rev febvre, coming of the book [eisenstein]

The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800 by Lucien Febvre; Henri-JeanMartinReview by: Elizabeth L. EisensteinThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 490-493Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877111 .Accessed: 29/04/2013 17:56

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Book Reviews

The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. By Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. Translated by David Gerard. Edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Dav,id Wootton. Foundations of History Li- brary.

London: New Left Books; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1976. Pp. 378. $27.00.

The recent appearance of an English translation points to the remarkably durable character of this survey of the printed book trade in early modern Europe. Despite the many years which have elapsed since 1958, when the initial French version was issued,' it is still unsurpassed as a work of synthesis. A lion's share of credit for producing such a long-lived work should go to Henri-Jean Martin, who wrote almost all of it in the end. But a debt is also owed to Henri Berr, who planned for the volume when designing his Evolution de l'humanite series-a series notable for enlisting the services of many future luminaries of the Annales school. As long ago as 1930, Berr lined up Lucien Febvre to serve as author of this particular volume. But Febvre procrastinated, first producing his masterwork on Le Problme de l'incroyance2 for the same series and then becoming engaged in other projects. Although his name appears as that of a coauthor and although he did furnish an initial outline, the actual work of writing devolved upon Martin, a formidably energetic and industrious scholar who now presides over a branch of the French knowledge industry devoted to the history of the book.

This prolonged, complex production history has led to a certain tension between plan and execution. Febvre's preface and chapter headings reflect his idiosyncratic, evocative, impressionistic style and provide somewhat deceptive packaging for the prosaic contents, loaded with facts and figures, which are supplied by Martin. Readers who are curious about Lucien Febvre's views on "the impact of printing" should not be deceived by the misleading subtitle tacked on to the English version. There is nothing in L'Apparition du livre which comes close to resembling the seminal passages on "L'Imprimerie et ses effets" in La ProbWme de lincroyance (pp. 418 ff.). Indeed, there is very little in the volume under review on the effects of the advent of printing, and what little there is seems disappointingly trite. The problems which most intrigued Febvre and which are still being tackled by many of his disciples are different from those with which Martin is concerned. Unlike other French scholars, such as Robert Mandrou, who have also written on the French book trade, Martin is less interested in the problem of 'mentalites" than in administrative and institutional issues. As one can see from his more recent masterwork, the two-volume Lihre bi

I Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L 'Apparition du livre, L' Evolution de l'humanite (Paris. 1958).

2 Lucien Febvre, Le Probleme de lincrovance aiC XVI' si/cl: La Religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1942).

Permission to reprint a book review in this section may be obtained only from the author.


Book Reviews 491

Paris,3 he is immensely well informed on the production, distribution, and consumption of printed books in early modem France. In L'Apparition du livre he also provides guidance to trends elsewhere in Western Europe and has enlisted the aid of collaborators to provide brief sketches (so brief as to be almost worthless in my view) of developments in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

In sketching the institutional and economic context of early printing, in handling problems associated with official controls and clandestine channels, in providing a close-up view of major printers and their firms, and in outlining a general 'geography" of book trade patterns, Martin offers a historical expertise which is lacking in other surveys produced by "book- men" and library scientists. Compared to S. H. Steinberg's Five Hundred Years of Printing,4 which races over the last five centuries, and Rudolf Hirsch's densely detailed Printing, Selling and Reading,5 which stops short a century after Gutenberg, the volume under review has the additional advantage of covering an interval that makes sense-both in terms of print technology and periodization schemes, for the '"early modem" era coincides with the age of the handpress. The work also has the merit of providing a full bibliographical apparatus; it is richly annotated and contains a mag- nificent classified bibliography. Despite inevitable outdating after a passage of eighteen years, this bibliography provides helpful guidance to a backlog of special studies, and it seems regrettable that the English editors have seen fit to omit it from their version without supplying an alternative or even an explanation.

Although one might wish for a new edition containing a supplementary section covering the last two decades of research, the 1958 volume holds up well as a useful survey of the emergence and expansion of the printed book trade in early modern Europe. It seems to me to be less successful in its effort to integrate this topic into the more general history of Western civilization. For one thing, it shares with other volumes in this series a tendency to confuse the evolution of French culture with that of all human- ity and offers a parochial French view of a truly cosmopolitan enterprise. Emphasis on French developments may be partly justified by considering that the period covered in this volume coincides with the French hegemony in Europe and with the displacement of Latin by French as a cosmopolitan language. Nevertheless, foreign firms played a leading role in the output of French-language presses, while Paris never did serve (as did Venice, Antwerp, and Amsterdam) as a central city of the early modem Republic of Letters. To be sure, these points are made clear in the excellent account of the 'geography of the book." But they are obscured in the strategic final chapter where an effort is made to relate the book trade to concurrent trends associated with humanism, Protestantism, early modern science, and the rise of the vemaculars. In the section on the Reformation, for example, preoccupation with French developments leads to serious distortion. The Lutheran revolt in Germany is sketched in the first eleven pages, the remaining twenty-seven deal with French affairs; about the Reformation and

I Henri-Jean Martin. Liure pouiaoirs et societe a Paris au XVII siecle (1598-1701), 2 vols. (Geneva, 1969).

4 S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, rev. ed. (London, 1961). Rudolf Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading 1450-1550, 2d ed. (Wiesbaden,

1974).


492 Book Reviews

the printed book trade throughout the rest of Western Europe nothing is said.

This final chapter, which is evocatively titled "Le Livre, ce ferment" (prosaically rendered as "The Book as a Force for Change" in the English version), is unsuccessful in other ways. Flaws which run through the volume entailing uncertain focus and weak powers of analysis are most visible here. To describe how "the book" acted as "a force for change" one would have to go back at least to the late Roman Empire and the advent of the codex. The real point of departure for this volume is not the shift from roll to codex but from script to print. Its real subject is not the advent of the book but the advent of a duplicating process which changed the nature of the book and of other written materials. From title to final chapter heading, however, all labels point the reader in the wrong direction, while the author all too often tries to have things both ways. The "ridiculous thesis that the Reformation was the child of the printing press," for example, is scornfully dismissed by pointing to the book: "no book has ever sufficed to change anybody's mind." Then confusion is compounded by discussion of Protes- tant propaganda embodied in such nonbooks as handbills, posters, and broadsheets (pp. 433-35).

This basic confusion helps to blunt the cutting edge of every attempt at analysis. That the treatment of the major cultural developments of early modern times is, to say the least, uninspired may be judged from the following excerpts: "All over the place but especially in Italy where humanism had already developed before, interest in the civilisations of antiquity and in the Latin language was growing . . . (p. 253)." "Printing does not seem to have played much part in developing scientific theory at the start although it seems to have helped draw public attention to technical matters . . . a new outlook . . . was already apparent in the numerous technical advances made in as many fields in the first half of the 15th century. And printing was, after all, simply the most spectacular" (p. 259).

I have deliberately cited from the new English version to supply evidence in support of my negative verdict concerning the recent translation. Even in the more smoothly written, clear French original, however, the reader will find that description rather than analysis is the author's strong point. Unfortunately, he has been ill served by those responsible for the English version on all counts. Granted that Lucien Febvre's style is notoriously hard to translate and that chapter headings presented difficulties, Martin's clear French could have been rendered into clear English. The careless handling of proper names (Peiresc appears as Pairesc on p. 154; Omont as Ormont on p. 351), the inconsistent use of French and English forms (Henry of and Marguerite de Navarre), the puzzling failure to follow the French index where its guidance might have helped (look up "paper" in both indexes), and other similar defects impair the book's value as a useful reference work and make things unnecessarily difficult for the uninformed reader. A preface to the French volume by Paul Chalus, outlining the volume's production history, has been dropped, along with the classified bibliography; footnotes have been removed to the back of the book; a misleading subtitle has been tacked on to the cover; yet there is no editorial note informing the reader that the French original has been altered in any way. Indeed, I have found no indication of the rationale or policy followed by those responsible for this translation.

Although editors and translator have been given no space, the blurb writer


Book Reviews 493 on the jacket cover has been given too much. The now-celebrated work of Lucien Febvre and the Annales school is featured prominently; Martin's indefatigable labors are downplayed. The volume is described as "one of the most exciting works of cultural history to have been produced in Europe since the war." Readers hoping to find something along the lines of the work of a Huizinga, a Burckhardt, or a Lucien Febvre are bound to be disappointed. For all Martin's sterling virtues, he is an unexciting author and this translation makes him unfairly hard to read. Teachers who recommend it to non-French-reading students will be running a risk. Instead of stimulat- ing interest in an intrinsically fascinating topic, The Coming of the Book in the English version is likely to have a deadening effect.

ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN University of Michigan

Methodology of History. By Jerzy Topolski. Translated by 0. Wojtasiew'iCZ. Synthese Library, number 88.

Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1977. Pp. x+690. $39.50. This huge volume by a Polish Marxist, which has been translated into adequate, if not impeccable, English, is in many ways an impressive one. As one would expect, it contains extensive discussions of the nature and types of historical sources and of various strategies of historical criticism and research, including a long and rather conservative chapter on the quantita- tive revolution. But it also goes well beyond what most American readers would normally call "methodology" of history, involving itself in problems of theory of meaning and theory of knowledge generally; ontological con- cerns about the nature of space and time; the analysis of basic historio- graphical concepts like fact, explanation, cause, and law; and the character- ization of the historian's subject matter in general terms, the author's own word for the whole package being "historics." By way of preface, there is a 160-page survey of the history of reflection on history and historical inquiry from the Greeks to the present day. This is a story in six rather unequal stages, which are described as pragmatic, critical, erudite, structural, logical, and dialectical, and for which exemplars are found in such figures as Herodotus, Voltaire, Ranke, Weber, the logical positivists, and Marx. The range of reading which is drawn on in filling out this ambitious scheme is truly astonishing. While Polish sources are understandably prominent, the works cited in other languages would provide an excellent select bibliography of the theory of historiography from the standpoint of a number of schools and interests.

Topolski's Marxism leads him at times to quote from Lenin and other authorities in ways that are rather tiresome. However, what is disappointing about the book is not that it argues dogmatically from a Marxist point of view-that could have been a valuable exercise-but that too often it argues only feebly, or fails to produce anything that could be called an argument at all. On issue after issue, after identifying allegedly "extreme" positions, the author simply reports his own "opinion," which generally falls somewhere in between. Among the very controversial theses he propounds with scarcely a vestige of supporting argument, and which this reviewer will not be alone in wanting to resist, are the following (I select only a few at random): all antecedent knowledge brought by historians to the interpreta-


Article Contentsp. 490p. 491p. 492p. 493

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. ii-viii+403-607Front Matter [pp. ii - viii]The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence [pp. 404 - 438]Social Mobility in Germany, 1900-1960 [pp. 439 - 461]The Genesis of Burke's Reflections [pp. 462 - 479]Review ArticleCorsi e Ricorsi [pp. 480 - 489]

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Abstracts [pp. 584 - 607]Back Matter

rev febvre, coming of the book [eisenstein]

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