The first part of this account of struggles over literacy begins with the later middle ages and follows issues in the construction of a literacy addressed to the lower orders through to the seventeenth century. After the suppression of the Lollard Bible had left the English peasantry without that spur to literacy, the sixteenth-century formation…

Attempting to push early modern presentism to the radical, logical conclusion of a more personal historicism, this essay draws on a number of interpretive practices and theoretical insights--Stephen Greenblatt's self-reflectivity, Toni Morrison's "rememory," Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," bell hooks's "passion of…