What is the History of the Book?
It feeds on many perspective and therefore is multidisciplinary
It has adopted new perceptions of history
I. The Annales School of Historiography (1929-)
II. The Coming of the Book by Febvre and Martin (1958 & 1976)
III. Post-modernism and New Historicism (Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt,)
Attempts at defining the discipline
Robert Darnton “What is the History of Books? (1982)
Joan Shelley Rubin’s conclusion
Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker “A New Model for the Study of the Book” (1993)
A) The Beginnings of The History of the Book as a discipline
The History of the book began when “scholars found themselves crossing paths in a no-man’s land located at the intersection of a half-dozen fields of study. They decided to constitute a field of their own and to invite in historians, literary scholars, sociologists, librarians, and anyone else who wanted to understand the book as a force in history” (Darnton. Reader 9).
A Multidisciplinary approach
The History of the book is a social and cultural history of communication in print (Darnton). As a result, it is located in the rise of social sciences.
The major disciplines from which it draws method and evidence are: History (focus on agency, power, & experience), Literature (texts & criticism), and Bibliography (descriptive and analytical bibliography)
History and Literature: cultural history, literary history, print culture studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, etc.
History and Bibliography: history of any book, publishing history, book-trade history, etc.
Literature and Bibliography: sociology of texts, authorship and composition studies, readership studies, print culture studies again.
Leslie Howsam. Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture. “Mapping the Interdisciplinaries” Figure 2. 17.
What is History?
“History” said J. B. Bury (1861-1927), “is a science; no less, and no more.” R.G. Collingwood.
“History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural processes – the cycle of the seasons, the human life-span – but of a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence.” (E. H. Carr. 134)
[Man] is a being “who can not only think, but think about his own thinking, who can observe himself in the act of observing, so that man is simultaneously the subject and the object of thought and observation.”
History is a recording of events in a narrative format for the purpose of informing future generations. (It begins with Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, involving both gods and men). Developed by the Greeks (Herodotus, 484-425 BC. Author of The Histories, father of history). Traditionally focused on political, governmental, and territorial events of national or international importance, its text is considered to be factual, formal, correct, and impartial.
It contains an authoritative national discourse, learned by its citizens as factual, and therefore true.
History broadens its scope: The Annales School of Historiography (20th Century)
Two founders: Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) Marc Bloch (1886 –1944)
(second generation) Fernand Braudel (1902 –1985) & Henri-Jean Martin (1924 – 2007)
The Annals School of Economic and Social Historiography (1929) perceived events as being less important than the mental framework that shaped decisions. In order to pull history from its “academic immobility” and renew it, however, the Annales founders felt that their approach:
– must constantly question the past;
– vigilantly examine its own methods of analysis;
– diversify its academic sources beyond the traditional written documents;
– open up to other disciplines and combine them.
Birth of the French school of the History of the Book
The Coming of the Book (L’Apparition du livre) by Febvre and Martin (1958 & 1976)
The rise of Social History and the fall of Political History
– Traditional history is indeed event-centered, and focuses on territorial warfare (military activity, politics, diplomacy); it ignores all else (arts, economy, civilization, culture, ideas). Its perspective is too limited.
– History is necessarily a cultural production, and is infused with religious and nationalistic biases.
– Historians should explore causes and effects, not list or justify events.
– It attempts to be scientific (and fails because events are unique and selected).
– Stringing (selected) facts in chronological order does not constitute an objective overview
– History is positivist (progress is guarantied in order to foster nationalism).
– Historical facts do not exist in pure form, with a single perspective.
– The past is recorded by the mind of the recorder (the scribe or historian).
Historians are not impartial
– All historical facts are subjective because they are recounted by subjective minds, selected by subjective historians who are themselves socially and culturally marked.
“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. {Ask what kind of a bee he has in his bonnet.] When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on a fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometime inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”
E. H. Carr. What is History? 1961. Chapter 1, “The historian and his facts.
History on trial
Post-modernism: The debunking of meta-narratives (1970s)
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist examined social control, and the relationship between institutions and people, power and knowledge.
History had traditionally been taught as impartial and authoritative. In the 1970s, post-modernism declared that all meta-narratives (grand-narratives) were biased, manipulated by those in power in order to maintain it, and do not represent either our reality or our state of mind, nor serve the public good.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
Rewriting history
Re-creation of a voice for the downtrodden, the vanquished.
Eduardo Galeano. Mirrors: Stories for Almost Everyone. 2010.
Adoption of the History of the Book as a discipline by the Americans
The Worcester, Massachusetts, conference on the book (Nov. 1984), sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, defined the history of the book study as follows:
“Every book is an economic commodity that passes through a cycle of production and consumption as it makes its way from the mind of the author, to the printing office, and finally to the reader. The history of the book thus recasts the history of ideas, as Robert Darnton has demonstrated in his studies of the spread of the Enlightenment. It recasts literary history by restoring to it the social history of writers and readers. It re-energizes the history of popular belief by paying close attention to the cheapest and most wildly circulating forms of print and to the milieu in which they travelled. Most importantly, the history of the book enlarges our understanding of authority – social, cultural, and political.” (David D. Hall. “The History of the Book: New Questions? New Answers?” 1986.)
“The history of the book has moved from the consideration of the book as a physical, printed object to a very broad conception of the book as a cultural entity, a structure of communication with social and economic implications.” (Jared Jenisch)
“To understand book history, one must understand the material conditions, social [power] structures, and cultural values of a given place. This forms the meaning that print can carry as it moves from author to reader.
There are three main rubrics of book history:
production (author, editor, technical innovation, government directives, economic forces);
distribution (all things that people bring to print, advertisements, selling, transport, censorship, libraries, schools);
reception (reading or use, which is not passive — can be public, private, oral, silent, individual, collective. It also bears the weight of emotions, ideologies, and identities. People now are looking at the how and why as well as the what of reading).”
Joan Shelley Rubin, “What is the History of the History of the Books?” (2003 online)
Darnton’s article: “What is the History of Books?” (1982)
Robert Darnton: American Cultural Historian, born in 1939
The Great Cat Massacre (1984)
“[T]he history of mentalités [is] a genre that requires different methods from those used in conventional genres, like political history. World views can not be chronicled in the manner of political events, but they are no less ‘real.’ Politics could not take place without the preliminary mental ordering that goes into the common-sense notion of the real world. Common sense itself is a social construction of reality, which varies from culture to culture. Far from being the arbitrary figment of some collective imagination, it expresses the common basis of experience in a given social order. To reconstruct the way peasants saw the world under the Old Regime, therefore, one should begin by asking what they had in common, what experiences they shared in the everyday life of their villages” (Darnton, Great Cat… 23)
The Communication circuit (people-focused)
“[The circuit] transmits messages, transforming them en route, as they pass from thought to writing, to printed characters and back to thought again. Book history concerns each phase of this process and the process as a whole, in all of its variations over space and time and in all its relations with other systems, economic, social, political, and cultural, in the surrounding environment” (Reader 11).
“Specialists pick one aspect of book history, or a particular time period and analyse it using the methodology of their particular discipline, “but the parts do not take on their full significance unless they are related to the whole and some holistic view of the book as a means of communications seems necessary if book history is to avoid being fragmented into esoteric specializations cut off from each other by arcane techniques and mutual misunderstanding” (Reader 11).