In Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720, Andrew Cambers looks at how English puritans used books. He makes three central claims: godly reading was frequently oral and communal; belief was thus socially constructed and maintained, not individualistic; and reading created cohesion among the godly and marked their separation from the ungodly. Cambers counters the historiographically dominant assumption that puritanism was an internally focused mode of religiosity, connected to the rise of individualism, especially through solitary reading. He looks at the “long” seventeenth century, treating early Stuart puritanism and nonconformity as one religious culture that ensured the impact of puritanism even after its political moment had passed.

Cambers begins with spaces that might seem private (the closet, bedchamber, and study), usefully showing that they were in fact frequently the setting for communal reading practices. Chapter 3 then demonstrates the centrality of “family religion” and shared reading in the household, an important contribution. Distinguishing between formal devotions in the hall and informal reading in the kitchen or parlor, Cambers details varied reading practices, from reading aloud (often sequentially over several days) to catechizing, repetition of sermons, and even exorcisms. The third main site of reading, which we might assume is the most public, the outdoors, was in fact, as Cambers shows, a favored location for meditative reading as well as godly gatherings.

Cambers then turns to public venues. Chapter 4 discusses the development of parish, town, and school libraries, showing that while parish libraries were initially created to support godly reading, with the Restoration imposition of Anglican control, godly reading had to shift to other centers. One example of the recurring difficulty of describing puritan reading as a distinct category appears in Cambers’s discussion of school libraries; he comments that one school required daily Bible reading yet held mainly classical authors in its library. Obviously, puritanism and humanism were perfectly consonant; that Cambers finds the juxtaposition noteworthy indicates the way that his argument needs puritanism to be a more distinct subculture than it was. This chapter establishes mainly clerical practice, pointing to a need to know more about lay culture beyond the household.

Chapter 5 looks at reading in parishes and towns. Cambers covers unfamiliar kinds of reading, such as parish registers as a source of news and admonition about the grim deaths of the ungodly and anonymously posted libels, circulated by both reading and copying. Cambers also notes the custom of distributing Bibles and other godly books to the poor as a recognized marker of godly identity, discusses coffeehouses (although without clear connection to godly readers), and surveys other commercial sites at which the godly may have read. Such evidence as Cambers finds of what happened in bookshops suggests that then as now people would comment on and recommend books, but it is not clear that the practices of the godly were particularly distinctive.

Prisons are the final reading space that Cambers considers. Drawing on recent studies of the permeability of prisons and their function in circulating news, Cambers complicates the picture of prisons as solitary spaces. Here, too, the reading and writing practices that he describes would seem to characterize all religious dissidents, including the Elizabethan Catholics whose experience he discusses as well as the royalist John Gibson in the 1650s. Cambers’s wide time frame raises questions about the level of generality of his discussion in this chapter; he draws heavily on Foxe’s accounts of Marian martyrs, arguing for the ongoing impact of Foxe on the puritan self-image as persecuted minority but offering surprisingly little data on imprisoned Restoration nonconformists, instead discussing the access to books enjoyed by a range of men of sufficient means.

Any study of reading faces the fact that reading is highly individual, even while practices might characterize a group. Cambers uses diaries because the problem of whether a source is representative seems less critical to him than the desire to avoid a homogenized picture of Protestant reading practices. Acknowledging that many of the specific practices that he identifies are not exclusive to puritans, he nonetheless wants to see the collection of practices as a whole as distinctive. Cambers’s project thus faces the challenge confronting any attempt to define puritanism since any particular practice may also typify nonpuritan piety. Further, other variables may be in play. Cambers’s survey of the closet draws on women’s practice, while that of the study draws on men’s practice, and his discussion of bedchamber reading mainly uses information about ministers and aristocratic women. Thus, while he aims to describe distinctively puritan practices, the roles of gender, social rank, and profession invite greater attention, and Cambers himself acknowledges that some of the instances he cites involve people who are not clearly puritan.

Indeed, what Cambers identifies as his central point, that puritanism was not individualistic but was rooted in collective practices both in and beyond the household, is important and true, but it could as well be argued of early modern religion in general. In that sense, Cambers perpetuates one feature of the historiography he seeks to overturn, its focus on an insufficiently contextualized puritanism. Further, the desire to drive home his thesis occasionally leads Cambers to tendentious reading—he quotes one reference to “delighteful Study and Pleasant conversation among his Books” (74) to show the communal nature of the study, yet “conversation” here would seem rather to be with books than with others of the godly. In the desire to make his argument, Cambers perhaps overstates his claims about the public, communal nature of reading since both closet and study reading did involve solitary reading and note taking, and godliness was intensely personal and focused on the heart, although it was not individualistic. Nonetheless, the point is well taken that among the godly, reading might be done out loud, with others, serving varied purposes from the devotional to the studious, and Godly Reading offers a vivid account of this neglected side of puritanism.