The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries - Softcover

Chartier, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804722676 ISBN 13: 9780804722674

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, what methods were used to monitor and control the increasing number of texts―from the early handwritten books to the later, printed volumes―that were being put into circulation?

In The Order of Books, Chartier examines the different systems required to regulate the world of writing through the centuries, from the registration of titles to the classification of works. The modern world has, he argues, directly inherited the products of this labor: the basic principle of referring to texts, the dream of a universal library, real or imaginary, containing all the works ever written, and the emergence of a new definition of the book leading to some of the innovations that transformed the relationship of the reader to the text.

The Order of Books will be welcomed by students and researchers of cultural history, and the history of reading in particular.

About this title

About the Author

Roger Chartier is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

From the Back Cover

“Always thoughtful, analytically avant-garde without being trendy, The Order of Books is a tour de force not only in the cultural history of the book, but also in cultural history at the very point where it intersects with theory.”—Orest Ranum, Johns Hopkins University

From the Inside Flap

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, what methods were used to monitor and control the increasing number of texts—from the early handwritten books to the later, printed volumes—that were being put into circulation?
In The Order of Books

, Chartier examines the different systems required to regulate the world of writing through the centuries, from the registration of titles to the classification of works. The modern world has, he argues, directly inherited the products of this labor: the basic principle of referring to texts, the dream of a universal library, real or imaginary, containing all the works ever written, and the emergence of a new definition of the book leading to some of the innovations that transformed the relationship of the reader to the text.
The Order of Books

will be welcomed by students and researchers of cultural history, and the history of reading in particular.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Order of Books

Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries By Roger Chartier

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 1994 Polity Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-2267-4

Contents

Preface.......................................vii1 Communities of Readers......................12 Figures of the Author.......................253 Libraries without Walls.....................61Epilogue......................................89Notes.........................................93Index.........................................115

Chapter One

Communities of Readers

Far from being writers - founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses - readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its production through the expansionism of reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise.

This magnificent passage from Michel de Certeau which contrasts writing - conservative, fixed, durable - and reading - always of the order of the ephemeral - constitutes both an obligatory base and a disquieting challenge for any history that hopes to inventory and make sense out of a practice (reading) that only rarely leaves traces, that is scattered in an infinity of singular acts, and that easily shakes off all constraints. Such a proposal is based on a dual presupposition: that reading is not already inscribed in the text with no conceivable gap between the meaning assigned to it (by its author, by custom, by criticism, and so forth) and the interpretation that its readers might make of it; and, as a corollary, that a text exists only because there is a reader to give it meaning. To return to Michel de Certeau:

Whether it is a question of newspapers or Proust, the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with codes of perception that it does not control. It becomes a text only in its relation to the exteriority of the reader, by an interplay of implications and ruses between two sorts of 'expectation' in combination: the expectation that organizes a readable space (a literality), and one that organizes a procedure necessary for the actualization of the work (a reading).

The historian's task is thus to reconstruct the variations that differentiate the espaces lisibles - that is, the texts in their discursive and material forms - and those that govern the circumstances of their effectuation - that is, the readings, understood as concrete practices and as procedures of interpretation.

Michel de Certeau's suggestions provide a basis for suggesting some of what is at stake and the problems and conditions of possibility of this sort of history. Its space is usually defined by three poles that the academic tradition usually keeps separate: first, the analysis of texts, be they canonical or ordinary, to discern their structures, their themes, and their aims; second, the history of books and, beyond that, the history of all objects and all forms that bear texts; third, the study of practices that seize on these objects and these forms in a variety of ways and produce differentiated uses and meanings. For me, a fundamental question underlies this approach that combines textual criticism, bibliography, and cultural history: in the societies of the ancien rgime, how did increased circulation of printed matter transform forms of sociability, permit new modes of thought, and change people's relationship with power?

Hence the need to stress the way in which the encounter between 'the world of the text' and 'the world of the reader' - to use Paul Ricoeur's terms - operates. To reconstruct this process of the 'actualization' of texts in its historical dimensions first requires that we accept the notion that their meanings are dependent upon the forms through which they are received and appropriated by their readers (or hearers). Readers and hearers, in point of fact, are never confronted with abstract or ideal texts detached from all materiality; they manipulate or perceive objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading (or their hearing), thus the possible comprehension of the text read (or heard). Against a purely semantic definition of the text (which inhabits not only structuralist criticism in all its variants but also the literary theories most attuned to a reconstruction of the reception of works), one must state that forms produce meaning and that a text, stable in its letter, is invested with a new meaning and status when the mechanisms that make it available to interpretation change.

We must also keep in mind that reading is always a practice embodied in acts, spaces, and habits. Far from being a phenomenology that wipes out all concrete modalities of the act of reading and characterizes that act by its effects, which are postulated to be universal (as with the operation of response to the text that makes the subject better understand himself or herself thanks to the mediation of interpretation), a history of reading must identify the specific mechanisms that distinguish the various communities of readers and traditions of reading. This move supposes the recognition of several sets of contrasts, the first of which is in the realm of reading ability. The essential but oversimplified separation of the literate from the illiterate does not exhaust the full range of differences in the reader's relation to writing. All who can read texts do not read them in the same fashion, and there is an enormous gap between the virtuosi among readers and the least skilled at reading, who have to oralize what they are reading in order to comprehend it and who are at ease only with a limited range of textual or typographical forms. There are equally great differences between the norms and conventions of reading that define, for each community of readers, legitimate uses of the book, ways to read, and the instruments and methods of interpretations. Finally, there are differences between the expectations and interests that various groups of readers invest in the practice of reading. Such expectations and interests, which govern practices, determine the way in which texts can be read and read differently by readers who do not have the same intellectual baggage or the same relationship with the written word.

Michel de Certeau gives an illustration of this sort of approach when he discusses the characteristics of mystical reading: 'By "mystical readings" I mean the set of reading procedures advised or practiced in the field of experience of the solitaries or the collectives designated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as "illuminated," "mystic" or "spiritual." In this minor, marginal, and dispersed community that was the mystical milieu, reading was regulated by norms and habits that invested the book with original functions: it replaced the institution of the church, held to be insufficient; it made discourse possible (the discourse of prayer, of communication with God, of the conversar); it indicated the practices by which spiritual experience could be constructed. The mystical relationship with the book can also be understood as a trajectory in which several 'moments' of reading succeed one another: the installation of an alterity that provides a basis for the subjective quest, the unfolding of a sense of joy, a physical reaction to the 'manducation' of the text that leaves its mark on the body, and, at the end of the process, cessation of reading, abandonment of the book, and absolute detachment. One of the first tasks of a history of reading that hopes to understand the varieties of the paradigmatic figure of the reader as poacher is thus to ascertain the networks of reading practices and the rules for reading proper to the various communities of readers - spiritual, intellectual, professional, and so forth.

But to read is always to read something. Naturally, if it is to exist the history of reading must be radically distinguished from a history of what is read: 'The reader emerges from the history of the book, in which he has long been merged, indistinct.... The reader was taken to be the effect of the book. Today he becomes detached from those books whose mere shadow he was supposed to be. And now that shadow is unshackled, it takes on relief and acquires an independence.' That founding independence is not an arbitrary liberty. It is limited by the codes and the conventions that regulate the practices of a membership community. It is also limited by the discursive and material forms of the texts read.

'New readers make new texts and their new meanings are a function of their new forms.' D. F. McKenzie perspicaciously notes here the dual set of variations - variations in the readers' resources and in textual and formal mechanisms - that any history that takes on the task of restoring the fluid and plural signification of texts must take into account. One can profit from McKenzie's dictum in several ways: by noting the major oppositions that distinguish the various modes of reading from one another; by specifying the practices most popular among readers; by focusing attention on the publishing formulas that offer old texts to new readers of a humbler sort and in greater number.

This perspective reflects a dual dissatisfaction with the history of the book in France in the last twenty or thirty years, where the historians' chief concern has been to measure the unequal presence of the book in the various groups that made up the society of the ancien rgime. This led to the construction (incidentally, quite necessarily so) of indicators to reveal cultural gaps at a given place and time: among such indicators are the percentage of probate inventories mentioning ownership of books, the classification of book collections according to the number of works they included, and thematic description of private libraries according to the place that the various bibliographical categories occupy in them. In this perspective, giving an account of the reading matter of the French between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century was above all a question of constructing data sets, establishing quantitative thresholds, and noting the cultural equivalents of social differences.

These procedures were adopted collectively (by the author of the present work among others), and they permitted the accumulation of a body of knowledge without which further investigation would have been inconceivable. They raise problems, however. First, such procedures rest on a narrowly sociographic conception implicitly postulating that cultural cleavages are necessarily organized according to pre-existent social divisions. I think we need to reject this dependence that relates gaps in cultural practices to a priori social oppositions, whether on the macroscopic scale of contrasts between dominant and dominated or between the elites and the people or on the scale of smaller differentiations, as for example among social groups in a hierarchy of conditions, professions, or levels of wealth.

Cultural divisions are not obligatorily organized in accordance with the one grid of social divisions that supposedly commands the unequal presence of objects or differences in behaviour patterns. We must turn the perspective around and begin by designating the social areas in which each corpus of texts and each genre of printed matter circulates. Beginning with objects, in this fashion, rather than with classes or groups leads to considering that the French style of sociocultural history has too long continued to exist on the basis of a mutilated conception of the social. By privileging only socioprofessional classification it has forgotten that other and equally social principles of differentiation might explain cultural divisions even more pertinently. The same is true of gender-based and generationally based distinctions, of religious affiliations, of communitarian solidarities, of educative or corporative traditions, and more.

Furthermore, the history of the book in its social and quantitative definition attempted to characterize cultural configurations on the basis of the categories of texts that were supposed to be specific to those configurations. This operation was doubly reductive. First, it equated the identification of differences with mere inequalities in distribution; second, it ignored the process by which a text takes on meaning for those who read it. Several shifts of emphasis could be proposed to correct these postulates. The first situates the recognition of the differences most deeply rooted in society in differing uses of shared materials. In the societies of the ancien rgime the same texts were appropriated by 'popular' readers and other readers more than has been thought. Either readers of more humble social condition were put in possession of books that were not specifically designed for them (as was the case of Menocchio, the Friuli miller, Jamerey Duval, the shepherd from Lorraine, or Mntra, the Paris glazier), or else inventive and canny bookseller-printers made available to a very large clientele texts that formerly had circulated only in the narrow world of wealth and letters (which was the case with the pliegos sueltos of Castile and the Catalan plecs, English chapbooks or the publishing formula known in France under the generic title of the Bibliothque bleue). What is essential is thus to understand how the same texts can be differently apprehended, manipulated, and comprehended.

A second shift of emphasis reconstructs the networks of practices that organized historically and socially differentiated modes of access of texts. Reading is not uniquely an abstract operation of the intellect: it brings the body into play, it is inscribed in a space and a relationship with oneself or with others. This is why special attention should be, paid to ways of reading that have disappeared in our contemporary world. One of these is reading aloud in its dual function of communicating the written word to those who are unable to decipher it themselves but also of cementing the interlocking forms of sociability that are emblematic of private life in the intimacy of the family circle, in worldly conviviality, and in literary circles and spheres of scholarly sociability. A history of reading must not limit itself to the genealogy of our own contemporary manner of reading, in silence and using only our eyes; it must also (and perhaps above all) take on the task of retracing forgotten gestures and habits that have not existed for some time. The challenge matters because it reveals not only the distant foreignness of practices that were common long ago but also the specific structure of texts composed for uses that are not the uses of today's readers of those same texts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the reading style implicit in a text, literary or not, was still often an oralization of the text, and the $reader' was an implicit auditor of a read discourse. The work, which was addressed to the ear as much as to the eye, plays with forms and procedures that subject writing to demands more appropriate to oral 'performance'. Many examples of this sort of continuing link between the text and the human voice can be found, from the motifs in Don Quixote to the structure of texts adapted for the Bibliothque bleue.

'Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines.' This remark can serve to introduce the third shift in emphasis that I would like to suggest. Contrary to representation elaborated by literature itself and taken up by the most quantitative form of history of the book, which state that the text exists in and of itself, separate from anything material, we need to remember that there is no text apart from the physical support that offers it for reading (or hearing), hence there is no comprehension of any written piece that does not at least in part depend upon the forms in which it reaches its reader. This means that we need to make a distinction between two sets of mechanisms, the ones that are part of the strategies of writing and the author's intentions, and the ones that result from publishing decisions or the constraints of the print shop.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Order of Booksby Roger Chartier Copyright © 1994 by Polity Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0804722676
• ISBN 13: 9780804722674
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 140