Few fields of historical scholarship have advanced more in the last half-century than the history of knowledge. No longer is intellectual history told as a heroic narrative in which mountain peaks – canonical Great Men – tower over their surroundings. Instead, we have realised that even the greatest individuals were embedded in their contexts and communities. An important way this realisation has been achieved is through the study of the practices by which texts were produced: reading, note-taking, teaching and much more. 

Like all good things, this trend can be taken to fanciful extremes: one can find recent studies in which artisans without any formal education are deemed as important to scientific change as Newton, or in which everyone who ever kept a diary is a ‘historian’. But generally the new approach has paid dividends.

One of its most important practitioners is Ann Blair, working on a period and place as significant as they are difficult to study: Europe between 1500 and 1650. This was the first age of the mass circulation of printed knowledge, often in forbidding Latin tomes. It is also the earliest