Explores the mindset in which people approached reading and writing in the sixteenth century, specifically the idea that reading books was 'good' for you in the sense that it was morally useful and informative.

Katherine C. Little received her BA from UC-Berkeley and her PhD from Duke University. She has taught at Vassar College, Fordham University, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Winner of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and co-founder of the online journal, New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession, she has published essays on topics both medieval and early modern. Her first book explores the late medieval heresy, Lollardy, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England; and the second charts the re-emergence of pastoral, Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry.

• Introduction: Reading Is Good for You


• 1: The New, the Medieval, and the Renaissance


• 2: Humanism and the Morality Play


• 3: Humanist Moral Fusion: Terence and the Prodigal Son


• 4: The Uses of Good Literature


• 5: Good Literature [bonae litterae] and the Good


• 6: Horatian Dulce et Utile as Poisonous Reading


• 7: Worldly Vanity and George Gascoigne


• 8: Edmund Spenser's Contemptus Mundi


• Afterword: Confidence and Doubt