| Reading Glasses argues that spectacles played a critical role in shaping ideas about vision in the American colonies over the course of the eighteenth century. Chapter Two explores the tension between changing expectations for visual aids in seventeenth-century England and the attitudes of Puritans who owned some of the few spectacles available in the early colonies. Chapters Three and Four trace the emergence of a new style, called temple spectacles, made after the 1720s and sold in the colonies by the 1740s, which allowed wearers---both the seriously afflicted and the merely curious---to try on an Enlightenment perspective. This perspective, the makers argued, simulated the privacy, interiority, and security of viewpoint that inhered in the camera obscura while freeing the hands to assist the eyes in collecting and documenting information. Drawing on probate inventories, account books, advertisements, correspondence, literature, medical and philosophical treatises, paintings, and engravings, and organized around the timeline suggested by extant artifacts, Reading Glasses documents how American colonists bought temple spectacles, as technologically restyled and materially refined by the English spectacle guild, to express and enable their devotion to reading, writing, account and other record keeping. Both practically and metaphorically, these spectacles helped to shape understandings of what it meant to be a spectator/speculator in a bourgeois public sphere, and reoriented the body in relation to pages and persons alike. Chapter Five explores how this new awareness of binocularity informed the texts and visions that constituted a functional body politic and a healthy nation in the emerging United States.;At the same time that observers became accustomed to a relatively powerful, individuated sense of sight by spectacle frames, they were challenged by conventions in the use of lenses to think about the coordination of their eyes. Reading Glasses demonstrates that temple spectacles formed a tangible link between Enlightenment understandings of vision and the binocular, bounded, embodied concept of vision symbolized by the stereoscope and other nineteenth century visual technologies. |
