Explores how the earliest printers moulded demand and created new markets and argues that marketing changed what was read and the place of reading in sixteenth-century readers' lives, shaping their expectations, tastes, and their practices and beliefs.

Alexandra da Costa is a Senior University Lecturer at the Faculty of English in Cambridge. Her research primarily focuses on early printed books meant for an English readership and late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century religious culture. Her previous book, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey's Defence of Orthodoxy 1524-1535 (OUP, 2012) examined the printed books that Syon Abbey sponsored in the turbulent 1530s, when the Church in England was threatened by both the spread of Lutheran heresy and Henry VIII's desire for greater ecclesiastical control.

• Introduction


• Devotional Reading


• 1: Sweet consolation: catechetical and contemplative guides


• 2: Dangerous fruit: selling forbidden books


• Worldly Reading


• 3: A taste for trifles: romances, scurrilous tales and merry gests


• 4: A hunger for news: pamphlets and broadsheets


• Practical Reading


• 5: Wide-ranging appetites: pilgrimage guides, advertisements and souvenirs


• 6: For the reader's digest: books for the householder, husband and housewife


• Afterword