On Reading the Enlightenment

Darnton approached the history of the book through the publishing trade. Kates, by contrast, is a Trinitarian not a Unitarian. His history depends on giving almost equal weight to authors, publishers and readers. His books are written, printed and read: each element has to be given proper recognition... The result of Kates’s trinitarian approach is that his book is not a history of ideas, nor book history, nor cultural history, nor a study in reception. It is, in parts, all of these, but much more than the sum of its parts. After all, authors and publishers are also readers; and readers, as they write letters and compile commonplace books, are also authors, not to mention the source of publishers’ profits. Only a Trinitarian approach can grasp the complexity of the book as written, printed and read. I hope no future historian of ideas will write about a book printed before the Industrial Revolution without asking how many copies were printed, how much they cost and who actually owned them.

David Wootton, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2023/the-enlightenment-as-reading-project/. Interesting review of Gary Kates’ recent The Books that Made the European Enlightenment. It highlights the need for ongoing innovation in studies of complex interactions between readers, writers and publishers, one that can be quite difficult given some of the information isn’t easily available. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that Darnton’s “communication circuit” and later Thomas Adams and Nicholas Barker’s “socio-economic conjuncture” both recognized the need for apprehending these complex interactions. As I wrote recently, “Darnton placed the book’s production in the exterior circle surrounding intellectual influences, political and legal sanctions, and publicity that overlaps with the economic and social conjunction. By contrast, Adams and Barker invert that relation. Their model’s center is the publication, manufacture, distribution, reception, and survival of the artifacts themselves. The former model maps the book-culture relation as a centrifugal interaction where written artifacts radiate out from the culture. The latter provides a centripetal relation whereby the artifacts themselves are impacted by the culture.” Printing Religion after the Enlightenment, p. 136. It is worth noting that what goes assumed in much cultural history is the model of the human mind itself, which relies on enlightenment epistemologies increasingly questioned by recent cognitive science. Hence, there is a need for new history of the book engaged with situated cognition.

timothywstanley@me.com

I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where I teach and research topics in philosophy of religion and the history of ideas.

www.timothywstanley.com
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