Burning Books: A Review Essay

The great scholarly project of the social sciences and humanities hovers over these two books. It is the study of the formation and maintenance of culture and the meaning of those objects—writings, art, architecture, city plans, the implements of everyday life—that embody culture. One of the major themes of this project is how the cultural meaning and therefore the treatment of cultural objects change with time and circumstances. Neither of the books considered here actually deals with this project or explicitly acknowledges it, but both treat one significant aspect of it: the destruction of books and libraries.

Reading their work gives one the impression that Haig Bosmajian and Rebecca Knuth approach their subject with ethical rather than scholarly aims. Both authors evince a palpable moral outrage at the destruction of books that colors their treatment of their topic, and this moralizing raises a question. Are they engaged in a scholarly study of the destruction of books or in a crusade to persuade their readers that such destruction is contrary to the core values of civilization? Given the tone of his writing, Bosmajian may be on a crusade. Knuth claims to be pursuing a scholarly project, but her judgmental treatment of book burners and destroyers of libraries creates a contrary impression.

Bosmajian claims to have written the first comprehensive history of book burning, there having been many books and articles about particular instances of such destruction. So the question in his case is, What will a comprehensive survey contribute to our knowledge of the frequency, context, and motivations of book burning? The answer is, Not much, at least if the survey is done the way Bosmajian has done it. Bosmajian organizes the incidents he recounts in categories based on the motivations of the burners. The book has chapters on the burning of blasphemous-heretical books, seditious-subversive books, and obscene-immoral books. This organizational plan pulls the events out of their historical context. Each one becomes an example of one of the motivations, not a part of a cultural, political, or religious movement in a particular place and time. The effect of this disengagement of book burning from its specific historical context is, ironically, to make Bosmajian's history ahistorical. The principal theme of the book is not history but categorization.

Moreover, the categories are analytic abstractions that do not capture the actual motivations of book burners. As Bosmajian's own work shows, book burners rarely have acted out of one motivation, and, as a result, he has to treat particular instances in more than one chapter. Consequently, the categorical organization leads to a good deal of repetition and some confusion. In addition, when applied to the past and to cultures like China, the usefulness of Bosmajian's categories is questionable. While the categories make sense to those of us in the West in the twenty-first century, they would not have made sense to premodern actors and do not today make sense to many non-Westerners. Before the Enlightenment, blasphemy and heresy had a strong political character because political authority was seen as deriving from divine authority. Thus, for assessing premodern and many non-Western instances the justifications for burning books cannot be categorized simply as religious or political. And, as Bosmajian himself acknowledges, the burning of "obscene" or "immoral" books is a modern phenomenon, stemming as much from changing notions of obscenity as from the separation of church and state, which was one of the results of the Enlightenment.

Yet, one can question whether the Enlightenment deserves significant blame for the burning of books considered obscene. Modern Westerners have achieved unprecedented insulation from their natural body functions, hiding them in private bathrooms and bedrooms; obscene books violate the new boundaries. Moreover, this fastidiousness is peculiarly Western, and including it as one of the major categories in his conceptual scheme emphasizes how...