Bad Readers and Ancient Rome

Laments about the decline of reading have saturated the digital age. Bad Readers and Ancient Rome looks back to the figure of the "bad reader" in imperial Rome to remind us that there has never been a golden age of reading. In this book, Lambert claims that the cultural category of the "bad reader" helps us tell a different story about reading culture in the imperial Roman world and challenges our own assumptions around reading today.Bad Readers and Ancient Rome illuminates the kinds of readers and practices often marginalized or dismissed in scholarly accounts of reading in antiquity. It shows that "bad reading" is a moving target, contingent on literary, social, and historical context. And it reveals that "bad reading" is more than a matter of misreading or misinterpretation: "bad reading" is a politically and socially charged practice. Cultural anxieties about "bad reading" cannot be understood through an analysis evacuated of power.Lambert mobilizes these insights to analyze the different roles played by "bad readers" in texts by Seneca the Younger, Plutarch, Martial, and Lucian. Jointly engaging the lenses of book history and queer studies, she argues that these authors fashion "bad readers" to stake claims to power, negotiate anxieties around embodied performances of gender, social status, and cultural identity, and implicate their own readers in the dangers and pleasures (hermeneutic and otherwise) of reading badly.