DREADFUL NEWS FROM WAPPING (AND ELSEWHERE): GENDER, READING AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Scenes of books and reading are often prominent in accounts of early modern women's encounters with the supernatural. This reveals a number of significant things about the way reading was conceptualized in the period, especially about the anxieties on the part of (largely educated male) authors about the extension of reading to the young, the female, and the lower class, and the fantasies of these subjects to transgress a demandingly bibliocentric Protestant culture. In these narratives, three elements converge—the supernatural, the uncontrollable act of reading and the leaky female body—all of which raised anxieties about proper boundaries, rational subjectivity, and the power of the state and church to authorize meanings and control behaviour, leading to the representation of reading as essentially uncanny.