Print and Power in France and England, 1500-1800

Abstract

This volume provides a wide range of arguments about the power of print in France and England from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. While discussions and theoretical concerns occasionally anticipate or echo others, the collection is especially notable for the diversity of arenas and formats in which political issues and the medium of print converge. Armstrong's research into modifications made to late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century Burgundian works printed in France uncovers publishers' systematic adoption of measures to avoid controversial political topics and disparagement of the French. As Austin contends, a discrepancy between authorial intention and audience reception also explains the publication triumph of Immanuel Tremellius's 1575–1579 Latin translation of the Bible, a standard of the Calvinist faith and successful competitor against the Catholic-identified Vulgate, which Tremellius himself valued and relied upon. Changes in the reception of academic publications in England are scrutinized by Knight, who compares Gabriel Harvey's anxieties in the 1570s and 1580s about circulating his work in English rather than Latin and attracting a court as well as academic audience, with Robert Burton's confident emphasis on institutional prejudices against the vernacular, signalling the acceptance of more commercially oriented scholarly publications forty years later. In her study of eighteenth-century public opinion in England through analysis of the anonymous ‘Letters to the Printer’ appearing in the London Chronicle in 1765, Dean uncovers another form of incongruity between the authors' message in this political exchange and the promotion of differing interpretations through the layout of these letters in juxtaposed columns. Other formats were adopted to disseminate governmental propaganda, such as André Félibien's illustrated books on royal buildings, tapestries and festivals during Louis XIV's reign. Reaching both a French and foreign audience, these beautiful volumes, Saunders asserts, attested to the king's power to mount public displays, while advertising his potential to mount military campaigns. Political staging through the illustrated book yielded different results for the less stable transitional government of the Directory, as Adams suggests in an analysis of Grasset Saint-Sauveur's Costumes des Représentans. Although designed to convey a positive image of the new administration through portrayal of official costumes, this volume was, according to Adams, as naive and flawed as the new Constitution. Less obvious was the elites' control of propaganda through clandestine pre-Revolutionary French pamphlets. Buttressed by the memoirs of the police lieutenant-general J.-P. Lenoir, Burrows argues against Habermas and Darnton that political crises of the period resulted more from royal failure to contain factionalism, manifest in subversive pamphleteering, than from the influence of outsiders. Morrissey's more philosophical piece on the shifting meaning of ‘charity’ and its relationship with the development of early English literary criticism seems the least relevant discussion of issues of print and power, as it traces the eighteenth-century rise of criticism as a perceived need to compensate for readers' limited ability in the context of changing ideas about the social control of text and meaning. The dense, high-quality articles in this collection, while wide-ranging, will interest French and English literary specialists, literary theorists, book historians and historians alike.