible's importance diminished in England and Germany, as vibrant, substantive traditions of scriptural interpretation developed in these countries. Sermons in particular are receiving much more attention than they did even a decade ago, thanks largely to the publication of The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of the Modern British Sermon, 1689-1901(2012. Didactic literature, both religiously oriented and not, has occasioned a good deal of interest, and the Methodists have received attention in studies such as Misty Gale Anderson's Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (2012).…”