Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, and Anna Wilson, eds. The Practice and Politics of Reading, 650–1500 Cambridge: Brewer, 2022. Pp. 339. $125.00 (cloth).

This volume grew out of the conference "Reading Then, Reading Now" held at Harvard University on April 18-20, 2019.To create a coherent book, the editors explain, the scope of the project was redefined to the more specific topic of the practices and politics of premodern reading in Britain.However, the far-reaching Introduction conveys something of the grand ambition of the original enterprise.Particularly striking is its identification of challenges brought by "the ubiquity of digital reading," which, it claims, "is changing our habits of thought and feeling and cultural attitudes at individual and societal levels" (2).The "normative literacy" that nowadays we take for granted, and in theory is a mark of progress (according to the grand narrative of increased literacy being a social good), has-the editors claim-its dark side, in a time of "both institutional surveillance and social media truthfabrication" (3).W. B. Yeats is purposefully misquoted: "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate mendacity.""Many of us have discovered that protocols of critical reading, nurtured so diligently, or so we thought, throughout entire educational systems, are fragile and defenseless", the editors declare."Apparently we must learn to read and to consider the personal, social, political, and even planetary 'implications of literacy,' all over again" (3).Indeed we must.What insights can medievalists offer?For a start, the shared ground "between manuscript-reading and web-reading cultures" has placed them "at the forefront of the creation of the digital humanities" (3).Second, "Scholars of premodern reading are in a position to theorize the turn towards literary modes of adaptation, allusion, and retelling in digital literatures" (3).And third, one age of anxiety knows another: "both the heady cultural optimism that greeted the emergence of the internet and the trepidation that has increasingly qualified it themselves have equivalents in many moments across the medieval centuries" (4).Medievalists are well-placed to appreciate comparable crises today.But, while these three factors certainly aid appreciation of the current situation, in themselves they cannot counter it.That may be achieved (one may venture to claim) through the modeling of balanced rational inquiry and analysis that should routinely take place in the classroom and in academic research.Kathryn Mogk Wagner's statement cannot be bettered: "By teaching readers how to use texts as sources of healing, models for ethical formation, and means of social action, they help bring about the conditions under which texts actually have such powers" (156).As teachers, "we may work to establish and reestablish ties-to make texts useful for human needs and longings, to render readers malleable to texts' formative influence, to link by link construct a coherent cultural world.