History of Reading News. Vol.XXII No.1 (1998:Fall)
by Sue Waterman

Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental, Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997. 522 pp. Bibliography, notes. 185 French francs.

Readers of Roger Chartier will immediately feel at home with this collection of essays on the history of reading in western culture. His basic tenets, eloquently described in his previous works, form the structure upon which this series of studies takes shape.

First, there is Michel de Certeau's oft-quoted description of writers and readers--of writers as toilers of the soil of language, and of readers as the poachers of their fields, of writing as a solid activity that resists the ravages of time, and reading as a transitory, repetitive one--a search for a lost paradise. One could almost believe that Chartier is haunted by this lost paradise.

The project, as described by Chartier and his co-editor, Guglielmo Cavallo, in their introduction, is to reconstruct, in all its diversity, the various modes of reading that have characterized western society since Antiquity. Two basic tenets are borne in mind throughout--first, that reading is not inscribed in the text a priori by a simultaneity of meaning, assigned by an author or by critics, and of interpretation, constructed by a reader. Second, that a text does not exist except that a reader gives it meaning.

Such a project then must somehow describe the encounter of two realms--that of the text itself and that of its reader. The realm of the text consists of objects and of forms; the realm of the reader consists of "communities of interpretation" (a term borrowed from Stanley Fish) who share a common pool of codes, interests and competencies. The mechanics of this encounter constitute much of what Chartier has explored in his previous work, that is, the interplay of objects, be they books, pamphlets or even performances, and of reading practices in a community of readers. This two-fold obsession with the materiality of texts and with the reading practices of a particular time or place informs all thirteen contributions of this volume.

Written by thirteen well-known scholars, the studies in Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental take us from ancient Greece right into the 21st century. Substantial contributions to scholarship all, the chapters follow chronologically from Greece to Rome, into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, through the Reformation, the 18th and 19th centuries, before ending with a look at the current situation of questioning the canon and the crisis of reading brought about by the rise of technology. The viewpoints offered by the authors are rich and varied, so that the ensemble of texts forms a veritable history of reading in the West, rather than thirteen individual and specialized chapters.

Briefly, the program is this: Beginning with ancient Greece, Jesper Svenbro of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Paris), describes its various reading practices, beginning in the 6th century BC.

Guglielmo Cavallo, the co-editor, writes next on ancient Rome, its adoption of Greek texts and how it appropriated and changed reading practices. Four chapters follow on read-ing in the Middle Ages. Malcolm Parkes of Oxford Univer- sity writes on monastic reading practices. Jacqueline Hamesse of the Academia Belgica in Rome writes on scholastic reading. Paul Saenger of the Newberry Library analyzes reading in the late Middle Ages. And Robert Bonfil of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem writes on European Jewish communities during the Middle Ages.

The era of the Renaissance is also covered in four chapters. Anthony Grafton of Princeton University analyzes humanist reading. Jean-Franois Gilmont, of the Catholic University of Louvain, writes on the Reformation and its effects on reading, while Dominique Julia, of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, treats the Counter Reformation. And Roger Chartier, also of the EHESS, describes popular reading and readers of the early modern era.

Reinhard Wittman, of the University of Munich, writes on the so-called revolution in reading at the end of the 18th century, where intensive reading of a few texts gave way to extensive reading of many, many texts.