In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe by Anthony Grafton
  • G. Thomas Tanselle (bio)
Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011), 256pp.

Grafton’s latest book, based on his 2009 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library, is a worthy addition to his impressive body of scholarship: like his earlier books, it is learned and well written, and—in the ease with which it marshals evidence from disparate sources—it displays his mastery of the field of Renaissance humanism. His subject here is original, even though a great deal has already been written on the printers of this period: he has chosen to focus on the “correctors” employed by the printers, looking at their varied roles, their effect on the texts that were published, and their status as a professional group. They were, as he points out, “a new social type . . . brought into the world by printing,” and they came to represent “a new culture” of “linguistic and textual precision.” Studying them requires access to marked-up manuscripts and proofs and annotated books, and Grafton has found a remarkable number of them, scattered in twenty libraries across Europe and one in the United States. It is easy to believe that (as he notes) he has been assembling this material for more than thirty years. The result is a richly detailed account, organized primarily into “The View from Inside the Shop” and “The View from the Author’s Study.”

Despite this second title, the question of authors’ stylistic and structural intentions does not play as large a role in Grafton’s work as one might be led to [End Page 144] expect by his opening example (from the twentieth century). He begins with a two-page account of the much-publicized relationship between the short-story writer Raymond Carver and the publishing-house editor Gordon Lish, who drastically altered Carver’s work, largely against his will. (Lish is alluded to at several later points, and Hermann Hesse’s displeasure with publishers’ editors is also cited.) Although one of Grafton’s main points is that modern author-publisher interchanges are reenactments of a pattern set in the early centuries of printing, Lish is an extreme instance of twentieth-century editing, and Renaissance correctors can scarcely be characterized as early Gordon Lishes, for their usual concern was with accuracy and philology, and such attention was generally appreciated by authors. (Only one or two of the fascinating “case studies” that punctuate Grafton’s book have a slight resemblance to the Lish situation.) Authorial intention, however, is a subject intimately related to the story Grafton is telling, and further insight into the subverted intentions of Renaissance authors could be gained by using the methods of modern scholarly editing. But doing so is understandably beyond Grafton’s scope, and his work can be seen as a model of an approach to book history that should be practiced more often: the detailed examination of the human actions and relationships that underlie the production of books.

G. Thomas Tanselle

G. Thomas Tanselle, formerly senior vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and adjunct professor of English at Columbia University, is coeditor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville. His other publications include Literature and Artifacts; A Rationale of Textual Criticism; Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction; Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing; Textual Criticism since Greg; and Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use.

...

pdf

Share