Material Aspects of Reading and Material Text Cultures

Reading and its different practices and modes belong to the most important forms of the reception of script-bearing artefacts, covering a wide range of perceptive modes in the reception of writing.1 There are manifold possible approaches how to analyse reading. The main reason for this is the fact that the act of reading is dependent on several variables, e. g. material and formal aspects of the writing surface and the writing itself, the text, the reader, and the context(s) in which something is read. As Sterponi puts it: “[R]eading positions one in a web of culturally stipulated relations between bodies, minds, and texts as artifacts and symbols.”2 As the title of this volume indicates, the main focus here lies on the material aspects of inscribed artefacts and their influence on the act of reading. Although it is not the material artefact, but the text written on it, that is the actual object of reading, the reception of texts is inextricably linked to the material objects bearing them.3 While the media and artefacts of writing have not been at the forefront of research on reading and reading practices for a long time, the beginning of the digital age and with it the de-materialisation of texts brought into focus also the materiality of non-/pre-digital objects of reading. Starting with the reconstruction of the meaning of (printed) books for the interpretation of their content in the merely French history of the books in the late 1970s and 1980s (esp. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier) the materiality of the artefacts of reading has increasingly been taken into consideration both in the research on reading practices and in a wide variety of historical and philological disciplines.4 Accordingly, the present volume joins an ever-growing field of research.5