Reading in Crisis: Francis Russell's Reading Records and the Beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War


 This essay discusses the reading records of Francis Russell, 1587–1641, later 4th Earl of Bedford. Drawing from a previously unstudied manuscript notebook from 1620 to 1622, the author demonstrates the importance of Russell's private archive at Woburn Abbey as an important repository for political, literary, and cultural history in the early Stuart age. The notebook evidences how a nobleman of Russell's wealth, stature, and influence prepared for political office, and more broadly, how he educated himself. The notebook contains a wide variety of texts, among them histories, sermons, poetry, political pamphlets, treatises, news, and gossip, much of which Russell brought to bear on the acute political Bohemian crisis then emerging, and on its consequences for domestic politics (for example, the 1621 Parliament). The notebook's contents also reveal more about early modern reading practice and the organization of knowledge and suggest the many networks of circulation through which Russell acquired his books, manuscript tracts, and oral information.