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Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His Books

The history of reading is hot. Historians, literary critics, and practi tioners of cultural studies devote books to it; interdisciplinary con ferences stage discussions of it; young scholars devote their dissertations and first articles to it; graduate and undergraduate courses cover it. At least one infallible sign, moreover, shows that this subdiscipline has really started to bubble: it has become the site of scholarly warfare. From the outside, big guns sound. Fretful students of past politics and economics beseech their book-historian colleagues to get off the dime, to pull their noses out from between the crumbling calf-bound covers of old books and return to the archives where they can study big political and social questions. From the inside, at the same time, comes an unsettling rattle of small-arms fire, directed by students of different kinds of book history. They denounce one another for the eccentricity of their methods and the poverty of their results. It would take a heart of stone to survey this crowded scene of scholars locked and writhing in combat — less a School of Athens than a Raft of the Medusa — with out smiling. In one sense, of course, the history of reading is not new at all — at least in the world of manuscript scholarship. Students of the classical and biblical traditions have always studied the mossy spans of commen tary that grew over the broken marble masses of the ancient texts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Reading the auctoritates, the classics