Scott Black argues that the early modern essay captures a process of reading on the page, and that these essays present in sometimes exhaustive detail the kind of historical evidence of readerly practice that other scholars sought to find in marginal comments. He persuasively makes that argument by examining the stated goals of essay writers, suggesting the ways in which they construe their own work within a larger sense of a genre. As he himself notes in his introduction, his own text tries to duplicate that genre, in that it explores, reads, and contextualizes the early modern essay without conclusion, offering its insights as tools readers may use as they wish. That decision—to write in a mode similar to the essays he examines—determines both the strengths and the weaknesses of this book. Black indeed offers a splendid tool to scholars interested in early modern readers, while his decision to delineate this tool without using it himself leaves his own readers to figure out how to apply his work to the essays he studies.

Black's book consists of two parts: his examination of the essay as a genre, and his examination of three different sorts of essays. I found the first part, “Of Essays,” to be the stronger of the two. Black considers the stated goals of various early modern essay writers, defines the characteristics of the genre as situated within the historical period, and locates his study within and against historicist and cultural studies of writing and reading. Black manages to anticipate and address questions raised in the course of his study, providing a clear and complete sense of the essay genre as he defines it. And he offers a dynamic definition, arguing that essays present a process of exploration or rumination of ideas, an invitation to share a journey along a path of thought. Black's approach emphasizes the readerly aspects of the essay and suggests that essays offer examples of the ways in which their authors read texts as well as providing methods that the essays’ readers might themselves employ in reading or ruminating. Essays, in short, invite their readers to try out the ideas that they explore and play with but never fully nail down. Black succeeds in his aim of reenacting this lively genre within this portion of his text, as he indeed provides plenty of concepts for his own readers’ use.

The second part, “Essays Exapted,” examines how the essay proved to be of use to natural science, to a sociable public sphere, and to the novel by looking at Robert Boyle, the Spectator, and Tom Jones. Since only the essay genre relates these three examinations to one another, this portion of the book does not especially cohere, though it does demonstrate the utility of Black's approach in examining shifts of usage in the essay genre and their corresponding cultural effects. These chapters are useful, particularly to anyone interested in theoretical or historical shifts within their subjects driven by considerations of genre, but they privilege the use of the essay genre over the use of the essays' content. When Black analyzes the text of essays, he again looks at what their writers have to say about their generic form or writes generally about how their content reflects the choices of their authors. The readerly position he assumes, then, is that of the modern scholar, not that of the contemporary reader of these essays. When he departs from that stance, in his analysis of Tom Jones, he turns away from the language of the essays in that text and instead analyzes the narrative written around them.

In consequence, Black's study of essays leaves the task of dealing with the content of essays to his readers. In his introduction, he quotes from a book by John Uffley, who provides for his readers an alphabetized list of quotations from his own reading. While Black suggests that Uffley's essay, and works like it, could provide a record of a reader's response to texts, Black himself restricts his study to the characteristics of the essay genre, leaving the application of his theory to his readers, or perhaps to his next publication. Finding the interpretative path leading from Uffley's essay to a model of his readerly practice appears difficult at best. As promising as Black's ideas seem to me, I cannot help but think that they would be more convincing and exciting if he had demonstrated the potential he sees in the essay directly. That said, Black's theoretical approach to the essay should be of use to literary scholars and historians, as a starting point for their own interpretations of early modern essays.