Taking Exception: Adversarial Reading in Early Modern Culture

A Paper Panel for RSA 2025, Boston

Sponsored by the Yale Program in Early Modern Studies

Adversarial reading took many forms in the early modern world. Readers took exception to each other's printed books and manuscripts, their politics, their poetry, their scholarship, their philosophy and religion; writers, in turn, took up readers’ objections and returned them in kind. Some readers took exception to texts in private with little expectation their notes would one day be public, while others treated their marginal arguments as extensions of, or preparation for, more public modes of disputation and controversy. These interventions could be learned or specious, convivial or ad hominem: as contemporary dictionaries remind us, the noun ‘animadversion’ carried senses of careful attention (to Randle Cotgrave, “heeding, consideration, judgement”) as well as its more familiar negative connotations (“censure, chiding, reprehension”).

This panel invites reflections on particularly vivid, complicated, new, or ironic examples of early modern objections. Potential papers might be interested in topics including, but not limited to:

• Insults, outrage, vituperation, and objections in early modern texts
• Adversarial marginalia in the archive
• Scenes of disputation in early modern culture
• Taking exception to ‘bad’ early modern scholarship: conjectures,
translations, source-hunting
• Correction as method of friendship, pedagogy, or condescension
• Intellectual disputes across borders
• Cases of accidental misreading or deliberate misrepresentation

Prospective speakers are invited to send a paper abstract with title (maximum 215 words total), short biography, and CV to Ben Card (ben.card@yale.edu) by August 2.