Introduction: discovering the renaissance reader Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker

Part I. The Material Text: 1. Errata: print, politics, and poetry in Early Modern England Seth Lerer

2. Off with their heads! Abandoning the capital in eighteenth-century London Richard Wendorf

Part II. Reading as Politics: 3. Boasting of silence: women readers and the patriarchal state Heidi Brayman Hackel

4. Reading revelations: prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in Early Modern Britain Kevin Sharpe

Part III. Print, Politics, and Performance: 5. Performances and playbooks: the closing of the theatres and the politics of drama David Scott Kastan

6. Irrational, impractical and unprofitable: reading the news in seventeenth-century Britain Joad Raymond

Part IV. Reading Physiologies: 7. Reading bodies Michael Shoenfeldt

8. Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society Adrian Jones

Part V. Reading Texts in Time: 9. Martial, Jonson and the assertion of plagiarism Joseph Loewenstein

10. The constitution of opinion and the pacification of reading Steven Zwicker

11. Cato's retreat: fabula, historia, and the question of constitutionalism in Mr Locke's Anonymous Essay on Government Kirsie McClure.