The first book-length presentation of Roger Chartier's work in English,
this volume provides a vivid example of the new directions of cultural
history in France. These essays probe the impact of printing on all
social classes of the ancien regime and reveal the surprising range of
ways in which texts and pictures were used by audiences with different
levels of literacy. Professor Chartier demonstrates that those who
attempted to regulate behavior and thought on behalf of church or state,
for example, were well aware of the wide influence of the printed word.
He finds fascinating evidence of fundamental processes of social control
in texts such as the guides to a good death or the treatises on norms of
civility, rules that originated at court but that were eventually
appropriated in various forms by society as a whole. Essays on the
evolution on the fete, on the cahiers de doleances of 1789, and on the
early paperback genre known as the Bibliotheque bleue complete the
picture of what people read and why and of what was published and what
influenced the publishers.
These essays offer a critical reappraisal of the complex connections
between the new culture of print and the oral and ritual-oriented forms
of traditional culture. The reader will discover essential patterns of
the cultural evolution of France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries.
Roger Chartier is Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from
the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions
preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting
them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the
Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich
scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by
Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
