Donald McKenzie: historiador del libro y filólogo

This contribution will show, firstly, how at the time when the French translation of Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts was published, the famous historian of the book, Roger Chartier, emphasized two contributions by the New Zealander (his interest in the materiality of text production and transmission, on the one hand, and his care about the social dimension of the text, on the other) that are in line with his own vision of the History of the book, the History of reading and editing. This led to an undermining of the dialogue that McKenzie had maintained with Greg-Bowers’s bibliographic academy. In countries of Roman language, McKenzies work has been read through this mediation lecture. Secondly, we shall return to this strictly philological dimension of McKenzies work and retrieve his interest in questions of authorial intention and textual authority and his reflection on textual instability. This second aspect will enable us to understand why that book became a reference at the same time for the “new” New Bibliographers as well as for the representatives of New Textualism. To conclude, it is suggested that the current bibliographic orientation of scholarly editing may allow to do justice to McKenzies double legacy for the history of the book and the theory of editing.