What is the History of the Book?

James Raven

• Verlag: Polity
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509523214
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storiografia

James Raven, a leading historian of the book, offers a fresh and accessible guide to the global study of the production, dissemination and reception of written and printed texts across all societies and in all ages. Students, teachers, researchers and general readers will benefit from the book's investigation of the subject's origins, scope and future direction. Based on original research and a wide range of sources, What is the History of the Book? shows how book history crosses disciplinary boundaries and intersects with literary, historical, media, library, conservation and communications studies. Raven uses examples from around the world to explore different traditions in bibliography, palaeography and manuscript studies. He analyses book history's growing global ambition and demonstrates how the study of reading practices opens up new horizons in social history and the history of knowledge. He shows how book history is contributing to debates about intellectual and popular culture, colonialism and the communication of ideas. The first global, accessible introduction to the field of book history from ancient to modern times, What is the History of the Book? is essential reading for all those interested in one of society's most important cultural artefacts.

1
The Scope of Book History

What is now generally recognized as an interdisciplinary scholarly endeavour called ‘the history of the book’ began its modern life in the 1980s. Importantly, however, its intellectual roots reach back many centuries. As advanced today, book history or ‘the history of the book’ aspires to study the historical consequences of the production, dissemination and reception of texts, in all their material forms, across all societies and in all ages.

Separately, these are no new subjects of enquiry, even though scholars from different disciplines have increasingly used the designation of ‘the history of the book’ to advance more capacious questions about the past meaning and function of books, claiming fresh perspectives and promoting, in particular, an interdisciplinarity that extends and revises older methods and conclusions. In many ways, this last initiative has been the most productive aspect of the enterprise, bringing together in conversation and collaborative scholarship a great diversity of participants: cultural and social historians, literary scholars and critics, those concerned with the theory and practice of textual editing, bibliographers, codicologists, palaeographers, epigraphers, philologists, rare books’ and special collections’ librarians, book conservators, linguists and translators, historians of science, of ideas and of art, anthropologists, archaeologists and specialists in media, communications and graphic communication studies. By their different methods, these interpreters of books study texts as the products of collaborative human agency acting on material forms. Together with language, those material texts and the information their signs encode are the most powerful tools available to write a history of meanings.

It is important to appreciate the breadth of the history of the book. It is a history reaching back 5,000 years, not simply a history of the paper codex, or indeed of the printed book, but the history of how diverse peoples in different parts of the world, in different ways, for different reasons and with very different consequences have striven to store, circulate and retrieve knowledge and information. The balance between these objectives, together with other practical, local and ideological considerations, has affected the choice of materials and their shaping to record, transport, read and conserve since at least the thirty-third century bce, the supposed age of the earliest surviving object claimed by some scholars to fulfil the definition of a book. Similarly, as this volume attempts to illustrate, activity in book history is worldwide, with new writing and research projects devoted to the history of the book in Africa, South America, China, India and South and Central Asia in addition to regions long associated with bibliographical and book historical studies. As will also be explored, a clear and developing incentive for histories of the book is to break free of national, imperial and otherwise political geographies – often the older and pragmatic organizing unit of study – and to pursue the linguistic, aesthetic, oceanic and postcolonial perspectives of what are manifestly livres sans frontières, books without borders. Sometimes, less obviously, these are also livres sans lecteurs, books without readers, where the historical human experience of books concerned an awareness or use of books that did not involve reading them.

These new agendas put the history of the book full square in the development of history itself, offering decisive contributions to developing interests in the history of class, ethnicity, gender and emotions, and revisions to the history of ideas, revolution, local and national politics, faith and belief, and diplomacy, among other fields. Contributory research, both of and within the material book, and in an astonishing range of extra-textual sources, informs fresh histories of censorship, copyright, the economics and geographies of publishing, the networks of distribution, the uses of libraries and the various source analyses offered in histories of reading and reception. The history of book production, circulation and influence intersects with and advances histories of revolution and ideas and of religious belief and practice, the social history of knowledge and histories of sociability and of intimate personal behaviour.

Drawing on a diverse heritage, by the early 1990s, numerous courses in book history, centres for the history of the book, and multivolume book history publishing projects advanced in Britain, France, many other European countries, the United States and Australasia. Most of the pioneers in the 1980s studied Europe and North America in the age of print. Robert Darnton in his seminal 1982 essay ‘What is the History of Books?’ proposed that ‘it might even be called the social and cultural history of communication by print’.¹ Within a decade or more, medievalists and palaeographers, drawing on much earlier research, also led collaborative projects in publishing and broader book history, often nationally conceived.

The branding of this endeavour has been significant, and the history of the book has been both beneficiary and victim of institutional aggrandisement. The ‘history of the book’ appears to be a translation of the earlier coined histoire du livre, but many different traditions of bibliographical, literary and historical research informed the development of book history in different parts of the world. Intrinsic to the understanding of how meaning is conveyed by texts is the history of reading, itself subject to numerous methodologies, types of source and theoretical perspectives.

Printing dominates published book history, but print – word and image – is far from the only means of graphic communication used to convey messages. Texts might be impressed, imprinted, inscribed, written, drawn, stencilled, block- or letter-press printed, engraved, stereotyped, lithographed, or photographically or digitally reproduced. As an example – and one strikingly at odds with the emphasis of many late twentieth-century histories of the book – historians of the great majority of centuries of book production in regions that now comprise India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are historians of the transmission of manuscript texts. Scribal productions were the only written texts until the mid-sixteenth century; they remained the preferred texts in South Asia until the early nineteenth century, almost three centuries after Catholic missionaries brought the first printing press with separately cast printing types to western India. Many more ancient texts in Sanskrit survive than those of equivalent age in Latin and Greek.

More broadly, although cultural historians and bibliographers of great distinction, including Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton and D. F. McKenzie, wrote pioneering studies in aspects of book history in the 1980s and 1990s, literary scholars subsequently exercised significant impact on its development. In the late twentieth century, objectives and techniques in literary criticism diverged. As new theoretical approaches advanced in literature departments across Europe and the Americas, some refugees from high theory allied their more historical interests to ‘the history of the book’. More recently, however, a much broader range of approaches in literary scholarship and textual criticism has also contributed to historical study of authorship, publishing and reception.

In addition to extended work on the traditional corpus of canonical texts, or of what in effect remains a ‘great tradition’, canonicity itself attracted greater interest. A literary canon, and especially what has been both positively and negatively termed the ‘Western canon’, is the body of books, art and music accepted generally as the most influential in shaping culture. Histories of books assist with the identification and analysis of ‘popular’, ‘minority’ and specific ‘genre’ literature, together with research in women's, gender, queer and ethnic studies. Histories of books recover the non-canonical or what the critic Margaret Cohen has called, with teasing historical implications, ‘the great unread’.² The replacement of many literature departments by departments of cultural studies, which embrace film and media studies, has further encouraged a new intersection with literary and gender theory and the literature of less familiar languages, as well as renewed interest in translation and untranslatability. The effect of much of this scholarship is to reintroduce historical, and especially social historical, perspectives into literary study. Among many outstanding examples, Michael Warner and then David Shields ingeniously reinterpreted early American literary, cultural and intellectual history, drawing upon very wide evidence of printed polemic, contest and conversation, where Shields also ‘explores for the history of the book the arenas of manuscript publication’.³ As a result of such studies, book history has enjoyed great and continuing popularity.

In recent years, another wave of book history has been more deliberately comparative, addressing non-European, extra-North American and postcolonial perspectives. New histories offer global comparisons in ways that are still in their infancy but also impossible without the secure underpinnings of accumulated, specialist, local and national bibliographical and archival research. To the fore are novel questions about transoceanic as well as transcontinental book production, circulation and reception, and of the localized creation and widely dispersed transmission of knowledge. The need to understand the economics of book production applies to book history in all ages and places: how a book was financed, why and how an individual or community met the costs of labour and acquisition, and what explains different levels of demand.

This volume identifies unknowns, uneven patterns of research and consequent future challenges. Western and non-Western comparisons in particular probe our understanding of the distinctions and overlaps, say, between commercial and non-commercial and institutional and private publishing, of the role of book and non-book printing by movable type, woodblocks, engraved plates or other processes, and of the relative efficiencies of different production, distribution and even reading practices. Study of Asian woodblock printing, for example, complicates more triumphalist histories of the European printing press by suggesting that the casting, composition, correction and painstaking redistribution of type is not always the most economically efficient method of printing.⁴

Taken together, the histories of books in different parts of the world contribute to a remarkable range of new scholarship from the history of news gathering and international journalism to the global history of particular works and of technological and knowledge transfer. Book history research informs, revises, problematizes and nuances broader narratives of practice, behaviour and representation, including diverse histories of subversion, revolution, reformation and conquest. Research on book production, circulation and reception has been conspicuous in recent explorations of the history of ritual, language, humour and emotions. An understanding of the transformative power of the book and especially of print and indigenous written texts has contributed largely to debates about the invention of traditions, the imagining of communities, colonial encounter, postcolonialism and subaltern studies.

Controversy and criticism have nevertheless accompanied book history, past and present, inviting debate about methodologies and assumptions. History is subject to both unconscious and deliberate emphasis upon certain prevalent values, and critical voices have accused influential studies in book history of anachronism and teleology. Those writing the history of book production and reception are warned against unthinking progressive narratives. Certain accounts, it is argued, brusquely assume an inevitable march to modernity and the subsumption of localized and critical differences within a globalizing totality. Others criticize the converse. In her final book, Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Elizabeth Eisenstein warned against current ‘considerable ambivalence about Western technologies of all kinds. Triumphalism is out of fashion, along with ideas of progress and other “Whiggish” views of historical development.’⁵ Concern with constraints to that development is not, however, abandoned in the discussion that follows here.

More bluntly still, for certain observers and even some participants, not all of this activity has actually been ‘history’, and for some, it is important that it is not. History concerns the recovery of past human experience. ...