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Reviews 211 This last of course is part of Hansen's declared strategy: in contrast to the postmodernist focus on the multivalence of Chaucer's writing, she finds the author alive, well and misogynistically kicking. Yet this in turn givesriseto an issue which needs to be addressed: Chaucer's position, in relation to that of his peers, towards women and the feminine. Surely 'feminism' and 'antifeminism' must be defined relative to the culture in which they are manifested. Hansen's very analysis of Chaucer's writings suggests that he was for his time unusually perceptive not only about the problems for men presented by the feminine within patriarchy, but also about the inedeemably compromised position of women within the system. No, after Hansen's inspiring study, we can no longer read a complacent and comfortable feminism in Chaucer's writing, but neither can we (nor should we expect to) in the novels of Charlotte Bronte. 'Feminism' may be defined by a reluctant epistemology as well as by ethics, and ethics will not necessarily come first. Joy Wallace Department of English University of Sydney Hindman, Sandra L., Printing the written word: the social history of books, circa 1450-1520, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth and paper; pp. xii, 332; 89 figures ; R.R.P. US$9.50 (cloth), $16.45 (paper). Printing the written word is a collection of essays which are mosdy based on papers given at the Northwestern University conference 'From scribal culture to print culture' in April 1987. They neverthelessrepresenta 'methodologically coherent point of view: namely that w e can best study the phenomenon of the impact of print from a close scrutiny of the primary sources, which are the books themselves' (p. 1). The work is also avowedly interdisciplinary, as was the originating conference, drawing on a number of fields including art history, analytical bibliography, literature and social history. Any theoretical limitations the book has are more a reflection of the monodisciplinary approach of some of the individual contributions rather than any reflection on the methodological ideal expressed in Sandra Hindman's Introduction. Methodologically, Hindman's collection has been assembled with an awareness of the impact of printing but in rejection of a common early view of it which she feelstobe exemplified by Elizabeth Eisenstein's The printing press as an agent ofchange (Cambridge, 1979); namely, that print culture represents a radical break with scribal culture. Much of the excellent work in this book repudiates that view by demonstrating the extent to which printed books of the fifteenth century owed their methods of production to manuscript books, which continued to be made and to be used alongside them. Hindman is uneasy with 212 Reviews Eisenstein's methodology, which appears so often to privilege secondary material over the books themselves, and with her repudiation of the primacy of archival research in printing history. Eisenstein also constructs arguments which are based on an elite fragment of books produced during thistime,rather than attempting to account for printed book production as a whole. Of course, this is a problem which is not limited to work on the fifteenth century or even to the entire hand press period. The relative lack of serious work on early m o d e m paperbacks, for example, remains a source of frustration for anyone interested in recent cultural history. The problem is, and it is a problem which this book admirably attempts to address, that cultural elites can only define themselves in terms of the non-elite. Even if w e are only interested in elite culture, we have to define it in relation to what is popular. Printing the written word is divided into three sections which conceptually offer themselves to an artefact-based study of this kind: 'Printers', 'Authors and artists', and 'Readers', each section having three or four chapters. Each section is strongly constructed, even if thefinalfour essays on readers are particularly impressive. Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen's chapter on incunable description shows how a fuller knowledge of provenance can help to reconstruct patterns of ownership and reading. Lotte Hellinga's excellent chapter on the importation of continental books into England and Scotland provides fascinating evidence about...

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