In Literary Sociability, Paul Trolander expands and deepens the insights offered up in Sociable Criticism in England, 1625–1725 (2007), coauthored with Zeynep Tenger. The earlier book offered a series of case studies, demonstrating through close readings of letters and print publications the fundamental sociability of literary critical discourse in the period—a sociability that, Trolander and Tenger argue, gradually adapted to the more impersonal and institutional medium of print at the turn of the century. In this new book, Trolander employs a more distant reading of “the epistolary record” of his subtitle, presenting his analysis of a wide range of literary activities undertaken by small groups, as they are represented in 28,400 letters written by 887 different individuals in 141 correspondence collections. In order to carry out such a large-scale analysis, Trolander created a relational database. Identifying the 3,002 letters in these collections that record relevant information about the preparation, publication, and circulation of texts, as well as the reputations and reputation-influencing activities of authors, their literary networks, and competing networks, Trolander recognized that the individuals involved in these transactions could be classified according to a handful of “subject positions” such as author, consumer, proxy, or regulator. Their “actions”—literary behaviors like recommending an author or work, supplying information, distributing a publication, or censuring it—could be codified as well because they adhered to “the lingua franca of friendship” (17) cultivated in seventeenth-century letter-writing. Thus he developed categories, ultimately twenty-two of them, based on the functions of epistolary literacy, or “letteracy,” represented in letter-writing manuals (here he began with the forms identified by Eve Tavor Bannet in Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820). Needless to say, simply creating the foundation for this study involved not only a massive labor of research and processing—there are few electronic resources to make this body of correspondence easily accessible, and so Trolander relied primarily on print editions and manuscripts (the latter for one-quarter of his initial group of letters)—but also a theoretical challenge in identifying historically authentic and meaningful categories that would reveal the workings of seventeenth-century literary sociability when processed.

The result is, as Trolander puts it, a model of seventeenth-century literary networks as “engines of social and cultural capital” (31), wherein manuscripts represented value that could serve certain functions within a small network itself, but which might also be used as the bases of mutually beneficial exchanges across interconnected groups and ultimately be monetized through print sales (31). Thus in his eight chapters Trolander examines the workings of small networks in six fields of letters—antiquarianism, belles lettres, natural science, philosophy, religious writing, and political controversy. Some of his conclusions, like the argument that literary activity in the seventeenth century was carried out by means of a system of friendship and reputation-building that is encoded within correspondences, accord with his previous work and offer a useful frame for previous studies of seventeenth-century scribal culture. Others, such as the view that choices between media are made tactically at the level of the individual and the group, rather than being generalizable across societies of a particular period, are gaining ground among scholars of script and print even beyond the early modern period (in this, Trolander seems to imply a modification of the teleological argument of his previous study, although he returns in his final chapter to the view that the brokering of influence practiced in social networks moved increasingly into print-based institutional structures). Still other conclusions may be more controversial, among these being Trolander's claim that the term coterie “should be dispensed with” (217), or his view that manuscript activity even in the seventeenth century is essentially preprint—that is, almost no authors were strictly amateur; for the majority, their writing projects were from the start destined for print publication and for the furtherance of what he calls professional authorship (a concept that might have been more clearly differentiated from the social and cultural capital he views as the primary goal of literary networks). This latter case raises for me the issue of how the source materials might shape the results: as Trolander acknowledges, “authors preserved epistolary records of interactions about books, reading, and writing more than any other group I examined” (162). While the study group includes what he calls “consumers”—those who offer evidence of reading books only, not of writing them or being involved in any way in their production—the kinds of letter collections available to him necessarily consist largely of the papers of persons of letters or of elite families centrally involved in the patronage of important religious, political, scientific, and literary figures. One wonders how the picture might differ if the correspondences examined had included those of less ambitious individuals—the middling sorts whose “epistolary literacy” Susan Whyman has examined in The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800.

Despite inevitable questions about how decisions made in the preparation of this database might impinge on the generalizability of the results, my primary response to this tremendous labor (of love, one assumes) is one of gratitude. Trolander has asked multiple questions of his data, and the results are generously presented in this book in the form of twenty-three tables and two figures, thereby providing a rich resource of information for further reference by scholars of seventeenth-century literary history, epistolarity, authorship, and media history. Two further tables in an appendix list the letter collections consulted and provide a streamlined summary of the types of letters and the principal actions recorded in them.

At points, the book has an oddly unfinished quality that can puzzle and even impede. Here are some examples: references in the second paragraph to a phrase in the study's title that is in fact not in its title, and later to a discussion of coteries in the opening chapter that is located rather in chapter 6; the presence of an elaborate table in chapter 5 that is nowhere mentioned in that chapter, and that introduces categories not discussed until chapter 6; the creation of twenty-two categories of action for chapter 6 versus the presentation of nine categories, some overlapping but others different, in Appendix A.2; finally, the lack of a conclusion of any sort. For the reader willing to engage with Trolander in the vocabulary-building and data-deciphering process, however, this is a very rewarding read and one that is likely to stimulate future thought about how literary production and circulation worked in seventeenth-century England.