"Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain traces the co-evolution of the essay and the mode of literacy it enabled. Focusing on the interactive processes of reading registered by the form, Of Essays offers a new approach to early modern textuality. It shows how the genre served to record, test and disseminate the skills required in a culture increasingly mediated by print. Presenting print culture as an ecosystem of interacting readers and readings, Of Essays explores the way humanist reading practices were adapted for new purposes. Essays and their distinctive mode of digestive and adaptive reading developed out of the mode of essayistic literacy was adopted by Boyle for his reformed experimental natural philosophy, by Addison and Steele for their social and sociable periodical, the Spectator, and by Fielding for his self-reflexive novel, Tom Jones."--BOOK JACKET.