Reading Robin Hood's Garland in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This study considers how some eighteenth-century publishers, instead of having their purchasers use these books for singing, envisaged them as material for communal and private reading in the polite middle-class home. The format of these books will therefore be discussed, and the essay will show how the compilers and editors of various editions published in the eighteenth century arranged the material in them in such a manner to emphasize the importance of reading etiquette.