|
Henri-Jean Martin
died on Saturday 13th January, 2007. Born in Paris on
the 16th January 1924, he was the leading authority
on the history of the book.
Henri-Jean Martin
possessed an intellectual energy which not even terminal
illness could curtail. With tenacity and courage, and
despite the suffering of his final months, he succeeded
in completing the book on which he had been working
for several years. Covering the long history of human
communication from the emergence of homo sapiens to
the invention of alphabetical writing, its ambitious
subject matter may very well surprise those who principally
knew him as the leading historian of the book and publishing
in France under the Ancien Régime.
Indeed, his
final project bears witness to his boundless intellectual
curiosity: Henri-Jean Martin enjoyed breaking through
the boundaries characteristic of narrow specialisms
which were often too narrow for his insatiable appetite,
one characterized by a desire for greater understanding
and to make that understanding lucidly intelligible.
In this respect, his work remained indebted to all that
was best in his mentor, Lucien Febvre (1878-1956).
Martin was
still a young librarian when Febvre invited him to collaborate
with him on the volume devoted to the invention of printing
in the collection L'Evolution de l'Humanité .
At that time, the older man was already an established
historian and founding father of the Annales School
. Martin, having graduated from the Ecole Nationale
des Chartes in 1947, had recently joined the Bibliothèque
Nationale, where, to his great disappointment, he was
assigned the task of cataloguing erotic books in the
Restricted Access Room. Nevertheless, he found pleasure
in his work with Febvre, compounded by affection and
respect for the senior scholar.
WIDER HORIZONS
The result of
their collaboration was L'Apparition du livre , published
in 1958 two years after the death of Febvre. It was
to become a classic, republished several times and translated
into several languages (translated into English by David
Gerard and published as The Coming of the Book by New
Left Books in 1976).
I first met
Henri-Jean Martin in 1966 in his grand office as Head
Librarian of the Bibliothèque municipale in Lyon
, a position to which he had been appointed in 1962,
after three years spent at the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). These posts gave him
ample scope for the research which led to his groundbreaking
doctoral thesis on the seventeenth-century Parisian
book trade.
In many respects,
this monumental work, published in 1969, just one year
after Martin's thesis was examined, did even more than
L'Apparition du livre to found the new discipline of
the history of the book. His achievement is all the
more remarkable, because the work was accomplished amid
the onerous demands of an ambitious outreach programme
to encourage reading among the general public as well
as overseeing the construction of a new branch of the
Bibliothèque municipale in the suburb of La Part-Dieu.
From 1963,
Henri-Jean Martin taught in the History and Philology
Division of the Ecole pratique des hautes études
(EPHE), his Monday five o'clock seminar becoming the
crucible for what would become the French school of
the history of the book, a school dedicated to locating
the history of print within the dual traditions of economic
and social history while also establishing a pioneering
history of literary circulation.
Few historians
can be credited with the invention of a new field of
research but Henri-Jean Martin is certainly one. From
his position in the EPHE, and later at the Ecole des
Chartes, where he was elected professor in 1970, he
produced generations of researchers, who in turn made
their way into the worlds of librarianship and higher
education, and without whom the four volumes of L'Histoire
de l'édition française would not have
been possible. I myself had the honour of working alongside
him as joint general editor of the work between 1982
and 1986.
Despite all
this, Henri-Jean Martin did not regard this important
enterprise as his crowning achievement, but rather the
starting point for new intellectual departures, leading
him eventually to widen the chronological scope of his
research in an effort to locate the history of the book
within the long history of written culture.
SCHOLARSHIP
In Histoire et
pouvoirs de l'écrit , published in 1988, with
a second edition in 1996, he analysed how writing, from
ideographic systems to new media, transformed regimes
of power as well as the ways modes of thought and even
societies themselves are organised. An enterprise of
this scope, requiring extensive reading and immense
scholarly dedication, was not without its pitfalls.
As someone who was always ready to seek the views of
others who could fill in his gaps in knowledge, Henri-Jean
Martin was well able to overcome them. Translated by
Lydia G. Cochrane, The History and Power of Writing
was published in English in 1994 by University of Chicago
Press .
He then returned
to the books that, in the course of his work as librarian
and historian, he had previously classified, counted,
and read. The task he set himself from then on was to
comprehend the ways in which, in accordance with their
historic moments, material textual forms both generate
and reflect practices of reading, changing cognitive
processes, literary genres and reading communities.
The result
was his two books, appearing in 1990 and 2000 respectively,
dedicated to the phenomenon of “textualisastion” ( "mise
en texte" ), first in manuscripts and then in printed
books: in these works he established the link between
the birth of the modern book and the division of texts
into paragraphs.
Henri-Jean
Martin was well known in the English-speaking world.
In the United States he received an award from the American
Printing History Association in 1990 and was invited
to deliver the Schouler Lectures at Johns Hopkins University
in 1994. These were translated by his friends Paul and
Nadine Saenger and were published by Johns Hopkins University
Press under the title The French Book: Religion, Absolutism,
and Readership 1585-1715 in 1996. He was warmly welcomed
in England , holding visiting fellowships at All Souls
College and the British Library. He was also invited
to deliver the Lyell Lectures at Oxford in 1995. Henri-Jean
Martin remembered fondly these sojourns in London and
Oxford and the times spent in the company of friends
as well as books. After his retirement in 1993, he established
a collection of images of rare books, now bequeathed
to the Ecole des Chartes. His visits to English libraries,
even moreso than their Parisian counterparts, had allowed
him to increase the scope of a collection of some 12,000
reproductions, providing valuable material for his 2000
publication, Naissance
du livre moderne (XIVe-XVIIe siecles): mise en page
et mise en texte du livre francais.
Henri-Jean
Martin was a complex personality, which made his friendship
all the more valuable, as well as enhancing the curious
fascination people felt for what he called, with more
than a touch of euphemism, his ‘nonconformist tendencies'.
Born into a
‘profoundly nationalist' family, Martin saw himself
as a ‘man of the right,' the product of a rigorous scholarly
discipline instilled at the Ecole des Chartes. He nevertheless
took enormous pleasure in debunking the pretensions
of the most prestigious institutions, in collaborating
with those who did not think like him and in encouraging
his pupils by his example and support to have the courage
of their intellectual convictions.
He had immense
respect for scholars. He was one of them. Like Febvre,
he had no time for narrow-minded academic pedantry.
Far from becoming ingrained in his ideas, Henri-Jean
Martin retained the enthusiasm of his youth, characterized
by the will to learn and a sense of intellectual urgency.
It is to his books that we must now turn to hear that
generous voice.
Translated
by Bill Bell
|
