Books in Space and Time: Bibliomania and Early Modern Histories of Learning and "Literature" in France

Early modern histories of learning and belles-lettres took authors, works, and (sometimes) editions as their objects. By contrast, bibliomaniacs craved objects that were far more particular: individual copies of books (or else specific manuscripts). My aim is to investigate the relationship between these two apparently disparate forms of early modern interest in the book production of the past: bibliomania and, on the other hand, histories of learning and belles-lettres.

Bibliomania began to be identified as a phenomenon in France in the second half of the seventeenth century. It spectacularly inflated the prices of livres rares et curieux on the Paris market throughout the eighteenth century, especially from about 1720, by which time it had also become prominent in England and the Low Countries. ¹ Isaac Disraeli later called bibliomania a "luxury of literature." ² Although the love of books, the collecting of books, and a concern for them as material artifacts were obviously not new and can be conveniently designated by the term bibliophilia, ³ bibliomania was more extreme in that it involved an almost complete disregard for the most common use of books: reading.

Bibliomania therefore seems to have been a far cry from early modern efforts to write in French the history of various objects known in the period as lettres, belles-lettres, littérature, auteurs, hommes illustres dans la République des lettres, poètes, poésie, ouvrages, and livres. These efforts were often considered to be connected to each other, though there was no consistent overall term for them. Many were histories of learning, that is, vernacular versions of what was called in Latin historia litteraria, the idea of which had been formulated most famously by Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century. ⁴ The phrase histoire littéraire, common in the late seventeenth century, began to appear in the "history of learning" sense in the titles of some vernacular histories from the first half of the eighteenth century, when it was also applied retrospectively to many earlier histories. (I use histoire littéraire in this period sense instead of in its modern ones, for which I reserve the phrase "literary history.") Although the Latin concept was mostly thought of in relation to the transnational Republic of Letters, the French phrase was sometimes understood more nationalistically, denoting the history of French learning, an enterprise that also had its late-sixteenth-century antecedents, notably in the alphabetically arranged bibliographies compiled by François Grudé de La Croix du Maine and Antoine du Verdier. ⁵

On the other hand, other more narrowly focused histories written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of works (such as poetry, oratory, historiography) that were considered eloquent. These were histories of belles-lettres in the rhetoric- and vernacular-oriented sense of that term, which developed in the seventeenth century. They were considered either rivals to, or subdivisions of, histories of belles-lettres in the broader, older "erudition" sense, which also subsisted well into the eighteenth century (and which corresponded roughly to littéraire in histoire littéraire). (Whenever I use belles-lettres, it will be in both the broad and narrow senses, unless one of the two is specified.) Subsequently, by the end of the eighteenth century, the less rhetorically oriented term littérature had displaced belles-lettres from many contexts. ⁶ As Emmanuelle Mortgat demonstrates in what promises to be an important study, the precursors of these histories of belles-lettres in the narrow sense included late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century histories of vernacular poetry undertaken by the Grands Rhétoriqueurs and then, as part of their nationalistic historiographical projects, by the Gallican scholars Etienne Pasquier and Claude Fauchet. ⁷ As has been well documented, belles-lettres in the restricted, rhetorical sense was, in turn, one of the roots of modern conceptions of "literature" as...