The Myth of Print Culture : Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method

Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). www.utppublishing.com Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 The Myth of Print Culture 10 1.1 Print and Scribal Culture (Eisenstein, Johns, Love) 11 1.2 The Coming of the Book and the Departure of Bibliographical Inquiry 21 2 Twenty Million Inclinable\* Can't Be Wrong 32 2.1 The Calculus of Book-Copies 32 2.2 The Quantification of Evidence 41 2.3 Note on the Relative Popularity of Juvenal and Persius 52 3 What Is a Book? Classification and Representation of Early Books 57 3.1 The Cataloguing of Early Book Fragments 57 3.2 Type Measurement and Facsimile Representation 75 4 The Notion of Variant and the Zen of Collation 88 4.1 Charlton Hinman and the Optical Collator 88 4.2 The Logic and Description of Press Variation 97 Of the chapters below, two have been previously published in part: the first section of chapter 5 appeared as The Presumed Influence of Skeat's

The Myth of Print Culture is a critique of bibliographical and editorial method, focusing on the disparity between levels of material evidence (unique and singular) and levels of text (abstract and reproducible). It demonstrates how the particulars of evidence are manipulated in standard scholarly arguments by the higher levels of textuality they are intended to support.

The individual studies in the book focus on a range of problems: basic definitions of what a book is; statistical assumptions; and editorial methods used to define and collate the presumably basic unit of 'variant.' This work differs from other recent studies in print culture in its emphasis on fifteenth-century books and its insistence that the problems encountered in that historical milieu (problems as basic as cataloguing errors) are the same as problems encountered in other areas of literary criticism. The difficulties in the simplest of cataloguing decisions, argues Joseph Dane, tend to repeat themselves at all levels of bibliographical, editorial, and literary history.

The Myth of Print Culture is a critique of bibliographical and editorial method, focusing on the disparity between levels of material evidence (unique and singular) and levels of text (abstract and reproducible). It demonstrates how the particulars of evidence are manipulated in standard scholarly arguments by the higher levels of textuality they are intended to support. The individual studies in the book focus on a range of problems: basic definitions of what a book is; statistical assumptions; and editorial methods used to define and collate the presumably basic unit of 'variant.' This work differs from other recent studies in print culture in its emphasis on fifteenth-century books and its insistence that the problems encountered in that historical milieu (problems as basic as cataloguing errors) are the same as problems encountered in other areas of literary criticism. The difficulties in the simplest of cataloguing decisions, argues Joseph Dane, tend to repeat themselves at all levels of bibliographical, editorial, and literary history Contents 5 Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 11 1. The Myth of Print Culture 18 2. Twenty Million Incunables Can't Be Wrong 40 3. What Is a Book? Classification and Representation of Early Books 65 4. The Notion of Variant and the Zen of Collation 96 5. Two Studies in Chaucer Editing 122 6. Editorial Variants 151 7. Bibliographical Myths and Methods 178 Conclusion 199 Notes 203 Principal Works Cited 237 Index 245 "The Myth of Print Culture is a critique of bibliographical and editorial method, focusing on the disparity between levels of material evidence (unique and singular) and levels of text (abstract and reproducible). It demonstrates how the particulars of evidence are manipulated in standard scholarly arguments by the higher levels of textuality they are intended to support."--Résumé de l'éditeur