Journal Article

Introduction: Reading through Error

Edson, Michael, Williams, Abigail, Leonard, Alice

2024

Overview

This special issue reimagines textual error not as failure but as a generative force in literary history, textual transmission, and reading practice. Focusing on the period 1500 to 1800, the contributions investigate how mistakes—typographic, interpretive, or conceptual—shaped writing, printing, and reception. Rather than policing the boundaries of \"good\" reading, these essays embrace errant interpretation, tracing how authors anticipated, exploited, or resisted misreading, and how readers responded. The collection surveys primary manuscript and early printed materials, including errata sheets and personal library collections, sermons, satire, poetry, and marginalia. \"Imperfect reading\" focuses on two areas: an early modern reader's encounter with textual error, and what a flawed or faulty reader of a text might look like. The collection argues for a more capacious understanding of \"imperfect reading,\" demonstrating that error served as a tool of wit, social commentary, and epistemological inquiry. In an era that prized accuracy yet teemed with textual instability, error emerges not only as evidence of disruption but as a strategy of meaning-making. This issue encourages a new vocabulary for understanding error, reframing it as a rich area for scholarly inquiry rather than a deficiency.

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press