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Roger Chartier. Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century. Translation by Arthur Goldhammer. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. (Material Texts Series). xiii + 203 pp.
There are a number of reasons why we constantly interrogate poetical texts to learn about the past, and also to better understand the societies we live in: the high symbolic value bestowed on literature by the educational system, institutional inertia, economic interests created around culture, urgent psychological and political needs to get in touch with traditions that are part of ourselves, and so forth. This book by Roger Chartier-proficiently translated by Arthur Goldhammer- would add another reason to the list: namely, that any progress achieved within a humanistic discipline that crosses boundaries to neighboring fields has the potential both to find unexplored objects of study and to raise new questions.
Inscription and Erasure disputes the long-standing division between the interpretation of texts and the description of the material supports and socio-historical environments in which texts appeared and circulated. Throughout the eight chapters that constitute this book-some of them had already been published independently-Chartier examines from a middle-ground between a socio-historical study of graphic culture and the hermeneutics of the poetical text "the manifold relationship between inscription and erasure, between the durable record and the ephemeral text, by studying the way in which writing was made literature by certain works belonging to various genres and composed in various times and places" (vi). The choice of texts studied in the book has not been made following any systematic criteria, nor does Chartier claim to have exhausted his methodological approach (xi). However, the selection of texts seems fully justified by the representative character of the issues at stake.
In the first chapter (1-12), Chartier deals with an implement of written culture that was fundamental until the widespread use of paper. Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Benedictine abbot and later archbishop Baudri de Borgueil wrote some 250 Latin poems containing recurrent allusions to the wax tablets in which he composed his works before those works were copied onto another, more definitive support, such as parchment. When addressing Baudri's...