English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 by David, R. Carlson

Abstract

The staging is disingenuous. The questions have been long answered, the either/or logic of their formulation repeatedly discredited. Internal contradictions persist. Though supportive of the Jain concept of the “simultaneity of yes and no” in terms of narrative method and philosoph­ ical vision, Herz arranges supernatural and realistic modes hierarchically in the epilogue: the ghost story is a “trace text,” a “shadow text” in relation to the “primary narrative” (128-29). Accordingly, supernatural and uncanny elements, Forster’s “elaborate metaphysical machinery wheeled into place to probe the experience in the cave” (131), are contingent. Often, in the midst of specific and engaging analysis, Herz appears content with summary observations that depend on clichés and stereotypes: the novel, “far larger than its design,” poses “many more questions than answers” ; British English as the “language of definition” pales in comparison to Indianized English, the “language of the underdrift” which communes with “deeper layer[s]” and “characterizes the speech of the Indian characters” (87). As much as Herz delays the introduction of the ghost story in her reading, as often as she prohibits the advance of her feeling for the interdependence of diverse elements, these seem to be the dimensions that she finds most absorbing. And, despite the range she provides, they are the ones, as reader, I needed her to more evenly pursue. De b o r a h sc h n itze r / University o f Winnipeg David, R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manu­ script and Print, 1475-1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). x, 275. Illustrated. The history of the book has received increased attention in the past few years, and David Carlson’s English Humanist Books not only offers a valuable contribution to that study, but also enhances it with an allied and integrated study of a related field. Carlson joins together the history of the book with that of early English humanism to place the production of books within particular cultural, material, and economic contexts. As he explains in the opening to his Introduction: This is a book about books: why they were made the way they were and how they were used, in England, during an important period in their history. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the technology for making books was changing, with the introduction of printing, and books were being put to new uses by an emergent group of professional humanists, who used them for their own advancement. (3) 490 Carlson focusses upon the period from 1475 to 1525, a time between the earliest humanist activity in England and humanism becoming the predom­ inant force in English intellectual culture, a time when “writings were fluid, mutable things ... and there was sensitivity among writers and readers to the nuances of a system of publication complicated in ways unparalleled be­ fore or since” (4). Publication was not fixed, as now, into being synonymous with publication in print, and a writer’s choice amongst the publishing op­ tions available to him (even the choice of which script or typeface to use) was in itself a message and a context: The relations among [the] three basic modes of publication that the early Tudor humanists used — deluxe [manuscript] presentation copies, for pre­ sentation to potential patrons; ephemeral manuscript copies, for circu­ lation hand to hand, characteristically among peers rather than social superiors; and printed copies, again for a comparatively broad and socially humble audience — are complicated. ... Briefly, the humanists appear to have been careful — though not invariably successful — about fitting modes of publication, and combinations of modes of publication, to the ends that they meant to serve by circulating their writings. (13) With such an emphasis upon the relationships among writer, patron, readership , text, and the physical properties of the written material, the generous illustrations in this book are integral to and lend force to its argument. As Carlson demonstrates, the livelihood of humanists during this pivotal span of time depended upon their successfully exploiting the complexities of this extended system of publication — they all but created the possibility in England of making a living by writing and were, in essence, inventing a social and cultural need for themselves. Their role...