Abstract
Over the past twenty or more years, scholarship on the history of reading has augmented its study of textual sources by making use of images. Images do not merely serve to illustrate and confirm established insights into the history of reading practices; they also reveal additional circumstances unique to the roles of images in the history of reading. By focusing on the image - whether illustration, woodcut, oil-painting, etching, lithograph, photograph, or drawing - history of reading identifies and permits systematic analysis of, on the one hand, the involuntary and topical representations of reading and using codices, books, newspapers, manuscripts, letters, etc. On the other hand, this systematic analysis also extends to innovative and even idiosyncratic depictions of reading. Discursive (verbal) representations and visual depictions of reading do not always correspond and often feature alternative or diverging elements. Although images open up history of reading to new lines of inquiry and can serve as correctives to long-standing theoretical approaches, a systematic analysis of depictions of reading requires a cohesive corpus of material, a critique of the image as such, and a method tailored to the specific medial qualities of the image. As it stands, history of reading cannot proceed any further without taking into account the visual sources that constitute that history's face
Messerli, Alfred