The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind: Transformations of the Written Word in Early Modern Europe by Roger Chartier, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (review)

Over the last half-century, study of the social and cultural developments in early modern Europe has fortuitously produced an intriguing subfield pertinent to contemporary life — the history of the book. Although its historiographical roots lay in concrete questions concerning Shakespeare’s intended work or the causes of the French Revolution, it has become, in its own right, a landscape upon which to observe historical trends, including the impact of the printing press, the tension between written and published texts, and the extent and nature of reading. A driving proponent of this work has been Roger Chartier, one of his generation’s great historical thinkers.

Consisting of twelve essays (either previously unpublished or otherwise issued in French, Spanish, or Italian) written between 2002 and 2012, The Author’s Mind and the Printer’s Hand stresses three major themes: the authority of the written word, the mobility of meaning, and the collective production of texts. The essays fall into two categories: abstract reflections on the nature of books, the history of historiography, and reading in the digital age; and detailed research seeking to unify literary criticism, bibliography, and cultural history. The former include Chartier’s inaugural lecture as professor of Écrit et cultures dans l’Europe moderne — an exposition of meaning and authority that sets the tone for the volume as a whole — and analyses of Fernand Braudel and Paul Ricœur. The latter address the use of punctuation in printing, the significance of translation, and, as methodological exemplars, the publishing of Cervantes’s and Shakespeare’s monumental literature.

In the present studies, Chartier has complicated the long-standing question of “What is a book?” by asking another one: “Who is an author?” He is chiefly concerned with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period before individual authorship was celebrated and ideas and texts were disseminated with exponential rapidity. Chartier stresses the importance of translators, correctors, typographers, copyists, and censors, and demonstrates that Cervantes and Shakespeare were far from the sole (or even primary) participants in the publication of their work. While elucidating print shop activities, Chartier shows that these great literary figures were not authors in a narrow understanding of the term; the “original” manuscript text passed through the hands of scribes, censors, typesetters, and correctors well before it reached the reader. Chartier challenges his readers to identify the “master of meaning” in the midst of this publishing cacophony (p. 19), going so far as to twice state that “authors do not write books, not even their own” (pp. 17, 150).

While Chartier’s point is well made, the reader is left to question the issue of proportionality. Cervantes and Shakespeare authored something, and editors, printers, and the like did not exhibit uniform affect on each and every text at any and all times. Translators and setters of punctuation influenced the published text significantly, as Chartier aptly shows, but they shaped what others produced. Conversely, readers, listeners, and actors, among others, formed and related their own sentiments, so unless we are prepared to define influence to some degree we may be left without an essential point of origin from which to study the history of a given text or book.

Regardless, Chartier’s work opens up new avenues of exploration. For instance, he contends that Cervantes could have inserted changes after a corrected, clean copy of (the not-yet-titled) Don Quixote had been produced by a scribe and approved by a censor (p. 152). This possibility raises questions about the relationship between legal and print practices: how did censors ensure that authors did not modify a text in the midst of an easily alterable print run? If, postproduction, censors discovered an objectionable passage, were they able to consult the approved copy, housed either in the print shop...