A Publishing History of a Prohibited Best-Seller: The Abbé de Vertot and his Histoire de Malte by Robert Thake (review)

Numerous bibliographers and book historians have written enthusiastically about the construction of ‘book biographies’. Roger Chartier sketched a theoretical model of a book’s history from its genesis, publication, circulation, and reception in different forms and in different places across generations of use and conservation. Isabel Hofmeyr’s influential study of Pilgrim’s Progress shows what can be done when a book is charted according to its multiple republication and translation in unexpected places around the world. Paul Eggert followed Henry Lawson’s 1896 collection While the Billy Boils, as he developed his writing career from short stories and sketches for newspapers. Fred Appel edited the Lives of Great Religious Books series published by Princeton University Press in which ‘all great religious books are living things whose careers in the world can take the most unexpected turns’. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit is cited by Appel as declaring: ‘You know what I’d like to read? A biography of a great book—the story of its reception over time.’ Dozens of smaller initiatives have drawn inspiration from such ambition. Two years ago, for example, Robin Naughton at the New York Academy of Medicine began his ‘Biography of a Book’ project, an interactive exhibition exploring the production and use of twelve books and manuscripts across time.

The test of these approaches remains in the quality of the bibliographical scholarship: a book ‘biography’ rests on an intimate understanding of subtle changes between successive editions, in typography and format, in paratextual developments, in the nuances of different translations, in different accompanying illustrations, and in the variations of emphasis in public reviews and individual readings. By this test, Robert Thake’s enthralling account of the Histoire des Chevaliers Hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jerusalem, usually known as the Histoire de Malte, written by the Abbé René Aubert de Vertot (1655–1735), is a major accomplishment—if one that begs further questions, especially about reception, and requires a small errata list (of the type that Vertot himself requested after the first printing of his book).

After two years’ preparation, Vertot was commissioned in May 1715 by the Order of St John to be its historian. Several histories of the Order already existed, notably the French account by Jean Baudoin of 1629, itself based on Giacomo Bosio’s Dell’istoria della Sacra Religione of 1602, but these were regarded as wanting and antiquated. Already sixty years old, Vertot was approached as ‘a man of noble birth, indeed, the most wise and most erudite’, his reputation secure as a serial historian of European revolutions. His history of the 1640 Portuguese revolution (first published as the Histoire de la conjuration de Portugal in 1689) enjoyed thirty-seven editions in numerous languages in the next century and a half, and his 1695 chronicle of revolution in Sweden was similarly celebrated. The engraving of Vertot in the first edition of the Histoire de Malte depicts a corpulent, double-chinned and self-important visage that confounds his more ascetic Capuchin days as the learned Brother Zachary.

The Order had a long wait for its history. The aging Vertot spent thirteen years composing the book. To help finance his labours and ‘pour vivre plus commodément’, Vertot sold his library to Michel Picot, seigneur of Closrivière, while retaining its use for the remainder of his life. The Histoire de Malte was published in Paris in four quarto volumes in 1726. Publication proved an international event, the sale advertised in journals throughout Europe. The earliest critic of the Histoire was apparently Vertot himself, who wrote to the newspapers about its corruption by the printers (if indeed it was Vertot: as there is a suggestion that the publicity was fabricated). Censure of the printers, however, proved a gnat’s bite compared to the furore which...