Noah Millstone (University of Birmingham)

Sites of Book Talk and the Nouvelles Librairiques in Early Modern Europe

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Response by Amanda Coate. 

This is a draft chapter from a book-in-progress. The Economy of Judgments will be the first study of early modern European ‘book talk’: the lively trade in book news, book rumor, book extracts and judgments about books. Book talk filled the conversation and correspondence of the learned, the semi-learned and observers of state affairs. It is one of the major forms of evidence used to track intellectual controversies, study the reception of particular works or analyze the impact of radical pamphlets. But neither historians nor literary scholars have investigated book talk itself, either as a family of genres or of forms of social practice; nor have they noticed how unmoored much book talk was from anyone actually reading the books they were talking about. This study frames book talk as an object of enquiry, and draws on printed and archival sources from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and England to track the evolution of book talk from the late Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. This is chapter 2, which follows a synoptic introduction and is followed in turn by chapters on book lists (catalogues, indices, bibliographies) and on what exactly people were talking about (authorship, quality, reception, importance, etc).