April 2013, Volume 41, Number 2 61
Cambers, AndrewGodly Reading: Print, Manuscriptand Puritanism in England,1580–1720Cambridge: Cambridge University Press304 pp., $99.00, ISBN 978-0-521-76489-6Publication Date: April 2011
In this wide-ranging study, Camberschallenges both the deeply ingrainedview that Puritans read silently, individ-ually, and in isolation and the concomi-tant notion that an inward-focused Re-formed religiosity was inevitably tiedto the emergence of individualism andmodernity. His stated goal is to demon-strate that Puritans frequently and de-liberately engaged in communal, oral,and social religious reading over thelong seventeenth century, and he arguesthat Puritans understood these activitiesas ones that distinguished them fromtheir neighbors, even though these read-ing practices were actually widespread.Rather than attempting to reconstruct asingle “godly reader,” Cambers pointsout that Puritans read in different waysat different times and in different places,and the book covers a lot of ground, asit moves from a discussion of reading inseemingly private spaces (closets, bed-chambers, studies) to household spaces(halls, parlors, kitchens, the outdoors);libraries (personal, parish, town, andschool); public spaces (churches, pul-pits, coffee houses, bookshops); andprisons. In fleshing out the differ-ent modes, styles, and political valen-cies of godly reading in these spaces,Cambers takes pains to demonstratethat sociable reading could be eitherconformist or more radical, and heformulates his argument by drawingprimarily on both men’s and women’sdiaries, biographies, and autobiogra-phies. He draws on other sources aswell, such as an unusual parish regis-ter, wills, libels, and book auction cat-alogues. The works of certain figuresappear frequently: John Foxe, LadyMargaret Hoby, John Bruen, NehemiahWallington, Ralph Josselin, Oliver Hey-wood, and John Rastrick.
For those who already assume thatgodly reading was often social, com-munal, and oral, Cambers’s main argu-ment will not deliver a weighty punch.Nevertheless, he is absolutely right tonote that religious reading (especially
devotional reading) and religious read-ing practices have been overlooked inmany recent studies that have focusedon goal-oriented secular reading or onthe content of libraries, and he con-vincingly demonstrates that, althoughearly modern images may have de-picted Puritans reading alone, descrip-tions of godly reading demonstrate thattheir reading was often communal andwas closely linked to prayer, discus-sion, and writing. The main strength ofthe volume lies in Cambers’s thoughtfulcollection and analysis of so many ex-amples of religious reading in such a di-versity of spaces across such an expanseof time. Indeed, his juxtaposition of so-ciable reading in Henrician and Mar-ian prisons, mid-seventeenth-centuryparish libraries, and post-Restorationbookshops asks us to consider the tra-jectory of godly reading over the courseof almost two hundred years, and itprovides a welcome complement tomore narrowly focused studies of singlefacets of early modern reading. Cam-bers also usefully provides evidenceof the ways in which Tudor and earlyStuart religious works (by John Foxe,Arthur Dent, Lewis Bayly, and SamuelClarke) continued to be a vital partof Puritan identity as they were readout loud, discussed, and passed downthrough generations of godly familiesand communities. The concluding dis-cussion of the reasons why histori-ans have so often connected Puritanismwith solitude and individualism wouldhave been more useful in the introduc-tion, and on occasion Cambers offersprimary evidence that does not per-fectly support the precise argument heis trying to make about godly read-ing. Nevertheless, this is an interest-ing and well-written book that is wellsuited for scholars, graduate students ofearly modern culture, and upper-levelundergraduates.
MICHELINE WHITECarleton University, Ottawa
Copyright © 2013 Taylor & Francis
Brooke, StephenSexual Politics: Sexuality, FamilyPlanning, and the British Left fromthe 1880s to the Present DayOxford: Oxford University Press320 pp., $125.00, ISBN978-0-19-956254-1Publication Date: November 2011
In this timely work, Stephen Brooke,professor of history at York Univer-sity, analyzes the intersections betweensocialist politics and sexuality in Eng-land between the 1880s and the present.Brooke focuses primarily on the LabourParty and examines the specific mannerin which gender, sexuality, class, andpolitics interacted with each other dur-ing this period. The study is organizedchronologically into three parts. In sec-tion 1, the author examines how debatesabout sexual freedom and birth controlplayed out within Labour during the in-terwar period. In section 2, he considersthe paths that led to the 1967 legislativereforms related to abortion, homosexu-ality, and birth control. In section 3, hecontends that issues of sexual reformand rights were central to Labour pol-itics in the 1970s and 1980s and thatthis emphasis owed its existence notonly to the influence of the women’sand gay liberation movements, but alsoto internal changes occurring withinLabour.
Brooke argues that the “political of-ten emerged from within the existingideologies and structures; it was a con-sequence of the ambiguities and inade-quacies of gender ideology and a tes-tament to the distance between suchideology and experiences, the unwind-ing and remaking of language aboutmotherhood, gender, class and sexual-ity” (9). During their campaign for birthcontrol in the 1920s, Labour reformersused the image of working-class moth-ers as victims but also promoted a visionof these women as reproductive labor-ers whose work was equivalent to that ofmale laborers, as well as the notion thatthese women were independent “work-ers and citizens who claimed public andprivate rights over their bodies on theirown terms” (56). In this manner, mater-nity was imbued with new class-basedmeanings, though there were limits tothis altered socialism.
The linking of maternity and classcontinued when middle- and working-class Labour women campaigned forabortion-law reform in the 1930s. Thesereformers once again employed the im-age of the working-class mother and ar-gued that abortion would protect boththe health of these women and theirfamilies. Working-class women associ-ated with the East Midlands WorkingWomen’s Association (EMWWA) tes-tified about the material realities of theirlives, making clear the declining signif-icance of the male breadwinner and theexistence of a “more complex figure at
