The history of the book as a field of study within the humanities: A retrospect,and a prospect by Graham Shaw

Introduction

The history of the book has become not only an academic discipline in its own right but also a field of study of critical importance for the advancement of the humanities in general. Implicit recognition of this can be seen in the resources – professional, financial or simply public – devoted to its pursuit: multivolume collaborative national projects for authoritative histories of the book and libraries; bibliographical societies; national ‘centres for the book’; journals; high-profile lecture series; conferences; university departments and institutes with both senior research fellows and postgraduate early-career researchers, rare book and library schools. As regards the public, we have radio interview series, meetings of public library ‘Friends’, book exhibitions, book signings, ‘book towns’, fairs and festivals, and so on. And now we have the more integrated study of the history of the book as a whole together with that of the other media. All compete for resources which are not unlimited, involving both public and semiprivate research foundations: for example, the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust with its aim of ‘Exploring the History of the Book in the World’ (https://willisoncharitabletrust.org).

Historians of the book have an internationally recognised scholarly association, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) with annual conferences, an electronic forum SHARP-L and newsletter Sharp News, two journals – Book History, with a selective review of the ‘State of the Discipline’, and Lingua Franca, a ‘journal of book history in translation’ – an annual book prize; and affiliation to the International Committee of Historical Sciences.

All this, and the prospect of global coverage, provide evidence of the increasing visibility of the history of the book as a field of study within the humanities. ¹ So, as Simon Eliot (co-founder of SHARP, Professor Emeritus of the History of the Book at the University of London Institute of English Studies and Chair of the Willison Foundation) has stated:

…we are being forced to view the book in a larger and more dynamic context…the history of information and its communication…If it [the history of the book] has sufficient intellectual courage…it will achieve a major and permanent place, perhaps even a central place, in the study of humanities in the future. (2007: 138, 148)

The recent development of the history of the book as a field of study

The history of the book as a field of interest to such people as authors, publishers, booksellers and librarians, and to readers, especially bibliophiles, is of course no recent matter; but one might say that in the past it has tended to be either antiquarian or focused on the book trade (as conspicuously in the case of Germany). What one might call the ‘new’ history of the book was anticipated so far as the English-speaking world was concerned by the development of historical bibliography, associated with AW Pollard of the British Museum Library, which ‘would tell an intelligent student a great deal about the mental and spiritual development of the English race which will not be found in any orthodox history, either of politics or literature’ (Willison, 2000). The characteristic of the ‘new’ history has been to demonstrate the role of books, together with such other media as radio, film, television and now digitised mediation, as the actual effective communicators of texts from authors to readers, listeners and so on regarding the history of the book as an essential factor in general cultural history.

In the words of its first effective systematisers Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in their L’apparition du livre of 1958, the concern of the new history of the book is to present ‘le livre’ in terms of cultural ‘ferment’ – ‘un des moyens le plus efficaces de…maitrise sur le monde’ (1958: 13) – or, in the words of the first of the collaborative, multivolume histories, Histoire de l’édition française (1982–1985), edited by Martin and Roger Chartier, to answer ‘les questions que l’histoire du livre, de l’édition et de la lecture, ainsi redéfinie, peut reformuler concernant les évolutions majeures qui transforment la civilisation européenne, ou plus largement la nouvelle histoire occidental’ (Chartier, 1991b: 636). This was a major French academic initiative, completed by the multivolume Histoire des bibliothèques françaises (2009) and the Histoire le la librairie française (2008).

As such it marked a concluding event in ‘The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School 1929-89’, which had subverted ‘The Old Historiographical Regime’ (Burke, 1990: 6–11) characterised by the predominance of high political history, and the marginalisation of cultural history, associated with the successors of Leopold von Ranke. Indeed, L’apparition du livre had in fact been scheduled to appear in the early 1930s in the series L’évolution de l’humanité, edited by Henri Berr – ‘a great intellectual entrepreneur’ (Burke, 1990: 10–11). It was planned as part of the grand strategy of replacing the predominance of political history with the synthèse of political, social and cultural history, anthropology and so on celebrated in the lavish, state-supported Encyclopédie Française (edited by the annaliste Lucien Febvre). Its volume XVIII was entitled ‘La civilisation écrite’; divided into ‘Métiers et Arts Graphiques’, ‘Le Livre’, ‘La Revue et le Journal’ and ‘Les Bibliothèques’; and was edited by the Administrateur générale de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Julien Cain (Cain, 1939) – haut fonctionnaire (Martin, 1996), comparable to Anthony Panizzi of the British Museum and its Library in public cultural–political standing.

The élan of the French histoire du livre was recognised internationally at the Boston conference of 1980 on ‘Books and Society in History’ (Carpenter, 1983), which included Robert Darnton’s subsequently classic paper ‘What is the History of Books’, including his concept of the ‘communications circuit’. It was followed by the New Zealand émigré DF McKenzie’s extending the remit of historical bibliography with what one might call his ‘postcolonial’ exposure of the material basis of a somewhat bland imperial textuality, based on access to the archives of the Cambridge University Press (McKitterick, 1999). His likewise subsequently classic first of the Panizzi Lectures Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986, 2nd ed. 1999) presented his concept of ‘the [material] book as an expressive form’. The lectures were received back into France, with acclaim, by Roger Chartier in his introduction to the translation, La bibliographie et la sociologie des textes (1991c). ² Further following the French, McKenzie became the main initiator of the collaborative, multivolume Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, publishing his manifesto, ‘History of the Book’, in the centenary celebration of the London Bibliographical Society (McKenzie, 1992).

And so, Roger Chartier. After collaborating with McKenzie in Cambridge – for example, jointly examining Adrian Johns’s thesis that became the ambitious The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998, xvi) – Chartier took Martin’s and McKenzie’s thought forward ‘de l’histoire du livre a l’histoire de la culture écrite’ (2008): ‘No one has done more than Chartier to move the history of the book into the mainstream of cultural history’ (Hunt, 1989: 19). Indeed, one might say that la culture écrite is the contemporary, characteristically demotic, re-envisioning of la civilisation écrite of Lucien Febvre’s pre-war Encyclopédie Française. Since 2006, Chartier has been Professeur au Collège de France titulaire de la Chaire Ecrit et Cultures dans l’Europe moderne, continuing his radio interview series, Les lundis de l’histoire, broadcast on France Culture, and with an international following constituted largely through visiting professorships at and publication by various American and other universities. Chartier’s standing is perhaps epitomised by his giving the 1998 Panizzi Lecture in London, Publishing Early Modern Drama in Europe, to illustrate ‘the endlessly generative cultural instability of all text[s] and their material forms’ – and with ‘a smiling and kindly’, though dying, McKenzie in the front row of the auditorium (1999).

However, at the same time, we must emphasise the continuing fundamental relevance of the likewise postcolonial ‘Toronto School’ and its more ecumenical – if more claustrophobic – cultural–historical view of ‘media and communication’. Such had been foreseen by Harold Adams Innis as early as his Empire and Communications of 1950 and Bias of Communication of 1951 and was taken forward by Marshall McLuhan in his Gutenberg Galaxy and the Making of Typographic Man (1962). McLuhan wrote in the preface to the revised edition of Empire and Communications: ‘Innis saw media, old and new…as living vortices of power creating hidden environments that act abrasively and destructively on…forms of culture’ (1972). The magisterial Northrop Frye judged Innis’s work as ‘perhaps the most comprehensive structure of ideas yet made by a Canadian thinker’ (1976: 341). We see the continuing influence of Innis and McLuhan on the current, inclusive A Social History of the Media from Gutenberg to the Internet of Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, ‘bringing history into media studies and the media into history’ and viewing ‘media convergencies’ as a complete ‘system in perpetual change’ (2009: viii, 237–274). ³

We now have encyclopaedic recognition of the maturity of the history of the book as a field of study: thus, The Book History Reader (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2002), the three-volume Dictionnaire encyclopédique du livre (Fouché et al., 2002–2011), the Blackwell A Companion to the History of the Book (Eliot and Rose, 2007), The Oxford Companion to the Book (Suarez and Woudhuysen, 2010) and in particular the more self-consciously global Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Howsam, 2015) with Sydney Shep’s chapter ‘Books in Global Perspective’ featuring Robert Fraser’s ‘groundbreaking’ Book History through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script (2008).

The reception of the history of the book as a field of study within the humanities

The main evidence for the history of the book being established as an essential field of study within the humanities is its use by the various disciplines to stabilise their particular subject matters involved in the vortices of the media. As Jerome McGann has it:

…all forms and states of knowledge, including factual and documentary knowledge, are mediated in precise and determinate ways. These mediations introduce determinate – and hence critically specifiable – instabilities into every kind of investigation. Scholarship is interpretation, whether it is carried out as a bibliocritical discourse or a literary exegesis. (1991: 98)

The discipline of general history has broadened out from the traditional hegemony of political history to exhibit an inclusive ‘culture of power and power of culture’. This was based on ‘the rise of the public sphere’ in the ancien regime, constituted by new ‘markets’ of ‘readers, of periodicals and newspapers’, and so on (Blanning, 2002).

It was exemplified both by the exuberance and ‘modernity’ of the British Enlightenment (Porter, 2000) and the role of ‘underground’ and (semi-)pornographic literature in the cultural origins of the French Revolution (Chartier, 1990, 1991a; Darnton, 1982, 1995). ⁴ It continues to the present day, with the more material aspects of ‘intellect and culture’ involved with ‘the growing salience and pervasiveness of the media’ (Harrison, 2010: xviii) leading via Northcliffe as a figure whose opinions mattered in a political system in which newspapers were a major instrument of communication (Cowling, 1971: 46), to the present crisis of cultural ‘dumbing down?’ (Harrison, 2010: 425–432).

Earlier, script culture is likewise seen as critically important in the whole of the Carolingian contribution to the ‘formation of an European identity’ (McKitterick, 1989, 2008 ⁵ ); outside Europe in South India ‘the true watershed in the history of communicative media was the invention, not of print capitalism, but of script-mercantilism, so to speak, of the sort found in both the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the vernacularised cultures’ (Pollock, 2007: 87).

Research into the collateral textuality of map culture – ‘the sovereign map’ (Jacob, 2006), in France ‘inspired [by] important advances in the history of the book’ (pp. 5, 373 note 4) – is likewise broadening the discipline of general history, particularly as regards its imperial aspects (Darwin, 2008): thus Matthew Edney’s Mapping an Empire (1997) is significantly subtitled ‘The Geographical Construction of British India 1765–1843’. ⁶

Finally, for a first presentation of the clear dominance and ubiquity of music as art ‘form’ in the modern West – from Handel’s Hallelujah! to The Beatles ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!’ – we have Blanning, The Triumph of Music (2008) ‘Contextual’ literary scholarship focuses on ‘literary cultures and the material book’ (Eliot et al., 2007), specifically on ‘the institutions in which literary acts take place’ to quote the general introduction to the Oxford English Literary History series (Bate, 2002), and including the ‘literary lives’ of authors, aiming ‘to trace the professional, publishing, and social context which shaped their writing’ as the Macmillan Literary Lives series (Dutton, 1989) has it. Thus as regards Shakespeare, we have early printing and publishing practice and the ‘emergent market for named authors’ (Burrow, 2004) with Shakespeare as a distinctively ‘literary’ dramatist and indeed occasionally ‘co-author’ (Erne, 2013; Vickers, 2002). As regards more recent and near-contemporary authors, with the greater survival of author and publisher archives such as Yeats and Macmillan, or Orwell and Gollancz, Secker and Warburg (and posthumously, samizdat), we have the sharper insights of ‘textual biography’/’biobibliography’ (Gould, 2007; Willison, 2012). More broadly, we have the analysis of the rise of whole literary genres dependent on material factors in their marketing, such as publishers’ title pages and the rise of the novel (Hunter, 2007).

So far as language is concerned, we might see something of a likewise ‘new window on cultural history’ as the bibliocritical implications of RC Alston’s exhaustive yet carefully categorised Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800 (1965–) are absorbed across the academy: grammars, glossaries and so on relating to the practice of law, art, music and so on (2007).

In the ‘new’ history of science represented by the Cambridge History and Philosophy of Science group – itself much influenced by McKenzie – ‘the disciplines of history of science and history of the Book…are now…more closely integrated with general social and cultural history’ (Frasca-Spada and Jardine, 2000: 1). ⁷ Two conspicuous examples require revision of our otherwise simplistic reading of the physical and biological scientific revolutions of the 17th and 19th centuries: Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998) ⁸ and James Secord’s analysis of a pioneer in the genre of modern ‘popular’ as distinct from professional, science writing, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2000) – in fact attributed to a publisher, Robert Chambers. Both Johns and Secord are conspicuously dependent on a firm and detailed grasp of publishing and reading practices and institutions of their times.

And then, in the inevitably more deeply problematic field of religious history, crucially dependent on the facts of life:

to understand the phenomenon of scripture in any fashion that is remotely faithful to historical realities, we must look to its function as a text that has above all been read and recited aloud, repeated and memorized, chanted and sung, quoted and alluded to in the oral and aural round of daily life…[an examination of] a continuum of textuality that ranges from that of ‘primary oral’ or preliterate cultures to that of the most highly literate, typographic cultures. (Graham, 1987: 156–157)

In general, as regards the pervasive role of the history of the book underlying the humanities as a whole, Peter Burke in his A Social History of knowledge places

academic knowledge in a wider framework…the exchange between the intellectual systems of academic elites and what might be called ‘alternative knowledges’…[for example, the case of economics] which involved not only the elaboration of new theories but the conferring of academic respectability on the practical knowledge of merchants, an originally oral knowledge which began to circulate more and more widely in print. (2000: 14–15) ⁹

The impact of the history of the book on the study of the next step in the cultural reception of learning – the diffusion and popularisation of established canonical scholarship, primarily through the textbook and the ‘library’ series of ‘classics’ (the librairie scolaire et universitaire) – shows the eventual role of textbooks, ‘libraries’ and so on to be in the development of publishing empires, domestic as well as global. ¹¹ As regards the terminus of the process of scholarship and learning – its summation in form of the encyclopaedia – the new history of encyclopaedia publishing signalled by Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’ (1979) locates the role of encyclopaedias in the development of cultural revolutions as well as empires. ¹² The rethinking of the rationale of the national research library in the 1960s and 1970s in France (and Britain) ¹³ produced a general perspective on encyclopaedias, technical scholarship and libraries since Sumer and Alexandria in the massive, research library exhibition catalogue, Tous les savoirs du monde: encyclopédies et bibliothèques, de Sumer au XXIe siècle (Schaer, 1996). ¹⁴

Finally, we have the critically important role of the pioneering individual advancer of learning – the artisan du savoir – associated with un lieu de savoir: for example, Stephen Hawking in natural science and, in the humanities, Michel Foucault. In the case of Foucault (Artières et al., 2014), we have the critical importance of his obsessive dedication to reading the textual archive – Foucault as reader in the Bibliothèque Nationale, sa résidence secondaire. In particular, we have his ‘archaeological’ exploration there of ‘everyday sub-literature – écriture quotidienne, sous-littératures’ (Foucault, 1969: 179): the ‘trash’ inevitable with the progress of legal deposit yet both underlying, and vital for, essential scholarship in the humanities such as dictionaries of biography (Willison, 1999).

Graham Shaw

Cultures of knowledge production, dissemination and reception in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America

The following schema is simply intended as an attempt to encompass the bewildering scope of what needs to be addressed, with some examples from different cultures.