101 in Review / Comptes rendus research represented in the notes, and will be of use chiefly to the beginner. Finally, my copy is not a distinguished example of the arts; the pages are well-designed and very readable, but some sheets are either badly imposed or folded, and binding glue (though the book appears to be stitched) has frequently seeped into the gutters . Despite certain reservations above, it must be stressed that The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World is a major contribution to book history as it moves outside the arena of the European book into the larger world. How wide that scene of writing, , and text production might be was suggested a century ago, by the planners of the of Congress. In his charming book On These Walls (1·995), John Y. Cole describes their efforts, which I saw recently in the east mosaic corridor of the Jefferson Building and the old entrance to the great Reading Room, where some of the research for this will have taken place. "Adorning the East Corridor are six lunettes by John White Alexander that depict The Evolultion of the Book. The subjects are, at the south end, the Cairn, Oral Tradition, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics, and at the north end, Pictu~re Writing, the Manu~script Book, and the P)rinting P)ress" (30). Today, few but tourists see the lunettes, as those in pursuit of book learning now enter the Reading Room from the east entrance. Yet here one spacious pictorial scheme predicts as an integrated set of possibilities the multiple modes of publication a modern book historian needs to keep in perspective. The digital, of course, had yet to be imagined, but the capaciousness of the artistic programme allows for many possibilities. The succeeding volumes in this influential project will show us how these possibilities continue to be worked out. GERMAINE WXARKENTIN University of Toronto

Chartier, Roger. Drarna in Early Modern Eulrope. The Panizzi Lectures, 1998. London: The British Library, I999. x, 73 pp.; $32.00 (paper). ISBN 0-7I23-4635-X.

Roger Chartier's is the fourteenth of the Panizzi Lectures inaugurated by D. F. McKenzie in I985 and his is a fitting tribute to McKenzie, who died soon after this series was presented. Chartier is deeply 102 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 9 concerned with theoretical issues and gives a very densely argued discussion of the relationship between performance and text in dramatic production. Beginning and ending with an evocation of Juan Luis Borges, Chartier observes in the first lecture that many ancient texts did not imply silent readers, and the classical ode, for example, must be seen as a ritual event. There is no author as such in this case, but the speaker, rather, is overwhelmed by the voice of the gods, sacred inspiration. The text cannot therefore be dissociated from the circumstances in which it is produced. Only afterwards, when the event is transformed into a poetic monument, is it necessary to assign it to an author and to create generic rules. Criticism comes much later, and "the three fundamental disciplines of the 'literary institution' (philology, literary history, hermeneutics) are thus set in place at the close of the trajectory leading from 'event' to monument'" For literary historians one of the main methodological problems-especially in the case of drama-is how to confront issues of orality when by nature performance is ephemeral and writing cannot fully record the event. Chartier suggests several means for dealing with this challenge including, perhaps most interestingly, the transformation of punctuation, that is the movement from oralized to grammatical punctuation, and he provides a detailed analysis, concluding like McKenzie before him, that "meanings are not therefore inherent but are constructed by successive interpretative acts." In his second lecture Chartier examines the ways in which plays were transmitted in the early modern period and points out that dramatists often authorized printed versions of their texts in order to combat the inaccuracy of editions based on shorthand transcriptions at actual performances. In his third lecture he describes different conditions of performance and how these effect textual transmission. Printed editions, as he observes, could use their own devices-from engravings, stage directions, and punctuation--to convey something of the action of the play. Studying "bad editions," moreover, gives us important information about differing encounters of the same text, "a negotiation between the different forms of the printed text and its own conditions of transmission and representation." In the early modern period there was a "topos" of reluctance to print, but this was counterbalanced by the convention that the written text would restore the author's real meaning which might have been violated by the circumstances of performance-the need to shorten running time in winter and so on. The movement from quarto to 103 Books in Review I Comptes rendus folio highlighted the developing importance of the author and the role of the book as mediator between audience and writer. On the other hand, publishers also used visual devices to identify· sententiae which might be memorized to be used elsewhere, lines which might be regarded as rhetorical amplifications out of the context of the play itself. Finally, by analyzing the first known printed prompt book of Hadmer Chartier moves in a contrary direction from what has come before and shows how the printed page can teach us a great deal about the recreation of theatrical events in differing historical contexts. As Chartier concludes, in order to understand the mobility of publishing drama in early modern Europe it is necessary to intertwine case studies, close , and general reflections. In doing this in his lectures he has also succeeded brilliantly in his goal of mingling "bibliographical analysis, cultural history and literature." This little volume is a tour de force, a superb example of the potential of the new , McKenzie's sociology of the text. As read text it is dramatic in the extreme; this reviewer can only regret having missed the performances and I do wonder if, like Giles Barber's fourth Panizzi lectures, they were accompanied by appropriate sound and fury, signifying something that has been lost in the subsequent printed form. JAMES P. CARLEY York University

Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds. Medicine, Mortality and the Book Trade. Publishing Pathways Series. Folkestone, Kent: St. Paul's ; New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1998. xii, 198 pp.; $39.9S US (). ISBN r-8847I8-8I-7 (Oak Knoll).

Medicine, Mortalit~Y and the Book Trade is the eighteenth publication in the Publishing Pathways series edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris. This volume contains seven essays from the annual conference on book trade history at the University of London. Its theme is novel, its title intriguing. As with any of essays, however, this is a difficult work to review because the title barely scratches the surface of its subject and because the compilers rely on conference submissions that range widely in time frame and quality.