The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in ReadingDavidWilliams. Montreal: <scp>McGill</scp>‐Queens <scp>UP</scp>, 2022. xxiv+502pp.<scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780228014690. $104.00 (cloth).

David Williams'sThe Communion of the Book is an unusual monograph in the best sense.In essence a history of the rise of Western modernity as told through the actions of readers, the book is part intellectual history, part media studies, and part literary analysis, both a gentle lament for the impending eclipse of "a culture historically shaped by print" (xxii) and an elegant example of the critical reading practices that Williams sees as having been central to that culture.In this second role the book makes its most interesting contributions to the field of early modern studies as it traces a wide and often circuitous route from the methodological principles and practices of the early Italian humanists through to their intellectual fulfilment in John Milton's late seventeenth-century writings, The History of Britain (1670) and Paradise Regain'd to which is added Samson Agonistes (1671), the latter a book in which, for Williams, "the key lessons of the humanist revolution in reading are starkly dramatized " (23).In between, we are treated to an interconnected set of case studies focused on the various kinds of reading that in Williams's view gave rise to the modern mind: philological, sacramental, juridical, historiographical, and classical.Indeed, Williams's claim that these particular modes of reading helped shape modern consciousness is more than mere metaphor.The Communion of the Book is framed in part as a response to evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich's theory-itself rooted in recent studies in the field of neuroscience-that the increase of literacy in the regions surrounding Martin Luther's hometown of Wittenburg in the sixteenth century produced psychological changes in the human brain that led to the development of our current WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) society.[Correction added on 18 February 2025: The word 'Communication' has been updated to 'Communion' in the preceding sentence.].Williams accepts Henrich's premise but adds to it the caveat, worked out over the course of his subsequent study, that it was not just any form of literacy that ushered in what we have come to describe as the modern era but, rather, a particular kind of reading practiced and developed by humanist scholars and their early modern successors.As he puts it in his Introduction, the first generation of Italian humanists "managed to change history" by "hunting down copies of lost texts from antiquity, by translating older, more authoritative copies of existing works, by emending corrupted texts and annotating variants, and by using philological methods to resituate these texts in the historical context where they were produced" (11-12).Moreover-and perhaps more importantly-these reading practices coupled with the invention of print and the introduction of paper books, "progressively transformed Western psychology," "revolutionizing religion

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