Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France, 1470-1550 (review)

Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France, 1470-1550. By Adrian Armstrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2000. Pp. xii+246. $74.

This is not a general-interest text. It is simple in style but specialized in expression and synthetic in approach, using vocabulary derived from literary criticism, semiotics, and reception theory. Further, Adrian Armstrong's immediate focus is the work of three rhétoriqueurs, French Renaissance poets who emphasized verbal and visual wordplay in their highly mannered verse. Citations from these poets are not translated, nor is spelling modernized; and while those with solid knowledge of modern French may eventually decipher the language, they will need more than linguistic facility to interpret the poetry.

What, then, might this work offer readers of Technology and Culture? The answer is implied in Armstrong's subtitle: the shift from "script culture" to "print culture" (terms entering mainstream American scholarship with the 1979 publication of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change) and the effect of this shift on the mentality and output of writers who experienced the transition from manuscript to letterpress production.

Armstrong promises (and largely delivers) an analysis that "embraces all the factors which may contribute to texts' presentation: layout, illustration and other aspects of what Roger Chartier has termed mise en livre" (p. 11). With the reference to Chartier, Armstrong places Technique and Technology within the broader context of the histoire du livre, now "an academic industry in its own right," as Adrian Johns puts it in The Nature of the Book (1998, p. 28). Certainly, it appears to be a competitive area of inquiry within medieval studies, for Armstrong is careful to differentiate his investigation from that of colleagues.

Perhaps to support his self-affiliation with historians of the book, Armstrong references basic texts on this topic, such as Henri Martin and Chartier, Histoire de l'édition française (1982), sketching what happened as (and after) the compositor replaced the scribe. Like most telescoping histories, his is accurate in the general but bloodless in the particular. We are told that printing allowed wider dissemination at lower cost; contributed to standardized spelling and punctuation; changed the appearance and layout of text; and led to advertising and marketing the book as product. We are not told--probably because it is not necessary to Armstrong's larger argument--that the first printers came to France from Germany in 1469; that forty-seven French cities had printing presses by 1500; that scribes displaced by the new technology often went into teaching; that French printers first went on strike in 1539; that in 1540 one Paris publisher employed 250 workers on thirteen presses to produce 500 sheets a day; or that the practice of giving authors free copies of published work is four centuries old.

Armstrong can be glib as well as bloodless. Discussing an edition of Jean Lemaire's Le Temple d'Honneur et de Vertus (1504), for example, he assumes that the concluding verses began with simply framed guide letters rather than the woodcuts used elsewhere because the publisher had "exhausted his stock" of elaborate capitals and was leaving it to the reader to "fill" the framed space (p. 133). He thus implies that printers neither reused capitals nor had others made, ignoring the fact that such frames were meant to be decorated ("filled") by professional illuminators.

Given that Armstrong writes of a time when publishing houses were replacing scriptoria, and writes at a time when electronic books are challenging print media, it is worth pondering an aspect of writing, and reading, addressed throughout Technique and Technology. Armstrong postulates that the press sundered the immediate link between writer and patron; that this led authors to develop rhetorical devices that would bring unknown readers to their point of view; and that this in turn rendered the author both more anonymous and more authoritative. This part of the argument...