Melissa Reynolds, <i>Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Pp. 318. ISBN 978-0-226-83489-4. $35.00 (paperback).

Melissa Reynolds's Reading Practice is a remarkable achievement, notable for outstanding scholarship and elegant, engaging prose.It is concerned with what she calls the 'practical text', a term she describes and identifies here.The book traces how such practical texts emerged in manuscript in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then how they transitioned into print in the sixteenth.In both media, the practical text was an important conduit for natural knowledge before the emergence of the New Science.A 'practical manuscript', in her estimation, is vernacular rather than in scholarly Latin, it is a collection of disparate material rather than a through-written treatise, and the knowledge it contains is utilitarian and practical rather than theoretical and abstract.It concerns recipes for medicines, cures and comestibles; advice about cultivating crops; prognostications for forecasting the weather or other events; and accounts of secrets and tricks.What holds these disparate materials together is their practical and utilitarian concerns: they are instructions or recipes about how to do something or to bring about a specific effect.Reynolds shows that the contents of these manuscripts were collected and assembled on an accretive basis, by ordinary or non-elite people, both women and men (though mostly women).Over ten years of research, Reynolds identified 182 practical manuscripts written in English, and 475 editions of printed practical books published in England between 1475 and 1600.She shows how these apparently disparate knowledge practices, one manuscript-based, and the other in print culture, are in fact one 'textual tradition'.One of the book's most impressive contributions lies in its deft handling of both finegrained textual analysis and large-scale cultural synthesis.Reynolds shows how practical texts offered a way for premodern English people to interpret and navigate their embodied lives, their health and their interactions with the natural world.These instructional texts were sometimes original and innovative, but more often they were translations or imitations of classical learning, or translations from other languages.As Reynolds shows, these practical texts exist in a kind of dialogue with medical traditions, and forms of natural history, that stretched back to antiquity.The practical texts of fifteenth-century England offered a way to access natural knowledge.Practical texts peddled old knowledge, especially advice that could be extracted and rearranged, creating new miscellanies out of old material.Practical texts thus occupied a space adjacent to -but distinct from -the emerging experimental method of figures like Bacon.Reynolds's sensitivity to the ways old knowledge was continually reworked for new audiences adds real richness to her account.