Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 Dosia Reichardt Mckitterick, David, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; hardback; pp. xi, 311; 44 b/w illustrations; RRP £45; ISBN 052182690. David McKitterick's book is an important addition to the recent scholarship that has challenged the idea of clearly defined communicative shifts which can be sliced up by date so that oral, manuscript, print and electronic cultures neatly succeed each other. McKitterick's argument, advanced through detailed research into the technology of print, is that it took four centuries for this new technology to become fully absorbed into the social fabric. The complementary nature of print and manuscript well into the seventeenth century is stressed. In this respect his work complements that of other scholars, such as Harold Love, Henry Woudhuysen and Leah Price whose The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel for instance, shows that the commonplace book survived long after its supposed demise in the Early Modern period. McKitterick's analysis effectively begins in the second chapter where the relationship between manuscript and print in early printed books is examined with many detailed examples. Interesting questions such as the establishment of the authority of print are raised, but sometimes subsumed beneath specific case histories. However, it is refreshing to note that McKitterick's scholarship includes developments on the continent, placing the history of publishing in England in a wider context. European bibliophiles, authors and printers inhabit these pages and the author also looks at music publishing – an integral part of the publication and circulation of much poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and one which has been mostly ignored or sidelined. The book contains some well-chosen illustrations, most of which are to be found in a chapter devoted to the production of images in print. The strategies adopted by printers to respond to book buyers' demands and budgets in respect [End Page 235] of illustrated volumes are well documented while McKitterick undermines the assumption that a text or image is ever stable, or reproduced exactly. He goes on to examine the reactions of authors and readers to the instability of printed texts, although the subject of plagiarism as an adjunct to the concept of the author with an economic relationship with his text vanishes under a discussion of typography. Other as yet unexamined issues are tantalizingly raised, but require perhaps another volume. Why, for instance, did printers in the eighteenth century start to distance themselves from readers and cease publishing addresses to them? As McKitterick moves through time towards the modern book, produced at high speed and with accuracy, he raises another fascinating point: that to punctuate is to interpret (as the volume of scholarship on the punctuation of the final stanza of Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn testifies). Here, however, McKitterick confines himself to historical detail about the printer's predicament and he avoids moving into the realm of McLuhan, making no comment about the effect of regularized punctuation on conformity, on habits of thought, or on any links with the Industrial Revolution. The author maintains his position as a historical biographer and leaves the implications of his work on cultural theory for others to explore. As a reference book for anyone working in related fields McKitterick's work is splendid, though perhaps too specialized for the general reader. Throughout there is a sense of nostalgia for the imperfections of early-printed material: the bibliophile's delight in flaw and variation. Vandalism towards books (a continuous phenomenon) is a recurring theme and provides a thought-provoking introductory chapter in which McKitterick asks us to consider the active destruction of our past through ignorance of the nature of our printed inheritance. By showing that manuscript culture was not immediately swamped by print McKitterick indicates that print in its turn can coexist with the new electronic media. His book is a timely warning for those who are too eager to substitute 'new lamps for old'. Dosia Reichardt English James Cook University Copyright © 2005 the author