Literacy in Everyday Life: Reading and Writing Early Modern Dutch Diaries

Focusing on four Dutch diaries from different periods of the early modern age, this book describes in detail the diversified use of reading in everyday life, examining it in a wider context of communication that also includes writing and speech. Until recently, historians of reading have concentrated on book ownership and trying to map out a history of who read what. The reading experience has been a subject more difficult to research. As has been pointed out before, egodocuments can be valuable sources in this case. Following this lead, Literacy in Everyday Life focuses upon four early modern Dutch diaries in which readers document their daily life and in which they recount their reading. In the analysis, other ways in which these four readers communicated are also addressed, especially speech and writing. This book therefore provides an insight into the possible uses of literacy and the interaction between the printed, written and spoken word in the early modern Dutch Republic.