Jack begins her narrative in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC with the birth of standardised language, noting that it took more than a thousand years to produce the first recorded woman reader and author, Princess Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad. It was Greece, however, with its more egalitarian laws and mores, that engendered the most famous woman reader and writer — the poetess Sappho, who composed her work in the company of women friends, inspiring them to read and write, earning her, perhaps, the distinction of founding the first female book club in human history. 

And yet reading has its dangers. Ms Jack shows that the intrinsic pleasure of reading and its potential to stir erotic desire has doomed women to ridicule, alienation and even death. And who was the demonic culprit that set this "evil" into motion? Gutenberg and his "satanic" press. 

Beginning in 1450, the dissemination of holy scripture across Europe, Britain, Asia and all points south and west gave birth to the Reformation, not only opening the portal to an unmediated relationship to God, but spawning individual engagement with the text, and the possibility of subjective interpretation, thereby scaring the living daylights out of the powers that be.

There is no better example than Henry VIII, who, breaking with the Catholic Church but not with its doctrines, succeeded in squelching his sixth and last wife Katherine Parr's desire to read with friends within the palace walls by burning one of them, Anne Askew, at the stake. Thankfully, Katherine got the final word, publishing her book Lamentations after Henry's death in 1547, which posits that personal engagement with holy Scripture is the hallmark of a good Christian life.