Emily
Overall I quite liked this book, despite it being at times a bit repetitive. Hobbins did a good job of carving out the fifteenth century as its own historically significant moment in the history of writing and publishing, and of clarifying just how unclear and complex a history it is: “If the picture I have drawn is too clear, then I have probably not explained it well enough” (218).
Using Jean Gerson as a means to explore the complex world of publishing before print I found to be a simultaneously necessary and frustrating device – necessary because without a central figure the narrative simply wouldn't hold together, but frustrating because I found myself constantly wondering at the apparent singularity of this figure. While Hobbins does give some passing attention to other authors such as Petrarch, occastionally the book read more like a laudatory biography than a more general history of pre-print authorship. Could Gerson really be so utterly unique?
I was particularly interested in Hobbins's exploration of authorship with an eye toward a general reading public. It had never really occurred to me just how big a risk it was in terms of time and effort, to write for publication in the middle ages, simply because there was very little guarantee of an audience: “An author who published a work with the desire to see it replicated was, above all things a creature of hope” (157). Hobbins does a good job of singling out the tract as a writer's means of breaking out of purely academic or religious circles, and of tracing the evolution of the tract from a classroom teaching tool to a more general method of investigating current topics, questions, and events (many of which would have been interesting to a more general lay readership).
Hobbins briefly mentions a tension that I find particularly interesting, and I wish he had gone into a little more detail about it, namely that medieval authors (much like modern content creators) wanted their works to be widely disseminated, and yet were worried about unauthorized copies being made. On page 166 Hobbins mentions that “unauthorized copying [was] even more troubling to authors,” but he doesn't really specify why, aside from the worries about inaccurate copying. However these worries would have equally present with regard to authorized and unauthorized copies. Wouldn't unauthorized copying be similar to a modern day video going ‘viral' and wouldn't that mean a greater potential readership for an author?
Lastly, I really liked that Hobbins supplied information about what he calls “distribution circles.” It was something that I had not really heard of before, and drove home the point that distribution was generally uneven, with long periods of slow and generally localized movement of texts, punctuated by moments of frenetic activity, which helped disburse texts around Europe.
What a fascinating accidental experiment to re-read this at 38, when I originally read it in my early 20s. I don't recall thinking that Maxim was a giant prick when I was younger, but now he spends 90% of the book wavering between acting like an impatient brute and a cold, indifferent statue. What on earth does our heroine see in him?? And our heroine. Boy, do I not remember getting so annoyed by her insecurities on my first read through. But now, I found myself telling her to grow a bit of spine and tell the house staff what to do, for pete's sake! All that aside, it remains a marvelously written novel.