The Author's Hand and the Printer's Mind

In Early Modern Europe the first readers of a book were not those who bought it. They were the scribes who copied the author’s or translator’s manuscript, the censors who licensed it, the publisher who decided to put this title in his catalogue, the copy editor who prepared the text for the press, divided it and added punctuation, the typesetters who composed the pages of the book, and the proof reader who corrected them. The author’s hand cannot be separated from the printers’ mind.

This book is devoted to the process of publication of the works that framed their readers’ representations of the past or of the world. Linking cultural history, textual criticism and bibliographical studies, dealing with canonical works - like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s plays - as well as lesser known texts, Roger Chartier identifies the fundamental discontinuities that transformed the circulation of the written word between the invention of printing and the definition, three centuries later, of what we call 'literature'. Preface
Part I: The Past in the Present
1. Listen to the Dead with Your Eyes
2. History: Reading Time
3. History and Social Science: A Return to Braudel
Part II: What is a Book?
4. The Powers of Print
5. The Author’s Hand
6. Pauses and Pitches
7. Translation
Part III: Texts and Meanings
8. Memory and Writing
9. Paratext and Preliminaries
10. Publishing Cervantes
11. Publishing Shakespeare
12. The Time of the Work

'In these essays on the linguistic, typographical, social and cultural contexts of works by Shakespeare and Cervantes (among others), Roger Chartier shows once again his remarkable gifts for close reading, original observations, and the judicious and fruitful use of sociocultural theory.'
Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

'These brilliant essays, by the world's foremost historian of the book, are an essential guide to the textual labyrinth in which we find ourselves, a perplexing maze in which manuscripts, printed books, and digital media vie for attention. By looking with singular learning and insight at early modern texts -- above all, works by Shakespeare and Cervantes -- Chartier enables us to understand not only the written traces that have been left by the past but also the traces that we will leave for the future.'
Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University


"Chartier’s essays provide an impressive model for just such a rigorous and sophisticated investigation of the reading and writing habits of the past..."
Andrew G. Bonnell, University of Queensland

Roger Chartier is professor of history at the Collège de France, Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.