The Brissot Dossier

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Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature

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Review of The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794

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Writing News and Telling Stories

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Collecting and Researching in the History of Books

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Discourse and Diffusion

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How Historians Play God

This essay recounts the career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the leader of the Girondists during the French Revolution, in a manner designed to pose questions about the nature of historical research in general. How, in piecing together information taken from scraps of paper, do historians come to an understanding of other lives? Put in the abstract, the problem belongs to epistemology or ethics. Confronted in practice, it is more like the puzzles uncovered by archaeologists. The historian digs out a shard of evidence from the archives and asks: was Brissot, the ultimate idealist, a spy for the police? By stepping in and out of layers of time, the historian is actually playing a deeper game, one that he or she may be reluctant to admit.Histor

Mademoiselle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: Communication Circuits in Eighteenth-Century France

In 1745 a chambermaid in Versailles was shut up in the Bastille for publishing a roman à clef about the sex life of Louis XV. In attempting to get to the bottom of the case, the police uncovered some remarkable information about how oral media and print culture intersected. Their investigation opens up some broad issues related to the history of women, authorship, reading, and public opinion.Histor

The Devil in the Holy Water: Political Libel in Eighteenth-Century France

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"What is the History of Books?" Revisited

Having accepted the invitation to revisit my essay of 1982, “What Is the History of Books?”, I find that I can do it only in the first person singular and therefore must ask to be excused for indulging in some autobiographical detail. I would also like to make a disclaimer: in proposing a model for studying the history of books twenty-four years ago, I did not mean to tell book historians how they ought to do their jobs. I hoped that the model might be useful in a heuristic way and never thought of it as comparable to the models favored by economists, the kind in which you insert data, work it over, and arrive at a bottom line. (I do not believe that bottom lines exist in history.) It seemed to me in 1982 that the history of books was suffering from fissiparousness: experts were pursuing such specialized studies that they were losing contact with one another. The esoteric elements of book history needed to be integrated into an overview that would show how the parts could connect to form a whole—or what I characterized as a communications circuit. The tendency toward fragmentation and specialization still exists.Histor