Authority in European Book Culture 1400–1600 ed. by Pollie Bromilow (review)

In this volume, Pollie Bromilow presents a cohesive and engaging series of chapters that makes a positive contribution to our appreciation of aspects of authority in early modern print culture. The ostensible objective of the volume is to question the notion of ‘authority as an enduring value that has the same presumed sources, agency and effects in the pre-modern period as in the twenty-first century’ (p. 2). Bromilow’s careful selection of contributions ensures that the volume achieves its goal of effectively problematising this assumption, while individual chapters remain united in voice and relevant both to each other and current scholarship in the field more broadly.

A number of the chapters focus on the physical aspects of early modern print culture, exploring the ways in which choice of font, paper, printers’ devices, and illustrations contributed to a book’s perceived authority. Such physical aspects might also extend to the ways in which a book or manuscript was distributed to its audience, with consequential effects for its reception. Brian Richardson’s chapter, for example, explores these physical means of authorisation through the themes of paratexts, revision, inscription, and transmission. These themes are themselves echoed in Adrian Armstrong’s typologies of authority: viral, aesthetic, discursive, pragmatic, editorial, and proprietorial. Richardson’s and Armstrong’s contributions serve well at the beginning of the volume, as they set up a framework within which to contextualise subsequent chapters.

Richardson notes, for example, that pragmatic authority – ‘the guidance of readers’ – ‘tends to be exercised through metadiscourse, in particular through prefatory material’ (p. 38), and this typology springs immediately to mind when one reads Helen Swift’s discussion of Martin Le Franc’s ‘use of his prologue to set the ground-rules for reading’ (p. 49). Other themes also find repeated expression throughout the volume, including the common use of humanist discursive and rhetorical strategies to establish a text’s authority in the minds of readers (e.g., pp. 72–73, 75–76, 98–99) and the construction of an authorial persona (whether real or imagined) to add credence to a text (e.g., pp. 93, 138, 139–44, 191–94, 196–97).

While common themes are apparent throughout the volume, a number of chapters present particularly interesting engagements with their subject matter. In Chapter 3, for example, Swift presents an alternative reading of Martin Le Franc’s La Complainte du livre du ‘Champion des dames’ a maistre Martin Le Franc son acteur. La Complainte presents a debate between Le Franc’s earlier poem, Le Champion des dames, and Le Franc himself, with Le Champion complaining of its frosty reception at the court of Philip the Good in the mid-fifteenth century. Swift suggests that La Complainte was itself an authorising exercise, ‘a strategy to boost interest in the original Champion manuscript’ (p. 45), rather than a genuine lament of Le Champion’s rejection, as has been often accepted. In a similar vein, Massimo Rospocher presents alternative readings of the propaganda that was generated by Pope Julius II’s publicity machine, illuminating the ‘positive side’ of the pope’s image, ‘which he himself took an active part in managing with his protean quality of generating a huge range of activities whose collective object was to exalt his figure and his role in contemporary affairs’ (p. 97). What emerges is an unfamiliar image of the pope alternately as herald of a ‘Golden Age’, an early modern Julius Caesar, and peacekeeper.

Overall, this volume is a valuable contribution to the study of authority in the early modern period, and provides its reader with useful tools to consider the multiplicity of actors, social influences, and historical contingencies that also shapes the notion of authority in other contexts.