Reviewed by: Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century Giuseppe Mazzotta (bio) Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century. By Roger Chartier. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 224 pp. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.50. We all recall the argument in favor of writing advanced by the deconstructionists a few years ago. In their unabashed enthusiasm for representation they rediscovered the Socratic view of the mythic invention of writing and explained the philosophical repression of écriture as the consequence of the deeply rooted fear that it weakened memory and that, by undermining orality and presence, it dismantled the pretensions of logocentrism. Roger Chartier, a distinguished historian very well known on both sides of the Atlantic, elegantly counters the clichés peddled by idealist thinkers about the nature and function of texts and gives weighty reasons for considering in a new light the whole question of writing and inscription. "The fear of obliteration," he writes at the very outset of his investigation, "obsessed the societies of early modern Europe" (vii). This fear underlay the most disparate cultural manifestations, chiefly among them, the aesthetics of writing. Thus, the Muses were acknowledged to be the children of Mnemosyne, and literary works early on in European consciousness turned into books of memory. Often (cf. Dante's Vita nova) they provided reflect ions on both the mechanisms and the fragility of memory in rescuing the past from oblivion and in neutralizing the "erasure" brought on by the devastations inflicted by time and death. Around this principle, Chartier builds a complex argument for a new and enlarged understanding of the economy and politics of writing. He probes the salient material changes produced over six centuries in the techniques of writing (from parchment to print) and explores the origin, development, and social (legal and political) repercuss ions of material inscriptions across a span of seven centuries in Europe. [End Page 667] Chartier's account of memory's cultivation against the threat of oblivion is only a preamble to a larger story he tells, and his narrative slides unobtrusively to related topics. With considerable flair he ponders writers' own reflections on the material instruments of their writing and erasures. The poems by the eleventh-century Benedictine abbot Baudri addressed to his wax tablets and his quills (a motif picked up by Guido Cavalcanti in the late thirteenth century), in turn, become the pretext to gauge anew old debates on the various modalities of reading, silent or aloud, and to evoke banqueting halls where the recitation of poetry would occur. One wished, however, that at this point Chartier turned his attention to a memorable experience recorded in St. Augustine's Confessions. Augustine walks into the study of the Bishop of Milan Ambrose and finds him absorbed in reading silently. The discovery, which upsets the convention of communal practices of reading aloud, such as one would find in, say, monastic refectories, shakes Augustine and induces him to reclaim as a privileged space the interiority of his soul (and to recognize the inseparable bond between silent reading and self-knowledge). Chartier is not detained by this sort of narrative that, in point of fact, would not lead him to alter his conclusions. He keeps his focus steadily on the key element of his work: how different writing technologies bring about a shift in the consciousness of the historical realities within which the man or woman of letters operates. Thus, he devotes the other chapters of his book to the analysis of the material space where books were produced (such as the typographic shop in Cervantes's Spain), to the role handwritten newsletters played in the dissemination of information in Ben Jonson's London, and to the question of the freedom of the press and the power of booksellers and magistrates in Diderot's career. A charming chapter is devoted to Goldoni's theater and its transformation of the oral tradition of the so-called commedia dell'arte and adoption of "woven words" for the amusement of the reader. But the most rewarding sections of this study are reserved for the general and controversial...