15 - Conclusion

Summary

AS THIS VOLUME's CHAPTERS have insisted, the transnational and global ambit is crucial to fuller understanding of the changing relationships between ideas and literary materialities in the Enlightenment world. More than sixty years after the publication of L’Apparition du Livre (‘The Coming of the Book’) by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, studies in what has become known as ‘book history’ have revolutionized the scope of bibliographical scholarship. Until recently, however, the new ‘book histories’ remained largely bound by nationally or linguistically based frameworks. They all too rarely engaged with adventurous research, both ongoing and well-established but conducted outside Europe and North America, concerning other vehicles for the conveyance of thought, approaches to the history of material objects, and communication networks in broad cultural-historical terms.

Whether it be contrasting European literary perceptions of China, the construction of iconic images of a British past, or the sharing of knowledge of the Orient, at issue is the interplay between textual content and the physical design and material construction of written or printed materials. In different ways, the preceding chapters reveal how, at a critical period in global interchange, textual meaning and appreciation were filtered by materiality and paratextual disposition, by the relationship between images and printed and or written characters and by the further interventions of letterpress, engraving and other methods of textual replication – and crucially, the relationship between them. Such relationships entailed numerous and complex hierarchies and dependencies, whether in non-representational Qur’anic penmanship and engraving, inked talipot palm leaf, hand-painting on printed and translated statistical charts, Christian missionary tracts or woodcuts and poor-quality intaglio accompanying subversive or scandalous literature. As contributors to this volume have made clear, transformations and transpositions were multiple. The aim has been to combine understanding of the intellectual and the material in the creation, diffusion and reception of different editions in different formats and translated languages, including adaptations, abridgements, illustrations, dedications, commentaries, advertisements and annotations. All these aspects generate their own questions: how, for example, did translated editions which might already have subtly changed meaning from the original (especially if abridged), convey knowledge and understanding even more differently when repackaged and published (and sometimes after a gap of many years) in different regional or national contexts?