Reviews of books 113 with the private and public spheres. Bouza’s initial claim that writing is more suitable than the other codes to the preservation of memory allows him to expand his analysis to ‘the significant stamp that writing left’ on early modern Spanish culture. Textual culture became part of daily life ‘even for the illiterate’ in the areas of religion, justice, and in the proliferation of signs and inscriptions in the streets and squares. The author explores the ‘circular’ line of production of writing and reading by investigating different authors, copyists, printers, booksellers and readers. He shows that the process of reading was realized by a combination of notes, summaries and glosses in the margins of the book which constituted the basis for the final version of a text to be ‘read in public, copied in manuscripts, or taken to a printing shop for publication’. Books could be hired, borrowed or sold by booksellers, authors, ped- dlers and street vendors or at auctions. Bouza proves that the economic interests of printers and booksellers were responsible for the significant change in the ‘tradi- tional relationship between genres and social groups’. While printing houses fulfilled the huge demand for popular books, the practice of oral reading was essential for the illiterate to become familiar with written texts, but it was also viewed ‘as a means of controlling reading’ in Counter-Reformation Spain. The pragmatic use of text that allows readers to become ‘co-authors of what they read’ challenges the incorrect nineteenth-century perception of the passive nature of early modern readers and their reading processes. Bouza’s claim that ‘writing became a principal characteristic of early modern civilization such that the practice came to be viewed as the consum- mation of humanity’ leads him to investigate the functions of the education system, of treatises concerning the education of men, of the misogynist approach to limited education for women, and of the formation of libraries and archives. He also reveals the early modern resistance to written culture in the ‘biblioclastic’ arbitristas who believed that the ruin of productivity and trade were due to the proliferation of schools. This debate was the origin of the concept of the born courtier promoted by the nobility whose ‘handwriting should be poor as sign of his caste’. Bouza concludes this stimulating book by confirming that textual culture ‘had begun to dominate the imagination of even the popular masses in their disguises’, as demonstrated by the Celestina masks worn in the 1555 Carnival in Toledo. Birkbeck College, University of London Carmen Fracchia Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. x + 230pp. 20 b & w illus. $22.50. ISBN 0-226-73036-0. In the Afterword to this elegant little book, Ingrid D. Rowland tells us that she and a colleague, after considering the circumstances of this seventeenth-century hoax in Tuscany, came to the conclusion that ‘what it’s really about’ is Galileo: ‘We had realized simultaneously that much of Curzio’s [the hoaxer’s] story had to do with relations between Tuscany and Rome in the aftermath of the sentence levelled against Galileo, the shining light of Tuscan intellectual life, by the Roman Inquisition in