Crossing Borders in Early Modern Europe: Sociology of Texts and Literature

Why this title and theme? The first reason is that today, here in the city of Lyon, when we honor the pioneer in the study of the history of books, our friend and mentor Henri-Jean Martin, I wish, by using the expression "sociology of texts," to associate with him a scholar who has also breached frontiers: Don McKenzie. McKenzie was a traveler between two worlds: on one side, the land of Aotearoa or New Zealand, on the other, Shakespeare's England and the dramatists who were his rivals or his successors, the printers and the booksellers of the Stationers' Company, the compositors and the pressmen of the printing shops. As Robert Darnton has written, Don McKenzie was a "heretic" of bibliography.¹ The "sociology of texts," which he defined as "the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception,"² has called into question the traditional postulates of bibliography, moved borders between knowledge, and shaken the enclosures that isolate scientific traditions.

In his Panizzi Lectures of 1985, Don McKenzie proposed an extension to the field of competence of bibliography, which has irritated the guardians of tradition. The discipline, transformed into the sociology of texts, was invited to new tasks: to invent protocols of description capable of taking into consideration all printed matter other than books and all texts that do not use words, and to consider in the same analytical perspective the whole processes of the production, transmission, and reception of texts, whatever their form may be. Such an approach, which stoutly crosses disciplinary borders, has become central to the understanding of how human societies have constructed and transmitted the meanings they have attributed to languages used to designate beings and things. By assigning to the sociology of texts the fundamental task of articulating material forms and symbolic meanings, McKenzie has contributed greatly to erasing the tenacious division that for so long separated sciences of description and sciences of interpretation, morphological studies and hermeneutical analysis.

This same project inspired the work of a third border-crosser whom I would like to associate with Henri-Jean Martin and Don McKenzie: Armando Petrucci. His work was decisive in tearing down another wall, one which for far too long had separated the history of books and that of writing. Petrucci transformed the learned and descriptive discipline that is paleography into a history of the uses of writing. He proposed the notion of "graphic culture," which designates for each society the totality of written objects and the practices that produce or use them.³ This concept invites understanding of the ties that exist between the different forms and surfaces of writing (whether manuscript, epigraphic, or printed) and inventorying the plurality of usages (e.g., political, administrative, religious, literary, private) that invest the written word in its diverse material forms.

The crossover between the sociology of texts and the history of graphic culture, or even, as Henri-Jean Martin suggests, the history of communication systems⁴ has allowed the toppling of other barriers—for example, the one that has long separated the history of ordinary productions of written culture from that of literature understood as a particular domain of creation and experience. The essential question asked here is that of the modalities by which readers, but also spectators or listeners, make sense of the texts they appropriate.

This inquiry has involved all of the approaches that have considered the production of meaning as constructed within the inventive and dynamic relationship that exists between readers and texts. The project has taken on diverse forms within the history of literature. The theory or poetics of reception centered attention on the dialogical relation between the propositions of each work and the aesthetic expectations and intellectual categories of its public or publics.⁵ The phenomenology of the act of reading, or reader response theory, has focused...