Notes
201 Notes The following are abbreviations used in the notes: CI Niccolò Tommaseo and Gino Capponi, Carteggio inedito dal 1833 al 1874, ed. Isidoro Del Lungo and Paolo Prunas (Bologna: N. Zanichelli , 1911–32). CSM Archivio di Stato, Milan, Cancelleria dello Stato di Milano LIGC Hortense Allart de Méritens, Lettere inedite a Gino Capponi, ed. Petre Ciureanu (Genoa: Tolozzi, 1961). introduction 1. I often recall and rethink the experience of this seminar. Now, many years later, I can see how much the field of the history of writing and the idea of “social relations of writing,” as they have been defined in Italy by such brilliant scholars as Petrucci and Nardelli, are infused by Gramsci’s insight that intellectual work can be understood only in the context of social relations: “The most widespread methodological error has been, I think, to have looked for a distinctive criterion in intellectual activities and not, on the contrary, in the whole complex of relations in which such activities are situated” (“L’errore metodico piú diffuso mi pare quello di aver cercato questo criterio di distinzione nell’intrinseco delle attività intellettuali e non invece nell’insieme del sistema di rapporti in cui esse . . . vengono a trovarsi nel complesso generale dei rapporti sociali”). Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin : Einaudi, 1975), 3:1516 (translation my own). 2. Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 184–85. 3. Ibid., 50. 202 | Notes to Introduction 4. I am here translating and paraphrasing the impassioned story told by Mario Rosa, “I depositi del sapere: Biblioteche, accademie, archivi,” in La memoria del sapere: Forme di conservazione e strutture organizzative dall’antichità a oggi, ed. Pietro Rossi (Bari: Laterza, 1988), 185. 5. I am here translating and paraphrasing the story told by Rosa, “I depositi ,” 186, and Maria Moranti and Luigi Moranti, Il trasferimento dei “Codices urbinates” alla Biblioteca vaticana: Cronistoria, documenti e inventario (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello, 1981), 78. 6. Moranti and Moranti, Il trasferimento, 87 n. 98. 7. Ibid., 85–86. 8. Ibid., 86 and document 136. 9. See Adrienne Rich, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1995). 10. Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) has definitely given me license to explore the many “detours” this book has taken as signposts pointing to alternative epistemologies. 11. See Joan Wallach Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–97; and Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Scott’s essay has had a profound impact on my endeavor to restore scholars to “critical scrutiny as active producers of knowledge” (788). I would like to think that my small contribution to this enterprise is my exploration of our relations to each other as scholars, archivists, librarians, and theorists via our physical and discursive connections to books, writing, libraries, and archives. Davis’s book and indeed all of her books have made it possible to imagine how the scholar, as storyteller, “can move into the way others remember the past and change it merely by introducing an unexpected detail into a familiar account” (7). 12. Jack Goody and Ian Watt have been tremendously influential in their reflection of this legacy. See their essay “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 60. The logical “abstractions” of our work, they write, and the “compartmentalization” of our knowledge “restrict the kind of connections” we can make between our studies, on the one hand, and our “social experience and immediate personal contexts,” on the other: “The essential way of thinking of the specialist in literate culture is fundamentally at odds with that of daily life and common experience; and the conflict is embodied in the long tradition of jokes about absent-minded professors.” 13. Scholars and theorists from Walter Benjamin to Hayden White have drawn our attention to the ideological and rhetorical aspects of the organization of history. My reorganizing project is indebted to their work and also to the work of Reynaldo Ileto, who has illustrated a method for reading against the grain of archival categories, and Irene Silverblatt, who urges us to see the construction of archival categories as a part of historical process. Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Outlines of a Non-linear Emplotment of...
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