What is close reading? An exploration of a methodology

ABSTRACT

What is close reading and what are the steps we take in close reading as a methodological approach? This article explores reading strategies and advocates for a more conscious close reading. Starting by tracing the hermeneutic heritage of close reading, and examining its development from the New Criticism movement onwards, it then describes the fundamental physical and cognitive aspects of reading as a distinct form of analytic attentiveness. Three methodological steps are delineated, discussed, and exemplified through the author’s close reading practices. By employing a paratextual lens to the close reading of manuscripts from the Early Modern period, the article demonstrates how theoretically informed readings, such as the paratextual perspective, enhance the reading process and deepen our understanding of historical conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Close reading
• reading strategies
• paratexts
• cultural history
• methodology
• manuscript studies

Introduction

In his famous 1597 essay ‘Of Studies’, the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) highlights the importance of studies and the benefits of reading. While studies can offer delight, ornament one’s life, and improve one’s abilities, reading can provide a coping mechanism for diverse situations, enhance readers’ intellect, and remove the restraints of the mind. As reading is the main entry into the diverse advancements in studies, Bacon reflects specifically on this practice, suggesting that individuals read ‘not to contradict, nor to belieue, but to waigh and consider. Some bookes are to bee tasted, others to bee swallowed, and some few to bee chewed and disgested: That is, some bookes are to be read only in partes; others to be read, but cursorily, and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention’ (Bacon 1597, 2). While Bacon acknowledges that books were made for different purposes and should be read accordingly, his meticulous explanations of study techniques reveal specific reading strategies. He argues that some books were meant to be read with great attention and reflection, others to be read fast and without much thought, and yet others to be read ‘only in parts’. There is reason to believe that Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) shares comparable sentiments regarding the significance and advantages of different reading. This assertion finds support in his comprehensive evaluation of various authors and their works, as elucidated in his essay ‘On Books’ (de Montaigne 1595–1877). In Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598), he reflects in a chapter entitled ‘Reading of Bookes’ upon how it may be conducted: ‘As the s[c]ent of spices and flowers is more acceptable somewhat off then close to the nose: so there are some things that please, if they be lightly passed over; which being exactly looked into do loose their grace’. However, he then distinguishes between different types of texts using a similar analogy: ‘Those things that live long, doe not soon spring up: so that worke which thou wouldst have always to be read, ought to be throughly laboured in, and seriouslie scanned’ (as quoted in Nicholson 2017, 643). It is the book in question – the text – that determines which methodology a reader chooses to employ; ultimately, it boils down to how the studies serve a particular reader. In this regard, little has changed since Bacon’s and Meres’s apt observations. As students and scholars within the humanities, we are constantly faced with making qualified methodological choices in our reading strategies. The books one must ‘chew and digest’ – that is, read with ‘diligence and attention’ or ‘throughly laboured in, and seriouslie scanned’ – could easily serve as an description of an analytic practice regularly exercised within humanistic and historical research, namely close reading.

Historically-oriented research is characterised by the engagement with and interpretation of texts, recognising them as fundamentally historical and cultural constructions. In our quest to understand historical conditions, experiences, and events, we study the narratives created through old and new books and manuscripts, collections of legends, broadside ballads, letters, brochures, posters, diplomas, laws, and inscriptions, and we ‘read’ images. We generate new material through fieldwork interviews and observations that serve as sources for later examinations. In these diverse reading exercises, we apply close reading as one of our strategies. As cultural historians, we are interested in ‘symbolic mediation’ in culture. Indeed, as Anna Green argues, cultural representations construct ‘meaning through signs and concepts’- (2008, 9), and therefore, our engagement with sources heavily depends on interpretive hermeneutic readings. As one of our core methodological tools, we conduct a close reading of our key texts; however, this particular methodology is often exempt from discussion when we reflect upon our methods (Gustavsson 2017, 122). Rather, while historians broadly concur that reading – for obvious reasons – is an essential method, how closely we conduct our readings and what guides the steps we take in our interpretation are hardly discussed even in central methodological works (see, e.g. Chartier 2014; Clark 2004; Green 2008; Tosh 2015).

While conducting close reading is something we expect our students to master, we tend to fall short when asked for proper introductions to it within historical and cultural studies. Perhaps the conceptual and disciplinary coining of close reading in literary studies from the first half of the twentieth century onwards (see further discussions below) has made the concept challenging to discuss.¹ Alternatively, perhaps historians’ debates concerning the productive quality of texts have overshadowed methodological explorations of how we read them. There are plenty of reflections on what working with historical texts entails. The now classical perspectives of Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Darnton represent some important examples. Ginzburg reflects on historians’ work in identifying ‘clues’ among seemingly trivial details, relating it to that of the stone age hunters’ ability to create a system based on seemingly insignificant traces in search of their prey (1992, 96–125). Similarly, Darnton promotes the productive value of ‘straying from the beaten path’ in his reading of sources in order to enjoy ‘some unusual views’ (1984, 6). Reflections on close reading as a method of textual interpretation are complemented by the focus on the history of reading (and writing) that has appeared in recent decades. Studies of reading cultures, reading communities, reading institutions, and reading modes and techniques are among the many subjects investigated in this context (see, e.g. Blair 2010; Guglielmo and Chartier 1999; Manguel 1997; Pettegree and der Weduwen 2021).² Although these are undoubtedly valuable both as methodological notions of how cultural historians see texts’ quality and what they may produce of historical value, and in understanding historical practices of reading, reading strategies are scarcely studied within our field. Thus, there is a need for systematic and methodological approaches and reflections to close reading in cultural history.

This article aims to contribute to such approaches and reflections by asking the following questions: What is close reading and what are the steps we take in close reading as a methodological approach? What follows is an exploration of close reading as a methodology with an emphasis on cultural historical research. The first part discusses the history of close reading as a methodology. Close reading was part of literary practices long before literature studies included critical methodological discussions of the practice from the 1920s onwards. This part of the article aims to identify where we find such practices; it then turns to reading practices among cultural historians during recent decades. The second part explores the fundamental act of reading attentively and argues that describing the core physical and cognitive practice of reading is essential for understanding its underlying methodology. Here, close reading is identified through three methodological steps: establishing the text’s readability and the purpose of reading it, exploring the text, and interpreting the text. The final part offers a close reading of a collection of Norwegian eighteenth-century manuscripts. By demonstrating how to read these sources from the perspective of a cultural historian, this section illustrates the different phases of close reading as a methodology and promotes a theoretically-informed reading of historical texts. As such, the search for a possible close reading strategy is as much an exploration and search within my reading strategies as it is of the readings of other cultural historians.

Close reading as an interpretive strategy

Peter Middleton explains close reading as ‘a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions’, an apt description when considering the numerous and varied definitions offered by literary studies (2005, 5). In its simplest form, close reading is a form of ‘productive attentiveness’ (Bialostosky 2006, 113), what Berthoff describes as a ‘way of attending to the interplay of saying and meaning’ (1999, 677). When reading texts closely, the readers ‘investigate the specific strength of a literary work in as many details as possible’ to understand ‘how a text works, how it creates its effects on the most minute level’ (Mikics 2007, 61). While this literary closeness to the microstructures of texts and attention to detail may risk the exclusion of historians, it is the critical practice where findings are connected to ‘broader philosophical, literary, and cultural questions’ that re-opens the reading and welcomes us (non-literary scholars) in as readers (Bell, Harris, and Méchoulan 2009, 6). While there are obvious differences between close reading poetry and close reading historical sources, reading is a distinct and central methodology within humanistic disciplines today. As a method, it has its own history.

The history of close reading is closely connected to the development of hermeneutics, the interpretation of cultural expressions in search of underlying meanings and connections. This Greco-Roman philosophical tradition stood for a more systematical development of the skill of (textual) interpretation, most explicitly reflected in language and concepts created by philosophers. The Greek word hermeneuein stands for the interpretation and conveyance of a message, while the discipline is labelled hermeneutike and understood as an art, techne, which we should understand as a technical and practice-oriented term. Hermeneutike techne, or the Latin concept ars interpretandi, thus denotes the practical and technical knowledge of interpretation (Gilje 2019, 35–38; Green 2008, 11–26; Kjørup 1996, 265–287; Lægreid and Skorgen 2006, 7–38). Hermeneutics has been closely connected to exegesis, the interpretation of biblical texts in Christian cultures, due to the inspiration it offered to early readings of biblical texts. In the second century CE, the Egyptian theologian Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253) promoted a hermeneutic theology resting on three principles for reading the Bible: a literal, a moral, and an allegorical meaning (Gilje 2019, 39–40). Hermeneutics was not limited to the interpretations of Christian religious texts, and exegetic commentaries were derived from major works within Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. Therefore, the early development of close reading produced commentaries reflecting classical rhetorical analysis and interpretations and discussions of normative (sacred and legal) texts. A highlight of this tradition that further illustrates the new reflexivity in interpreting texts is Didascalicon, a twelfth-century work by the canon regular of Saint-Victor, Hugh of Saint-Victor (died 1141). In the work, Saint-Victor reconsiders his experiences as a teacher and scholar and reflects on the value and meaning of reading, giving one of the six books comprising Didascalicon the title ‘Order and ways of reading and the discipline “of reading”’ (here quoted from Poirel 2020, 113–140).³

The hermeneutic heritage of textual interpretation was further developed through the medieval and the beginning of the Early Modern period, perhaps most notably by Martin Luther in his Reformation, which included an insistence on new ways of interpreting the Bible. Instead of viewing the biblical texts as containing layers of meaning that were up to the readers (theologians) to disclose, he promoted a theology based on the Bible alone (sola Scriptura), holding that the Bible – guided by the holy spirit – should explain unclear passages (Scriptura sui interpres). The latter part of his reading strategy is the introduction of what we today know as ‘the hermeneutic circle’, where reading alternates between a focus on the text as a whole and the text as individual parts. In a secularised approach, Luther’s emphasis on the reader’s interpretation of the Bible based on the text alone placed hermeneutics at the centre of biblical studies and theology.

The further development of hermeneutics as a methodology in the Early Modern and modern periods was influenced by emerging sciences and disciplines. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) became the frontrunners for a culturally and historically based hermeneutics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, philosophers like Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) had already advocated for a historicisation and contextualisation of biblical texts in the seventeenth century, forming the base for historical-critical hermeneutics (Gilje 2019). For Herder, hermeneutics concerned the understanding of cultural variation and the meaning behind different cultural expressions, while Schleiermacher was occupied with cultural translation and advocated the need for a broad contextualisation with additional sources to understand a historical text. Dilthey is known for clearly distinguishing between the natural sciences, which aim to explain the existence of material objects in the world, and humanistic disciplines, which seek to understand how humans experience the world.⁴ How we best interpret texts has since been subject to discussions in a broad range of academic disciplines and scholarly contexts, often marked by fundamental, broader, and existential questions of humanistic understanding.

In the first half of the twentieth century, close reading was subject to much discussion within literary studies. The prevailing movement that exerted significant influence was the Anglo-American paradigmatic direction known as New Criticism, which emphasized explication, advocating that a close reading should be confined to the work itself. In the United Kingdom, this approach is commonly denoted as Practical Criticism, a term originating from the title of I. A. Richards book from 1929. In this work, Richards elucidates how his instructional reading exercises with students as an instructor at Cambridge University during the 1920s contributed to the development of his methodology and principles for textual interpretation. Richards promoted the autonomy of texts, particularly poems, asserting that language and form were paramount for understanding them, rather than relying on preconceived notions or beliefs. In the preface of his book, he acknowledges concealing ’the particulars of the authorship and the date of the poems’, contending that the reader’s engagement is enhanced ‘if the reader remains unaware […] until his own opinions of them have been formed and tested’ (Richards 1930, viii). Ideally, the work should be regarded as a self-contained, self-referential, aesthetic object warranting primary focus. Other seminal works in the realm of literary criticism in the UK during this period include T. S. Eliot’s Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism published in (1920) and Richards’ student William Empson’s book Seven Types of Ambiguity from (1930). The latter gained prominence for its proposition that uncertainty or the multiplicity of meanings in word usage – ranging from double meaning to outright contradictions – could enrich poetry rather than detract from it.

The critical literary movement known as New Criticism originated with the publication of the book The New Criticism by the American scholar and poet John Crow Ransome in (1941), where he outlined some of the foundational principles of this approach to literary analysis. In the early 1920s, Ransome was associated with the Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt University, who aimed to establish a modern southern literature through the influential literary magazine The Fugitive (1922–1925). According to New Critics, literary texts, particularly poetry, should be closely examined, with a focus on the connotative and associative meanings of words, as well as the functions of figurative language such as symbolism, metaphor, and imagery, viewing the text as ‘a coherent, unified, organic whole’ (Di Leo 2020, 137) even though it appeared as containing a high degree of ambiguity. In reading, it was the inseparable relationship between poetic form and content which defined a works meaning. The notion that any altering the wording of a text could consequently change its meaning was famously articulated by Cleanth Brooks’s (1947) work The Well Wrought Urn, where he coined the phrase ‘the heresy of paraphrase’ arguing that ‘any good poem sets up against all attempts to paraphrase it’ (Brooks, 196). New Critics asserted the autonomy of literary works, considering both the author’s intentions and readers’ responses irrelevant in the interpretation of the text. In their essays ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949), Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt emphasized the detachment of a poem from its author and the need to avoid interpreting texts based on readers’ psychological or emotional responses because it was ‘a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949, 31, authors italics). Rejecting any diversion from the text itself, New Criticism advocates sought to analyse texts exclusively through the lens of linguistic complexity.

The UK approach of Practical Criticism and the US approach of New Criticism shared common ground in literary criticism but diverged in significant ways. Practical Criticism, often emphasising ambiguity and metaphor, facilitated a more creative interpretation of texts, wheras American critics tended toward a formalist approach, prioritizing elements such as speaker, tension, tone and organic form in their analysis.

A key aspect of the The New Criticism movement’s development of close reading as a methodology was its insistence on separating historical interpretation from close textual analysis, arguing that historical and contextual considerations could lead to an unambiguous and closed reading. One noteable departure from this viewpoint is the Cambridge School, a historiographical movement associated with scholars at the University of Cambridge, advocating for a historicist or contextualist approach to text interpretation. Quentin Skinner’s seminal article ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ from 1969 is considered foundational to the movement’s principles. In this work, asserts that ‘To understand a text must at least be to understand both the intention to be understood, and the intention that this intention be understood, which the text as an intended act of communication must have embodied’ (Skinner 2002, 86). According to Skinner, ‘decoding’ the writer’s intentions necessitates considering all relevant facts about the social context of the text (Skinner 2002, 87). The movement, as noted by John Dunn, one of its central figures’, was, a revolt against what they percieved as ahistorical approaches within the field of history of political thought (Dunn 1996, 11–38).⁵ While Skinner empahsized authorial intention and Dunn focused on biography, John Greville Agard Pocock, another prominent figure in the Cambridge School, introduced the concept of ‘languages’ of political thought.

Since the emergence of New Criticism in literary studies from the 1920s onwards, scholars discussing text interpretation and close reading as methodologies have adopted a host of literary practices to understand how texts work (see, e.g. Brown 2017; B. H. Smith 2016). Literary theorists have advocated for different types of close reading, emphasising diverse elements such as the reader’s experience, the norms of interpretive communities, and the deconstructionists’ goal to reveal different, often contradictory meanings of a text (see, e.g. Derrida 1997; Fish 1982; Rosenblatt 1978). In questions of text and intention, another prominent discussion has been what implications the question about the sender of a text has for the historical text. In his seminal 1968 article ‘The Death of the Author’ Roland Barthes argues that ‘it is language which speaks, not the author’ (Barthes 1988, 167–72). Following Barthes discussion, Michel Foucault explores the concept of the author in his 1969 article, questioning ‘What is an author’ and suggesting that argues that the author exists as a function of a written text but is not necessarily integral to its interpretation (Foucault 1988).

Regarding the material boundaries of text, an element disregarded by the New Critics in favour of language alone, received renewed attention with the semiological tradition following Ferdinand de Saussure (Di Leo 2020, 139). The growing importance of materiality within humanistic studies in later decades has led to a material turn in academic research, highlighting the role of physical objects, substances and bodily experiences in shaping human experiences, ideas, and practices. Close reading text could therefore entail, in a post New Criticism manner, giving equal attention to the text’s material features as to the text itself. This is commonly demonstrated within book historical research, which will be illustrated in the last section of this article.

Cultural historians have always used texts to understand the past. By providing data and details as reference points to uncover other texts and as testimonies to a past that is otherwise lost to us, the reading of texts is essential to historical writing. By situating texts in their historical contexts, we seek to understand the writers’ motivations, distinctions, and beliefs and strive in many ways to ‘see things their way’ as Quentin Skinner puts it (2002, 3). Rather than questioning which close reading technique to use, our approach to reading indicates the questions we pose to the texts. These questions are coloured by paradigmatic shifts and geographical, cultural, and social conditions. Furthermore, they are never constant and are continually evolving.⁶

The increasing historical attention to the search for meaning and understanding, both at an individual and group scale, has contributed to an increasing interest in close reading within cultural history in recent decades (Amundsen 1999, 68). As cultural historians, we seek meaning and understanding through symbolic mediations that serve as representations – rather than reconstructions – of past realities, as Anna Green points out (2008, 9). Our reading of texts essentially questions how they represent the past. According to Roger Chartier, the temporality of texts engages ‘the two axes that organize all investigation of cultural history or cultural sociology’ (2014, 24), namely that of the synchronic and diachronic axis. The synchronic is how the text is situated in relation to other contemporary texts; the diachronic is how a text as genre and discipline points further back in time, connecting itself to past texts and expressions. This understanding of the temporal quality of the texts resembles what Mikhail Bakhtin introduces as a text’s dialogism, proclaiming, ‘I live in a world of other people’s words’ (1986, 143). No text rests exclusively on itself but echoes other manuscripts and utterances. As cultural historians, whether we investigate the heteroglossia and dialogic disposition in language, read texts as material culture, or are interested in the cultural dynamics of textual cultures like the one represented by the ‘Republic of Letters’, we seek to understand the meaning of what we read. Thus, a specific form of attentive reading is required, which will be explored in the following section.

The act of reading attentively

Close reading is a physical practice that involves the optical or tactile and cognitive act of reading texts attentively. Physically, we can imagine bending our head over the text in question, letting our eyes (or fingers) fixate on words and characters to allow them to form cognitive meanings and correlations. We read fast, then maybe slow, in parts and then as a whole, and then we read again. Our eyes (and fingers) catch words that leave unconscious impressions and memories that enable us to form meaning through time and repetition. These repetitions qualify us to carry out an interpretation of the text. Alberto Manguel (1997, 7) states that:

In every case, it is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place or event a certain possible readability; it is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, and then decipher it. We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand.

We read to make sense of something. While decoding the system of signs to enable the readability of a text, posing questions gives further purpose and direction to our reading. Searching for answers to our questions helps to clarify the text and gives it meaning. Therefore, in the very first step of close reading, the reader must establish the text’s readability and the purpose of reading it.

At a basic level, readability implies establishing whether an individual can understand the language, signs, and symbols used in the text and if its material (or digital) condition renders it legible. The reading is also followed by questions posed to the text, from the starting point of ‘what is this?’ to more informed questions of increasing complexity. In this initial phase, where readability and purpose are scrutinised, the subsequent reading journey is determined.

The second step in attentive close reading is what I label exploring the text, which challenges the reader with two basic tasks that usually occur in sequence. Firstly, the reader studies the text by observing any information of particular interest in an interplay between the text and the reader. Either the totality of the text or specific parts of it – or both – may be in focus. The reader may be looking for everything from linguistic elements, semantic aspects, syntax, rhetoric, structural elements, thematic, and generic references in the text – or perhaps a mixture of all of these. In this phase, the reader delves into the form and structure of the text, gaining insight into the usage, purpose, and contextual significance of the language. It is in this engagement with the text, the cultural historian meet prior close reading traditions emphasising language. In his instructive book on close reading, David Greenham focuses on what he identifies as the ‘six contexts of close reading’ being the semantic, the syntactic, the thematic, the iterative, the generic, and the adversarial (2019, 7). The use of language, its presence in the text, and its impact, along with cultural and historical references, collectively provide an initial gateway for understanding the text, largely influenced by the reader’s context.⁷

Among the diverse range of scholars who identify as cultural historians, professional backgrounds are varied and so, therefore, are their situating. While a reader trained in folklore may be highly attentive to generic features in a close reading of a text, someone with a background in social history may look for elements of social structure by identifying groups, classifying them, and describing them. The conditions influencing the reading of texts were also a concern for the author advising the poet and statesman Fulke Greville (1554–1628) on research techniques. In the acquisition of research assistants to gather material for a treatise, he pointed out that:

… in general one Man’s Notes will little profit another, because one man’s Conceit doth so much differ from another’s; and also because the bare Note itself is nothing so much worth, as the suggestion it gives the Reader. Next I think, no profit is gotten by his Notes, that is not judicious in that whereof he makes his Notes (quoted from Snow 1960, 374).⁸

Our approaches to reading is fundamentally based on this mixture of situated optics and cognitive actions – actions that form our first impressions and basic assumptions before analytical concepts and theories are applied to the text. In this phase, we explore the text, conceptualise the content, and make our primary judgements. Usually, these first impressions and assumptions navigate us towards our theoretical choices as our reading and analysis continue. The varied backgrounds of readers further allow us to recognise the heterogeneous features of close reading. As pointed out by Peter Rabinowitz, individual practices often involve implicit and unquestioned values of the reader towards the text that may contribute to problematic interpretations (1992, 233). While a situated readership is an undeniable feature of all reading, combating the potential pitfalls remains a critical element of the reading process. Questioning why a researcher reads a particular text or corpus instead of others may be a simple yet valuable way to avoid such discrimination.

Another decisive element for conducting a close reading and choosing a theoretical approach is determining what type of text will be analysed. Source criticism is needed to determine the use of a given text, and an initial skim may indicate whether the text deserves closer attention and in-depth analysis, whether it is a primary source of information that references other relevant sources, or if both of these scenarios are true. A detailed textual analysis may become redundant when a text receives the status of information and there is no apparent reason for questioning its interpretation (Deane 2020, 2). Determining the status of the text defines its role as a source and how a reader understands and interprets it. This step relates to Roger Chartier’s emphasis on how the meaning of a text is constructed in the area between the cultural competencies of readers and the creativity and particularity of textual production; how, on the one hand, a text is made recognisable and simultaneously made to stand out (2014, 22–24).

The third step in the process of close reading involves the interpretation of the observations and analysis and their presentation as a conclusion. This phase involves reading and re-reading the text several times. We employ analytical concepts and theories that sharpen our reading of the text and give it direction, and we ask questions such as how and why. These actions prevent the data, details, and observations from being merely descriptions in the conclusion, classifying them as informed interpretations of the text’s content. Therefore, interpretations of texts involve the concept of representation in the sense that texts have both transparent and reflexive dimensions (Chartier 2014, 22–24).

For a close reader, the answer to most questions may lie in the details. It is essential to focus on anecdote and detail – on the historical actors themselves and on the process of writing – in order to discern the singularities, the specific contours, the ways of arranging or appropriating the larger elements of a given culture (Bell, Harris, and Méchoulan 2009, 4). The details, singularities, and specific contours of texts are not necessarily easy to define, though advanced data programming now allows for singularities to be extracted from large corpuses of text. Whether it is specific and individual details in a text or reoccurring motifs in several works that the reader is investigating, we acknowledge that different reading techniques contribute to distinct types of interpretive material and determine the potential interpretations that can be made. This choice transcends the use of different reading strategies, as discussed in the introduction, and reflects the chosen closeness level of the researcher’s close reading. There are, of course, fundamental differences in what information and meaning can be extracted from a text of ten pages compared to one paragraph or one word.

The dual nature of close reading is one of its central features, stressing singularity but also linking to the broader context and world in which the text exists. It possesses a complex difference but contains resemblances that can be distinguished (Bell, Harris, and Méchoulan 2009, 4). The singularity created by close reading, however, also empowers examples drawn from the text in specific ways because the example is something ‘that has been extracted from the usual circulation of discourse, immobilized in its singularity in order to be invoked in multiple situations’ (Bell, Harris, and Méchoulan 2009, 5). There is power in the example because its ability to control or defer is fused in its character. Therefore, close reading demands critical attention and scrutiny. As Anne Eriksen points out, examples are given a paradigmatic meaning even though they initially serve as illustrations of general circumstances (2019). Eriksen posits that the example receives ‘its cultural and rhetorical energy’ in this duality of being both regular and exceptional (2019, 357–358). As such, the example that often follows from a close reading is a projection beyond its own time and context, and the echo of this projection provides it with value and meaning.

Paratextual reading as a close reading strategy

As the previous discussion revealed, there are numerous ways of conducting close reading. Individual interests, the background of the reader, and the text itself help to determine their function and status in our investigations and adjust our level of closeness, the reading of the texts, and what theories we apply. This process will be exemplified in the following discussion using a systematic and comprehensive reading I conducted some years ago on a corpus of magical manuscripts from Norway, primarily from the eighteenth century (Ohrvik 2018). My initial goal was to study these manuscripts as sources of the cultural history of early modern medicine in Norway. As well as containing recipes for how to make ink and colour, prepare leather, and other arts, the texts contained many magical formulas, charms, and conjurations to protect against sickness and disease in humans and animals. Since the texts reflect a perception of sickness as inflicted by supernatural means, the methods reflected in the manuscripts for combating it are often countermagic. Therefore, these magical manuscripts, commonly entitled by their writers as the ‘Black Book’ (Svartebog) to denote their connection to the black arts, are rich sources of Early Modern notions and practices concerning magic, witchcraft, and popular medicine.

My first reading of the manuscripts provided an overview of the material and its contents. In my case, the immediate readability of the texts depended on specific reading skills in Early Modern gothic handwriting styles from the seventeenth century onwards. As gothic had not been part of my previous academic training, I needed to learn it. Before my first comprehensive reading of the manuscripts, my preparation involved establishing an overview of the previous research conducted on this genre of writing both domestically and internationally. As my attentive reading and aim to discover the texts proceeded, however, so did my frustration: the challenge lay in progressing past how previous scholars had read and interpreted the material. The significance put on the close reading of magical charms and conjurations and understanding the dynamics and symbols of magical practices and rituals weighed heavily on me during my first readings of the texts. In more ways than one, my prejudices about the material made it hard to find an original perspective and conduct a novel reading – and to determine my purpose for reading it.

Consequential turns and discoveries often arrive when least expected and, at times, when one’s attention is focused elsewhere. In this case, it happened while I was sitting in the reading room of the manuscript collection at the National Library of Oslo with a stack of magical manuscripts to examine. As I stared at the collection in front of me, I suddenly realised that from this perspective, they did not look like manuscripts but resembled printed books. Half of the items had decorated leather binding and were made in quarto or octavo formats. When I opened one, I found a classical elaborated baroque title page written in gothic fracture, imitating the typographical style of printed texts. The question was: did it matter that they looked like printed books? Did it make any difference whether I, as a reader, interpreted them as manuscripts or books? What constituted a book in the Early Modern period? What was the meaning behind the material forms of the Black Books? These initial questions directed me towards investigating production technologies and studying the intended use and mode of the knowledge in the Black Books. The materiality of the texts urged me to see them as products of knowledge rather than ‘magic’, ‘witchcraft’, or ‘medicine’.

As I found my way through the material and decided on the main objectives of the investigation, my reading required some theoretical guidance. The titles, the introduction, the use of paragraph headings, and the list of contents that had finally caught my attention conceptually represented paratexts and paved the way to the conceptual framework of the French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1930–2018). In his Seuils from 1987 and the English translation Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation ten years later, Genette describes paratexts as a transactional tool that:

constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (1997, 2).

Essentially, paratexts affect the text and the world in which it is presented and, according to Genette, play a key role in controlling our reading of it. Paratexts are, as Helen Smith and Louise Wilson note, ‘an array of liminal forms’ (2011, 2) – they constitute the zone between the inside and the outside of the text while making claims about both worlds. A study of paratexts essentially involves ‘its means, methods, and effects’ (Genette 1997, 2).

I adopted Genette’s paratextual framework as an essential guide in my close reading of the manuscripts, where it functioned as a methodological device and a theoretical framework for my study. It fixed my gaze, determined the empirical scope, established premises for my reading, and provided a conceptual apparatus. Although it is tailored to the context of printed books, Genette’s apparatus was undoubtedly useful for the world of handwritten texts when applied with paratextual elements. As a result, the paratextual reading highlighted how writers conceptualised the knowledge in the manuscripts through the titles they gave their books, how they described and labelled the content in the introductions, and their use of tables of contents and running paragraph headings.

One of the paratextual elements of the Black Books that enhanced my understanding of them as knowledge products was the reading of the manuscript titles. The serially copied allegorical ‘biography’, which is given as part of the title in many manuscripts, points towards an understanding of the value of the knowledge presented within, as illustrated in this title from the late eighteenth century (MS 4 1819, National Library):

The Black Book

Was first found at the Wittenberg Academy

In the year 1529

In a Marble Chest

written on Parchment.⁹

The title situates the knowledge in time, space, and in connection with material features. Rather than a factual designation, the text creates a symbolic relationship with knowledge institutions (Wittenberg), knowledge containers (marble chest), and knowledge technologies (parchment) that – in and through the book – can be reactivated and used. Some of the manuscripts also contain a more detailed description in the title of the manuscript’s content and link more directly to specific branches of knowledge (MS 4 1819, National Library):

A Summary of Cyprian and the Jewish Cabal

together with Necromancy, Demonology and Goetia

Comprising Mathematical, Chemical, Experimental Physical Arts and Sciences.

A summary of Ceremonial Magic and Theurgy …¹⁰

The titles’ claim to present and represent these branches of knowledge concerns the connections the writers want to create rather than what the Black Books actually offer. While containing popular medical treatments and general protection through magical means, the books do not promote key topics within learned natural philosophy. However, the claims to such topics in the book titles are interesting and point us towards the writers’ ideas, valuations of knowledge, ambitions for the manuscript, and how they wanted the text to be received.

As my reading of the Black Books turned in the direction of their intended audience and reception, their material elements became increasingly important. Studying the material features of the manuscripts revealed that the books, when possible, were produced with proper and ornamented stiff covers, had a comprehensive reading navigation apparatus including tables of contents, paragraph headings, and book sections, and were made in somewhat larger formats than the typical small handbooks: sextodecimo, duodecimo, and octavo. It was evident from the material features of the manuscripts that their makers wanted them to look like printed books of knowledge, granting them the same air of authority. This ‘reading’ of the material features of the Black Books was further strengthened by the claim in some of these texts that they were previously printed volumes and that the font used in central parts of the books is gothic fracture, which is the font typically used in printed matter.

Due to its chief focus on the linguistic elements, however, Genette’s apparatus falls somewhat short when evaluating materialistic features, a point Jerome McGann claims limits his paratextual reading since ‘texts […] are embodied phenomena, and the body of the text is not exclusively linguistic’ (1991, 13). In my study, it became evident that the very production of the manuscripts was essential to their understanding as books, given their stiff covers, binding, and carefully chosen fonts and formats. The manuscripts were constructed as books by their writers and were conceived of and treated as books by their users. Therefore, I argue that they should be regarded as part of European book history (and research). Conducting a close reading where the materialistic features became an extension of the text, acknowledging that the ‘materiality of the book is inseparable from that of the text’ as Roger Chartier puts it, allowed for a more complete reading of the manuscripts (2014, ix). It was an approach which recognised that the material form is part of the communication process that conditions historical particularity (Rem et al. 2008).¹¹

Focusing on genre provided another approach to close reading the manuscripts, offering ‘a framework for the form, understanding and interpretation’ of the texts as cultural expressions (Österlund-Pötzsch 2022, 17), – a ‘speech style oriented to the production and reception of a particular kind of text’ (Bauman 2004, 3–4). In Genette’s paratextual framework, a text’s generic features are primarily encountered on the title page, often through the title itself as a central generic identification element. These elements serve as what Genette refers to as the first entrance way or threshold to the main body of the text, establishing the tone and creating parameters between itself and the readership (1997, 94–103). Thus, a reading of the titles could potentially reveal the books identity and the intended relationship between the book and its reader (Genette 1997, 94–103, see also Ohrvik 2018, 142).

The use of titles such as ‘Cyprian’ (Cyprianus), ‘Art Book’ (konstbog), and ‘Black Book’ (Svartebogen) in a number of manuscripts served to attach them to historical, literary and semantic properties. Attributing the authorship to Cyprian, a legendary magician from the medieval period, linked the books to the common attribution practice connected to the European grimoire tradition, where historical and legendary figures like Albertus Magnus, Faust, Heinrich Agrippa, and Solomon served as central authoritative voices legitimizing the content of the books. Similarly, the use of ‘Art Book’ functioned as a genre identifier, semantically and literarily connecting the manuscripts to specific texts circulating in the European book market in the Early Modern period, such as Italian secreti books, German Kunstbüchlein, and the Danish Konstbog. By employing similar terminology and claiming to present similar arts, the manuscripts established intertextual connections with other similar books, providing a general identification of their content as theoretical and practical knowledge. Lastly, the term ‘Black Book’ served as a central identifier for a specific branch of the knowledge within the books, namely, that related to the black arts. This not only refereed to specific magical practices but also contributed to associating the content (black arts) with its owner (Cyprian) and possibly classifying it as a blend of theoretical and practical knowledge.

Implementing a close reading methodology

Today, we are confronted with a new generation of history students of which an increasing degree have established reading habits and strategies contrary to how we have traditionally understood close reading. Students digitally skim texts or parts of texts, engage in instant messaging, and use abbreviated codes of communication that relay minimal information. These practices do not necessarily make them poorer close readers; however, their reading approach is different, which proves the importance of teaching and learning close reading methodology. One of the aims in this article has been to provide the reader with a guide to close reading, firstly by identifying and labelling the different steps in the reading process and secondly by offering examples of how it may be conducted. Rather than offering something resembling fixed interpretive techniques, my objective has been to contribute to and advocate a more conscious close reading.

Close reading is a method shared by cultural historians and other humanities disciplines, although its excecution has evolved over time and across academic fields. What unites us is not so much the specific technique we employ, but rather the questions we ask. Peter Rabinowitz’s critical notion on close reading suggests a departure from it in favour of what he terms ‘flexible reading’, as close reading ‘rests on faulty assumptions about how literature is read’ and may lead to misinterpretations (1994, 218). Rabinowitz critiques the emphasis within literary studies on a work’s value being contingent upon its responsiveness to close reading. He argues that the primary focus should be on cultivating diverse reading approaches:

If I’m against close reading, then what am I for? The obvious alternative is pluralism. We can legitimately show our students that different writers in different social, historical, and economic contexts write for different purposes and with different expectations. Likewise, we can teach our students that different readers (or the same reader under different circumstances) read for different reasons. (1994, 221)

As Francis Bacon and Francis Mere aptly pointed out many centuries ago, we engage in and apply multiple strategies because our reading serves different purposes, and our texts possess different qualities. Whether we advocate for the flexible or close strategy of reading, we can agree on what Rabinowitz (1994, 221) identifies as the significant consequences of our reading, namely ‘that every decision about how to read opens certain doors only by closing others’.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ane Ohrvik

Ane Ohrvik is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Norway. Specializing in the history of knowledge in early modern Europe and contemporary pilgrimage in Northern Europe, her publications include topics relating to magic and witchcraft, history of medicine, rituals, book history, heritage, and folk religion. Her recent publications include Medicine, Magic and Art in Early Modern Norway (2018) and Reframing Pilgrimage in Northern Europe, a co-edited volume of Numen (2020).

Notes

1. It is not my intention to artificially divide among distinct humanistic disciplines but to acknowledge the possible differences between approaching a text from the position of literary studies and that of an historian (see the discussion of literary studies and New Criticism below).

2. Another field is literacy studies, which involves topics such as word recognition, comprehension, orthography, alphabetics, phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and fluency.

3. I owe thanks to Dirk Johannsen who made me aware of this particular text. I am also grateful for his thorough reading and comments on this article.

4. The development of hermeneutics was related to the evolution of scientific disciplines and history in particular. For more information on the background of history as discipline, see Charlotte Backerra’s article elsewhere in this volume.

5. The revolt also concerned the type of history writing which sought to eliminate theoretical debate, disregard the meaning of the historically distinct intellectual context of discourses of a given historical era, and of what they perceived to be anachronistic methods of interpretation.

6. See the introduction to this volume for a more detailed discussion of the paradigmatic shifts that have marked cultural history research.

7. When searching online, there are numerous examples of practical guides to close reading as part of the methodological training offered to students by universities worldwide, see, i.e. University of Berkeley (Accessed June 20 2023 https://slc.berkeley.edu/writing-worksheets-and-other-writing-resources/close-reading); University of York (Accessed June 20 2023 https://www.york.ac.uk/english/writing-at-york/writing-resources/close-reading/); University of Guelph (Accessed June 20 2023 https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/c.php?g=130967&p=5002902); Monash University (Accessed June 20 2023 https://www.monash.edu/learnhq/study-better/develop-strategies-for-reading-and-note-making/read-critically).

8. The authorship of this letter has been subject to discussion. While Vernon F. Snow argues that it must have been written by Francis Bacon, Paul E. J. Hammer deem his arguments unconvincing and places the authorship to Robert Devereux, the 2^nd Earl of Essex (1565–1601), see (Hammer 1994).

9. All translations are by the author.

10. See also Ms 8 620b, National Library; Ms Moltke Moe 106 IIIa.

Norwegian Folklore Archive; Ms Moltke Moe 106 IIIe, Norwegian Folklore Archive.

11. The great breakthrough in emphasising that books as objects and material forms carry meaning and can work as primary forces in the reception of books (even though the perspective had occupied bibliographers for some time) was Donald F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1984), where the author argues that materiality is crucial to the meaning of texts.