How do we read books which emerge from our own environment, which are part of our ongoing contemporaneity? If we address ourselves to works of the past, products of a different society, a different economy, a different historical matrix, we are reading not only those works but by implication the silent language of anticipations and expectations, permissions and prohibitions, which surround them and make up their context. Whatever else a book may do it records a series of choices from the available discourses at a particular time. It is a commonplace to say that the condition of meaning is exclusion, but it is worth remembering when reading a book from the past that we are indirectly reading or being exposed to the tacit social rules and conditions which governed the exclusions and inclusions which are as much a part of the book as any more ostensible subject matter.