Les Raisons du livre: du statut de l’œuvre écrite à la figuration du symbole (XIIe–XVIIe siècles) ed. by Gérard Gros (review)

This volume investigates the polyvalent signification of the book in literary and artistic works from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. Contributors deploy three analytical strategies, scrutinizing: texts featuring descriptions of books; images accompanying texts, integral to the text itself; and images depicting books. The volume is eclectic, covering some five hundred years; yet it is coherent in terms of a shared commitment to demonstrating that the represented book is never ‘banal’ (pp. 19, 98), but always symbolically supercharged. As Frédérique Marty-Badiola asserts, the book ‘n’est pas un objet inerte, mais plutôt une matière vivante’ (p. 112). Alongside close attention to the book motif itself, contributors examine the role of ‘la triade indispensable à la carrière du livre’ (p. 26) — writers, readers, and publishers — individuals who orient themselves in the world in terms of their relation to the symbolic book-object. The volume dispels any myth of a monolithic interpretation of the book-object, showcasing instead its almost endless figurative value(s). Indeed, the majority of contributors deftly situate their arguments as to a specific reading of the book’s symbolism in terms of precise sociocultural circumstances. Marty-Badiola’s interrogation of images of the Annunciation in which the Virgin Mary is pictured reading or holding a book is particularly subtle. The chapter unpacks with enviable clarity the ways in which changing forms of Marian devotion in the thirteenth century led to the book becoming an attribute of the Virgin, and the ways in which the imaged book functions as an extra hermeneutic space, operating in turn as a proxy for Christ and Mary’s body. Entries in the volume consider French and Latin material, with the notable exception of Marie-Sophie Masse’s intricate study of the shifting meaning of the vernacular German term buoch (book) in literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The large chronological sweep of the collection is bifurcated by the invention of printing, with five of the volume’s ten chapters considering the impact of printing on the general understanding of the book’s essential nature. The rapidly changing codicological landscape provoked considerable unease in some quarters. Pierre Rivière, for example, explicitly linked the proliferation of books with the rise of the Antichrist in his 1497 work La Nef des folz du monde, as easier access to sacred texts increased the chance of incorrect theological interpretations by the laity. Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou offers an insightful study on the ways in which sixteenth-century poets expressed anxiety about the fragility of knowledge transmission and conservation, by deploying the image of neglected manuscripts, left to the depredations of insects and rats. Across the volume, quotations from primary sources tend to be unnecessarily lengthy, while some essays forego analytical rigour in favour of description. Nevertheless, this collection is a stimulating and valuable work, encouraging readers to engage with the plurality of signification offered by the book-object.