Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700 by Carla Mazzio, Bradin Cormack (2005) Paperback

by Carla Mazzio

This work examines the relationship between book use and forms of thought and theory in the early modern period. Drawing on legal, medical, religious, scientific and literary texts, and on how-to books on topics ranging from cooking, praying, and memorizing to socializing, surveying, and traveling, Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio explore how early books defined the conditions of their own use and in so doing imagined the social and theoretical significance of that use. The volume addresses the material dimensions of the book in terms of the knowledge systems that informed them, looking not only to printed features such as title pages, tables, indexes and illustrations but also to the marginalia and other marks of use that actual readers and users left in and on their books. The authors argue that when books reflect on the uses they anticipate or ask of their readers, they tend to theorize their own forms. Book Use, Book Theory offers a fascinating approach to the history of the book and the history of theory as it emerged from textual practice.

Genres: History, Academic

Paperback

First published August 15, 2005

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most immediate reaction I had to this book was that I wished I had been able to see the exhibit on which it was based. I'm sure it was extraordinary, though the catalog nicely points out the strangeness involved in any type of book exhibition (i.e., books on display cannot be used in their traditional sense). Taking this as a starting premise, the authors suggest many other ways the books in the exhibition were used by their contemporary readers, evidence they take from the books' marginalia, composition, and technological features. The authors are primarily interested in how books were read, making a good case that "just reading" books was not actually understood as "use" in the Early Modern period. Rather, readers needed to engage with texts through memorization, rearticulaiton (in the form of indexing or commonplacing), etc. to truly "use" their books. The most interesting premise the book raises is that books, which it defines primarily as technologies of representation, are always simultaneously concerned with the limits of their representative capacities. Book use, the authors suggest, is one of the ways that such limits are simultaneously exposed but also tested. Cormack and Mazzio are hardly the first scholars to suggest as much, but reading their analysis alongside beautiful visual images of an incredible array of books both reinforces their point and makes it more pleasant to ingest.

[Brackman1066 · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's interesting that several of the books that deal with early modern books are in fact exhibition catalogues (see English in Print). This one is a broader overview than English in Print, more interested in theorizing how people may have used books in a way similar to Sherman's Used Books (which was published after this one). For concrete ideas of early printing or examples of how to talk in detail about specific artifacts; I'd try English in Print; for more general theoretical discussion, this one is good.