The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language 0812251490, 9780812251494

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Prologue. Originary Prints
Chapter 1. The Artificial Tongue: Beginnings
Chapter 2. Hand of Brass: From Manuscript to Print
Chapter 3. Teleprinting: Geoffroy Tory and the Gallic Hercules
Chapter 4. Phonography: Accents, Orthography, Typography
Chapter 5. Grammatization: Pedagogies of the Mother Tongue
Chapter 6. Prosthetic Sovereignty: François I and the Ear of the People
Chapter 7. Survival: Du Bellay and the Life of Language
Epilogue
Appendix. Technical Treatises on the French Language, 1500–1600
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

The Prosthetic Tongue

MATERIAL TEXTS



Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The

PROSTHETIC TONGUE Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language

Katie Chenoweth

u n i v e r si t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e ss ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A catalogue record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-5149-4

For Marnie

Why should the mother tongue be shielded from the operation of writing? . . . Why should the mother tongue not have a history? —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

contents

Prologue. Originary Prints

1

Chapter 1. The Artificial Tongue: Beginnings

12

Chapter 2. Hand of Brass: From Manuscript to Print

48

Chapter 3. Teleprinting: Geoffroy Tory and the Gallic Hercules

87

Chapter 4. Phonography: Accents, Orthography, Typography

136

Chapter 5. Grammatization: Pedagogies of the Mother Tongue

186

Chapter 6. Prosthetic Sovereignty: François I and the Ear of the People

229

Chapter 7. Survival: Du Bellay and the Life of Language

261

Epilogue 291 Appendix. Technical Treatises on the French Language, 1500–1600

295

Notes 301 Index 341 Acknowledgments

349

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Prologue

Originary Prints

Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction. —Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

Of all the cultural “revolutions” brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the “rise” of European vernacular languages. Walter Benjamin opens his essay on the technological reproducibility of the artwork by noting that “the enormous changes brought about in literature by movable type, the technological reproduction of writing” were, already in 1936, “well known.”1 Historians today typically agree that movable type played “an essential role in the formation and fixation” of vernaculars like English, French, and Spanish, standardizing and codifying these languages according to new grammatical and orthographic norms. They recognize that printing gave rise to what Benedict Anderson calls print-­languages, that is, mechanically reproducible idioms “below” Latin and “above” spoken vernaculars, which rose to power and allowed new proto-­national communities to be imagined. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that profoundly shaped modernity. And yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined. This book sets out to better understand the relationship between printing and vernacular language that takes shape in the sixteenth century by looking closely at the history of one language—French—over the course of two remarkable decades, roughly 1529 to 1550. What happens to the French language in the print shop? How is the langue maternelle redefined or reinvented typographically? How does printing technology come to imprint itself on the national tongue, at its very root? What are

2 Prologue

the cultural and political stakes of fashioning a mechanically reproducible vernacular? And what other mutations—in the relation between technics and language, in the definition of the human, in the history of life itself—does this vernacular “rise” announce? The Prosthetic Tongue charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains—from typography, orthography, and grammar, to politics, pedagogy, and poetics—over the course of two transformative decades in the sixteenth century. A veritable “new media” moment, the period between 1529 and 1550 witnesses a proliferation of technological effects within the body of the French language: the introduction of accents and new characters, the development of phonetic spelling reforms and royal language policies, the publication of the first French grammars and dictionaries that make the “mother tongue” a textual and pedagogical object, among others. The key initiators of this movement are humanist printers (Geoffroy Tory, Robert Estienne, and Étienne Dolet, to name a few) who set out to modernize the vernacular by deploying the materials, techniques, and underlying technological framework of the print shop. During this period, the French language comes to be increasingly mediated: mechanized, regulated, codified, and instrumentalized in unprecedented ways. And yet, as it is reinvented for the age of mechanical reproduction, the vernacular tongue will also come to appear more “natural” and “alive,” more “native” and “maternal” than ever. I will argue that this, too, is a technological effect: by extending the reach of the voice typographically, printing endows the vernacular with a new spectral presence and an augmented form of “life.” In this way, printing will at once intensify the technicity of the tongue and conceal that same technicity by producing new cultural fantasies of naturalness, nativeness, appropriation, and presence. Printing will introduce new effects of technological mediation while also instituting vernacular language as a privileged medium of self-­presence, the idiom in which one hears oneself speak. In short, printing will operate as a prosthesis for the tongue that conceals its own prosthetic nature. Blindness to the prosthesis is the law.2 This book thus seeks to allow what is technological at the “beginning” of the modern French language to come into view. My privileged theoretical interlocutor in this project is Jacques Derrida, whose work—best known under the name “deconstruction”—ceaselessly interrogates that which presents itself as “natural” or “living,” as well as the originality of any “origin.” When asked in the 2002 documentary film Derrida to describe the origin of deconstruction, Derrida appears at first to evade the question by pausing to note the mediated

Prologue 3

and artificial character of the situation in which he and his interviewer find themselves—before observing that he has, in fact, already begun to answer the question by performing one of deconstruction’s quintessential gestures. Before responding to this question [on the origin of deconstruction], I would like to make a preliminary remark on the utterly artificial character of this situation. I don’t know who will watch what we are in the process of filming or recording. But I would like to underscore rather than efface the technical conditions and not feign “naturality” where it does not exist. I’ve already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction, because one of the gestures of deconstruction consists in particular in not naturalizing, in not acting as if what isn’t natural were natural, as if what is conditioned by history, technics, the institution, society were given as natural.3 Deconstruction entails, among other things, showing what is historical, technical, or institutional in that which might otherwise pass itself off as natural. “There is no deconstruction,” Derrida will write elsewhere, “which . . . does not begin . . . by calling into question the dissociation between thought and technology . . . however secret, subtle, sublime or denied it may be.”4 Deconstruction, as Arthur Bradley remarks, “remains the most self-­conscious philosophy of originary technicity” inasmuch as it “destroys any concept of a pure, natural, or non-­ technical point of origin.”5 Technics emerges in Derrida’s thought as the originary and irreducible condition of “the entire sphere of the living.”6 The central deconstructive gesture of this book will be to de-­naturalize the modern French language—and, with it, the general category of the “vernacular,” the “mother tongue,” or the “living” language—by revealing how it has been historically constituted and conditioned by printing technology. So-­called vernacular language (the term comes from the Latin vernaculus, meaning “native,” “domestic,” “indigenous”) is particularly susceptible to fantasies and ideologies of naturality. The “vernacular” or the “mother tongue” has always seemed to produce itself, as a figure of pure physis, or nature, unaffected by the externality or technicity of grammar or writing, for example. During the late medieval period and throughout the sixteenth century, vernacular language was regularly regarded as “natural,” as opposed to Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the ancient textual languages characterized as “artificial.” The most influential articulation of this natural/artificial distinction is that of Dante in the early

4 Prologue

fourteenth century. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia (1302–1305; editio princeps 1529), Dante affirms the superior “nobility” of vernacular language, which all infants “acquire from those around them when they first start to distinguish sounds,” over the secondary technical artifact he calls gramatica, or grammatical language. While the vernacular is intimate and immediate, acquired from the breast with the nurse’s milk, gramatica with its “rules and theory” always remains “at one remove from us,” requiring lengthy study and resisting total appropriation. The vernacular lives in the mouth and the body, gramatica on the page and in school; the vernacular is essentially oral/aural, while gramatica is written and textual. The “natural” character of vernacular language is thus conceived within a (phonocentric, logocentric) hierarchy of speech over writing that valorizes speech as native, present, and living while repressing writing as secondary and distant, technological and dead. While vernaculars are subject to temporal and spatial flux, gramatica is possessed of the uncanny stillness of the dead letter, “a certain immutable identity . . . in different times and places” that allows it to survive across epochs. Even as Dante seeks out a more “illustrious” literary Italian vernacular, the nobility of this idiom is rooted in its status as naturalis over and against the artificialis, in its “originality” and universality as speech, in its proximity to the human: “Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race [tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata]; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.”7 As Simone Marchesi suggests, for Dante “artificial languages have been devised to supplement natural idioms, and not in any way to replace them. They are artificial tools, prosthetic limbs designed to carry out a function that natural languages can no longer perform.”8 Dante notes that not every language has acquired the supplement of gramatica as Greek, Latin, and Hebrew have: not every mother tongue has grafted onto itself this “prosthetic limb.” One of the primary developments of the sixteenth century that will concern us here is what historian Sylvain Auroux calls the “technological revolution of grammatization,” that is, the widespread introduction of vernacular grammars and dictionaries that would amount to supplementing every mother tongue with the prosthesis of gramatica. For Auroux, this phenomenon constitutes the second major “techno-­linguistic” revolution after the invention of writing. I suggest that the production of these linguistic instruments in the sixteenth century would be symptomatic of a more

Prologue 5

fundamental development or “revolution,” namely, a technological turn in vernacular language occasioned by printing, in which printing technology itself comes to act as a supplement for the mother tongue. As we will see further on, drawing on Derrida’s reading in Of Grammatology, this supplement never merely adds itself on to the plenitude of a fully natural or fully present language but rather always risks substituting for it and thereby reveals an originary défaut, a fault or defect in the presumed naturalness of the tongue it comes to supplement. Through the frame of print—a frame at once material and imaginary, technological and conceptual—the vernacular is reconceived as artificial and reinvented in the image of the “dead” or foreign languages to which it nevertheless continues to be opposed (as “native,” “living,” and so on). In print, the mother tongue becomes an object of technē in an unprecedented way, even as this technicity is disavowed or relegated to the status of “mere” supplement. This book sets out to investigate the shape and the stakes of this technological turn, which will disrupt and reconfigure the partition between nature and artifice in a fundamental way. Like the telephone and other modern technologies after it, the reproductive machinery of the printing press will be conceived, in Elissa Marder’s words, “as a fetishistic extension of the body of the mother.”9 Printed vernacular text technologically (re)produces the mother tongue as a “fantasy of full presence, life, and unending connection.”10 In this sense, printing and the “rise” of the vernacular anticipate what Avital Ronell describes as the “time bomb” of the invention of condensed milk at the “beginning of the modern concept of technology.” “Something like the history of positive technology is unthinkable,” writes Ronell, “without the extension of this maternal substance into its technological other: in other words, its precise mode of preservation and survival.”11 My suggestion here is that printing already enacts a radical extension of the maternal linguistic substance, mechanizing it and rendering it reproducible, canning it like condensed milk in the preservable form of typography. Printing, as I will argue, has everything to do with survival. Of course, nature and artifice, or the mother and its other, were never opposed in any stable or legitimate way to begin with. Each already touched the other—otherwise, they would not be subject to disruption and reconfiguration with the arrival of print. Printing restructures and discloses, augments and accelerates a contamination of the natural by the artificial that was already at work. Likewise, a technological approach to vernacular language would necessarily predate printing: we need only think of medieval wordbooks or Occitan grammars to see that the production of vernacular language was actively

6 Prologue

“technologized” in all kinds of ways during the centuries before Gutenberg. What’s more, at the beginning of the sixteenth century the language called Francois, that is, the “French” language, was already an “artificial” tongue of sorts. As Jean-­François Courouau suggests, French was “developed empirically and progressively, from the twelfth century, by scribes, royal notaries, officers of the royal chancellery, clerks and authors of works of all kinds.”12 The French language of the medieval period was already “a complex artifact composed of traits originally belonging to various oïl dialects and augmented by forms copied from ancient languages, primarily Latin.”13 Before printing, the French language was already an “artifact” of writing practices and technologies. The technological approach to vernacular language that emerges around 1530 would not, therefore, be something radically new; rather, the technicity of the vernacular will be reimagined, transformed, and intensified in a new medium. Looking further back still, the invention of writing itself would, four millennia before it gets mechanized in Mainz, “technologize” language in fundamental ways by making it durable, repeatable, and so on. And yet even this seemingly inaugural event of technologization would, from a Derridean perspective, follow from a more originary technicity of language without which all subsequent moments of “technologization” would never have been possible in the first place. Under the heading arche-­writing, Derrida encourages us to think of language and technics as indissociable. There would therefore be no historical moment at which language suddenly “becomes” technological: there is no language without technics. Nevertheless, I want to ask how a certain technicity of language is indeed opened—externalized, exposed, and extended, made possible in a different mode and within another horizon—by the development of movable type. This opening would mark a “turn” of technology that produces in the body of the French language an unparalleled proliferation of diacritics and orthographies, grammars and dictionaries, linguistic laws and institutions, technical treatises and theoretical innovations. Printing liberates a grammatological movement in the French language. And yet this “turn” would be no swerve, no arrival of technics or writing from the outside, but rather a cut in a prior cut, a re-­marking of the mark, an overprinting of an originary imprint. Print is a prosthesis for a tongue that is always already prosthetic. Any historical claim this book stakes out would necessarily be conditioned or contaminated by the “always-­already” and by a certain noneventfulness of the event of printing. Indeed, it would be conditioned or contaminated by the very repetition that printing technology itself mechanizes and mobilizes. I will

Prologue 7

argue here that movable type does produce in language a specific series of technological effects (of regulation, externalization, estrangement, spectrality, and presence, among others), that are transformative for French culture and the French language during the early modern period. And yet the “mechanical reproducibility” that one so readily attributes to the printing press is not simply an alien force that suddenly happens upon language one fine day in the middle of the fifteenth century. If printing makes something happen to language and in language (and I contend that it does) this something was always already possible, always already at work in some form that printing puts to work and allows us to see differently. What happens in print was already happening, only according to a different structure and in a different form. The turn of printing would thus always repeat or reproduce a prior “turn” of technē.14 David Wills insists in his Prosthesis (an essential work for what I am attempting to think here, and for any deconstructive thinking of technics) on precisely such a repetition when he evokes the advent of printing. Even as it presents itself as an inaugural “moment” of technological modernity, printing would participate in a general logic and movement of technē that has always already begun. “In what might be called this first cybernetic moment,” writes Wills, “the human hand is superseded by the machine”; and yet this moment would be “no different of course from the first ‘moment’ of the technē in general—memory, the wheel, the pen, what you will.”15 This and yet must be our refrain: with Wills and Derrida, we must see the “revolution” of printing as the repetition of a more general turning of technē. I propose to replace the conventional narrative of the “rise” of the vernacular—with its teleological, nationalist, and metaphysical implications of a national language coming into its own, and which I have retained in the title of this book if only to strike it through or overturn it—with this turn of the always already, which, like the turning of the wooden screw at the center of the press or the pull of the bar in the printer’s workshop, is an essentially repeatable gesture caught up in the dynamics of mechanical reproducibility and unable to rise above them. How are we, then, to think of the specificity of printing technology or the print medium—and to what extent can we think of such a specificity at all? This is one of the driving questions, both methodological and philosophical, of this book. Derrida himself will pose a version of this question in a televised interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler from the early 1990s, published as Echographies of Television. Referring to the television cameras that surround him and the general technological apparatus that makes the televised interview possible, Derrida asks: “What, in terms of the general history of

8 Prologue

teletechnology or of teletechnological writing, is the specificity of our moment, with devices like those that surround us here? This is an enormous and difficult question.”16 Derrida affirms that there does indeed seem to be something especially “vivid” about what is happening or “asserting itself ” technologically “today” (meaning, in the late twentieth century).17 Yet whatever this specificity may be, it “does not all of a sudden substitute the prosthesis, teletechnology, etc. for immediate or natural speech.”18 Indeed, what Derrida encourages us to think, as a counter-­gesture to the dominant tendency to perceive new technologies as arriving from the outside, befalling an otherwise natural state—the tendency, in short, to perceive them as somehow radically “new”—is the fact that such machines “have always been there, they are always there, even when we wrote by hand, even during so-­called live conversation.”19 Here and elsewhere, Derrida evokes the possibility of a certain media technological specificity while simultaneously insisting on the always-­already that undercuts any linear narrative of technological or media historical development, and always underscoring (sometimes rather elliptically) the “enormity” or “difficulty” of this very question. What we are able to say is “new” about “new media” thus remains something of an open question within Derridean deconstruction, a question always interrupted by what Derrida will describe in a late essay as a “certain impossible possibility of saying the event.”20 Without pretending to overcome such difficulties—without pretending, that is, to overcome the impossibility of saying such an event—this book attempts to pick up where Derrida left us, as it were, in writing a deconstructive history of printing as a “new” medium that would take account of both the always-­already of writing or technics and the novelty of printing. In short, I attempt here to think printing as both repetition and event, following Derrida in understanding these not as mutually exclusive but as in fact mutually constitutive. In this respect, I also share certain methodological sympathies with the still emerging field of media archaeology, which seeks traces of “old” media within the “new,” and which, according to Jussi Parikka, “sees media cultures as sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew.”21 The Prosthetic Tongue would perhaps then be a “media archaeology” of the modern French language but one which, following Derrida, questions the value of the arche as origin, and which locates at the beginning of this language—as its opening—an arche-­prosthesis. The prosthetic tongue of my title is the conceptual figure I offer, borrowed and grafted onto this book from Derrida and Wills, for navigating this both/and of the printing “revolution” and the vernacular “rise.” This prosthetic tongue

Prologue 9

necessarily escapes more proper modes of historicization or periodization. “Where would such a thing, a prosthesis, have to start in order to have started? How would it begin?” asks Wills.22 As with Derrida’s generalized concept of “writing”—which confounds the classical conception of writing as secondary and external, as artificial technique—the prosthesis of this prosthetic tongue must no longer be thought of as something that is merely added on from the outside to a preexisting langue (as intact language or integral body). Instead, the prosthetic tongue affirms the originariness of technics within la langue and recognizes the structural necessity of prosthetic supplementarity to any “natural” language.23 My titular “prosthetic tongue” names, then, at least three things. To start, it is my name for printing technology as it comes into contact with vernacular language. Printing engages the French language in an intensified movement of technological supplementarity; it mobilizes effects of technicity and mechanical reproducibility in the vernacular, giving rise to a proliferation of “new” technological effects: diacritical marks, grammars, dictionaries, technical treatises, and so on, but also more pronounced phonocentric fantasies of immediacy and presence, nativeness and naturalness, voice and life. “Prosthetic tongue” thus also names the French langue itself as it comes to be touched and technologized by printing. As we shall see, the French language becomes more discernibly prosthetic in print: it gets repeated, reproduced, regulated, and ordered; extended in time and space; externalized and estranged; pasted and cut; spectralized and reanimated. Yet what my “prosthetic tongue” ultimately names is the originary technicity of the tongue that printing uncannily discloses. The tongue, as we are coming to see, has always been technological and mechanical, external and estranged: this is what printing allows us to perceive in an unprecedented way. The prosthetic, as Wills argues, does not simply introduce artifice where there was none but rather allows “the unnatural within the natural” to become perceptible.24 Printing reveals that “the language called maternal is never purely natural,” as Derrida suggests in his Monolingualism of the Other (a book the often-­neglected subtitle of which is “The Prosthesis of Origin”).25 The period explored in this book, 1529–1550, thus operates as a heuristic opening onto both the technological formation of the modern French language and an underlying technicity of language, both of which have tended to be obscured as they become naturalized or nationalized, humanized, and ideologically effaced. In this opening, something of the artifice at work in the mother tongue is rendered palpable; the sutures of a national language are laid bare. Caught up in the mechanism of a new writing technology, the tongue will—if only for a moment—allow its prosthetic nature to be glimpsed. This

10 Prologue

prosthetic tongue points to an articulation of speech and writing, body and trace, biology and technology, living and nonliving—their suturing, their mutual imprinting—that would be not generated by printing but rather mutated by it. This is also to say that printing (re)produces a new species of tongue. In Chapter 1 (“The Artificial Tongue: Beginnings”), I explore these methodological questions further while fleshing out the titular figure of the “prosthetic tongue” as both theoretical trope and historical artifact. The subsequent chapters of this book are each similarly organized around a central term or figure (e.g., “phonography,” “monolingualism,” “survival”) that articulates history with theory, language with technology, media with philosophy, past with present. Although these chapters proceed in a roughly chronological order—from the European invention of printing in Chapter 2 through Joachim Du Bellay’s 1549 manifesto “defending and illustrating” the vernacular in Chapter 7—such articulations will necessarily destabilize any straightforward sense of chronology or linear historicity. Before turning to the vernacular language revolution in France, I look back in Chapter 2 (“Hand of Brass: From Manuscript to Print”) to the moment when printing was first introduced in Europe, the “incunabular” period, to reveal how the first generation of printers imagined their new writing machines as metallic prostheses for the scribal hand—a hand conceived, at least since Aristotle, as an originary prosthesis for the human turned toward technē. Chapter 3 (“Teleprinting: Geoffroy Tory and the Gallic Hercules”) launches the book’s investigation of the French vernacular movement by turning to that movement’s seminal text—Geoffroy Tory’s 1529 typographical treatise Champ fleury—in order to understand how print typography comes to be imagined as a powerful amplifier for what Derrida refers to as the “teletechnological” effects of language. In Chapter 4 (“Phonography: Accents, Orthography, Typography”), I examine the ways in which printing technology radically extends but also disrupts phonography—the writing of sound or the voice—through the introduction of new accents, characters, typefaces, and orthographic systems in French writing. Chapter 5 (“Grammatization: Pedagogies of the Mother Tongue”) explores the cultural stakes of the project—one first undertaken by humanist printers—to make the French langue maternelle an object of grammar and pedagogy, as well as what this project owes to the materials and the technological approach of the printer’s workshop. Chapter 6 (“Prosthetic Sovereignty: François I and the Ear of the People”) turns to the legal and political scene, asking how the 1539 Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts—a landmark act codifying the French vernacular as the official idiom of French administration and justice—and even the very name of the king, François, participate in the prosthetic logic of printing. In

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Chapter 7 (“Survival: Du Bellay and the Life of Language”), I conclude by looking to the most enduring text of the French vernacular movement, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, asking how it mobilizes the horticultural figure to the graft—a figure echoed in a printer’s vine-­leaf ornament that spreads across the first edition of the book—to engineer the technological survival of the French tongue in a way that redefines the “life” of language.

Chapter 1

The Artificial Tongue Beginnings

Beginning (I) The sixteenth century occupies an uneasy place in traditional histories of the French language, hovering uncertainly between what linguists call “Middle French” (le français moyen) and “Modern French” (le français moderne). As Peter Rickard writes in his History of the French Language, “The dates and duration of the Middle French period are as arbitrary as the term ‘Middle French’ itself.”1 While the beginning of Middle French is typically dated to the early fourteenth century, its end is a subject of debate, ranging from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth—putting the beginning of “Modern French” on one side or the other of the sixteenth century, depending on whom one asks.2 When I speak of the beginning of a “modern” French in this book, I do not intend to make a historical demarcation on linguistic grounds, even if the period studied here is indeed one of profound linguistic change. Instead, I use the term “modern” as a concept and a construct, as much imagined as real, taking my cue from sixteenth-­century writers themselves who use it to distinguish vernacular languages from ancient ones and to designate their own post-­classical, post-­ medieval period—and their own printed tongue. Indeed, according to a humanist commonplace of the early sixteenth century, it is the art of printing itself that demarcates this “modern” period. Along with artillery, its diabolical counterpart, printing marks an epochal difference with respect to both antiquity—since the ancient Greeks and Romans had no such technology—and the more recent medieval, manuscript past. To begin, printing supplies evidence that les modernes are not destined to be culturally



The Artificial Tongue

13

inferior to les anciens, an anxiety and ambivalence at the heart of humanist practices of imitatio. In Joachim Du Bellay’s landmark “defense” of the French vernacular, the poet will call upon printing to serve as a “witness” testifying to the potential—a specifically modern, technological potential—for “our language” (nostre La[n]gue) to “one day acquire ornament and artifice as elaborate as in Greek and Latin” (recevoir quelquefoy cest ornement, & artifice aussi curieux, qu’il est aux Grecz, est [sic] Romains): “I call forth as witnesses of what I say only printing, the sister of the Muses and the tenth of them, and that no less admirable than pernicious thunderbolt of artillery, with so many other nonancient inventions, which truly show that through the long passage of the ages the minds of men have not been as debased as some would claim.” (Je ne produiray pour temoings de ce, que je dy l’imprimerie, Seur des Muses, & dixieme d’elles: & ceste non moins admirable, que pernicieuse foudre d’Artillerie: auecques tant d’autres non antiques inuentions, qui montrent veritablement, que par le long cour des Siecles, les Espris des ho[m]mes ne sont point si abatardiz, qu’on voudroit bien dire.)3 But printing appears not only as a “witness” or symptom of modernity: it also functions symbolically as an engine of that modernity itself—“modernity” understood above all as a posthumous and even uncanny “restoration” of antiquity, that is, a repetition or reproduction of ancient tongues and letters. As Rabelais’s Gargantua writes in the famous letter to his fictional son in Pantagruel (1532), “Now all disciplines have been brought back; languages have been restored: Greek, . . . Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin; elegant and accurate books are now in use, printing having been invented in my lifetime through divine inspiration just as artillery, on the contrary, was invented through the prompting of the devil.” (Maintenant toutes disciplines sont restituees, les langues instaurees. Grecque, . . . Hebraicque, Caldeicque, Latine. Les impressions tant elegantes et correctes en usance, qui ont este inventees de mon aage par inspiration divine, comme a contrefil lartillerie par suggestion diabolicque.) The technological novelty of printing (re)produces a new “age”—a rupture cast by Rabelais as a generational divide, printing having been invented in the father’s “lifetime” (aage). Insofar as it has the power to “restore” the languages that constitute the foundation of a humanist education—granting these languages what Neil Kenny calls a “posthumous presence”—printing is seen to open an epoch in which “the whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of learned teachers and of the most ample libraries” (tout le monde est plain de gens scavans, de precepteurs tresdoctes, de librairies tresamples).4 Almost from the moment of its introduction in the fifteenth century, printing promised new modalities of survival and new forms of linguistic “life,”

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Chapter 1

not only for its archival potential but also, even primarily, for this perceived ability to “restore” authors, languages, and disciplines. In the media culture of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, printing reanimates; it reproduces and regenerates. With the introduction of the new medium comes a new— unanticipated and “miraculous,” untimely and decidedly unnatural—phase of “life” for Greek and Latin. This topos of resuscitation or resurrection through printing will take hold in French humanist discourse of the early sixteenth century and will become a central motif of the French vernacular movement from Geoffroy Tory to Joachim Du Bellay. It is also attested by Guillaume Budé, France’s preeminent humanist philologist, the royal librarian at Fontainebleau under François I, and the adviser who encouraged the king to found the College of lecteurs royaulx (the future Collège de France) to teach humanistic disciplines not offered at the Sorbonne. In his De Philologia (1532), a fictionalized Latin dialogue between humanist and king, Budé observes that Latin and Greek letters have been dead (intermortuae), buried, and embalmed (conditae) for more than a thousand years. The humanist praises François for supporting the development of philology in France as the discipline uniquely capable of delivering the Greek and Latin languages in their “ancient, authentic, and pure” form.5 François, in turn, praises printing, which has the miraculous power to make “letters” that were “inanimate and lifeless for so long” thrive again in France. Budé agrees with the king, affirming that the new technology will give the Greek and Latin languages “the last helping hand to restore their lives.” Movable type operates for both humanist and king as a prosthetic extension of linguistic life, a technological “helping hand” prolonging the natural term of Greek and Latin and offering these languages a new form of survival after and beyond their ordained historical epochs. The other “restorer” in this scene, appearing as a sovereign double of the printing press, is the king himself, whose moniker as patron of humanistic study was not just Père des Lettres, “Father of Letters,” but indeed Restaurateur des Lettres, “Restorer of Letters.” As we shall see, this sovereign-­mechanical restoration of ancient languages during the early years of François’s reign will soon extend—more forcefully and also more enduringly—to the vernacular language that shares his name. If printing can bring “inanimate” languages back to life, why would it not similarly be able to restore the vernacular, or even give birth to a new tongue—especially one bearing the sovereign name of the king? The projects to modernize the French language undertaken by the printers and reformers studied in this book (Geoffroy Tory, Robert Estienne, Étienne Dolet, Louis Meigret, Jacques Peletier, Joachim Du Bellay, and others) will rely



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on printing—explicitly but also implicitly, conceptually but also technically and materially—as an epochal force of reanimation and reinvention. The ars that brings ancient tongues back to life also opens another techno-­future for the vernacular. Geoffroy Tory, a typographical innovator and the first French royal printer, conceives of his own Champ fleury, a treatise on the “art and science of letters,” as announcing a new “beginning” for the French language. Before explaining how to “fashion” ( faconner) letters using a ruler and compass, Tory sets out a historical trajectory for a new and technologically improved French tongue that “begins” with his own book: “All things have had a beginning. When one person treats letters, and another words, a third will come to declare expressions, and then another still will arrive who will order beautiful oration. In this way we will find that little by little we will make our way, such that we will come to the great Poetic and Rhetorical Fields full of beautiful, good, and sweet-­smelling flowers of speech.” (Toutes  choses ont eu commancement. Quant l’ung traictera des Lettres, & l’aultre des Vocales, ung Tiers viendra / qui declarera les Dictions. & puis encores ung aultre surviendra qui ordonnera la belle Oraison. Par ainsi on trouvera que peu a peu on passera le chemin, si bien qu’on viendra aux grans Champs Poetiques  et Rhetoriques plains de belles / bonnes / & odoriferentes fleurs de parler.)6 The future that awaits the French language is a field of full speech and full presence, an end to mediation where we will be able to “say honestly and easily everything we wish” (dire honnestement & facillement tout ce qu’on vouldra). As we shall see further in Chapter 3, it is printing that opens this horizon for Tory. To modernize the French language in this context means to break self-­consciously from the recent past by reviving Greek and Latin antiquity, while simultaneously displacing those revered ancient languages in a new time and a new technological medium. In this sense, the “beginning” of French already takes place as a repetition.7 The iterability of this beginning becomes evident when Tory repeats precisely the same phrase, “all things have had a beginning,” further on in his book, this time in reference to the past trajectories of Greek and Latin: “If it is true that all things had a beginning, it is certain that the Greek tongue, and likewise the Latin tongue, were at one time uncultivated and without Rule of Grammar, as our tongue is presently; but the good Ancients who were virtuous and studious took pain and diligence to reduce and set them to certain Rule, in order to use them properly to write and record good knowledge in memory.” (S’il est vray que toutes choses ont eu commancement, il est certain que la langue Grecque, semblablement la Latine ont este quelque temps incultes & sans Reigle de Grammaire, comme est de present la nostre, mais les bons Anciens vertueux

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& studieux ont prins peine, & mis diligence a les reduyre & mettre a certaine Reigle, pour en user honnestement a escripre & rediger les bonnes Sciences en memoire.)8 The “beginning” of a new French takes place—in a highly performative, self-­conscious, self-­programming mode—as a modern copy or reproduction of these other beginnings; French “begins” by reproducing the dead languages that the printing machine brought back to life. Such would be the technological “birth” of modern French in 1529. In his classic study The Light in Troy, Thomas Greene observes that, despite the indisputable continuities that exist in fact between the periods we call the “Middle Ages” and the “Renaissance,” there is nevertheless a striking “will of Renaissance cultures to distinguish themselves diacritically from their immediate past” as they look to “resurrect” and “resuscitate” a remote past that has been lost.9 However mythical the supposed rupture of Renaissance modernity may in fact be with respect to preceding centuries, this narrative must nevertheless be recognized as a mobilizing idea for Renaissance writers themselves, including those who are at the center of this book who look to distinguish themselves, as Greene suggests, “diacritically”—often quite literally, in the form of typography and diacritics— from their immediate past. The project to reinvent French that begins in the printer’s workshop around 1530 will rely not only on the imagined and material functions of printing technology but also on an underlying philological understanding of linguistic historicity—that is, the idea that languages come into being and change over time. This idea first emerged in the fifteenth century in the work of Italian humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Lorenzo Valla, who observed through a diachronic analysis of classical texts that the Latin language had undergone important grammatical and stylistic developments. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, Adriano Castellesi proposed a narrative of progress and decline that would become one of the dominant models for thinking about linguistic historicity in the sixteenth century. In his De Sermone Latino (1513; first published in France in 1517), Castellesi breaks down the chronology of Latin development into distinct ages (tempora): his “most ancient” (antiquissimum) period goes up to Livius Andronicus; the “ancient” (antiquum) runs from Livius Andronicus to Cicero; his “perfect” (perfectum) age is that of Cicero and Caesar; and his “imperfect” (imperfectum) age—the moment of decline—includes Seneca, Statius, Quintilian, Tacitus, Pliny, and Apuleius.10 “Perfection” in this schema implies both a stylistic standard to be imitated (as Ann Moss observes, “only the authors of the ‘Age of Perfection’ can provide moderns with safe models of Roman language and its elegance”) and a cultural zenith, a state of culmination



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or completion.11 In this way, the historical unfolding of language comes to be understood teleologically, as a movement toward “perfection”—even as any such perfection is haunted by another, ineluctable movement toward decline and degradation. In the work of vernacular philologists in Italy, this historical model will take on a vitalist inflection as the rise and fall of language comes to be conceived according to a natural life cycle—itself derived from Aristotelian natural philosophy—of generation, growth, and corruption.12 In this organic model, languages are “born” and “grow”; like plants, they “blossom” and “flower.” “If our vulgar language was not born in the time of Latin flowering, when and how was it born?” (Se la nostra volgar lingua non era a que’ tempi nata, ne’ quali latina fiori, quando e in che modo nacque ella?) asks one of the interlocutors in Pietro Bembo’s dialogue on vernacular poetry, Prose della vulgar lingua (composed 1506–1512, published in 1525). The answer to this question, provided by another interlocutor: the vernacular “grew and came into being” (crescesse e venisse in istato) with the arrival of the Barbarians in Italy, when the Roman and Barbarian tongues mixed and from them “a new one was born” (nascessene una nuova).13 This notion of a birth of the vernacular that is at once historical and biological will become one of the linchpins of the vernacular movement in France. Accompanying this birth is an emergent conception of the vernacular as a “living” tongue. One of the earliest formulations of the modern distinction between “living” and “dead” languages appears in 1540, in Alessandro Citolini’s defense of Italian (Lettera in difesa de la lingua volgare), which valorizes the vernacular precisely in the name of “life.” Citolini attacks those who speak of Latin and the vernacular “as if they existed in the same time, and they do not see that the Latin language is dead and buried in books; and that the vernacular language is alive and now holds in Italy that same place which Latin had when it lived” (come s’elle fossero in un medesimo termine e non s’avvaggono che la latina e morta e sepolta ne’ libri; e che la volgare è viva e tiene ora in Italia quel medesimo luogo che tenne la latina mentre visse).14 In this reconfiguration of Dante’s vernacular/gramatica divide, Latin and vernacular are no longer two different species of language but rather comparable tongues belonging to different historical epochs. The idea that Latin was once itself a “mother tongue” in fact predates this period: Nicole Oresme, for example, had already affirmed in the introduction to his 1369 translation of Aristotle’s Ethics that Latin was the “common and maternal language” (le langage commun et maternel) of the Romans, and that Greek occupied the same place for them “as Latin does now

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with respect to French for us” (comme est maintenant latin en resgart du francois quant a nous). The determinate shift in the sixteenth century—one that will have major consequences for the discourse on the vernacular and its relation to printing technology—is the recasting of this translatio according to a metaphysics of life and death. Maternal, native, natural, spoken, domestic, interior, present, proper, pure, living: these terms and values appear together in vernacular discourse, often in the very same texts, as part of a cohesive metaphysical and ideological constellation. Their opposites will be consistently associated with Greek and Latin: foreign, artificial, acquired, written, mute, past, absent, exterior, other, dead. As Citolini affirms, Latin is a language that used to be alive but is now dead—“buried in books”—while the vernacular lives in the present: “It is alive, and as living it grows, generates, creates, produces, gives birth, and always makes itself rich and abundant” (Elle e viva, e come viva, cresce, genera, crea, produce, partorisce e sempre si fa pui ricca e piu abbondante).15 Yet, as we shall see, this “living” vernacular is already a dead language in the making—not only in the future, after its time has passed (as have the times of Latin and Greek), but already, right now, in the present, since the survival of the vernacular tongue will entail burying it alive. Viewing languages as historical beings brings about a fundamental change in their ontology: languages as historical entities no longer are, that is, they no longer possess a static or an essential mode of being that would transcend history; rather, they become over time, growing and declining, invested with a form of cultural and historical “life.” For the humanist philologist, languages are essentially dynamic and malleable, material and mortal. Languages can perish or thrive. Each language has a beginning and, with proper care, can survive. French vernacular writers of the sixteenth century, who followed the Italian questione della lingua closely and appropriated much of its discourse, took an active interest in the techniques that produce linguistic flourishing and survival. They looked to Latin and Greek (but also Italian, often implicitly rather than explicitly) as models, asking how—by what technical means—a vernacular language may extend the limits of its natural life. This question traverses the texts we will encounter in this book, from Geoffroy Tory’s Champ fleury in 1529 to Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse in 1549, but it is posed perhaps most explicitly in a little-­known treatise printed in Lyon in 1548 titled Discours comme une langue vulgaire se peult perpetuer (“Discourse on how a vernacular tongue can perpetuate itself ”), which is dedicated solely to the question of the survival of that perishable species of tongue known as “vernacular” (vulgaire). The author, Jacques de Beaune, asks why some vernacular



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languages “will continue for many centuries” (seront continuées par plusieurs siecles) while others “will have such little duration, that the very people who saw them be born will be able to see their completion and end” (auront si petite durée, que ceulx mesme qui les ont veu naistre, en pourront voir l’acheuement, & la fin).16 De Beaune’s proposed solution is technical in nature: in order for French to endure like Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the French must write; they must create a cultural archive, recording their knowledge and “putting their deeds into writing, and leaving the memory of them to their descendants” (mectre leurs faictz par escript, & en laisser en leur descendentz la memoire).17 For French writers of the sixteenth century, linguistic historicity means that their vernacular can be conceived, through an analogy with Latin or Greek, as still at its beginning—still in its “ancient” age—with “perfection” in its future (we have already seen this trajectory, or telos, announce itself with the typographer Geoffroy Tory). It also means that the future of the vernacular can be shaped by human hands. In this way, the philologist’s historicity, which brings about a thinking of vernacular language as “living,” also encourages a thinking of vernacular language as a product of human craft and artifice. The vernacular conceived historically—the vernacular that begins—thus sits at an uncanny crossroads of bios and technē, life and technology. Language lives a “life” shaped by technics. Du Bellay opens his influential Deffence by affirming precisely this technicity of linguistic life: “For languages are not born of themselves like herbs, roots, and trees, . . . but all their strength is born in the world from the desire and will of mortals.” (Donques les langues ne sont nées d’elles mesmes en facon d’herbs, racines, et arbres, . . . mais toute leur vertu est née au monde du vouloir et arbitre des mortelz.)18 For Du Bellay, the “birth” of language is a technological event, and the project to “illustrate” French through poetic imitation is premised on the notion that languages thrive through the “artifice and industry of men alone” (le seul artifice et industrie des hommes).19 And yet the persistent metaphors for language in this period, including in Du Bellay’s own manifesto, will be agricultural: the French vernacular is a “plant” in need of cultivation so that it can “blossom” and bear “fruit.” Vernacular language emerges at this juncture—in print—as what we might somewhat anachronistically call the premier biotechnology of early modern culture. Geoffroy Tory anticipates this thinking in his Champ fleury, the work that, as we have seen, announces a new “beginning” for the French vernacular in 1529. Citing the technical process by which ancient grammarians “perfected” Latin, Tory invites French writers to intervene technologically in the life of their language: “When Donatus, Servius, Priscian, Diomedes . . . and the other similar

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good authors came, they polished the language [i.e., Latin] and put it in such good order, that from that point forward it increasingly augmented in its perfection. . . . Would to God that we could do the same . . . [so that] having our language well regulated, we could compose and put down knowledge and art in memory and in writing.” (Quant Donatus, Servius, Priscianus, Diomedes . . . & les aultres bons Autheurs semblables furent venus, ilz la polyrent & mirent en si bonne ordre, que depuis a tousjours de bien en myeulx augmente en sa perfection. . . . Pleust a Dieu que peussions ainsi faire . . . en ayant nostre langue bien reiglee, peussions rediger & mettre bonnes Sciences & Arts en memoire & par escript.)20 The historical becoming of language remains to be produced by vernacular technicians of the letter: French writers, grammarians, and printers to come. For Tory, this production takes the shape of a quasi-­mechanical reproducibility (“order,” “rule,” “memory,” “writing,” etc.) introduced into the natural life of language. Yet for Tory, as for Du Bellay, the image of this technological perfection is a “flowering” (his titular “flowering field,” the champ fleury) that confounds any rigid distinction between technē and its others (physis, bios) and suggests a thinking of historical linguistic “life” that is indissociable from technics. The ability to reimagine French as a cultural rival to Latin and Greek—the ideological crux of the vernacular “revolution”—will thus develop out of the philologist’s historical ontology and its attendant technicity, along with an emergent conception of the vernacular as “alive.”21 Once all language is understood to be historically and technologically produced, French is no longer inherently or essentially inferior to Greek and Latin. Instead, the vernacular emerges as a language whose “perfection” is on the horizon, poised to rise above Latin as the dead language makes way for the living. In this way, humanist philology “liberates” the vernaculars and brings them to “life.” But it is impossible to think of this liberation and this animation, I suggest, without printing: that epoch-­defining machine thought to bring dead languages back to life. The humanist printer’s workshop operates as the site for imagining and theorizing, crafting and “perfecting” the future of the French language: it is the site of the “birth” of modern French that is, from the start, a repetition and a rebirth produced technologically. Indeed, humanist printers are the techno-­philologists who first set the French language within a horizon of bio-­techno-­historical becoming. As the passages from Tory’s Champ fleury quoted above suggest, this new horizon entails a strange structure of anticipation: it is open to the future—the anticipation of the coming event, the future archivization of the “perfect”



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language (“having our language well regulated, we could compose and put down knowledge and art in memory and in writing”)—but also, at the same time, closed off so as to neutralize the future, wanting to “regulate” and archive it, as if to institutionalize it in advance. The French language comes to life only to be killed off in the same breath. Derrida refers to this simultaneous opening and closing in the Echographies of Television interviews as a “horizon effect” that “reduces, presentifies, transforms into memory, into the future anterior . . . that which it announces tomorrow as still to come.”22 The “beginning” of the French language that emerges in the image of Greek and Latin is already thought in the future anterior tense—that is, as an anticipation of its end, of its technological survival as archive and artifact, as a posthumous presence living on beyond its natural term. The “birth” of French is buried in books from the start.

Beginning (II) For Martin Heidegger, the invention of printing in the mid-­fifteenth century coincides with the “beginning of the modern period [der Neuzeit].”23 This basic idea—that the European “invention” of printing marks an epochal change, that printing is the critical technology of what we call western “modernity”—is far from unique to Heidegger. It has, especially since Elizabeth Eisenstein’s landmark The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980), become commonplace, if not uncontroversial.24 What is singular about Heidegger’s version of this claim, however, is that his “beginning of the modern period” is historico-­ontological (seinsgeschichtlich) rather than what Heidegger would dismiss as merely historiographical (historisch). The printing press transforms the human relation to language, and thus to being (“language is the house of being”), opening a new historical epoch. It is thus also an agent of ontological destruction. For Heidegger, the becoming-­type of the word tears language from its proper place in the writing hand; where writing should reveal, printing conceals. In the printing press (and, later, the typewriter, the typesetting machine, and the rotary press) we find “the irruption of the mechanism in the realm of the word.”25 The “beginning” of the modern period would be marked by this “irruption” of mechanicity in language: a violent incursion of technicity, a breaking in from the outside. “The fact that the invention of the printing press coincides [zusammenfällt] with the beginning of the modern period is no coincidence [kein Zufall],” writes Heidegger. It is no accident (kein Zufall) that printing and modernity arrive together, yet printing for Heidegger would be precisely that:

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an accident or a contingency (ein Zufall), something that befalls writing and language. Heidegger’s “beginning” is the violent arrival of the machine in language as a stranger, a destructive force, a “signless cloud” that transforms our relation to being and history.26 A “modern” language would be one marked by this machinic estrangement. While this book takes seriously the idea that printing fundamentally reshaped language at a particular place and point in time, my hypothesis is that it should be possible to understand this phenomenon without yet deciding, as Heidegger does, that it comes to corrupt an otherwise non-­machinic language with the effects of mechanical reproduction.27 It should be possible to consider the development of printing in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an event in the history of language without necessarily understanding it as an accident, whether happy or unhappy, that comes upon language from the outside. (“At bottom,” Derrida writes, “an accident does not happen if the essence cannot be affected by such an accident. If the essence is accidentable, it is a priori accidented.”)28 It should be possible to approach this event without being suspicious of printing or positing dominant media modalities that come before (orality, manuscript culture, etc.) as more “natural” or somehow more properly “human,” or neglecting what was “technological” about those modalities. Following Geoffroy Tory’s desire to have the French language begin (again) in the print shop, we might begin to put pressure on Heidegger’s desire to keep language and technology apart. We might begin to think that mechanicity is nothing foreign to the tongue, that it has inhabited the “realm of the word” from the start. We might, in short, be able to affirm such a “beginning” rather than treating it with suspicion or without succumbing to nostalgia for a lost, pre-­“modern,” supposedly pre-­technological age. This affirmative thinking moves in the direction of Derrida and deconstruction. The place of printing in Derrida’s work is at once obvious and elliptical, both overstated and under-­explored. “Deconstruction is tied to typography, rather than . . . merely to writing,” observes the media theorist Walter Ong.29 While his published texts deal only infrequently with the printing press or printing technology (such as in the opening essay of Margins of Philosophy titled “Tympan,” or else in the “Geschlecht” series, which takes up the typographical precisely in response to Heidegger’s aversion to printing), Derrida’s unconventional uses of typographical space and the printed book form are recurrent and well known (as in the two-­columned Glas). One might say that deconstruction presses philosophy, subjecting philosophical discourse to a typographics it typically seeks to keep at bay as external, accidental, or other. Most significant,



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perhaps, printing and the materiality of the printed book generate a number of the recurrent “conceptual” motifs in Derrida’s work—with “conceptual” here in scare quotes because these terms engage a certain empiricism that would mark the “departure” of deconstruction in relation to the epoch of logocentrism, even if this empiricism ends up “destroying itself ” as it breaks down the traditional opposition between philosophy and its empirical, nonphilosophical other.30 (As Geoffrey Bennington writes, deconstruction is “no longer philosophy, without for all that falling into the empiricism that philosophy always sees in it.”)31 From Of Grammatology in 1967 through Paper Machine in 2001, a lexicon of printing—terms like empreinte, estampe, imprimer, impression, surimpression, type, frappe, marge, hors-­texte, or tympan—cuts through Derrida’s corpus as a subset of a more capacious lexicon of the graphic and the textual (citation, signature, marque, gramme, trace, écriture, etc.). Broadly speaking, Derrida mobilizes these signifiers to insist that something commonly assumed to be proper to printing (or writing) is in fact more originary and already at work.32 To my knowledge, Derrida himself never thematizes the invention of printing as such, though printing does figure prominently as exemplum in his discussion of “inventions” in the essay “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” After first appearing as a “machine,” the invention of which “produces a new operational possibility,”33 the printing press reappears as Derrida asks what an invention “is” and what it “does.” To invent, he affirms, is to “ find something for the first time.”34 This inventing-­as-­finding is “an event without precedent whose novelty may be . . . of the (invented) thing found (for example, a technical apparatus that did not exist before: printing, a vaccine, nuclear weapons, a musical form, an institution).”35 What is essential for Derrida about any invention— the first example of which is the printing press—is the following: “[The invention] does not create an existence or world as a set of existents, it does not have the theological meaning of a veritable creation of existence ex nihilo. It discovers for the first time, it unveils what was already found there, or produces what, as tekhne, was not already found there but is still not created, in the strong sense of the word, is only put together, starting with a stock of existing and available elements, in a given configuration.”36 Derrida’s thinking offers us the resources for conceiving of a certain printed character of language before the “invention” of the printing press that would prevent any clear cut between two epochs of the word, the handwritten and the printed, the proper and the improper, the good and the bad.37 Printing as technē may “produce what . . . was not already found there,” but it is not “created” in an absolute rupture with what came before.

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The key Derrida text for thinking about the relation between printing and vernacular language is Of Grammatology. It is here that Derrida coins the term “arche-­writing” (archi-­écriture) to designate a kind of writing that “appears well before writing in the narrow sense” and in fact “opens speech itself.”38 Arche-­ writing names the spacing and temporalization that are traditionally associated only with writing but which actually constitute both the “first possibility of speech” and the originary condition of “what philosophy would call experience, even the experience of being: . . . of presence.”39 Both language and the experience of presence are for Derrida never “pure” but corrupted from the start by an opening onto an outside, by spacing and repetition, and thus by a certain mechanicity. This means that before the invention of printing, and even before the advent of “writing” in the conventional sense, speech—traditionally imagined to be fully present to itself and to meaning—has already been contaminated by nonpresence, the nonliving, and even the nonhuman. Language does not wait for writing (or printing) to become repeatable and mechanical; it does not wait for writing (or printing) to be marked by deferral and difference, by spatiality and temporality. These are what “open” language to begin with. If Derrida continues to use the term “writing” to designate this originary spacing and repeatability at the heart of language, it is to underscore the way in which the Western philosophical tradition—which he will diagnose as “phonocentric” and “logocentric”—has relentlessly disguised or repressed these features within speech and relegated them to writing, which is in turn conceived as merely secondary, derived, external, instrumental, technological, and so on, a “technique in the service of language, mouthpiece [porte-­parole], interpreter of an originary speech.”40 This “narrow and historically determined concept of writing” is precisely what Derrida calls on us to rethink in Of Grammatology; indeed, it is what he believes is already in the process of mutating in 1967. Rethinking writing as originary means destabilizing the binary and hierarchical opposition between speech and writing, along with the entire series of oppositions this one carries with it (presence/absence, inside/outside, transcendental/empirical, life/ death, etc.). It thus also entails a reconsideration of technē and its others (physis, bios, etc.). Derrida insists in the opening pages of Of Grammatology that we cannot simply understand writing through recourse to a familiar “essence of technics.”41 Instead, “a certain sort of question about the sense and origin of writing precedes, or at least is mixed up with, a certain type of question about the origin of technics.”42 To think of writing (or printing) as “technological” without also interrogating the “origin of technics” would fall back into the



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classical, phonocentric understanding of writing as a mere instrument of speech. Our project here to understand the relation between printing technology and vernacular language will necessarily have to take up this task in order not to view printing—as the dominant histories of language and printing have done— as a mere instrument that acts on the vernacular from the outside. If language for Derrida “begins” with arche-­writing—which he also refers to quasi-­synonymously as the “trace” or even just “writing” (écriture) in a general sense—such a beginning would no longer be thought of as a full or fully present origin. As writing, this beginning is precisely a nonorigin: an originary mark, stamp, or print, an originary reproduction. The beginning that is arche-­ writing or the trace “is not only the disappearance of origin, it means . . . that the origin has not even disappeared, that it was only ever constituted as a back-­ formation [en retour] by a non-­origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.”43 The “origin” is always prosthetic, always technologically supplemented. The phenomenon we usually refer to as writing—say, a pencil mark on a piece of paper—could in fact only come into being because this originary writing was already at work “inside” language: “The alleged derivativeness of writing, however real or massive, was only possible on one condition: that ‘original,’ ‘natural,’ etc. language never existed, that it was never intact, untouched by writing, that it has itself always been a writing.”44 There can be no “pure,” “authentic,” “natural,” “intact” language whose identity writing—or printing— comes to corrupt, because writing already inhabits language from the start as its very condition and “beginning.”45 The invention of movable-­type printing by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century—and, before that, by Chinese printers in the eleventh century—would likewise only be possible because there is already printing of some kind at work. In the wake of Derrida, this book coins the term “arche-­printing” to refer to a general mechanical reproducibility of language—an originary typography— that would mark language from the beginning and constitute, structurally, the condition of possibility for Gutenberg’s invention. To paraphrase Derrida, the alleged derivativeness of printing was only possible on the condition that “original” or “natural” language has itself always been printed. Printing mobilizes that which in language is already mechanical, reproducible, or typographical— restructuring and intensifying these features, certainly, but not introducing them whole cloth, as if from the outside. The concept of arche-­printing encourages us to think about the effects of printing on language in a way that does not restrict printing to a merely secondary, exterior, instrumental, or even accidental role. Indeed, it would already be a mistake to speak about the effects of printing

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“on” language as if language already existed independently, waiting to be printed. Arche-­printing implies that the supplement we take printing to be— something that would act on an intact body of language from without—is producing language from the start. This concept thus challenges not only the privileging of handwriting that we saw in Heidegger but also any account of printing that continues to privilege speech. These are, in fact, one and the same metaphysical privilege, both maintained out of a supposed unmediated proximity of the hand or the voice with logos (language, thought, meaning). The debasement or repression of printing—assigning it a status secondary or external to language—will map closely onto the debasement and repression of writing that Derrida tracks in Of Grammatology, its status as “supplement.” Walter Ong’s influential account of printing would in this sense be exemplary. In Orality and Literacy and other works, Ong argues that printing serves to “commodify” or “reify” what he refers to as “living human speech.”46 For Ong, there exists a “pristine and primary orality” in which speech is internal, alive, transient, powerful, and present.47 Thinking within a phonocentric tradition that reaches back to Plato, Ong affirms that the invention of writing “technologizes the word,” translating the auditory experience of language into the spatial and visual, and thereby rendering it external, permanent, distant, and dead. Printing, in Ong’s account, comes to redouble this technologization, “situating words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did” and bringing about a shift in the organization of human consciousness from auditory dominance to “sight-­dominance.”48 In short, movable type is thought to operate as the deadest form of the dead letter, killing off the living voice with a new technological efficiency: “Alphabetic writing had broken the word up into spatial equivalents of phonemic units . . . the letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur. With alphabetic letterpress print it is otherwise. Words are made out of units (types) which pre-­exist as units before the words which they will constitute. Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did.”49 If writing represents for Ong the initial “technologization” of the living word, printing comes in to finish the job, hardening the word into a dead thing in space. Yet the voice, as Derrida affirms in both Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomenon, has always already been “invested, undone, required, and marked in its essence by a certain spatiality.”50 If the voice does indeed make itself spatial and visible in alphabetic writing—and, in a more radical way, in print—this spatialization is in a sense nothing new. “Already, within its own representation, the voice sees itself [la voix se voit] and maintains itself.”51 What I wish to suggest with the concept of arche-­printing is that everything



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that seems to characterize printing in relation to speech or handwriting—mechanicity, repeatability, spatiality, typography—in fact always already marks language, including any supposedly “living human speech,” from within and from the beginning. What appears to us as “living human speech” has always already been imprinted in order to be heard; it is arche-­typed. In fact, as we have already begun to see, printing actually extends and (re)produces the very idea of the “living language” to which Ong would want to oppose it. There would be no “life” of language without arche-­printing. Arche-­printing thus also allows us to begin to understand the “rise” of the vernacular within the broader history of Western phonocentrism, that is, the metaphysical privileging of speech (and, with it, hearing, sound, breath, voice) over writing. As Derrida argues in Of Grammatology, this privilege relies on an apparent self-­proximity and transparency of the voice, its unique and intimate relation to the speaking subject that is imagined to be immediate and not subject to the delay, exteriority, or difference of writing. This “system of hearing-­oneself-­speak” (système du s’entendre-­parler), as Derrida calls it, is an “auto-­affection that seems to suspend all borrowing of signifiers from the world and thus to render itself universal and transparent to the signified.”52 My presence (to myself, to meaning, to the signified in general) seems to be given to me through the voice, as an effect of this system that presents itself as immediate and internal. I am present to myself in the time of a breath. Alphabetic or phonetic writing would be the medium par excellence of this system insofar as it appears to most immediately re-­present or reproduce the immediacy and living presence of the voice. For this same reason, however, phonetic writing reduces the graphic to an instrumental function as “translator of a full and fully present speech (present to itself, to its signified, to the other, the very condition of . . . presence in general)” and represses any other writing, any graphie that does not efface itself in the representation of speech.53 Although Of Grammatology announces a certain “closure” of the phonocentric epoch, Derrida nevertheless suggests there is (or was) something necessary about phonocentrism and its dominance in the history of the West: The privilege of the phonè does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy (let us say of the “life” of “history” or of “being as self-­relation”). The system of “hearing-­oneself-­speak” through the phonic substance—which ­presents itself as the non-­exterior, non-­worldly, therefore non-­ empirical or non-­contingent signifier—had to dominate the history

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of the world during an entire epoch, has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of the origin of the world, in terms of the difference between the worldly and non-­worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and non-­ideality, universal and non-­universal, transcendental and empirical, etc.54 The phonocentric epoch is not just any phase, then; it is, as Derrida will later make explicit, “an economic phase of humanization.”55 The system of hearing-­ oneself-­speak, which is extended in phonetic writing, participates in the becoming human of human. What is at stake in the “exhaustion”—the essoufflement, or running out of breath—of this system that Derrida senses occurring as he writes Of Grammatology in the mid-­1960s is not just the “death of speech” but the mutation of a certain constitution of the human. The writing to come, which “trembles” and is just becoming “perceptible,” can therefore “only announce itself, present itself, in the species of monstrosity.”56 The liberation of writing from phoneticism—its extension into the biological or cybernetic “program,” for example—dislodges all of the metaphysical concepts “which until recently served to separate the machine from man.”57 As we may expect by now, Derrida affirms that this mutation he announces in Of Grammatology is not exactly new. Indeed, it has “always already announced itself.”58 And yet certain technological developments make it appear today (in the “today” of 1967), “as such” and “after the fact.”59 Derrida points in particular to the “extension of phonography and of all the means of conserving spoken language, of making it function outside the presence of a speaking subject.”60 Devices like the phonograph, tape recorder, or answering machine extend “phonography” (a term Derrida uses here in the general sense to designate the writing of sound, thus effectively as a synonym for phonetic writing), but for that very reason they reveal the limits of phonography or cause it to “tremble”—precisely because with their possibilities of reserve and replay they reveal the lag, delay, and non-­presence that always already affect speech and the voice, and a fortiori any “phonetic” writing, from the beginning. These devices, Derrida suggests, “teach us” something that was not perceptible in the same way before, namely, “that phonetic writing, the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West, is limited in time and space and limits itself even as it is in the process of imposing its law on the only cultural areas that still escaped it.”61 Modern phonographic technologies come to disrupt the fantasy of phonetic writing even as they extend its power and its reach.



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Of Grammatology famously opens by announcing the “end of the book and the beginning of writing.” Even more explicitly than in Of Grammatology, however, Derrida links this double movement of the “extension of phonography” to the “end of the book” in a little-­known piece from 1968 titled “Culture et écriture, la prolifération des livres et la fin du livre” (“Culture and Writing: The Proliferation of Books and the End of the Book”) that summarizes and develops certain arguments from the opening section of his book. For Derrida, the end of the book coincides paradoxically, in a Babelesque way, with a worldwide “proliferation of books.” One major symptom of this “end of the book” is less, as we might suspect, the substitution of the book by new technologies than an explosion in the production of books and the emergence of increasingly specialized libraries that push the structure or concept of the book—as a fantasy of (philosophical, theological) totality and universality that would be bound up in Western logocentrism—to its limit. For Derrida, this idea of the “book” has always implied the “presence and privilege of speech and logos,” insofar as a book “is always supposed to represent the unity and totality of spoken discourse, which has merely been transcribed.”62 In the linear unfolding of the book, which follows the linearity of alphabetic script, writing acts as “merely the representative of an instance of speech.” And, in this book, one imagines one can reconstitute the voice of the author as speaking subject—and, with this voice, thought, meaning, and truth. “Via the book one always looks to recover the living presence of speech and the person who speaks, who stands behind it.” This idea of the book thus goes hand in hand with the debasement of writing: “There is nothing surprising, then, about the fact that a culture which, more than any other, practices writing and lives off of writing—the West—would simultaneously be a culture in which writing is looked down on, placed beneath speech, like the slave beneath the master, death beneath life, etc.” For this reason, as counterintuitive as it may sound, the “end of the book” is also for Derrida concomitant with the “end of speech.” This does not mean that one ceases to speak any more than it means that one ceases to write or publish books. It means instead that a certain “age of the book” is pushed to its breaking point, allowing something else—what Derrida calls l’outre-­livre, the beyond-­the-­book—to come into view, giving us a glimpse beyond the metaphysical enclosures of logocentrism and phonocentrism. As in Of Grammatology, Derrida points to certain “signs” that mark “the opening of this outre-­livre,” which include the increasing prevalence of nonphonetic forms of writing, especially the “logico-­mathematical writing” that will, he suggests, have a decisive hold over “our lives to come” in the forms of “programming and computer

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science” as well as in “the writing that is found at every level of the organization of life (the biological code: writing, chain of voiceless traces).”63 What these forms of nonphonetic writing do is displace “the entire system of values associated with the predominance of the voice,” namely, the philosophical, theological, and humanistic values of phono-­logocentrism. “One can either resist this displacement (the proliferation of the old discourse),” writes Derrida, “or affirm it; it is implacably necessary, and cruel.”64 Movable-­type printing, in its European manifestation at least, not only relies on and deploys the technology of alphabetic writing but also gives the alphabet a new cultural importance. In a recent book on early modern alphabetics, Erika Boeckeler argues that the new medium of print and the material reality of letters as type helped produce “a literary and visual culture highly attentive to the letter,” as well as an emergent tendency (which we will encounter in the work of Geoffroy Tory) to “link the alphabetic with the human form.”65 My contention here is that, as an alphabetic technology, movable-­type printing extends both phonetic writing and the system of hearing-­oneself-­speak; it acts as a technology of the voice, and thus also as a technology of presence. It continues, amplifies, and massively accelerates what Derrida calls the great phonetic “adventure” of the West.66 It is therefore no accident, I suggest, that printing tended to favor the vernacular, precisely as the idiom that is perceived (as we saw with Dante) to entertain the most intimate, proximate, or immediate relationship with speech. As we will see in Chapter 4, the first half of the sixteenth century witnesses a renewed attention to the phonetic principle and questions of pronunciation, starting with the pronunciation of Greek and Latin. My claim here is that the vernacular “rises” in print as an extension of phonography, the writing of the voice. Historians from Ferdinand Brunot to Benedict Anderson have tended to attribute the eventual dominance of vernaculars in the print market to questions of economics and to “print capitalism.” As Brunot writes, “The book in French was likely to reach a wider audience and, frankly, to have more buyers. . . . The extension of printing necessarily had to result in the adoption of a language that was more known than Latin . . . if the workshops did not want to be out of work. . . . This is an economic reason that perhaps contributed more than any other to the triumph of French over Latin.”67 Yet Of Grammatology invites us to think about this “triumph” according to the economy of another system, namely, that of the “system of hearing-­oneself-­speak.” The printing apparatus allows the sixteenth-­century vernacular speaker to better hear himself speak in his “own” language or “mother tongue”—a language that will appear more



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“properly” one’s own and more fully maternal precisely by means of this apparatus. I will argue throughout this book that the introduction of French accents and phonetic spelling reforms, as well as the first grammars and dictionaries and even the famous Ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts, must be understood according to this logic and this “economy.” Yet if printing indeed functions as an “extension of phonography,” it would be subject to the same paradoxical double movement that Derrida observes in the media technologies and other developments surrounding him in 1967, as the extension of phonography introduces new effects of delay and difference that reveal the ways in which the voice was never present to itself to begin with. The extension allows us to glimpse what is “beyond” the enclosure: the outre-­livre. As we saw above, Derrida wants to situate this moment in the 1960s, while insisting that such a situation has always “announced itself.” I propose here that an analogous moment of epochal trembling—an extension that is also a disruption—is brought by the “rise” of the vernacular and the proliferation of vernacular books that mark the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Vernacular printing would thus also participate in—extending but also disrupting—the historical process of hominization, the becoming human of the human, and the “history of life” in general. It would mark a stage in what Derrida, following André Leroi-­Gourhan, describes as an “exteriorization of the trace” that has “always already begun” but is “ever greater” (une extériorisation toujours déjà commencée mais toujours plus grande de la trace), from genetic inscription and instinctive behaviors up to tools, alphabetic writing, machine reading, cybernetics, and more, that “increases [élargit] différance and the possibility of putting in reserve [la mise en réserve].”68 Arche-­printing invites, finally, a thinking of printing and its “history” that would touch not only what comes before printing (speech, handwriting, etc.) but also what follows. When we cease to understand the invention of printing technology as absolute rupture with respect to the past—or with respect to the human, or “life”—we must also open ourselves to the possibility of its contamination by future media and technologies whose “inventions” are still to come in the sixteenth century. Arche-­printing is at work both “before” and “after” printing. It is in this sense that I will often propose in this book to grasp the cultural mechanisms of printing by way of modern technologies, such as the phonograph or the broad category of what Derrida calls “teletechnologies.” There is already a phonograph playing in the printing press, I suggest, and printing is already teletechnological: a machine that produces virtual effects of presence at a distance and with a delay, infinitely reproducing spectral voices of a French language past or to come. Likewise, there is a printing beyond printing—a printing

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after the press—as the tongue continues to extend itself into new prosthetic territories.

Histories This book is far from the first to put Derrida in dialogue with early modern writing. From the first reception of deconstruction in America in the late 1970s, scholars of early modern literature and culture have taken up the provocations of Derrida’s work, particularly around the question of writing. Groundbreaking studies that are now classics in the field, such as Terence Cave’s The Cornucopian Text (1979) and Richard Regosin’s The Matter of My Book (1977), drew both explicitly and implicitly on Derrida’s theorization of writing and the attendant deconstructions of logocentrism, phonocentrism, and the metaphysics of presence. As John O’Brien points out, it was this theoretical context that “enabled Cave to undertake his project with its special force.”69 Along with Regosin’s The Matter of My Book, the work of Tom Conley, Lawrence Kritzman, and Hassan Melehy have encouraged early modern scholars to read Derrida as an interlocutor of Montaigne. Conley’s “Cataparalysis,” published in Diacritics in 1978, proposes a “graft of Montaigne-­Derrida” and affirms that Montaigne “resembles the very figures Derrida reads with such urgency today.”70 More recently, Kritzman’s The Fabulous Imagination “discovers Montaigne always already deep into a dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” as Hélène Cixous (herself a passionate reader of Montaigne) affirms. Perhaps the study that most resembles my own in its approach is Jonathan Goldberg’s Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (1990), which examines writing both “in the narrow sense” and in the generalized sense Derrida gives it. Goldberg’s path in that book is “historical as well as theoretical” as he pursues the possibility of a “cultural graphology,” which Derrida announces but just as quickly drops in Of Grammatology.71 This abandoned prospect of a cultural graphology is also Juliet Fleming’s project in her recent Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida (2016), which proposes to “use the resources of deconstruction to shake up and enlarge the field that, for the time being, and in spite of its obvious limitations, might still be called book history.”72 My own no less modest task here would be to use the resources of Derrida’s thought to “shake up” and “enlarge” the fields of language history and print history by articulating them, both with each other and with a deconstructive approach. “It is undoubtedly necessary today,” wrote Derrida in 1967 of the



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“liberation” of a theory of writing, “to undertake a reflection within which ‘positive’ discovery and the ‘deconstruction’ of the history of metaphysics . . . keep each other in check reciprocally, minutely, laboriously.”73 This book is, to my knowledge, the first to approach deconstructively the history of the French language, Derrida’s “one” language that is nevertheless “not [his] own,” as he affirms in the autobiographical text The Monolingualism of the Other. The Prosthetic Tongue attempts to write a history of the “beginning” of the modern French language that takes into account the fact that this beginning cannot be simple but is, like all origins, always already supplemented. What it means to write its “history,” then, remains to be determined. The print shop here would be anything but another “degree zero” for the French language: it is a scene in which there are only reproductions and no originals—and thus no “original” or “authentic” French language whose unfolding we can witness through time or whose essence we can locate. In the print shop, reproduction has always already begun; there is no such thing as an “original.” As Walter Benjamin affirms in his artwork essay, mechanical reproduction erodes the “here and now of the original”—its “aura”—that “underlies the concept of its authenticity.”74 This book looks to strip the French language of its aura, while recognizing that printing itself works to manufacture all kinds of effects and fantasies of “aura”—that phenomenon of presence which supposedly “eludes technological . . . reproduction.”75 The understanding of printing proposed in this book seeks precisely to destabilize the notion of “origin” and its attendant and interrelated ideological effects—phonocentrism, nationalism, ethnocentrism—which have too often determined the narratives surrounding the history of French and other European languages.76 To say that the modern French language “begins” in the print shop here means to call into question any fantasy of origin, any mythical beginning or birth of the national language.77 This French language is reproductions—prints of prints—all the way down. To contaminate the so-­called origin of the modern French language with the thought of arche-­printing means to throw a wrench into the gears of this mythical operation in part because it troubles the question of ontology or essence—the what is—that is implied every time we ask “where” or “when” something—say, writing—begins. As Derrida insists in Of Grammatology, these very questions (“Where does writing begin? When does writing begin?”) rely on a thinking of the origin that is confounded by the trace, or arche-­ writing.78 The same would be true when it comes to asking where and when “writing” in the general sense that Derrida gives it becomes “writing” in the colloquial sense, or where and when one passes from one graphic system to

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another—or where and when we pass from manuscript to print. Such positive knowledge is defied by the trace, which, as Derrida affirms, “is nothing, it is not a being, it exceeds the question what is.”79 To contaminate the so-­called origin of the modern French language with (arche-­)printing thus means to undermine the methodological certainties and metaphysical presuppositions of most traditional language histories. It is no coincidence that the first volume of Ferdinand Brunot’s Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 begins by defining what the French language is: “Let us define the French language—without taking into account either dialects or patois—by saying that it is the continuation of what scholars are beginning to more properly call le francien, that is, the special form of spoken Latin, as it took root in Paris and the surrounding area, and as it developed over time, extending little by little outside of its proper domain into every country where political, economic, scientific, and literary reasons caused it to be spoken, written, or understood.”80 Definition and origin—along with a unique place of origin established as the tongue’s “proper domain”—are co-­constitutive. Contaminating differences (“dialects” and “patois”) are banished. In this instance, the possibility of a “history” of the French language opens by affirming as origin a hypothetical language called le francien, a now generally discredited hypothesis proposed by nineteenth-­century linguists that would fall under what Bernard Cerquiglini calls la fabrique des origines: the fabrication or manufacture of origins.81 Printing will both interrupt and generate such manufacturing of origins of the French language through its reproductive mechanism. As Brunot points out in the same opening pages of his Histoire, it was during the sixteenth century (indeed, during the very decades studied in this book) that “the question of the origin of our language was posed and seriously studied for the first time” by humanist writers like Guillaume Budé, Charles de Bovelles, Jacques Du Bois (Sylvius), Joachim Périon, and Henri Estienne. The fact that this question has no simple answer—because there is no simple origin—is what Derrida insists “a meditation on the trace should .  .  . teach us.”82 There would likewise be no simple “history” of a language, since any thinking of the trace (or arche-­printing) necessarily works against the grain of a historical telos, the “linear scheme of the unfolding of presence” with which “the word history has undoubtedly always been associated.”83 In his own very brief foray into the sixteenth-­century history of the French language in a text called “If There Is Cause to Translate I” (a title that paraphrases both Descartes and the Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts), Derrida affirms: “If we wanted to immerse ourselves in this enormous history, which we cannot, we would have to



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problematize simultaneously and methodically all the practices of historians of language. Their system of interpretation, as you can easily imagine, is never neutral: philosophically and politically. It conveys an at least implicit philosophy of language, and itself practices a certain language (rhetoric, writing, etc.), and takes sides, at a specific moment, in a language war.”84 This book similarly does not undertake a “methodical” problematizing of “all the practices of historians of language,” but it does attempt to imagine and put into practice another kind of language history. Such a history would have to begin by discarding altogether the designation “Middle French” that often attaches to the language of Renaissance France, insofar as it implies a teleological movement—one not so different from the Renaissance humanist’s “most ancient,” “ancient,” “perfect,” for example—and a becoming-­“ itself ” (in its essence or purity) of the French language as it moves toward modernity. “By the seventeenth century languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern forms,” write Lucien Febvre and Henri-­Jean Martin in The Coming of the Book.85 This teleology goes hand in hand, I suggest, with a phonocentric conception of printing (as instrumental, artificial, exterior to la langue). Canonical historical studies like those of Febvre and Martin, Brunot, and Anderson all recognize that so-­called modern national languages in Europe take shape through some effect of printing technology.86 Yet these accounts invariably (if variously) treat printing as an external force that comes to act upon language from without, rather than as something originary that disrupts and mobilizes language from “within.” They think printing and its relation to vernacular language according to the traditional (metaphysical) definition of writing is associated with phonetic script, which printing in fact simultaneously extends and disrupts. Traditional historical analysis has, in short, largely continued to operate within the conceptual horizon opened (or enclosed) by printing. We find evidence of this in the very language Brunot and others use to talk about the historical effect of printing on vernacular language, the semantic deposits of what Friedrich Kittler might call their media “situation.” Just as printers like Geoffroy Tory will use a language grounded in printing technology to describe their project to reform French (correction, reigle, ordre, etc.), Brunot will speak of the printing press acting as an “instrument of vernacularization,” while Febvre and Martin will use the printer’s own language: for them, printing acts in an instrumental fashion on the vernacular, “fixing” orthography and “forming” grammar.87 Brunot begins the second volume of his Histoire by observing that, before the sixteenth century, there were few who considered French an “instrument of high culture” (instrument de haute culture), and that “experiments by writers to

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perfect [perfectionner] this instrument” were intermittent—without taking into account that a project to “perfect” French and its very treatment as an “instrument” begin in earnest in the printer’s shop.88 This book thus shares with Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book (though on rather different philosophical and historiographic grounds) a skepticism regarding any notion of an instrumental “print culture” whose actions and effects we could calculate in advance.89 Above all, even while attempting to understand the beginning of “modern” French as a product of the print shop, this book rejects any vision of printing as a producer of the identity or self-­presence of a French that would somehow come into its own during the sixteenth century. What printing does produce are effects of identity and presence, the technological mechanisms of which remain to be explored—or, more precisely, remain to be read. What printing produces, we might say, is the effect of a modern French language we are still learning to read. If new media technologies have a heuristic function—if there is something they allow to appear—the vantage point they provide is not transcendental. I have no absolute perspective here, no absolute meta-­language with which to speak of the history of printing or the history of language. This book and the media “history” it attempts to describe are themselves necessarily situated, caught up in the machinery of language, caught undecidably between the transcendental and the empirical. What this book calls printing does not raise itself, then, into a transcendental (on the “agent of change” model). It names instead as a “quasi-­transcendental,” a quasi-­synonym of arche-­writing or trace, for example, that nevertheless names something singular (“historical”).90 The quasi-­ transcendental, as Geoffrey Bennington has characterized it, would result from a displacement of the empirical/transcendental opposition, “maintaining as legible the trace of a passage through the traditional opposition”—here, by maintaining the name printing—“and by giving this opposition a radical uncertainty.”91 It is a transcendental “originarily contaminated by what [it] transcend[s].”92 Printing here does not seek to master the field (of language, writing, media, technology, history) from without, but instead recognizes its own limits, situating itself by naming the medium that determines its situation.

La Langue Artificielle The “prosthetic tongue” is not only a conceptual figure; it is also an actual sixteenth-­century device, which one can find sticking out of the pages of



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Ambroise Paré’s Œuvres. As we shall see, this prosthesis reveals the tongue to be an arche-­printing machine. Paré (1510–1590) was a celebrated barber-­surgeon, anatomist, and premier chirurgien to four French kings. He pioneered modern surgical procedures like amputation, was the first to identify the “phantom limb” phenomenon, and designed an array of innovative prosthetic devices.93 In the section of his Œuvres (1575) dedicated to prosthetics, just after the palatal obturator (which gets affixed to the roof of the mouth with a pair of pliers) and before the prosthetic ear (made of boiled leather or paper), one finds a langue artificielle, or “artificial tongue.” This tongue appears in Book XXIII, Chapter 5, titled “The means of helping those who would have their tongue cut off, and making them speak” (Le moyen de secourir ceux qui auroient la langue coupee, & les faire parler). Like the other prosthetic devices in Paré’s famous book, the tongue is presented to the reader as an “instrument” or “artifice.” It is a product of technē fashioned by human hands, designed to supplement the deficiencies of nature or, in the words of Paré’s first English translator, “to repair or supplie the natural or accidental defects or wants in Man’s bodie” (d’adiouster ce qui defaut naturellement ou par accident).94 Unlike the leather ear, which is purely cosmetic, the langue artificielle is a functional device, “an instrument made to supplie the defect of the speech when the tongue is cut off.” The prosthetic tongue, like writing, (re)produces speech where the natural tongue fails. Paré begins his description of the langue artificielle by recounting its accidental invention by an anonymous peasant (un quidam) in a village near the city of Bourges in central France. This particular man, Paré writes, was missing a “great part” of his tongue and had endured three years without being able to speak. The discovery of the prosthetic device arrives as a chance occurrence— what happens when, one day, wood meets flesh: It happen’d on a time that as hee was in the fields with reapers, hee drinking in a wooden dish, was tickled by som of the standers by, not endureing the tickling, hee suddenly broke out into articulate and intellegible words. Hee himself wondring thereat, and delighted with the noveltie of the thing, as a miracle, put the same dish to his mouth just in the same manner as before, and then hee spake so plainly and articulately, that hee might bee understood by them all. (Aduint que luy estant aux champs auec des faucheurs, beuuant en une escuelle de bois assez déliee, l’vn d’eux le chatouilla, ainsi qu’il auoit l’escuelle entre ses dents, & profera quelque parolle, en sorte

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qu’il fut entendu. Puis derechef cognoissant auoir ainsi parlé, reprint son escuelle, & s’efforça à la mettre en mesme situation qu’elle estoit auparauant: & derechef parloit, de sorte qu’on le pouuoit bien entendre auecques ladicte escuelle.)95 The ur-­technological scene of agriculture sets the stage for a moment of invention, as the mouth itself becomes another natural “field” to be cultivated and technologized. The event itself arrives as if by accident—in a jubilant moment of “tickling”—but also in direct response to a deficiency in the body. (“Necessity,” Paré notes for the reader in the margin of his text, “is the mistress of arts.”) In terms that recall contemporary responses to other new technologies, like the printing press, the experience of the artificial tongue is one of “wonder” and “delight” at “the novelty of the thing” capable of overcoming a “defect of language.” The artificial tongue produces language “as a miracle”: inarticulate noises are transformed in an instant into “articulate and intelligible words” that can be “understood by all.” What is restored to the tongueless man through technē is not simply a lost body part but the very possibility of language and the humanity that classically hinges on the linguistic faculty. In the moment of wonder and triumph that accompanies the invention of the artificial tongue, there is nevertheless something uncanny about the efficiency with which a wooden bowl manages to mimic the function of lost flesh. Indeed, what the artificial tongue would seem to disclose is the instrumentality, mechanicity, or technicity of every “natural” tongue—and, with it, all that the tongue confers. The very possibility of prosthesis reveals that the original tongue, the one that has been cut off, was already acting in some sense as a technology for breaking sound into “articulate and intelligible words.”96 In an earlier anatomical description of the tongue that enumerates the organ’s substance, parts, and functions, Paré affirms that, after tasting, the tongue’s second “action and commodity” (action & utilité) is to serve as “an instrument to distinguish the voice by articulate speeech [sic], for which it was made movable into each part of the mouth” (pour la confirmation & articulation de la voix: à cause dequoy elle a esté flexile & mobile par toutes les parties de la bouche).97 The third function of the tongue, which further instrumentalizes it, points already toward the wooden dish that will become the accidental prosthesis: “The third is to help chaw and swallow the meat. For which cause it is like a scoop or dish with which we throw back the corn into the mill, which hath scaped grinding.” (Tiercement, pour seruir à mascher & briser les viandes, & à les aualler: & pource a esté



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faicte comme vne pelle, de laquelle on remet le bled qui eschappe sous la meule.)98 The fleshy tongue, like its wooden substitute, is an “instrument.” When it comes to producing language, it is an articulating apparatus. Thus, before any “accident” occurs (and we do not know how Paré’s French peasant lost his tongue, since the narrative begins in medias res, with the tongue already cut off), it would seem that the movable tongue is touched by technology, that there is an “artificiality attached to or within the natural.”99 This intimate touch of technology may be troubling; it may trouble, in particular, our ability to draw a clear line between nature and technē, human and nonhuman, life and its others. The articulating tongue makes cuts, dividing sound into the distinct parts of phonemes, syllables, and words. As Ferdinand de Saussure recalls, “In Latin, the word articulus means ‘member, part, subdivision in a sequence of things.’ As regards language, articulation may refer to the division of the chain of speech into syllables, or to the division of the chain of meanings into meaningful units.”100 For influential Latin grammarians like Priscian and Diomedes, articulate speech, or vox articulata, designates the specific technical object with which grammar is concerned, namely, speech that is representable by letters. By definition, articulate speech is scriptable; it exists in relation to writing—alphabetic writing in particular—and opens onto writing. Any sound that cannot be written down is for the grammarian “inarticulate”—that is, not reducible to the discrete parts of letters. Donatus, the fourth-­century grammarian who composed what would become the most popular Latin school grammar through the sixteenth century (and, before the Bible, the very first text printed by Gutenberg), defines the letter in his Ars Minor as “the smallest part of articulate speech” (pars minima uocis articulatae). The very category of vox articulata assumes a certain convertibility of letter and sound. When Paré’s peasant begins to speak with the help of the prosthetic tongue, what he produces are proto-­ letters. He has already begun to write. If the tongue can speak in letters, we may well begin to suspect that the limit between speech and writing is one that can be pierced or even radically destabilized. In Of Grammatology, Derrida links the notion of articulation precisely to arche-­writing, that writing already at work in speech that “appears long before writing in the narrow sense” and comes to trouble the traditional opposition between writing and speech, or vox.101 As we have seen, writing emerges in Of Grammatology as originary, that which “opens” speech and makes language possible.102 In his readings of Saussure and Rousseau, Derrida sees such an

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originary writing at work in the concept of articulation, in which the features traditionally associated with writing—division, repetition, spacing—seem already to be present in speech. “Articulation,” Derrida writes, “is the becoming-­ writing of language.”103 Yet this does not mean that there would be some inarticulate or pre-­articulate language in relation to which articulation/writing would be derivative or secondary. As Paré’s anecdote demonstrates so well, language “begins”—or, rather, as in the case of the tongueless man we all resemble, begins again—with articulation. Articulation “broaches language.”104 It is in this sense that Derrida can affirm that articulation as the “becoming-­writing of language” is nothing other than “the becoming-­language of language.”105 Following this generalized sense of writing that Derrida invites us to consider, the tongue would thus also be a writing instrument. The way this instrument divides sound into reproducible “parts”—parts that are representable by letters—constitutes a mechanization that would anticipate not only writing but also, as we shall see, the printing press. A kind of typography has already begun in the mouth. There is something “prosthetic” about the tongue from the start, insofar as prosthesis implies an intimate conjunction or articulation (articulus also means “joint”) of nature and technē, speech and writing, human and machine, life and death. As Wills suggests, articulation is the “adjunction of or relation to radical otherness that conditions the whole prosthetic undertaking.” Just as there is writing before writing, there is prosthesis before prosthesis; we may even see the two terms as quasi-­synonyms.106 For Derrida’s “writing” does not only or even primarily refer to something at work within language; it necessarily opens onto what is “outside” language even as it troubles the absoluteness of any inside/ outside distinction. (Derrida’s thought, as Geoffrey Bennington reminds us, “is not essentially a philosophy of language.”)107 The articulating effect of the prosthetic is at work in Derrida’s “writing,” which “beggars the distinction, on which every other definition of writing continues to rely, between life and the technological extensions that make it possible.”108 What difference, then, does the appearance of a prosthetic device like the one described by Paré make? To start, I would suggest that Paré’s “artificial” tongue in Book XXIII, dedicated to prosthetic devices, makes palpable the technicity of the tongue that was only implicit in his description in Book VI, on the anatomy muscles and bones. Even as he presents the anatomical tongue as a useful “instrument” of articulation (such an instrumental thinking of the human body and its parts can be traced at least back to Aristotle), this organ nevertheless remains for Paré squarely within the realm of the human and the



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living. As such, unlike the manufactured prosthesis that is by design repeatable and copyable, it is supposedly unique and irreplaceable. In a section on the “wounds of the tongue,” Paré affirms that if the tongue is merely “slit” it may be sutured and heal, but that if a part of the tongue is “wholly cut off ” then it “cannot be repaired, because every part separated and pluckt from the living body, from whence it had life, spirit and blood, presently dyes” (iamais la piece ne peut estre reprise, pource que toute partie separée du corps viuant, auec lequel elle estoit conioncte par vie, perd la vie en mesme instant).109 To start, then, the arrival of the langue artificielle, which comes to “supply” a “defect or want in Man’s bodie,” discloses the technicity of the original tongue. As it reanimates the tongue artificially, we come to see the tongue’s own animations as strangely artificial. Indeed, if the tongue can be so aptly imitated, it must already contain within it a kind of “reproductive essence.”110 The prosthesis thus permits us to think about the ways in which some technē and some reproducibility have already affected nature from the start, from its own origin. As the woodenness of the living tongue makes itself felt, these categories cannot remain intact: “The principle of life, once again, merges with the principle of death.”111 This thinking would track closely to the “logic of supplementarity” that Derrida articulates in his extended reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. The artificial tongue would seem entirely external. Indeed, this apparently external nature of the supplement is what allows the original living tongue to appear, precisely, as original, living, and unique. Safely quarantined some seven hundred pages from the anatomical tongue—hiding in the back of the book along with the plague, the womb, and monsters—the prosthesis seems to “come from an outside which would be simply the outside.”112 While such thinking conforms to “the logic of identity and to the principle of classical ontology (the outside is outside, being is, etc.),” it does not conform to what Derrida calls the “logic of supplementarity.”113 This other logic is the one we have begun to sketch out above, namely, that the thing that is added—the supplement—never simply adds to an already full presence, no matter how secondary it may seem. Indeed, the very possibility of the supplement (artifice, writing, the copy, etc.) instead points to a défaut, a fault or deficit, within that which is supplemented (life, speech, the original, etc.). The logic of supplementarity would have it that “the outside be inside, that the other and the lack come to add themselves as a plus that replaces a minus, that what adds itself to something takes the place of a fault [défaut] in the thing, that the fault, as the outside of the inside, should

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already be within the inside, etc.”114 Paré himself already points us toward this logic, announcing the prosthesis as that which supplies “ce qui defaut”; his nature is already marked by a fault that opens onto artifice, mechanicity, and the nonliving. The prosthesis unlocks, as it were, the movement of supplementarity. The prosthetic tongue thus allows us to see that every tongue is caught up from the start in a movement of repetition and reproduction. The evidence that the artificial tongue works—that it performs the proper function of the tongue— is, first, that the speaker can make himself “understood by all.” Such understanding or communication requires as a first condition that the man’s speech be recognizable and therefore repeatable. In order for the sounds of speech to be repeatable and recognizable, the tongue’s articulating movements must be regular and reproducible—and therefore already mechanical and even (as was suggested above) typographical. The device’s second test comes when the peasant holds the wooden dish up to his mouth a second time (derechef, “once again”) to see if its miraculous effect can be repeated. It is only when his sounds are recognized for a second time—only, that is, through the demonstrated reproducibility of the instrument’s function—that the narrative comes to a close and the wooden bowl is confirmed as a new tongue. We might say, then, that a tongue is only a tongue when it engages in this reproducibility that cannot be rigorously distinguished from a machine-­like repetition. In this sense, Paré’s prosthesis shows the tongue participating in “iterability,” or the repetition with difference that makes writing (and all language) possible. Where there is repetition, there must be identity but also, necessarily, self-­difference. The iterable tongue is split—double, self-­different—at its origin. Tongue-­splitting as a surgical operation makes multiple appearances in Paré’s Œuvres: an operation necessary in order to open the possibility of speech. Strikingly, it appears for the first time in Paré’s text in a section on “disjoyning those things which are continu[ous]” alongside circumcision and the hymen, figures that operate as other names for iterability in Derrida’s corpus: “the disjunction of the membrane called Hymen, or any other troubling the neck of the womb; the dissection of the ligament of the tongue, which hinders children from sucking and speaking, and of that which hinders the Glans from being uncovered of the foreskin” (aussi couper l’hymen, ou vne cicatrice au conduit de la femme: couper le filet qui est sous la langue, qui empesche les enfans de teter & parler, ou celuy de la verge qui empesche que le prepuce ne soit descouuert).115 “Disjoyning” the tongue unleashes speech in the inarticulate child. Language here begins with a cut (of spacing, difference, exteriority). For Derrida, this



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cut-­in-­the-­same of iterability constitutes the “emergence [surgissement] of the mark”—that is, the possibility of writing in a general sense.116 The cut or cutting off that makes the prosthetic supplement necessary for the tongueless man would be, above all, a repetition of this originary cut that opened language—as writing—to begin with. The prosthesis reproduces and magnifies the iterability of the tongue, unleashing its movability, as it were, and setting it loose outside the mouth. In the pages of Paré’s book, we find that the prosthetic tongue keeps reproducing itself with no end in sight. To start, the peasant’s wooden dish reproduces the fleshy tongue as an instrument of speech. This ad hoc device in turn serves as a prototype for the surgeon’s apparatus, which is designed to be reproduced in turn. Following Paré’s narrative, there appears a woodcut illustration—the technology that William Ivins famously argues allowed for the first “exactly repeatable pictorial statements”—that breaks the tongue into its constituent parts and labels it with letters, enabling the readers of this printed book to fashion new devices in turn (Figure 1). Paré tells us that his own device is itself a copy, one that is meant to engender the manufacture of further copies: a physician in Bourges named Le Tellier “shewed me this instrument: and I my selfe made trial thereof on a young man whose tongue was cut off, and it succeeded well, and took verie good effect. And I think other Surgeons in such cases may do the like” (i’en ay veu l’experience à vn jeune garçon, auquel on auoit coupé la langue, lequel, lequel neantmoins par le benefice dudit instrument, proferoit si bien ses mots, qu’on le pouuoit entendre entierement. . . . Et de ce chacun en face l’espreuue, lors qu’on se trouuera à l’endroit pour ce faire).117 The iterable structure of the prosthetic tongue is such that it can be detached from its original context (a field outside Bourges), repeated in a different context (the office of the physician in Bourges, Paré’s experiment with his patient), and be—like a printed text—reproduced infinitely in future contexts yet to be decided. Indeed, Paré’s langue artificielle would seem to communicate in some essential way with printing as a form of prosthetic iterability, a technological unleashing of the tongue’s movability. In the print shop, the written letter becomes a “type” (from the Greek typos, “a blow, dent, impression, mark,” “a figure in relief ” or “struck from metal,” from the root typtein, “to strike, beat”), a “character” (from the Latin caracter, “an impressed mark or stamp,” from the Greek kharaktē´r, “type, character”), or a “sort” (from the old French sorte, “class, kind, type”). What mechanizes writing is not just the press itself (borrowed from agricultural technology and already in use for woodblock printing before

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Figure 1. “Instrument pour aider à parler à un patient, lequel auroit portion de la langue coupee” (Instrument to help a patient speak who has a portion of the tongue cut off). Ambroise Paré, Œuvres (Paris: 1598), 896. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Gutenberg) but the character or type, the reproducible metal letter.118 Typography is the technological heart of printing. Early printers in France were often referred to in Latin as typographus (type-­writer), and their printing house as a typographia or officina typographia. Each piece of type can make thousands of identical impressions. Metal sorts are cast from a mold (known as a matrix) and sorted into compartments in the printer’s wooden type case, where they are selected by a compositor (or typesetter) when composing a text, and then stored



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again for reuse. It has been suggested that typography represents “the first reduction of any handicraft to mechanical terms” by translating the movement of the hand into a linear, fragmented series of characters.119 The way the tongue reproduces itself inside Paré’s book in some sense only imitates what is already happening to that book itself as a printed artifact. The Œuvres, which first appear in 1575, were reissued repeatedly, with twelve new French editions between 1579 and 1685, in addition to multiple editions in Latin (1582), Dutch (1592), and English (1634); each edition would likely have had a print run of around 1,000 copies.120 Many thousands of Paré’s prosthetic tongues thus circulated throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a variety of European tongues. While all the early French editions of the Œuvres and the 1582 Latin Opera, all printed in Paris, seem to reuse the same woodcut for the illustration of the tongue (easily identified by its flaw: too much wood cut away, leaving inkless gaps in both strings), the Dutch, English, and later French editions printed in Lyon introduce new woodcuts that imitate the first but with minor variations. In a 1649 English edition, the position of the strings is similar to that of earlier versions but reversed and, even more strikingly, the letters C and D have been switched, suggesting that the engraver was using a previous copy of the book as a model but neglected to reverse the image to account for the effect of the print. The woodcut itself participates in the iterability of the wooden instrument it illustrates. There would be, in some sense, no difference between these two wooden devices—tongue and cut block—as instruments of reproduction that are themselves reproducible. The woodcut is also a prosthesis; the prosthesis is also a piece of printing technology. And even a single copy of the woodcut illustration gives us the tongue two times: one view of the top, another of the bottom, as if the printed prosthesis were sliced in twain, split from itself from the start. The four letters on the tongue—A, B, C, D—are carved into the woodcut (their irregularity gives this away), though they clearly imitate Roman typographical characters. The visual impression is that the tongue has been imprinted— and not just with any letters, but with the very ones that, coming at the beginning of the alphabet, so often signify the entry into literacy. Indeed, the langue artificielle strikingly resembles an elementary version of a hornbook: the wooden paddle mounted with a printed page of the alphabet that was the most common way of learning the alphabet in the sixteenth century. The child learns to recognize each letter and voice the corresponding sound: A, B, C, D, . . . Of course, letters like the ones found on Paré’s tongue are a conventional feature of anatomies and machine books of the period; they are used as labels or tags to designate

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various “parts” of the body or machine. Paré’s own anatomical illustrations in the Œuvres make extensive use of such letters. Attaching letters makes the body or machine iterable by dividing it into citable units. Here, they allow Paré to dictate the different parts of the instrument (“(A) est la partie superieure . . . (B) la partie inferieure . . .”) and its “use.” Similar characters proliferate on this page, as the printed book mobilizes typographical characters to cut itself up, body-­or machine-­like, into lettered parts. The letters A, B, C, and D that we see on the tongue reappear in the margin of this page—and every other page of the volume—at regularly spaced intervals, dividing the page and thereby providing a referencing system for readers.121 (This type of system, developed by sixteenth-­ century French printers, is still most notably used to reference the works of Plato.) Another form of prosthetic iterability, these letters invite citation of the book in other contexts; we could even use them to cite the langue artificielle (it would be 896D, given its placement on the lowest part of the page) if we wanted to send another reader-­surgeon to the book to make his own copy of the device. Additional letters (GG ij) known as a “signature” or “signature mark” appear on the bottom right-­hand corner of the next page, directing the binder in arranging and gathering loose sheets in the proper order. Paré informs the reader that the letter A corresponds to the “upper part” of the instrument, which his patient held between his incisors so “that it could not come out of his mouth nor bee seen”—a utilitarian but also social function that allows the artifice of the device to be masked, fully contained inside the mouth.122 The sharp “cutting teeth” grasp the instrument, holding it in place but also keeping it from being discovered. The prosthesis that discloses the technicity of the tongue is at the same time a machine of semblance and dissembling; it seeks to imitate nature and thereby conceal its own artifice. It “seemed [the patient] had nothing in his mouth” (sembloit qu’il n’eust rien en sa bouche), writes Paré.123 B corresponds to the “lower part” (partie inferieure), which was “more subtle,” held “close to the membranous ligament which is under the tongue” (iustement contre l’extremité du reste de la langue estant au droit du filet ou ligament de la langue).124 What is most hidden inside the mouth is the “hard” juncture of membrane and wood, the imperfect contact of the human with the inanimate world that marks the operation of the prosthetic in general. The letters C and D show, respectively, the “hollowed” inner part and raised outer part of the instrument. Meanwhile, a string pierces the disc, allowing the user to hang the tongue “about his neck” so that it is always ready at hand.



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In the case of the prosthetic tongue, however, the letters A, B, C, and D would seem to overflow any purely conventional function as they recall the power of articulate—which is also to say, iterable, mechanical—speech that the device itself restores. They recall that the tongue is a machine for (re)producing letters. Above all, then, they announce the prosthetic tongue as an avatar of the printed vernacular tongue. Like Paré’s wooden device, the printed French vernacular language will be offered to the reader as a technological supplement for the natural tongue. Like Paré’s device, this tongue will trouble the limit between speech and writing, nature and artifice, life and its others. And, like Paré’s device, this tongue will seem to waver at the limit between these categories, now flaunting its status as technological invention (a wooden tongue hanging around the user’s neck, dangling conspicuously on a string), now concealing that status (a simulacrum of a natural organ, gripped tightly inside the mouth to keep its artifice from showing, ready to produce live speech). To call the French language in the age of print “prosthetic” does not simply mean to affirm its manufactured or technological nature. It means to imagine a form of “life” inseparable from and animated by technology, which is to say, to affirm that the tongue cannot begin to speak without a cut.

Chapter 2

Hand of Brass From Manuscript to Print

Read these twice eight Satires, . . . / which Jacobus de Fivizzano has written with a hand of brass. —Printer’s colophon, c. 1472 One cannot talk about the hand without talking about technology. —Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand”

The Cut One night in the middle of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida and Jean Genet had an argument about writing machines.1 The conversation took place at the Derrida home in the suburbs of Paris, after the philosopher had begun regularly using an Olivetti typewriter. Derrida would later recall in an interview that Genet—novelist, playwright, poet—never touched a typewriter, insisting that he could only compose his texts by hand. “ ‘One cannot write on a typewriter,’ ” Derrida reports Genet saying, “ ‘you realize that it kills your sentence, it’s an unacceptable violence, it’s a question of the body.’ ”2 Derrida countered that all writing involves a negotiation between a body and an instrument, that there is always a “cut” of some kind: “A cut is introduced even with the dip pen or the pencil. There is cutting no matter what.”3 Genet and Derrida went back and forth all night debating the effect of the machine on poetry, literature, and the composition of a sentence. At the end of the night, Genet returned to Paris with their friend Paule Thévenin; back at home, he and Thévenin continued



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the discussion: “ ‘I think Jacques is right,’ ” Genet concluded, according to Derrida.4 And yet, first thing the next morning, Genet picked up the telephone to call his friend and tell him, “ ‘You’re wrong.’ ”5 Decades after the fact, Derrida will refer to this as “an interminable discussion about what happens between the writing body and writing, depending on what comes between them.”6 As we saw in Chapter 1, Martin Heidegger is as suspicious of the typewriter as Jean Genet—or more profoundly suspicious still, since for Heidegger the stakes are not only literary and aesthetic but also ontological. It is our relation to being itself that is threatened by the typewriter, which tears language from its “proper” and “essential” place in the writing hand. “Writing, in its essential essence, is hand-­writing [Hand-­schrift],” writes Heidegger.7 The development of modern writing technologies “is one of the main reasons for the increasing destruction of the word” because the word “no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the properly acting hand, but by means of the mechanical forces it releases.”8 Yet any “destruction of the word” wrought by the typewriter would only amplify or extend the “mechanical forces” set in motion centuries earlier by the printing press. In printing, “the word-­signs [Wortzeichen] become type [Buchstaben], and the writing stroke [zug] disappears. The type is ‘set’ [gesetzt], the set becomes ‘pressed’ [gepreßt]. This mechanism of setting and pressing and ‘printing’ [Druckens] is the preliminary form of the typewriter.”9 The initial destructive moment, already at work in letterpress printing, is the disappearance of the “stroke” of handwriting when the word becomes “type.” Heidegger’s word for type here is Buchstaben, literally “letters”: mechanization entails the lettering of language. Strikingly, this sense of what is novel about printing is echoed by early printers in some of the first descriptions of printing technology. In 1465, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer advertise that “the present splendid edition . . . has been fashioned not by ink from the quill nor by a reed of brass, but by a certain ingenious invention of printing or lettering.”10 Similarly, the first printer at Leuven, John of Westphalia, writes in a 1475 colophon that his book was completed “not with the flowing pen, but by a most modern technique of lettering” (non fluviali calamo sed arte quadam caracterizandi modernissima). For Heidegger, the arrival of this “modern technique” is a major ontological event: “When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, i.e., from the hand, and was transferred to the machine, a transformation occurred in the relation of Being to man.”11 Mechanization tears us, unawares, from our dwelling in language. If at first printing and machine writing offer certain “advantages and conveniences,” they also “unwittingly steer preferences and needs to this kind of written communication.”12 This pull exercised by mechanical

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writing would be nothing short of ontological catastrophe: by “veil[ing] the essence of writing,” the machine “withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand, without man’s experiencing this withdrawal appropriately and recognizing that it has transformed the relation of Being to his essence.”13 In his essay “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” Derrida suggests that the “essential” relationship between writing and the hand in Heidegger in fact conceals a surreptitious phonocentrism.14 Understanding the arrival of the machine as a violent “cut” in an otherwise uncut body or language implicates the cut of writing—here displaced onto typography as “bad” writing.15 Even as it seems to embrace a certain writing, Heidegger’s critique of the typewriter preserves a presumed intimacy or immediacy between the writing hand and thought, which the hand alone shows. In this privileged relation to thought (and thus logos), the hand, which is peculiar to the human, is tied to speech: “Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can handily achieve the works of handicraft,” writes Heidegger.16 Both the hand and thinking are “thought on the basis of speech.”17 The typewriter destroys thought and speech in the same stroke of its keys. In this way, what appears to be a valorization of writing in Heidegger is ultimately a devalorization that is entirely consistent, as Derrida notes, with a logocentrism and phonocentrism “being organized around the hand and speech.”18 The danger that printing represents for Heidegger relies on a philosophical tradition that reaches back at least to Aristotle, according to which the hand operates as a synecdoche of humanity: it is the part of the body that makes us human, what distinguishes us from every other species. The hand is thought of as what is “proper to man.” It thus partakes of a privileged relationship with those other faculties classically understood to be “proper to man,” especially speech. If the hand is believed to “hold the essence of man,” then the introduction of printing—which substitutes mechanical writing for manuscript, machine for hand—can only constitute a violent and an alienating act, a kind of amputation.19 As Derrida’s recollection of Genet’s remarks suggest, such an amputation becomes legible and makes itself felt in writing (“It kills your sentence, it’s an unacceptable violence”). Derrida responds to the typewriter allergy of a Genet or a Heidegger by proposing another way of thinking about technology, and by encouraging us to imagine another history of the writing hand. “When we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology,” Derrida insists.20 Even when we write with a pen or quill, “there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability.”21 Mechanical writing would represent instead “another organization of the cut.” The fact that the very qualities usually



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associated with printing and subsequent writing technologies are already operative when we write by hand would be symptomatic of what I have called arche-­ printing: instrumentality, regular reproducibility, and mechanical iterability are features of writing both before and after the introduction of typography— albeit in different modes that remain to be determined. If technology belongs on both sides of this historical divide, then, as Derrida insists, “it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology.”22 By the same logic, the hand does not simply disappear with typography; it, too, inhabits both the “before” and “after” of printing. “What we call ‘typed’ writing is also ‘manual,’ ” Derrida reminds us. The writing hand has in fact always already been touched by technology. As I will argue in this chapter, it constitutes an originary prosthesis of the human. Any strict or absolute opposition between writing as a handicraft and the “mechanical” writing of printing thus demands to be rethought. Such a rethinking is what I undertake in this chapter. If I begin with the hand and not the tongue, it is because of the (philosophical, medical, anthropological) tradition that privileges the hand as the locus of the relation between technics and the human and because, as we have already begun to see with Heidegger, the transformative relationship between printing and language that develops in the sixteenth century will necessarily be shaped by what is already happening between printing and the hand. In the first half of this chapter, I look to a tradition of the hand stretching from Aristotle and Galen to Ambroise Paré, locating in their texts the resources for viewing the hand as an originary prosthesis that would undermine any neat opposition between technics and the human. I then pause briefly on the writing hand of one particular late medieval scribe, Jean Miélot, in order to shed light on at least one mode of manuscript technicity that is contemporary with the invention of printing. I turn in the second half of the chapter to the moment in the middle of the fifteenth century when there appeared in Europe a kind of writing perceived as “artificial”—a writing that supersedes the hand. Like every new media technology, printing will disrupt, reorganize, and repartition the relation between nature and artifice, life and death, past and future, inside and outside; it will redefine the prosthetic relation between writing and the body. I explore this redefinition through the lens of printers’ colophons from the incunabula period. My task throughout this chapter is to think of the shift from manuscript to printing as another—different but not radically new—“organization of the cut,” and to attend to the specific, but not radically new, forms of technicity and prosthesis introduced by Gutenberg’s press. I will attempt to open another history of the writing hand, which is also to say another

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history of the relation between the human and technics. If we begin from the premise that printing does not introduce technology into an otherwise nontechnological, naïve, or “proper” scene of writing, how are we to understand the difference it nevertheless does make?

Instrument of Instruments Technology “begins” in the hand. This insight traverses a certain thinking of the hand as the site of the relation between the human and technics from ancient philosophy and medicine (Aristotle, Galen), to Renaissance anatomy (Ambroise Paré), to modern paleontology (André Leroi-­Gourhan) and philosophy (Martin Heidegger, Bernard Stiegler). For Aristotle, the hand is the “instrument of instruments”: a tool for using other tools but also the ur-­instrument, the prototype for all technology.23 In Book IV of On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle affirms that the hand is not simply an instrument; it opens onto instrumentality in general as a defining feature of the human. Aristotle observes that all other animals are endowed by nature with a single, unchangeable instrument for their defense. For the human, however, “it is always possible to have many forms of protection and to exchange them.”24 The hand would thus demonstrate for Aristotle the superiority of the human as the creature “able to acquire the most arts”: “For the most intelligent animal would use the greatest number of instruments well, and the hand would seem to be not one instrument, but many; indeed it is, as it were, an instrument for instruments. Accordingly, to the one able to acquire the most arts, nature has provided the most useful of instruments, the hand.”25 The hand would be the original multitool or multimedium, a Swiss Army knife fashioned by nature and attached to the human body. The “grasping” and “squeezing” hand, with its articulated fingers and opposable thumb, is an instrument of biological enhancement and technological becoming. The hand, Aristotle insists, “becomes” any instrument or weapon it desires, including those of other animals: it “becomes a talon, claw, horn, spear, sword, and any other weapon or instrument—it will be all these thanks to its ability to grasp and hold them all.”26 Where there is the hand there are arts and arms, a joining of the human to technics in both a productive and defensive mode. It’s worth noting that “arts” and “arms” share an etymological root, via the Greek ἀραρίσκω (to join, fasten; to fit together, construct; to contrive; to equip, furnish; to make pleasing), with the Latin artus (joint; sinew, power; limbs) and thus with “articulation” of all



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kinds. The articulated joints of the fingers, which grasp to acquire arts or wield arms, would themselves be agents of articulation or joining. The human would be defined, in turn, by its ability to articulate itself: to join or fasten itself to the inorganic world, to equip itself with otherness, to contrive. The ancient physician Galen, following Aristotle, insists that nature has singularly endowed the “godlike” human with this most adaptable tool in order to “compensate for the nakedness of his body.”27 The hand for Galen would constitute a kind of originary prosthesis: a compensatory device added onto the human—like a belated Promethean gift of technology—that is also, paradoxically, one of his own “parts” occurring naturally “in his body.”28 This hand would be prosthetic not simply because of its belated addition to the human body but, more fundamentally, because it marks a point of articulation between the organic and the inorganic. It is this more capacious and powerful sense that David Wills gives the term in his landmark work on the subject: there is prosthesis where “the human is subjected to an intimate relation with the inanimate,” where there is articulation—but also, therefore, contamination or confusion, substitution or transfer—between the natural and the artificial, human and machine, self and other, inside and outside, life and death.29 Prosthesis would be another name for articulation itself, as Wills suggests (“the adjunction of or relation to radical otherness that conditions the whole prosthetic undertaking”), as well as, by the same token, another name for the operation of art, ars or technē, more generally. It is perhaps not surprising to find an Aristotelian-­Galenian genealogy of the hand reappearing in the work of Ambroise Paré. Paré’s Œuvres of 1575 is a volume brimming with woodcut illustrations of body parts, surgical instruments, monsters, and artificial limbs—including his famous mechanical hand, the main artificielle. At the center of this textual universe is the hand: it is the anatomical instrument implicated by every other instrument and surgical procedure. (The name “surgeon” comes, by way of French and Latin, from the Greek kheír, “hand,” and érgon, “work”; the surgeon, as opposed to the physician, is the one who works with his or her hands.) Bringing the Aristotelian formula into French—the vernacular language increasingly instrumentalized and mechanized in his own time—Paré will describe the hand as “the instrument that surpasses all other instruments” (l’instrument qui surpasse tous autres instruments) or “the organ of organs, and the instrument of human instruments, designed to grasp and hold something” (l’organe des organes, & l’instrument des instruments humains, destiné pour prendre & tenir quelque chose).30 For Paré, the hand is engaged from the start in a supplemental logic. In

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a chapter inspired by Galen, titled “Man has an unarmed body” (“L’homme a le corps desarmé”), Paré writes that “in compensation for being naked and unarmed, [man] has the hand” (En recompense de ce qu’il est nu et desarmé, il a la main).31 As it did in Aristotle and Galen, the hand in Paré appears as an “arm,” a multipurpose weapon or an instrument that equips an otherwise dis-­ armed or amputated body. No “arms” without the hands: “[man] makes all the arms with his hands” (il faict toutes armes avec ses mains).32 Yet Paré goes further, marking a modern prosthetic age. In a time when postclassical technologies proliferate—artillery, clockwork, the mechanical reproduction of writing through printing—the human appears as a congenital amputee, supplemented from the start with a prosthetic hand that will serve as the prototype for all the mechanical limbs and other remedial devices Paré will design (including, I would hazard, the prosthetic tongue). In fact, modern prosthetics were developed alongside and in response to these other modern technologies, especially the new machines de guerre of artillery. Paré was a battlefield surgeon under François I, and he was the first to advocate for amputation as a treatment for wounds caused by firearms in place of cauterization and other traditional treatments. The new types of injuries brought about by the violence of artillery required the sixteenth-­century surgeon to depart from Galen and other ancient authorities. Cannons and large guns had first been introduced into European warfare in the fourteenth century, and most battlefields featured handheld firearms by the middle of the fifteenth century. The practice of amputation—and the subsequent need for artificial limbs—thus became necessary and common in direct response to the modern machinery of war. Perhaps the most famous wearer of such an artificial limb is the German knight and poet Götz von Berlichingen, also known as Götz of the Iron Hand, who lost his right arm in 1504 from enemy canon fire. His second mechanical prosthesis, which survives today, featured movable fingers with joints at each of the knuckles, and was functional enough to allow him to hold a sword, horse’s reins, or quill. (“My right hand, though not useless in combat, is insensitive to the grasp of affection,” says Götz in Goethe’s play dramatizing his life.)33 Paré’s mechanical hand and other limbs are moving parts in this machinery: they are the restorative counterpart to the violence of guns in an emerging techno-­culture. These limbs are designed using the techniques of the clockmaker, then reproduced on a mass scale using the printer’s press. Printing is linked to prosthetics symbolically, as well: contemporary observers often viewed the press as the peaceful technological counterpart to artillery, the divine answer to artillery’s diabolical violence.



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Figure 2. “Portrait de la main artificielle” (Portait of the artificial hand). Ambroise Paré, Œuvres (Paris: 1598), 902. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

As we saw in Chapter 1, Ambroise Paré presents his designs for “artificial” body parts—hand, arm, leg, eye, ear, nose, tongue, and others—in Book XXIII of his Œuvres. It is here that his own mechanical hand appears, an artificial device intended to “help and imitate nature” (Figure 2). Manufactured by a Parisian locksmith Paré identifies as “Le Petit Lorrain,” the hand is designed to hold, grasp, and grab just like any “natural” organ. In an earlier surgical treatise (Dix livres de la chirurgie: avec le magasin des instrumens necessaire à icelle, 1564), Paré had suggested that this and other artificial limbs are intended to supplement the medically necessary but “inhuman” act of amputation.34 While “it is a truly inhuman thing to so amputate a member,” Paré insists that we must “put the life of the whole body before the loss of a part.” (Et combien que ce soit vne

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chose fort inhumaine d’ainsi extirper vn me[m]bre, neantmoins nous deuons preposer la vie de tout le corps à la perte d’vne partie d’iceluy.)35 He reassures the reader that “usage has given us the means of imitating nature, and supplying the deficiency of lost members, as you will see with the artificial members that we will describe below” (l’vsage nous a donné les moiens d’imiter nature, & supplier au deffaut des membres perduz comme tu verras aux membres artificielz que nous descrirons cy-­apres).36 The artificial hand imitates the “natural” hand not only through its cosmetic and functional resemblance but also in its under­ lying supplemental logic. Like the hand fashioned by nature, the limb fashioned by the locksmith and fitted by the surgeon “supplies a deficiency” and (re)constitutes the body as properly human. The locksmith’s hand reproduces the prosthesis in its own image. This resemblance plays out in a famous woodcut illustration from Paré’s Œuvres, an image itself cut by hand out of wood and destined for replication by the printing machine. As we saw in the case of the prosthetic tongue, the goal of producing the woodcut and disseminating it in print is to enable the production of further devices. Language, too, is subject to a principle of mechanical reproducibility in order to ensure the reproduction of the device: Paré underscores that each “part” (partie) of his device is “done with the proper terms and the vocabulary of the artisan, in order that any Locksmith or Clockmaker can understand it, and make similar artificial arms or legs” (Faicte en propres termes & mots de l’artisan: à fin que chacun Serruier ou Horologeur les puisse entendre, & faire bras ou iambes artificielles semblables).37 This illustration of the hand adheres to the visual conventions of sixteenth-­century anatomies, such as those of Vesalius or Charles Estienne. Following the Renaissance écorché aesthetic, the external “skin” of Paré’s device is removed to reveal the system of pinions, rods, triggers, and springs inside, each part labeled in the anatomical style (this time with numbers instead of letters). Indeed, the style here is so similar to an anatomy that the reader would be forgiven for confusing these mechanical parts with the human anatomical illustrations that appear in Book III of Paré’s Œuvres. As we have seen, such confusion would be the hallmark of the prosthetic.38 Prosthesis occurs, as Wills affirms, “on the border between the living and the lifeless.”39 What Paré shows us in his Aristotelian articulation of the hand is that the manual organ occurs on the same border: living/nonliving, human/nonhuman, natural/unnatural, anatomical/mechanical. Latent in the Aristotelian conception of the hand as “instrument of instruments” is this same suturing, a prosthetic contamination. Indeed, the hand emerges in the Aristotelian tradition as the node in a paradox that would be constitutive of



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the human relationship to technics.40 The hand as “instrument of instruments” distinguishes the human from other animals, yet it does so precisely by marking the human body as deficient and orienting it toward the necessary supplement of technology. As Bernard Stiegler writes, “the hand is the hand only insofar as it allows access to art, to artifice, and to tekhne.”41 In its grasping toward other instruments, the hand situates the human from the beginning in a technical milieu; its joints act as articulations between nature and artifice, between the human body and the material world it manipulates and refashions. The hand, we might say, is always grasping toward a humanity that can never be fully constituted as such in this essentially supplemental relationship. Mediation would therefore also “begin” in the hand. In his treatise On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, Galen demonstrates the extraordinary adaptability of the hand through an extensive list of manual activities. Following a discussion of defensive arms, clothing, housing, and all the ways in which “man” makes himself “lord . . . of animals,” Galen turns to politics, religion, transport, and music—a universe in which “all the . . . instruments of the arts” come into being as artifacts of the hand.42 This capaciousness anticipates in a striking way Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of “media,” which he defines as “any extension of ourselves”: communications media like books or television, but also clothing, electricity, or the wheel—any technology that “extends” or externalizes an aspect of the human body or sensorium. The necessary Derridean or Willsian inflection of McLuhan would be that various forms of media never simply “extend” an intact or integral body but rather reveal, according to a logic of supplementarity or a prosthetic logic, that the body was “always already imperfect, mechanical, in relations of dependence, originarily disabled or incomplete, . . . in short . . . prosthetic.”43 Galen indeed has media on the brain; not only does writing figure alongside shipbuilding and knife wielding, it envelops and traverses all these other instrumental activities. He even intimates that it is through writing that he has come to appropriate Aristotle’s understanding of the hand as an “instrument for other instruments”: “Such is the hand of man as an instrument of defense. But, being also a peaceful and social animal, with his hands he writes laws for himself, raises altars and statues to the gods, builds ships, makes flutes, lyres, knives, fire-­tongs, and all the other instruments of the arts, and in his writings leaves behind his commentaries on the theories of them. Even now, thanks to writings set down by the hand, it is yet possible for you to hold converse with Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and other Ancients.”44 The instrumental hand marks for Galen the possibility of culture in general, and externalized

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forms of cultural memory in particular. The writing hand produces laws, theories, and commentaries; it allows one to “hold converse” with the dead. Galen’s anatomical-­philosophical intuition here about the role of the hand has been given paleontological grounding in the work of André Leroi-­Gourhan, who argues that language and tools co-­evolve (“Tools for the hand, language for the face, are twin poles of the same apparatus”).45 I would be tempted to say—in the Aristotelian mode that Galen also apes—that the hand appears here as something like the medium of media. The instrumental hand opens onto mediation, creating the possibility of writing and pointing toward a “general mediality that is constitutive of the human as a ‘biotechnical’ form of life.”46 Wherever the hand appears—which is also where the “human” appears—we are already in the realm of the technological, the mediated, and the prosthetic.

The Double Desk In the revised edition of Paré’s Œuvres from 1585, the reader discovers not just one artificial hand—the mechanical iron hand with its joints and springs, designed to perform a variety of instrumental functions—but a second one designed with only one function in mind: writing. It is “a hand made of boiled leather, or pasted paper, the fingers holding a writing quill, for the person who has had his hand entirely cut off and amputated” (une main faicte de cuir boullu, ou papier collé, les doigts tenant vne plume pour escrire, à celuy qui auroit eu la main du tout coupee & amputee) (Figure 3).47 The woodcut illustration shows a quill being held in place by a small, hollow cylinder that binds the fingers together. This second hand, unable to budge from its penhold and made from lighter materials—paper and leather, the very materials of the printed book— suggests that the writing hand becomes in a real (material, technical) sense a hand apart, transformed by the instrumental rigors of writing.48 Each writing technology technologizes the hand in its own way; each tool requires the hand to adapt, to become a new tool in its media technological assemblage.49 Use and habit form the hand around the apparatus. Derrida speaks of using a typewriter with an international keyboard for years, despite the difficulty in obtaining a new one, simply because it was the apparatus to which he had become accustomed. (“I didn’t know how to type on a French keyboard until the ’70s. I replaced a little Olivetti with a little Olivetti each time.”)50 Friedrich Nietzsche famously acquired and just as quickly abandoned a Hansen Writing Ball in 1882, finding it too cumbersome to write with, even



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Figure 3. “Une main faicte de cuir bouilly, ou papier collé” (A hand made of boiled leather, or papier collé). Ambroise Paré, Œuvres (Paris: Veuve Gabriel Buon, 1598), 903. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

though his eyesight was failing. (One page typed by Nietzsche, full of typos, begins with a nonsensical string of letters when the characters on the ball jammed: “MELSDNDRGILSTHCZMQNMOY.”)51 Even if every writing machine is designed for the hand, the instrument ultimately instrumentalizes the hand in its fashion. As Jonathan Goldberg observes in his illuminating study of Renaissance writing manuals, the hand “is made into [a] grasping instrument by the pen.” It is the instrument that “serves as master,” gathering together the fingers and ushering the student-­writer into the social order of writing.52 Not only different instruments but even different scripts (say, secretarial versus italic) require the hand to adapt to their regimes, which always operate as functions of broader social and symbolic forces. The fact that twenty-­first century technologies have given rise to new ailments—carpal tunnel syndrome or “texting thumb” (usually a form of tendinitis or arthritis)— would be symptomatic of the hand stressing to adapt itself to these new forms of instrumentalization in the digital writing regime. And yet the instrumental hand can and does adapt, more or less successfully: it types, texts, dials, swipes;

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it touches the touchscreen, scrawls with a stylus, punches a code. Like speaking a second language or playing a musical instrument, we generally adapt better to these technologies the younger we are. Generations are now marked sociologically—for example, “digital natives” and “digital immigrants”53—by the way users type or text. We are dated by our hands. However quaint or comparatively “natural” the hand of a medieval scribe grasping his quill may seem today, this, too, is a technological hand. Writing with a quill was learned through formal, often strenuous training. As handwriting is becoming an increasingly rare practice in the twenty-­first century, nostalgia tends to obscure its technicity, even as the very rarity of handwriting makes us experience anew how difficult—how very technical and specific, how manually intensive and even painful—writing with a pen or pencil (let alone a goose quill) can be. Before turning to see how printing supersedes the hand, it is worth pausing on an iconic scene of manuscript production from the mid-­fifteenth century, the same period that witnesses the introduction of movable type.54 Without claiming that this scene is representative of manuscript culture— indeed, it is in many respects unique—I present it here as a concrete antidote to the historical and/or metaphysical fantasy of writing before print as nontechnical, immediate, or natural.55 The scene in question is a portrait miniature of Jean Miélot (?–1472), who was a celebrated translator, scribe, ducal secretary, and compiler of manuscripts at the Burgundian courts of Philippe Le Bon and Charles Le Téméraire.56 The dukes of Burgundy possessed a rich library modeled on that of the French king Charles V; at the time of the death of Charles Le Téméraire in 1477, the library held nearly a thousand volumes, many of them illuminated. This miniature, one of two known portraits of Miélot at work, appears on the first page of his French translation of De nobilitate, a dialogue on “true nobility” by the Italian humanist Buonaccorso da Montemagno (Figure 4). Miélot was also the scribe of this particular manuscript, a deluxe presentation copy that belonged to Philippe and is now housed in the Belgian Royal Library (Brussels, KBR 9278-­ 80). In the miniature, Miélot appears to be working at home, or at least in some kind of lodgings or domestic space rather than in a scriptorium, office, or shop. He sits in a tall, upright chair before at a lectern-­style desk. The slope of the writing surface is steep, a common style for scribal desks since quill pens work best when held at a right angle to the writing surface. When writing with a quill on parchment or vellum, the movement comes not from the fingers—with the hand resting on the writing surface, as we do with a modern pen—but from the arm and elbow. The miniature shows that for Miélot, like for almost all medieval



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Figure 4. Portrait of Jean Miélot in his study. Le Debat d’Honneur. Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Brussels, MS KBR 9278-80, f. 10r (c. 1450). Courtesy of the Royal Library of Belgium.

scribes, writing is a two-­handed operation. In his right hand is the goose quill that, in this moment, seems to have just been dipped into the inkhorn held in the desk just next to that hand. In his left hand is a pen knife, which serves a variety of functions: it holds down the springy vellum page as he writes; it marks his place; it acts as an eraser or scraper, a grattoir, scratching off freshly inked mistakes on the thick vellum; it also serves to sharpen the quill, which has to be done frequently. There is no manuscript production without this repetitive sharpening that is also scraping and erasure.57 In Miélot’s case, this

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usual two-­handed operation is echoed by something more unusual: a desk that is itself double. Typically, a scribe would place the exemplar (or source text) and copy side by side on the desk. Miélot’s desk is undoubtedly a custom artifact, a kind of bespoke object tailored to his body and his work as a translator-­scribe. This sophisticated desk has been rigged to hold two texts at once so that the copyist—whose two hands are both occupied in the mechanics of writing with quill and parchment—can move back and forth between the two texts just by tilting his head up slightly. The exemplar is held open by a lead weight, one end across the pages of the book, the other dangling down behind it attached by a string. This is a desk for a scribe who copies texts, but it is also the desk of a translator; Miélot plays both roles. This portrait foregrounds mediation and technics; it lays open the scene of writing as one of technical mediation that passes through not only a complex social apparatus but also the body of the scribe, which becomes equally technical. The creases in Miélot’s robe accentuate his angled posture as he leans in to meet the angle of the desk. The bed in the background—ready to receive a reclining body once the writing is done—strikes a contrast to the stark uprightness of the scribe’s chair. Everything about the desk presents itself as an extension of the seated, inclining, writing body and its movement between texts. The most striking detail, perhaps, is the curved cutout in the wood of the upper desk, designed to allow Miélot to slide his hand in and turn the pages of the book. If this image is a fantasy of writing, it is not one of immediacy but a fetishistic scene of lead and wood, tools and toys, the constrained position of the body in relation to instruments and the apparatus. As we will see in scribal colophons below, the writing body is also, often, a body in pain. And there are more instruments than are strictly necessary here, more supports than writing strictly requires. Miélot’s scene is one of excess: not only double hands and double desks but a proliferation of doubles, and doubles of doubles. In the upper right-­hand corner of the desk another quill sits ready to substitute for the one in his hand; in addition to the two books on the desk are the book on the bench, the two sets of two books each on the ground, and more books still in the trunk, waiting to be opened. Writing—as copying—takes place here as the pleasure and pain of that which is constitutively supplementary. At the center of this scene is the hand. The miniature of Jean Miélot opens up for the reader as if seen through a window: its marked linear perspective—a novel and conspicuous pictorial technique at this point in the history of visual representation—gives the impression that the reader-­viewer might even be watching Miélot through a peephole of the kind Brunelleschi, the inventor (or



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modern reviver) of linear perspective, used to verify the accuracy of his compositions. The miniature engages us voyeuristically in Miélot’s scene of writing instruments, and what it draws our attention to at the geometrical center of the composition is his right hand. Each element of the writing apparatus, from the position of the ink bottle to the slope of the desk, is oriented toward the hand and designed for manual use. We can imagine the hand becoming a whole series of instruments here, adapting from moment to moment as it dips, flips, reaches, grasps, steadies, scratches, cuts. This hand takes on an ironic poignancy when we recall its place in the chronology of writing technologies. What Miélot undoubtedly did not know— what no one at the Burgundian court was likely to know in 1450, given its relative secrecy—was that some two hundred miles away in the German town of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg was perfecting the technology of movable type, the invention that would put most professional scribes out of business by the end of the fifteenth century. We must bear in mind as we turn toward this moment that if the rise of printing entails a certain amputation and artificial reproduction of the writing hand, this hand is already prosthetic; it comes pre-­cut.

“The Hand That Wrote It Is No More” A colophon is an appendage to the book. The term derives from a Greek word meaning “head,” “crest,” or “summit”; the Greek proverbial phrase “to put on the colophon” means “[to put] the finishing stroke to anything, as when a building is completed by the addition of a coping-­stone, or a discourse is summed up by a recapitulation of the general gist.”58 The colophon is where the technical production of the book—its materiality and mediatedness, its status as a written object in the world—gets inscribed in the body of the text as a supplement to the text “proper.” In a number of manuscripts, the colophon is where the hand of the scribe is depicted as a cramped and weary instrument. Prior to the development of the title page, many early printed books followed the example of their manuscript predecessors and featured colophons at their tail end.59 In addition to providing information about the production of the book—the date and place of printing, the name of the printer, and other details—these short texts offer some of the earliest and most evocative representations of printing. The colophons produced by the first generation of print technicians thus constitute a fragmentary but illuminating (and remarkably underutilized) archive

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for studying the mechanization of writing in the fifteenth century, as well as the dynamics of media change more broadly. They show us how printing was imagined when it was still an unfamiliar technology, perceived by contemporaries as wondrous and even “divine.” They provide a window onto what printing meant culturally before its effects were normalized, naturalized, and incorporated into new social and techno-­cultural regimes. Like the work of printers and writers that we will examine in subsequent chapters, early colophons lay bare for us the sutures of a prosthetic operation. Only about 20 percent of surviving manuscripts have any kind of colophon, though scribes increasingly supplied them in the later Middle Ages.60 Some manuscript colophons include only the name of the scribe or the date he finished copying the text; usually there is only one name, even when it is obvious that multiple hands participated in the copying.61 Other manuscript colophons indicate the place of writing, the name of the scribe’s patron, the purpose of the text, or other contextual information. The most striking colophons contain personal notes from the scribe: a prayer, a request for payment, or a declaration of relief that the text has at last been completed, such as this colophon from the late fourteenth century: “This work is written, Master, give me a drink. Let the right hand of the scribe be free from the oppressiveness of pain!” In the colophon, that supplemental “head” or “summit” that both exceeds and completes the text, the manuscript calls attention to its own materiality, to its status as a manual artifact. This callback to the visual and material may have been particularly incongruous in the context of oral reading, either privately or in groups, which was a dominant practice for much of the Middle Ages and remained common among certain groups of readers until the fifteenth century and even later.62 In the same stroke, the colophon summons the writing body as an integral part of the production of the book. These elements come together in a well-­ known colophon from the ninth century: “I beseech you, my friend, when you are reading my book, to keep your hands behind its back, for fear you should do mischief to the text by some sudden movement, for a man who knows nothing about writing thinks that it is no concern of his. Whereas to a writer the last line is as sweet as the port is to a sailor. Three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body toils. Thanks be to God, I, Warembert, wrote this book in God’s name. Thanks be to God. Amen.”63 The materiality of book and body commingle here as the reader is asked to care for the text—and to keep her or his own hands off the page. The colophon reminds the reader that the writing body is subject to constraint and pain, to material forms of social and disciplinary control, to an entire scriptive regime outside of which there is no book.



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Above all, the scribal colophon acts as an index, that type of sign that bears a “real,” “physical” or “existential,” relation to its referent.64 Like the inky paw prints, cat urine, mouse bites, and insect holes left in some medieval manuscripts, the colophon is an index of the material presence of the hand that wrote it. It attests to a certain bodily reality of the writing hand. Either implicitly or explicitly, every colophon announces: a hand was here and made this mark. The generic elements of the colophon—the date, the use of deixis (“this work”), the self-­referentiality—all contribute to this indexical reality effect. A colophon always summons a writing body that is also a spectral body, one that is already structurally absent; the colophon operates in a future anterior tense. We find this future anteriority on display in a colophon from one medieval Irish scribe, who looks forward with anticipatory melancholy to the specter his own hand will become: “This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over thy page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.’ ”65 This scribe testifies at once to the instrumentality of all scribal hands and to a certain drama of the trace, the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of the hand played out in every colophon. The hand that survives in the colophon is always a kind of phantom limb: it appears and yet, in its very appearance, “is no more.”66 A different spectral melancholy attends these manuscript colophons today, not only because many centuries have passed since these scribal hands have passed away, but because the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century eventually meant the virtual disappearance of this entire scriptive regime—the disappearance of almost every professional scribal hand. Already by the mid-­ sixteenth century, the scribe will have become a specter of media history, no longer up to date. The following definition appears for the word librarius, or “scribe,” in the 1538 volume generally considered the first dictionary of the French language, the bilingual Dictionarium Latinogallicum compiled and printed by the celebrated Parisian printer Robert Estienne: “librarius, a writer who used to write books in the past, in whose place printers have succeeded” (Ung escripvain qui escrivoit les livres anciennement, au lieu duquel ont succedé les imprimeurs).67 As Lisa Gitelman writes of media perceived to be “old,” the scribal hand no longer gets the job done. The scribe’s “place” has been taken by a new kind of writer, the scribe’s hands relegated to an ancient past whose outmodedness is codified by the printer’s dictionary definition. It is to this other kind of writer—the printer—that we now turn. During the second half of the fifteenth century, books begin to appear written not by hand, with quill and ink, but with another set of tools altogether:

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a supply of small metal blocks bearing individual letters and other graphic signs.68 Most scholars today credit the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg with the European invention of this technology, which allowed books to be copied with unprecedented efficiency using techniques and materials that were markedly different from those used by scribes for the previous millennium (even if certain aspects of scribal culture were necessarily retained or adapted by printers, as we shall see).69 The basic step-­by-­step method for printing with movable type seems to have been set in place by 1500 and, remarkably, remained essentially unchanged for three centuries.70 The most novel element of the new art was its metal type: individual characters cast out of lead alloy that could be reused or “moved” in the composition of each new page of text. David Shaw’s analysis of early printing terminology has revealed that it was indeed metal type—and not the design of the press itself—that constituted the “essence of Gutenberg’s invention” in the eyes of the first generations of printers. “Printing” was already an established technique for producing woodcut images and even text in what are known today as block-­books. The fifteenth-­century abbot Johannes Trithemius describes Gutenberg’s method as a marked improvement over these earlier xylographic techniques, in which “letters were not movable (amovibiles) from the blocks” and had to be “shaped by hand (manibus sculpebant).” Gutenberg and his associates discovered “more subtle methods,” according to Trithemius: “They found a way of casting the shapes of all the letters of the Latin alphabet, which they themselves called matrices, from which they again cast types of bronze or tin, sufficient for the whole of what they wanted to print which previously they engraved by hand.”71 This process was, of course, far from being fully mechanized; until the nineteenth century, human hands were still involved in every stage of printing, from cutting punches and casting sorts to setting type, applying ink, and pulling the lever of the press.72 But these manual movements become, in some fundamental way, accessories to the more essential movability of letters themselves. The first major book produced using movable type, Gutenberg’s forty-­two-­ line Biblia Latina, was published in Mainz, Germany, in 1454 or 1455. Printing initially spread as craftsmen affiliated with Gutenberg traveled to Bamberg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Rome. Within two decades, workshops had been established across Western Europe, and every important urban center was home to a press by the turn of the sixteenth century.73 In 1499, Polydore Vergil claims in his De Inventoribus Rerum, an enormously popular history of ancient and modern inventions, that the Duke of Urbino’s renowned manuscript library



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was “nothing in comparison with an achievement of our own day, a newly devised way of writing.”74 This new way of writing—which will soon become the hallmark of modernity for Renaissance humanists, the technology that marks a perceived break with respect to antiquity—unleashes text into the world. “In one day,” writes Polydore, “just one person can print the same number of letters that many people could hardly write in a whole year. Books in all the disciplines have poured out so profusely from this invention that no work can possibly remain wanting to anyone, however needy.” After naming the inventor of this “art of making impressions of letters,” Polydore observes that in his own time printing “flourishes throughout almost the whole world” and is “quite familiar to all.” Though it remains a “wonder,” he foresees that printing is “destined . . . gradually to become somewhat commonplace.”75 This historical horizon was a pressing concern for Johannes Trithemius, who in 1492 penned a tract defending the handwritten book and calling on monks not to abandon scribal practice. “Brothers,” writes Trithemius in his De laude scriptorum manualium, “no one should think or say ‘Why do I have to wear myself out writing by hand, when the art of printing has brought so many books to light, so that we can cheaply put together a great library?’ ”76 Recognizing the efficiency of printing, Trithemius admonishes the “sloth” of any scribe who would prefer the new way of writing and invokes what we might call an ethics of consignation. In this moment when the cultural place of the hand has begun to flicker, scribes emerge as archivers and caretakers. “However useful the tradition of the learned, without the attention of the scribe it would never come to the notice of posterity.”77 Trithemius insists that, in the absence of scribes, writing would be “shattered by chance,” exposed to catastrophic loss. While the manuscript book preserves cultural memory, books printed on paper are subject to decay and destruction. “Who doesn’t know how great is the distance between a scribed and a printed book?” he asks his readers in 1492 (a readership that would become much larger when the treatise was printed two years later). “The scripture on parchment can persist a thousand years, but on paper, how long will it last? . . . Posterity will judge this question.” 78 Trithemius envisions a future in which, “even if all the books in the world were printed,” the manuscript would continue to function as the superlative archival medium, the medium of record. The scribe will “perpetuate” printed books with his hand, thereby “giv[ing] limp books fixity, value to those of small price, longevity to the short-­lived.”79 The hand itself, he imagines, will become a technology of survival.

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For other early observers, it is printing that opens new archival possibilities. At the initiative of two Sorbonne professors, Guillaume Fichet and Johann Heynlin, the first press was brought to Paris from Germany around 1470, along with a team of three German printers: Michael Friburger, Ulrich Gering, and Martin Crantz. Fichet had served as rector of the Sorbonne and was, in 1470, its librarian. Although the operation seems to have been an independent initiative underwritten by Fichet and several benefactors, the press was initially housed within the walls of the Paris university.80 The first editions issued from this press conclude with a verse colophon announcing the arrival—in a city renowned as a center of learning and manuscript production81—of a new way of writing: “Just as the sun spreads light over the world, you spread knowledge everywhere, O Paris, royal city that nourishes muses. Accept now in exchange for your virtues this nearly divine art of writing that Germany has invented. Here are the first books that this new industry has produced on French soil, in your own house (aedibus). They are the work of masters Michael, Ulrich, and Martin, who will print more still (Hos impresserunt ac facient alios).”82 As the printers announce the coming of the German invention to Paris, they herald it as the irruption of a new technology—pregnant with the magical or divine quality that attends new technologies—in the very aedis of France, its house. (We are not far here from Heidegger’s sense that printing constitutes an “irruption of the mechanism” in language as the “house of being.”) Printing comes from abroad; it breaks in. The colophon itself serves as a kind of promissory note, opening onto another future for the book in Paris. Where there is one printed book, there will be more: this is the essence of mechanical reproduction. Hos impresserunt ac facient alios. Fichet, an ardent promoter of humanism, who was wildly optimistic about the potential of the press, will soon write in his famous letter that humanistic studies “have derived much light from the new kind of book-­producers, whom in our own time Germany, like another Trojan horse, has discharged upon the world.”83 Printing operates as a luminous machine de guerre, “another Trojan horse,” come from abroad to surprise the European center of manuscript production. What opens this other future for the humanist Fichet is orthography, “straight” or “correct” writing. In this inaugural moment, typography appears as an orthographic apparatus. It thus promises “exact inscription of events and thus . . . their exact repetition, the possibility of experiencing the same thing more than once.”84 In his preface to the first book issued from the Paris press, Fichet congratulates his collaborator, Heynlin, for helping bring the new industry



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to a city where “bad copyists [have] contributed as much as any other cause to hastening our descent into barbarism.”85 He observes with pleasure that their book, which Heynlin edited, “has been clearly and correctly reproduced by the German printers.”86 While the printers simply promise to produce more books in their colophon, Fichet sees a superior mode of reproduction. “What great joy is mine,” he writes to Heynlin, “to see that you had the bright idea to dispel, at long last, this scourge from the city of Paris! These industrious men of the book whom you have brought to this city from your country of Germany produce books that are very correct and true to the copy that is given them.” The press as an orthographic technology appears here as an orthotic, or corrective, device for the copyist’s hand. At the same time, at the very moment of its arrival in Paris, printing already participates in a mythical narrative of rebirth and renewal premised on a supposed medieval darkness and illiteracy. Renewal is equated here with an orthographic principle of correction: a correct copying of texts that also corrects the errors of the past. Renewal is the promise of the machine that supersedes the hand. The second book produced by the Paris press was the Orthographia of Gasparino. In a closing epistle to that book, addressed to his friend Robert Gaguin, Fichet writes the following of orthography: “The principle of correct writing (which is the interpretation of the term orthography) constitutes our foundation in every language, Greek, Latin, and the vernacular; without which, indeed, nothing can possibly be correctly and purely written, nothing read, nothing expressed, save in confused fashion.” This epistle, known as the “Fichet letter,” is famous for containing the earliest attribution of movable type to Gutenberg. Fichet inscribes the German inventor in an evolutionary history of writing technologies: Gutenberg was the first who “devised the art of printing, whereby books are made, not by a reed, as did the ancients, nor with a quill, as do we, but with brass letters (aereis litteris), and that swiftly, neatly, beautifully.” Printing not only speeds up the reproduction of texts, it marks a historical rupture. The future will be written in metal characters: “But that great Gutenberg has discovered things far more pleasing and more divine, in carving out letters in such fashion that whatever can be said or thought can by them be written down at once and transcribed and committed to the memory of posterity.” The new writing technology provokes for the librarian an archival fantasy of immediate and exact inscription: a world without loss and beyond mediation, where everything that “can be said or thought” finds itself recorded “at once” and for “posterity.”

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The Brass Hand . . . or is my flesh of brasse? —Job 6:12 (King James translation)

Experiments with new techniques for writing had begun taking place in different parts of Europe in the 1430s and 1440s, including one documented creation in Avignon of an ars artificialiter scribendi, or “artificial way of writing.”87 The turn to “artificial” writing was, scholars tend to agree, spurred by a large and rapidly expanding demand for books in the fifteenth century.88 If, as Febvre and Martin suggest, some 20,000,000 books were printed during the last three decades of the fifteenth century, this would attest “to the volume of society’s pent-­up demand for book information and the success of the printing press in supplying it.”89 Leon Battista Alberti, recounting a conversation with a friend around 1466, does the math on Gutenberg’s new mechanics: “It happened that we greatly approved of the German inventor who in these times has made it possible, by certain pressings down of characters, to have more than two hundred volumes written out in a hundred days from an original, with the labor of no more than three men; for with only one downwards pressure a large sheet is written out.”90 In the popular imaginary, at least, the press accomplishes the labor of writing with miraculous economy, producing books at speeds and in quantities that were physically impossible for the copyist.91 If printing “supplies” a market demand, it does so by supplementing the physical limitations of the writing hand. Like other mechanical devices, it augments the capabilities of the human body; this is what it means to write “artificially.” This augmentation will also be an amputation. Marshall McLuhan makes the provocative claim in Understanding Media that technological media are not only “extensions” of the body or sensory organs but also are “auto-­amputations.”92 When a particular organ is confronted with strain or overstimulation, humans invent new media that externalize that organ (hence, media as “extension”) and thereby “amputate” its function from the body.93 The stimuli that McLuhan suggests prompt the invention of technological media—“stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load”—are precisely those of the fifteenth-­century book market. The classic example McLuhan offers of this phenomenon is the wheel as an extension/amputation of the foot: “the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was the



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immediate occasion of the extension or ‘amputation’ of this function from our bodies.” While the relief offered by the wheel is more intuitive than that of the printing press, McLuhan insists that the principle of self-­amputation as relief “applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer.”94 Printing would function as an “artificial” hand insofar as it relieves the writing hand from overstimulation and strain in an accelerating culture of book consumption and production. Two colophons point precisely to the appearance of printing as “counter-­ irritant” and extending/amputating prosthetic device. The first, quoted earlier, comes from a manuscript: This work is written, Master, give me a drink; Let the right hand of the scribe be free from the oppressiveness of pain! The second, quoted at the outset of this chapter, comes from an early printed book: Read these twice eight Satires by Juvenal of Aquinas, Which Jacobus de Fivizzano has written with a hand of brass to make the marks . . . (Octo bis satyras Iuvenalis perlege aquini: Scripsit quas Iacobus aere notante manu Di Fivizano. . .) These colophons were produced roughly a century apart. Neither provides an exact date, as many colophons do, but both tell the reader how the book was written: the first by “the right hand of the scribe” (dextera scriptoris), the second “with a writing hand of brass” (aere notante manu). This last formula is coined by the printer Jacobus de Fivizzano, who was introducing printing to his readers in Tuscany around 1472. Printing, as a brand new writing technology, has no recognizable name for this audience; in order to make it legible, the printer improvises and describes it as a “writing” or “marking” (notante) hand made of brass. The formula signals the novelty and artificiality of the printer’s device, but it also evokes the imperviousness of this new “hand” to the pain and labor of writing. In contrast to every medieval colophon, it tells the reader that no human hand was here to make these marks. Above all, it suggests an understanding of printing technology as a prosthetic supplement to the writing hand.

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Jacobus’s formula aere notante manu seems to be completely idiosyncratic, appearing in no other printed text before or after.95 Jacobus established his printing operation in his home city of Fivizzano in Tuscany after returning from Venice, where he trained in the new art.96 The origin of his “hand of brass,” as well as the prosthetic role it suggests, can be traced back to a 1469 colophon from Johann of Speyer, the first printer at Venice, which announces that the “writing brass” (aere notante) of printing will allow the “tired hand” ( fessa manus) to “rest” (quiescat). This verse colophon addresses the reader in the voice of the book’s ancient author, Pliny the Elder: I, erst so rare few bookmen could afford me, And erst so blurred that buyers’ eyes would fail— To Venice now ‘t was John of Speier restored me, And made recording brass unfold my tale [Exscripsitque libros aere notante meos; literally, “And wrote my books with a writing brass”]. Let rest the tired hand, let rest the reed: [Fessa manus quondam moneo: calamusque quiescat] Mere toil to zealous wits the prize must cede.97 The verb that advises the weary hand and its writing instrument to rest is quiesco, which means to rest, to be inactive, to sleep. For the printer, the invention of the “recording brass” means that the writing hand can become a kind of vestigial organ: it can be deactivated.98 And yet writing cannot do without the hand. What is perhaps most remarkable about Jacobus de Fivizzano’s formula is the cut-­and-­paste job he does on the earlier colophon. The “tired hand” told to rest by Johann of Speyer gets re-­appended onto the “writing brass” in order to produce that strange three-­word phrase, aere notante manu. While Johann suggests that the human hand should be left behind and “rest” in the age of the new technological instrument, Jacobus extends this prosthetic logic to make printing technology his own brass hand (“Read these twice eight Satires by Juvenal of Aquinas, / Which Jacobus de Fivizzano has written with a hand of brass to make the marks”). Between Venice and Fivizzano, between the lines of the two colophons, printing appears as another hand that blurs the line between the human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, hand and machine. By sheer coincidence, another new writing machine will appear in Fiviz­ zano some three centuries later. In 1808, the blind Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano composed what is now the oldest surviving example of typewritten text on a device made especially for her use. The countess’s typewriter, the first



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such machine to leave an enduring trace, was an assistive technology that compensated for her lost eyesight and allowed her to draft legible correspondence to friends. The countess was not alone: a blind Viennese duchess was also the recipient of a writing machine built for her by Wolfgang von Kempelen, the inventor most famous for his Mechanical Turk, a chess-­playing device that fooled observers into thinking it was an automaton while in fact concealing a human chess master within. As Friedrich Kittler observes, a remarkable number of early typewriting machines were constructed for blind or deaf users; at least one inventor, Pierre Foucault, was blind himself. “Blindness and deafness,” writes Kittler, “precisely when they affect either speech or writing, yield what would otherwise be beyond reach: information on the human information machine. Whereupon its replacement by mechanics can begin.”99 While the “tired hand” is the primary figure of printing’s remedial or prosthetic function, failing eyes can also be found—including in the colophon above by Johann of Speyer, which evokes the difficulty of reading manuscript text (“so blurred that buyers’ eyes would fail”). Printing as a remedial device for the eyes appears in a number of early accounts, perhaps most famously in the first documented sighting of the Gutenberg Bible. The scholar-­bishop Aeneas Silvius (the future Pope Pius II), writing in the spring of 1455, reported to his friend Cardinal Carvajal that he had seen at the Frankfurt book fair a “marvelous man” (vir mirabilis) who had produced a copy of the Bible so “clean and correct in [its] letter,” so “perfect,” that the Cardinal should be able to “read it effortlessly without [his] glasses.”100 In this seminal account of a printed text, the new way of writing is recognized as the effective replacement of one assistive technology (eyeglasses) by another (the printing press). Perhaps nowhere is this physical relief of printing more evident than in the first book printed in English, Raoul Lefèvre’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, published in Bruges in 1473 or 1474. The colophon by William Caxton, who both translated and printed the book, appears as a singular hybrid of the manuscript and print genres: Thus ende I this book, whyche I have translated after myn Auctor as nyghe as God hath gyven me cunnyng. . . . And for as moche as in the wrytyng of the same my penne is worn, my hande wery & not steadfast, myne eyen dimed with overmoche lokyng on the whit paper, and my courage not so prone and redy to laboure as it hath ben, and that age crepeth on me dayly and feebleth all the bodye, and also be cause I have promysid to diverce gentilmen and to my frendes to addresse to

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them as hastely as I myght this said book, therefore I have practysed & lerned at my grete charge and dispense to ordeyn this said book in prynte, after the maner & forme as ye may here see, and is not wreton [i.e., “written”] with penne & inke as other bokes ben, to the ende that every man may have them attones. For all the bookes of this storye, named The Recule of the Historyes of Troyes thus enpryntid [i.e., “imprinted”] as ye here see were begonne in oon day, and also fynysshid in oon day. Caxton’s litany of ailments from the process of writing out his translation—the “wery” and “not steadfast” hand, the “dim[m]ed” eyes, the fatigue and broken courage, the unwillingness to engage in further “laboure,” especially as age creeps up on him and “feebleth all the bodye”—all evoke the scribal colophon. At the same time, they signal a kind of breaking point for the writing hand. With his body and “penne” worn out, straining under the social pressure of friends and “diverce gentilmen” who await promised copies of the book, Caxton searches for a remedy. Printing offers itself as a means of fulfilling a demand the human body can no longer meet. In contrast to the scribal colophon, the text that Caxton complains of copying is not the one we are reading; even if the labor of the translation is implicit, his weary hand leaves no indexical trace on this page. Indeed—in a formula we will see repeatedly in the next section as the hallmark of the earliest colophons—we are told that this book is not written “with penne & inke as other bokes ben.” On this page, the metal hand leaves its trace. Caxton’s colophon offers up the writing hand only to erase it in a logic of prosthetic substitution. This logic is also one of speed: Caxton tells the reader that the 350-­page collection before his or her eyes was produced “in oon day.” The prosthetic hand is an accelerator, reproducing language in superhuman time.

“Without Any Driving of the Pen” The printer’s colophon is itself something of a vestigial organ, a residual habit transposed into print from handwritten books. The title page, which announces the printer or publisher at the beginning of the book, did not emerge until the early 1490s.101 The persistence of the colophon at the end of the book for nearly a generation reveals, according to one nineteenth-­century bibliographer, the “extent to which the printer was influenced by the example of his predecessor,



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the copyist.”102 Even though many manuscripts were not copied from start to finish (under the pecia system, for example), the colophon on the final leaf gives the impression of a book produced in a continuous, linear fashion. It has been suggested that the earliest printed books may in fact have been produced start to finish on one-­pull presses, but colophons can be found at the ends of books well after the introduction of the two-­pull press—that is, well after pages were printed in nonsequential order. If the colophon is, then, a kind of media hangover, it is also where printers distinguish themselves from scribes—where the art of printing marks its technological departure from handwriting. New media tend to imitate, appropriate, extend, rehearse, and critique older or rival media forms, a process Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have dubbed “remediation.”103 In the very same site where the copyist called attention to the instruments, labor, and materials of handwriting, the printer reflects self-­consciously on printing techniques, on the novelty and artifice of mechanical writing, and on the relation (typically, the superiority) of printing to older instruments and scriptive technologies. The colophon is where the first generation of printers can be seen imagining the place of printing in the media landscape of fifteenth-­ century Europe—as well as engineering, in often awkward Latin verse, the future obsolescence of the copyist’s quill. While certain early master-­printers like Aldus Manutius were humanist scholars, many printers were “hard, practical men” with little formal education.104 Some or even most Latin colophons were probably the work of editors or correctors, the learned readers who amended the manuscript text prior to printing and who proofread pages before they were reproduced hundreds of times. Still, the Latin of early colophons is not elegant; modern scholars have described it as difficult to translate, “convoluted,” and “far from classical.”105 Their discourse has a bricolage quality about it. This quality would speak, first, to the bricolage nature of printing itself, which combines a host of old tools and techniques from scribal practice, metalworking, agriculture, and other arts in order to produce the printer’s machinery. The first generation of printers was comprised of bricoleurs. It’s also worth noting, though, that discourse surrounding emergent media is often improvisatory and a bit awkward, since it marks the attempt to capture a shift in the relation between life and technics at the very moment that relation is being reorganized, renewed, and intensified. When media are in transition, everything is thrown out of joint: time, experience, the body, language itself. Natural and technical terms get cobbled together in an attempt to express the new invention: we have already seen the printer’s “hand of brass”; in a similar vein, the earliest users of Edison’s phonograph called it the

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“talking machine”; and shortly after the Daguerreotype process went public, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a piece for a Philadelphia newspaper describing that proc­ ess as “photogeny,” a term derived from Greek words “signifying sun-­painting.” The way early users imagine and describe new media inevitably borrows from existing media forms while insisting on their newness and difference, as well as on their technological triumph over the contingencies of the human body and mortality: a hand of brass, for example, that can write hundreds of books in one day. The awkwardness of formulations like aere notante manu testifies at once to a continuity of print with respect to manuscript and its inassimilability to familiar experience or existing modes of representation. The very first colophon written by means other than a human hand appears in the Psalterium cum canticis et hymnis. This book, commonly known as the Mainz Psalter, is the second substantial text in Europe to be printed using ­movable type (the first being the Gutenberg Bible). It is the first book to indicate the date of its publication (August 14, 1457) and the names of its printers (Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer). Johann Fust had been a backer of Gutenberg’s early printing ventures and had sued him for unpaid debt following the publication of the forty-­t wo-­line Bible. Fust won the suit and seized Gutenberg’s printing operation, using it to produce the Psalter in partnership with his adopted son, Peter Schoeffer. As is the case for many early printed books, the Mainz Psalter still looks strikingly like a manuscript book.106 All surviving copies and fragments are printed not on paper but on more costly vellum, and the text is printed in multiple colors (a complex and time-­consuming process) with large blue and red capital letters that imitate contemporary manuscript aesthetics. Moreover, some portions of the text are produced by hand, including certain capital letters and musical scores that accompany the psalms. The “beautifully even” hand of the scribe that wrote this section so closely resembles the textura type found elsewhere in the Psalter that it has been suggested as its model, or exemplar.107 It is not until we reach the colophon—that moment where the book turns back to reflect on itself as a technical and material object—that we discover the “revolutionary” difference between the Mainz Psalter and other books. Seven lines of Latin prose in red type read: The present copy of the Psalms, adorned with beauty of capital letters, and sufficiently marked out with rubrics, has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and lettering without any driving of the pen, And to the worship of God has been diligently



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brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord 1457, on the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption. (Presens spalmorum [sic, for “psalmorum”] codex venustate capitalium decoratus Rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus, Adinuentione artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi absque calami vlla exaracione sic effigiatus, Et ad eusebiam dei industrie est consummatus, Per Johannem fust ciuem maguntinum, Et Petrum Schoffer de Gernsz­ heim Anno domini Millesimo.cccc.lvij In vigilia Assumpcionis.)108 Like its scribal predecessors, this colophon documents the facts of the book’s production: the contents, the date it was finished, and the names of the men who “diligently brought [it] to completion.” However, this book announces itself as the product of a new way of writing. In the absence of an established technical lexicon,109 the printers improvise a Latin vocabulary to describe their book’s innovative production method: imprimendi (from imprimere, to print, imprint, impress, stamp) and caracterizandi (from character, a shape, letter, mark, brand, stamp, character, type, etc.).110 Imprimendi designates the action of the wooden screw press and the impression made by type on the page, while caracterizandi evokes the new importance of the individual “character” in print production. In this way, the very first print colophon announces the arrival of a new species of trace and a new specter of writing: that of metal stamped on the page, the “artificial” invention, the machine that writes without any human hand. Emerging media exhibit two apparently contradictory tendencies: they tend to reproduce the “practices, formats, and deep assumptions of their predecessors,” while also drawing attention to their novelty and foregrounding the features that distinguish them from existing media.111 Despite the striking formal and aesthetic continuity between the Mainz Psalter and its manuscript contemporaries, Fust and Schoeffer take pains to distinguish printing by marking its process as artificiosa. This Latin term characterizes printing as “ingenious,” “skilled,” or “technical,” but it also suggests its status as “artificial” or “unnatural” with respect to manuscript production. The existing method of copying a text by hand was far from “unskilled” and certainly not “natural.” Not only was the sophisticated technicity of copying widely represented in scribal portraits and colophons, but one of the printers of the Mainz colophon, Peter Schoeffer, had trained as a scribe in Paris before learning printing techniques with Gutenberg and setting up shop with Fust. The word artificiosa marks, I

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suggest, a perceived break with the writing hand and its mode of instrumentality, what we might call its instrumental program. The phrase that immediately follows further opens this break: absque calami vlla exaracione, “without any driving of the pen.” Instead of the features that printers will soon promote—speed, efficiency, correctness, beauty, and so on—Fust and Schoeffer define printing in this first moment by way of the absence of scribal tools. This absence may be read as an implicit overcoming: a simultaneous overcoming of the pen, the hand, and the technological history of writing up to that point. This is writing without writing—or a techno-­fantasy— insofar as the activity of “writing” had heretofore been defined by the movement of the hand and its grasping of instruments. Before printing, there is no such thing as “manuscript,” a writing specific to the hand: all “writing” is handwriting. As Alfred Pollard notes in his Essay on Colophons, absque calami vlla exaracione jumbles together different instruments: calamus is properly a reed pen but could also be used to describe a quill;112 exaracione refers to the scratching action of a stylus on a wax tablet.113 Ancient and modern instruments and different writing surfaces converge indiscriminately in this inelegant phrase, only to be displaced and surpassed by the artificiosa invention. Indeed, like the term artificiosa, the formula absque calami vlla exaracione here marks above all the perceived historico-­phenomenological difference between old and new media. In the same gesture, it offers printing as a technological marvel that surpasses common experience and understanding, catapulting the reader of this book of Psalms into the realm of faith: how is it possible that a text was copied “without any driving of the pen”? This quality will soon be echoed in the commonplace of printing as a “divine” art. And, although book historians have shown that the Mainz Psalter was produced using painstaking techniques (a fact also suggested by the reference to the “diligent” completion of the book by the printers), absque calami vlla exaracione evokes an overcoming of the scribe’s labor; the term exaracione is not just the action of a stylus marking a tablet but also the plowing of the field. In a narrative that will become a recurrent theme of printers’ colophons—and, later, a cliché of technological modernity—printing emerges as the triumph of technical skill over manual toil, a replacement of brute labor by the ingenious machine. The divine activity in question would be handless writing, “writing while keeping your hands in your pockets,” a form of inscription that transcends the human body and human history.114 Fust and Schoeffer’s formula made an impact. Variations on it can be found in numerous other colophons from the incunable era, spreading from Mainz



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like a new media meme.115 We have already seen it being used by Guillaume Fichet in Paris in 1470. This repetition, especially beyond Mainz, suggests that the rhetoric of printing spreads alongside the new medium’s techniques (an unsurprising phenomenon, perhaps, given that the role of the medium is precisely to reproduce language), reproducing its technological imaginary with each printed volume.116 In 1473, seventeen years after the Mainz Psalter, the ­ex-­scribe Peter Schoeffer can still be found churning out the formula he helped originate, boasting that his printed book was made “not by the writing of a reed, but skillfully put together from the tips of characters.”117 If printing marks a rupture in relation to the history of writing, it also breaks the “flow” of writing. This flow-­breaking feature of Gutenberg’s invention is signaled in the variation on the Fust-­Schoeffer formula we saw earlier in this chapter by John of Westphalia, who writes in 1475 that his book was completed “not with the flowing pen, but by a most modern technique of lettering” (non fluviali calamo sed arte quadam caracterizandi modernissima).118 With its metal characters and moving mechanical parts, printing operates by breaking up writing.119 The printer is a fragmenter, an intensifier of the cuts that constitute language from the start.120 The fact that Donatus’s elementary grammar, the Ars Minor, was one of the most popular early printed texts—over 300 incunable editions were printed, some preceding the Gutenberg Bible—could be viewed as a testament to this function.121 The brief and popular Ars Minor would have been a practical and sound economic choice for trying out mechanical writing; it was the most widely distributed schoolbook of the fifteenth century.122 But Donatus’s little grammar is also a book that models for the printer how to mechanize language. Its text begins: “How many parts of speech are there? Eight. What are they? Noun, pronoun, verb, [etc.].” Printing, like grammar, operates by breaking language into its component parts and by creating types. Printing acts, we could say, as a mechanical extension of the ancient linguistic technology of grammar. Its metal letters (grammata) are grammatizing. “Grammatization” is indeed the term used by Bernard Stiegler, who, drawing on Derrida’s work in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, theorizes the process by which technology in general creates breaks in that which was previously continuous or considered “natural.” Grammatization cuts. Stiegler defines this term as the historical process “whereby the currents and continuities shaping our lives become discrete elements.”123 The invention of writing, which “break[s] into discrete elements the flux of speech,” would be a key stage in the history of grammatization—which is also for Stiegler the history of human memory, subject to ever-­increasing externalization and prostheticization.124 By further

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breaking the (already broken) “flux” of handwriting into ever more discrete parts, printing would constitute a major stage in the history of grammatization. Gutenberg’s individual metal characters break into and accelerate human history. In the case of the Mainz Psalter colophon, this discretization can be palpably discerned in a typographical breakdown in the first two words. The colophon, which intends to announce “this present copy of the Psalms,” reads: Presens spalmorum. If this second word looks strange even to a non-­Latinist eye, it is because its first two letters are reversed: the correct text should read psalmorum (“of the Psalms”). The fact that this is indeed an error and not a deliberate (however inexplicable) orthographic choice is confirmed by the fact that Fust and Schoeffer’s second edition of the Psalter in 1459 repeats the colophon with some minor additions, but corrects this word so that it reads “Psalmorum.” What is most striking about this error is that it is one a scribe is unlikely to make, since it would seem to result not from an omitted or a misread word but rather from a typesetting malfunction on the part of the compositor. In many ways, the compositor resembles the scribe as he sits before a text to be copied. But the scribe’s slanted desk is replaced in the print shop by a case of metal type with individual compartments for each character. The left hand that held the knife now holds the composing stick, while the right hand, which held the quill, selects individual sorts one at a time and places them in the stick, left to right and upside down, in mirror image. The compositor’s hand, in contrast to the continuous action of the scribal hand, “operates in a series of discrete movements” as it retrieves characters from the finite number of compartments arranged in a rectangular receptacle.125 The logistics of printing and the (cultural, economic) demand for speed require an increasing automation of this movement. “To work really fast a compositor has to handle the letters without pausing or looking: he has to become an automaton, just like the modern typist at the keyboard.”126 One Venetian colophon from 1490 asks the reader to forgive precisely the type of error found in the Mainz colophon and distinguishes it from the conventional errors of manuscript: “Studious reader, if by chance you find a stumbling-­bock in any alteration, transposal, inversion, or omission of letters, ascribe it not to carelessness, but to the difficulty of correction, since you find that none of the words have been omitted.”127 However much the Mainz Psalter may otherwise resemble a handwritten text, this error in the colophon tells us—before we even arrive at that influential formula—that this text was produced not with the fluid movement of the pen, but one letter at a time, upside down in the composing stick. Absque calami vlla exaracione means:



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printing breaks language; printing breaks the (already articulated, technological) hand, which is now ordered to grasp repeatedly—automatically, quasi-­ mechanically—for each metal letter, one by one, until the job is done.128 This would be the other “organization of the cut” introduced by printing technology.

Residual Hands At the moment of its introduction, printing appears as a historical successor and rival to the writing hand. In this sense, the incunabula period could be said to constitute the inaugural “new media” moment of modernity. In their colophons, early printers produce the “economic and cultural orientation toward novelty and innovation” that will become characteristic of modern media. The value of printing in this emergent moment derives in large part from a sense of historical rupture, a fetishization of novelty, and the imagined obsolescence of old technologies (the hand, quill, reed, etc.). But printing does not for all that render handwriting obsolete; to paraphrase Friedrich Kittler, it assigns it other places in the media system. Writing by hand actually increased in the sixteenth century, as Peter Stallybrass and others have shown, and it is well known that manuscripts continued to circulate alongside printed books for hundreds of years in many countries. Scholars today are increasingly looking to highlight the complexities of the relationships between handwritten and printed text and to complicate the idea that print simply replaces manuscript. This narrative of obsolescence tends to obscure the ways in which print can “generate, sustain, and organize handwriting.”129 The totalizing revolution of printing—like much of the discourse surrounding “new media” today—is at least as much myth as reality. Printing effects a shift in the cultural status of handwriting from “dominant” to “residual” media practice. The terminology of “emergent,” “dominant,” “residual,” and “archaic” has been borrowed by media historians from the work of the Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams to describe the temporal lags, overlaps, discontinuities, and lacunae of media history.130 In contrast to the archaic, which is “wholly recognized as an element of the past,” the category of the residual reflects the fact that “some experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formations.” Manuscript by the end of the fifteenth century becomes a residual media practice in the sense that it was “effectively formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process.” Even as printing becomes the dominant

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technology for copying texts, handwriting is still active “as an effective element of the present.”131 In 1528, the Dutch humanist Erasmus observes that “now, with the existence of printing, it has come about that some scholars never write at all.”132 Erasmus notes, however, that writing a letter by hand can for that very reason “add a note of conviction” or an “element of pleasure” for the reader. Handwriting, in this new media system, becomes a mark of affection, a bearer of presence, and a trace of the voice: “Why, even when we get letters in their own hand from friends and fellow-­scholars, how we welcome them and seem to be listening to their very voices and to be looking at them face to face.”133 The hand persists, despite its symbolic amputation by Gutenberg’s machinery. In the printer’s workshop, hands will actually multiply as they are cut up and cut off: the scribe’s two hands become the six hands of the print workers who reproduce texts by mechanical means. Yet in this multiplication, we are no longer dealing with the same hand.134 This process can be witnessed vividly by juxtaposing the portrait miniature of Jean Miélot (see Figure 4) with the iconic mark of the Parisian printer Josse Bade, which first appeared in 1507 and is among the earliest pictorial representations of printing (Figure 5). In this woodcut, we see the three typical print workers: at the far right is the compositor pulling type from the case in front of him and placing it into the composing stick; to the immediate left of the press, in the background, is the beater, whose job is to ink the type using the two leather-­covered ink balls he holds in both hands; at the far left is the puller, who moves the inked type and paper under the press by turning the wheel with his left hand, while with his right hand he pulls the bar that makes the impression on the page. In the portrait of Miélot, as noted earlier, the scribe’s hand—that synecdoche of the human—is at the center of the composition, each instrument of manuscript production orbiting it and affirming its status as the ur-­instrument. In the woodcut, by contrast, the machine has moved to the center as the dominant instrument; indeed, it has become the subject of the portrait. But there is another, unseen subject here: the master printer Josse Bade whose presence is made known via the inscription at the center of the woodcut, which is printed with type on the figure of the press: Prelum Ascensianum. This inscription marks the machine, the prelum (a wine or oil press in antiquity), as belonging to the master printer who was sometimes called “Badius Ascensius” after his hometown of Asse. Prelum Ascensianum tells the buyer or reader that the one who calls himself printer is not the man who operates the machine but the one who invests the capital and owns the means of production, even though (or precisely because) his own hands appear nowhere in

Figure 5. Printer’s mark of Josse Bade. Guillaume Budé, De Asse (Paris: Josse Bade, 1514), Title Page [A1r]. Oversize 2991.217q. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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the woodcut. This inscription announces a structural reorganization of the economy of writing that comes with mechanization, while also producing a curious confusion between the master printer and the machinery that bears his name. The machine is the master here, the machine itself is the “printer” in a presage of the way that term will come to be used in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries to designate not an industrious artisan or even an investor of capital but a piece of mundane office equipment.135 Meanwhile, the three human workers (and their six hands) move to the margins, practically pushed out of the frame of the woodcut; indeed, no single body can be seen in its entirety. Hands continue to be instrumental and necessary—each one accomplishing a different task with a different set of tools, exercising an Aristotelian multifunctionality—but they have become secondary to the mechanism of the press and the master printer’s capital. Printing technology itself becomes the new “instrument of instruments.” Most remarkably, perhaps, the multiplication of figures and hands represents a veritable dismemberment of the scribe as each print worker takes on one of the artisan’s old functions. The mechanization of writing via movable type, which breaks language into its alphabetic parts, likewise fragments the writing body and its gestures. As we have seen, the print worker who most obviously resembles the old figure of the scribe is the compositor sitting before the copy and arranging text. But the puller, too, recalls Miélot: occupying the foreground and sporting a pouch for tools, his body inclines away from the press as he pulls the bar, just as the scribe’s body inclines toward his writing surface. If the beater in the background least resembles the scribe, he calls to mind the fact that a single gesture of the scribal hand—dipping the quill into the inkwell—has now been assigned to one worker as his primary task. The printing press, this image suggests, multiplies hands in much the same way it multiplies texts, by isolating their functions, augmenting their own repetitive actions, and intensifying the extent to which the writing body is itself mechanized. The multiplication does not stop there; it also operates in Bade’s woodcut itself: while the portrait miniature of Jean Miélot and the manuscript text in which it is found are unique works, now housed in the Royal Library in Brussels, the woodcut printer’s mark was reproduced many thousands of times on the title pages of Bade’s editions between 1507 and 1519 that are now disseminated throughout the world. This woodcut was his mark, the icon of his brand, and the sign that the book had become a new kind of commodity in a burgeoning capitalist mode of production. The scribe’s hands are multiplied not just three times but over and over again as long as the woodcut lasts—reproduced



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identically, hundreds of times a day, “more quickly than asparagus is cooked,” in a process that will fundamentally alter the production of time, space, and language.136 This is the hand in the age of mechanical reproduction. Miélot, for his part, never lived to see this transformation occur; he died in 1472, two years before the first presses arrived at the seats of the Burgundian court in Bruges and Leuven, where the printer John of Westphalia will soon declare that he no longer writes books “with the flowing pen” but “with the help of the industrious technique of printing.”137 If writing is not yet fully automatized here, we can glimpse on the horizon what André Leroi-­Gourhan identifies as the most recent “stage” in the evolution of the hand—a manual “regression” and new “liberation” of the hand—in which the organ “is used to set off a programmed process in automatic machines that not only exteriorize tools, gestures, and mobility but whose effect also spills over into memory and mechanical behavior.”138 A prototype for this stage of the hand is developed, familiarized, and spread across the globe by Gutenberg’s technology. Yet Leroi-­Gourhan himself recognizes that printing remains somehow within the regime of the hand. Writing in 1965, Leroi-­Gourhan predicts a future technological universe in which books will have been replaced by a “preselected and instantaneously reconstituted information . . . delivered by a huge magnetic storage facility with electronic selection.”139 Reading will persist for centuries, he anticipates, but writing is “probably doomed to disappear rapidly” as part of the “general phenomenon of manual regression.”140 Yet this disappearance of writing—and, with it, philosophy and literature as we know them—is “not especially to be regretted” in Leroi-­Gourhan’s estimation, “since the curiously archaic forms employed by thinking human beings during the period of alphabetical graphism will be preserved in print.”141 A century and a half after the first generation of printers’ colophons appear, the prosthetic function of printing and an attendant manual regression are foregrounded in a description of printing from Étienne Binet’s popular 1621 tome Essay des merveilles de nature, et des plus nobles artifices. Binet plays on Polydore Vergil’s seminal representation of printing to proclaim that the universe can now be populated with an “infinite” number (une infinité) of perfect books, thanks to the press that “runs so easily” (roule si aisément) through a series of mechanical gestures and “just one turn of the arm” (un seul tour de bras): “Just one man in one day will do more work, without making a single error, almost as if playing, in all kinds of languages and professions, simply by pulling, pushing, and inking the Letters in the chassis, and with just one turn of the arm, than a hundred men would have been able to do together in the past,

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making a thousand errors, with which they corrupted ancient manuscripts” (Vn seul homme en vn iour fera plus de besongne, sans faire nulle faute, & quasi se ioüant, en toutes sortes de Langues & de professions, ne faisant que tirer, pousser, & enyurer les lettres enchassées, & d’vn seul tour de bras, que cent hommes iadis n’eussent sçeu faire ensemble, en faisant mille fautes dont ils ont corrompu les manuscrits.)142 Polydore Vergil had predicted in the late fifteenth century that the “wonder” of printing was “destined . . . gradually to become somewhat commonplace”; for Binet that day has arrived. Printing, he declares, is a “familiar miracle” (miracle familier) but also something of a paradox: the very “facility” that makes printing so miraculous is also what has “taken away our astonishment” at it. “Because the thing is ordinary, it no longer seems admirable.”143 This tendency toward a dwindling astonishment is precisely why it is necessary to return to moments when technologies were new: before they became “ordinary,” before the prosthesis seemed natural. It is to another such moment in 1529 that we now turn, as the hand of brass reaches out to touch the tongue.

Chapter 3

Teleprinting Geoffroy Tory and the Gallic Hercules

O Devoted Lovers of good Letters! Would to God that some Noble heart would apply himself to ordering and regulating our French Language! —Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury, “Aux Lecteurs de ce Present Livre humble Salut” . . . (for every language is a tele-­technics). —Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

The Teleprinter The prefix tele-­comes to us from the Greek têle, meaning “at a distance, far off, far away, far from.” Technologies marked as “tele” seem to overcome or even abolish physical and temporal distance: they make what is far away (têle) near; they make the remote or the past into a part of the here and now. The lenses of the telescope, the wires and code of the telegram, the television satellite system, or the data packets traveling the global network of the Internet are all tele-­ techniques that produce new effects of proximity and intimacy, even as they also provoke other effects of expropriation and disconnect. Indeed, as we shall see, the trademark of technologies marked by the tele-­is this strange coexistence of near and far, present and past, living and dead. Teletechnology means the voice of the other is just a phone call away, and yet this voice comes to me—right in my ear—as a long-­distance ghost.

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Derrida suggests in Specters of Marx that teletechnologies—a neologism that, as we saw in the Prologue, seems to designate both a specificity of modern media and something already at work in “old” technologies like writing—are spectral and spectralizing. The space and time they produce are not those of a “living present.” Like writing, they must be thought not according to classical ontology, with its oppositions of being and nonbeing or presence and absence, for example, but rather according to what Derrida calls a “hauntology.” “The medium of the media themselves (news, the press, telecommunications, techno-­ tele-­discursivity . . .),” he writes, “is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death.”1 For Derrida, the spectralized space produced by teletechnological media is also a political space; teletechnologies are what “assure and determine the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political.”2 Several pages later in the same text, Derrida salutes Marx for having recognized an originary technicity in language, to which he quickly adds the tele-­prefix: “Marx is one of the rare thinkers of the past to have taken seriously, at least in its principle, the originary indissociability of technics and language, and thus of tele-­technics (for every language is a teletechnics).”3 To affirm language—every language—as a teletechnics means to affirm that the medium of language, too, is caught up from the start in the hauntological situation that we find in modern media culture. Language, too, produces specters, and cannot be thought according to the essence of life or of death; language as teletechnics can only be a living-­dead tongue. Likewise, whatever political space language and its teletechnics (re)produce—for instance, the proto-­national space generated by vernacular print-­languages in the sixteenth century—will be similarly haunted and out of joint. The tele-­that Derrida attaches to the technicity of language travels along a wire of media history, from telescope and telegram to telephone, television, and telecommunications. It also marks the teleprinter, a now largely defunct piece of twentieth-­century office equipment that was used to send and receive typed messages over wires similar to telegraph or telephone lines. Before the advent of the fax machine or networked computers, teleprinters allowed for nearly instantaneous point-­to-­point or point-­to-­multipoint communication of text messages via telex and other networks. Mid-­twentieth-­century teleprinters resembled electric typewriters with telephones, paper-­tape reels, or (later) monitors built in. Also known as teletype machines (or, in French, as téléscripteurs), teleprinters were used for official purposes like military communication and air

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traffic control, but they also were used to connect businesses and to deliver news to newsrooms. With a teleprinter, it was possible to connect in “real time” with the intimacy of a tête-­à-­tête: sender and recipient could type on their respective keyboards and the characters would be immediately printed on the distant typewriter. Alternatively, using the point-­to-­multipoint system, a single sender could transmit a message across the wire to any number of teleprinters simultaneously, relaying text to far-­off machines all typing simultaneously with phantom hands. For those with hearing or speech difficulties, a style of teletype machine known as TDD, or telecommunications device for the deaf, came into standard use, substituting for the telephone and functioning as a kind of prosthetic ear and mouthpiece. Such devices would point to the underlying teletechnological affinity between the teleprinter and the telephone. More important, they would suggest that the teleprinter always engages prosthetically with the ear/voice apparatus, intervening and producing ghostly echoes in the circuit of speech: the privileged circuit of phone and logos, of the system of hearing-­oneself-­speak. As we saw in Chapter 1, in this system the signifier and signified stick together in the time of the breath. I want to hear myself speak because this is where presence happens: I speak and hear myself, seemingly without passing through any externality; speech offers me the appearance of a pure interiority and direct access to thought (thus the essential intimacy of phonocentrism and logocentrism). The link between the voice and the ear would seem to be essential, indissociable. As Geoffroy Tory, the sixteenth-­century printer who is the focus of this chapter, puts it: “la langue a acointance a loreille,” that is, the tongue has a familiar, intimate relationship, a closeness or friendship, with the ear.4 This intimate relationship is what the teleprinter—and before it the printing press, since every printer is a teleprinter—both promises and disturbs as it stretches the acointance of tongue and ear in space and time with its typographical prosthesis, magnifying the hauntological effects of language as it goes. French vernacular printing, I suggest in this chapter, emerges in 1529 with Tory’s Champ fleury as teleprinting. The contemporary figure for this technological “turn”—the figure that singularly illustrates the teletechnological imaginary of an emergent French vernacular print culture—will be the Gallic Hercules, the mythical demigod who leads his people by means of a golden chain that attaches to their ears and pierces his own tongue. For the teleprinter is a prosthetic tongue. Or, rather, it acts as a prosthesis for the entire voice/ear apparatus, opening and exposing its system to the

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technological other. A vintage (1986) advertisement for an Olivetti model TE 500 E teleprinter, featuring the curiously Heideggerian tagline “Olivetti Telecommunications: The Ways of Thinking” (Telecomunicazioni Olivetti: Le Vie del Pensiero), shows an image of the latest teleprinting machine at the bottom and, at the top, a young boy standing on the beach holding a conch shell to his ear (Figure 6). The image seems to suggest that through the teleprinter we tend an ear—that uniquely susceptible organ, the opening onto language, and the “most open organ [that] the infant cannot close,” as both Derrida and Freud remind us—and make ourselves the receivers of echoes from elsewhere, the oceanic and perhaps maternal echoes of the conch whose own form appears as the ear’s uncanny double.5 Insofar as it receives and types out the characters transmitted to it across the wire, the teleprinter itself acts as the uncanny double of an ear that is already uncanny (“Uncanny is what it is; double is what it can become,” writes Derrida of the ear in his Ear of the Other). And insofar as this electromechanical machine transmits—wires extending from it and carrying its text into the distance—the teleprinter redoubles and re-­marks that originary cut in the tongue with its typing and its paper tape. With its alphabetic teletransmission, the teleprinter plugs into and interrupts the ear/voice circuit, simultaneously extending and disrupting it in much the way Avital Ronell suggests the telephone does by engaging the hand—the hand that dials, answers, and holds the phone—in the act of speaking. Bringing the hand, which is classically meant to write—the hand as technē, as we have seen—to the mouth in order to speak creates what Ronell describes as a “new complicity” that “invades the boundaries marking the essential relationship of writing to speech.”6 As the hand grasps the telephone, attaching itself prosthetically “to the voice/ear couple,” it “disturb[s] the domestic tranquility of a strict logocentricity”; the telephonic hand “slams down on the house of logos.” 7 The same will be true, I want to suggest, of the prosthetic ear and tongue of vernacular teleprinting, which simultaneously opens and short-­circuits phonocentric “ways of thinking” and cuts new technological paths for language. Vernacular printing will place the tongue under the sign of the tele, intensifying what is always already (as Derrida suggests) teletechnological in language. Just as printing unleashes in writing a mechanical iterability it already possesses (what we have called arche-­printing), it will also, and in the same stroke, unlock teletechnicity within vernacular language, restructuring it in such a way as to dramatically extend its reach, accelerate its transmission, and intensify its haunting effects. This unlocking “begins” in 1529 with a call.

Figure 6. Advertisement for the Olivetti TE 500 E teleprinter, developed by Olteco (Olivetti Telecomunicazioni) in 1986. Courtesy of the Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti, Ivrea, Italy.

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Tory’s Call Several years before the first vernacular grammars and dictionaries appear in France, before the first accents, orthographic reforms, or defenses and illustrations, Geoffroy Tory’s Champ fleury calls on French readers to rethink vernacular language typographically. William Ivins heralded it in 1920 as “one of the most important books ever issued in French,”8 but he notes that despite its “great influence,” Champ fleury had “almost completely faded from the memories of all men except bibliophiles and philologists.”9 In many histories of the French language, including Brunot’s Histoire, Tory’s book appears a seminal articulation of vernacular advocacy, and thus a forerunner to Joachim Du Bellay’s better-­known Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse published two decades later. Tory has also long been known for his role as the first imprimeur du roy under François I and, as Ivins alludes to, as the printer who introduced a number of accents, punctuation, and diacritical marks still in use in French today (e.g., the cedilla, the apostrophe, the comma). In recent decades, Tory has become the object of renewed scholarly attention, starting with Tom Conley’s pathbreaking readings of Champ fleury in the Self-­Made Map and The Graphic Unconscious.10 A 2011 exhibition at the Musée national de la Renaissance in Écouen and its accompanying catalog helped consolidate Tory’s status as a major figure of the French Renaissance. Champ fleury is first and foremost a grammatological treatise. It is concerned with the “art and science of letters”: exploring the history of the alphabet; interpreting the allegorical significance of letter shapes in relation to the human body and the liberal arts; affirming that the shapes of letters are proof, in Conley’s words, “of the universal design of sound and figure and of the perfect analogy of writing to the human body and the cosmos”; establishing fixed forms and proportions for Roman majuscules on a square grid; teaching readers the proper “fashioning” (la facon) of these characters using a ruler and compass; providing rules for proper pronunciation of each letter; and, to start, encouraging the grammatization of the French vernacular tongue—setting it to “rule” and “order.”11 We might, then, add to the roster of Tory’s inaugural gestures his status as the first grammatologist of the French language. The royal privilege for Champ fleury, issued for the unusually long period of ten years, identifies its author as “our dear and much loved master Geoffroy Tory of Bourges, bookseller residing in Paris” (nostre cher & bien ame maistre Geoffroy Tory de Bourges, libraire demourant a Paris). Tory (c. 1480–1533) was a humanist scholar, teacher, author, engraver, bookseller, printer, and, for a short period between

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1531 and his death, France’s first royal printer.12 Born in Bourges around 1480, Tory issued from what he describes in Champ fleury as “an unimportant and humble family.”13 Despite these modest origins, Tory was able to pursue university studies in Bourges, after which he traveled to Italy and studied with renowned Latinists in Rome and Bologna. By 1505 or 1506, Tory was back in France working as corrector and editor in the shops of some of the most important printers in Paris, including Gilles de Gourmont and Henri Estienne. He oversaw several noteworthy editions, including a Quintilian, three ancient geographical texts, and Alberti’s De re aedificatoria. During this same period, he took on positions teaching grammar and philosophy at the Collège du Plessis, the Collège de Bourgogne, and the Collège de Coqueret. Tory left Paris and returned to Italy around 1515, possibly motivated by the increasing attacks on Parisian humanists by more conservative academic factions, or possibly, as Timothy Reiss suggests, “to return to the source of so much of [his] thinking.”14 Once back in Paris, by early 1523, Tory signed a lease on premises for his own bookshop, which he established under the sign of the Pot cassé, or “broken pot.” That same year, he began work on Champ fleury, the idea for which came to him early one morning as a “fantasy.” Between 1523 and 1529, when Champ fleury finally appeared, Tory published celebrated Books of Hours that modernized the Parisian genre with a humanist and an Italianate sensibility. During this same period, he worked in the print shop of Simon de Colines, who was not only an important printer but also a prolific punchcutter “at the vanguard in the modernization of French typographical style.”15 By the time he published Champ fleury in 1529, Tory was thus well versed in both the technical and theoretical dimensions of humanist printing. Although he likely oversaw the production of Champ fleury, Tory did not print it himself and did not yet possess the means to do so. He did, however, engrave a portion of its numerous woodcuts and sell the book at his librairie on the Petit Pont. Following the publication of Champ fleury, Tory set up his own print shop and received his appointment as imprimeur du roy from François I. This honor would seem to recognize less Tory’s accomplishments as a printer (since his operation was brand new) than his vision for the French language in print—a vision that would quickly be appropriated by the Valois monarch as part of a new cultural politics of the vernacular. The period between the publication of Champ fleury in 1529 and Tory’s death in 1533 saw several landmark publications that put his proposed orthotypographical reforms into practice, most notably his edition of Clément Marot’s Adolescence Clémentine, which featured the first systematic use of the cedilla (ç), the acute accent over the e (é), and the apostrophe to mark elision.

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Champ fleury is not only a theoretical treatise on letters but also a how-­to manual. Books II and III are dedicated to Tory’s visual layouts of Roman (or “Attic,” as Tory calls them) capital letters, which Tory maps onto the human body and face according to what he claims are their original proportions, followed by precise, step-­by-­step instructions on how to craft each letter according to geometric principles (Figure 7). Each letter of the alphabet is rationalized and rendered exactly repeatable, as Tory methodically shows the reader where to place the compass and specifies how many turns are required to produce the desired form. The spatial mechanism that ensures exact repeatability is the 10x10 grid, the units of which Tory refers to as “bodies” (corps). “And when you will have the pleasure of making Attic letters,” Tory instructs the would­be typographer, “you must before anything else establish a Square according to the height you wish to make them, then mark a cross in the middle, and then the other lines on one side and the other in equidistant measure, such that the Square is equally divided.” (Et notez, que quant vous viendra a plaisir vouloir faire lettre Attique, debvez avant toute chose, constituer ung Quarre selon la haulteur que la pretendez faire, puis y signer une croix au mylieu, & consequemment les aultres lignes tant d’ung coste que daultre en equidistante mesure, en sorte que ledict Quarre soit esgallement divise.)16 With this system, as Tom Conley suggests, “the printed page becomes a ground that can be subject to geometric operations; it can be gridded, fashioned into prototypes of pixels, coordinated, graphed, and even navigated.”17 Within the space of this grid, letter bodies and human bodies co-­emerge as technologically reproducible, organizable, and modulatable, as well as extendable in space and time. As Conley argues, the grid with its X at the center implies a “cartographic logic of extension”—the square can be as large or small as you wish your letters to be—which will take on for Tory both spatial and historico-­ temporal dimensions.18 The grid allows for a perspectival projection that opens onto a national French space while simultaneously looking back to an illustrious ancient past and forward to an even more illustrious vernacular future. Inherent in Tory’s typographical project and his “digitized treatment of space,” then, we can already detect both something of the teletechnological and something of the prosthetic.19 Indeed, inside the pixelated space of the grid, the human is articulated with the typographical character according to an originary prosthetic relation that would constitute the “proper and true proportion of Letter” (deue & vraye Proportion des Lettres) (Figure 8).20 For Tory, the human is arche-­t yped.

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Figure 7. “La Lettre F” (The Letter F). Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 40v. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

The typographical project of Books II and III is opened in Champ fleury by another technological initiative: the project to “regulate” and “order” the French language. Tory announces this undertaking in Book I, which he describes as an “Exhortation to set and order the French Tongue to certain Rule of speaking elegantly in good and sounder French Language” (Exhortation a mettre & ordonner la Langue  Francoise par certaine Reigle de parler elegamment en bon & plussain Langage Francois).21 With this “exhortation,” Champ fleury places a collective call to French readers to come intervene in the history of their language. If the printed book with its reproducible text and magnified readership already functions as a teletechnology through which such a call can be placed (as the very presence of Tory’s “exhortation” implies), what Tory calls for is precisely the collective manufacturing of conditions that would amplify this teletechnological potential. Tory wants to make the French language travel farther and longer, with higher fidelity sound, resonating through the apparatus of press-­book-­tongue-­ear; he wants to dial up the tele in the vernacular language. Tory makes this project clear in an opening epistle to his readers, hailing them with a French Salut! (“Aux Lecteurs de ce Present Livre humble Salut”) and entreating them to take the tele-­future of their language in hand:

Figure 8. “Lettres Attiques accordent en proportion au corps humain” (Attic Letters agree proportionally with the human body). Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 18r. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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O Devoted Lovers of good Letters! Would to God that some Noble heart apply himself to setting down and ordering by Rule our French Language! This would be a means for many thousands of men to strive to use beautiful and good speech! If it is not set down and ordered, one will find that every fifty years the French language will, for the most part, be changed and perverted. (O Devotz Amateurs de bonnes Lettres! Pleust a Dieu que quelque Noble cueur semployast a mettre & ordonner par Reigle nostre Langage Francois! Ce seroit moyen que maints Milliers dhommes se everturoient a souvent user de belles & bonnes parolles! Sil ny est mys & ordonne / on trouvera que de Cinquante Ans en Cinquante Ans la La [sic] langue Francoise, pour la plus grande part, sera changee & pervertie.)22 Tory places his readers at a critical juncture. If they do not act, French will continue to be “changed and perverted”; it will die the death of most vernaculars, limited in its geographic reach and bound historically to the mortal bodies of its speakers. But if they intervene in the life of the vernacular by “ordering” it artificially, the French language will survive, even as, or precisely because, it introduces technological “rule” into the tongue. Another kind of death—the “death” of technics as difference, repetition, and alterity—must be introduced in order to preserve the life of language, to maintain its presence. In the same way that typographical tools (the grid, ruler, and compass) allow Tory’s letter designs to be exactly repeated in the hands of future typographers, grammatical “order” and “rule” promise to fabricate a prosthetic iterability that will reproduce the French language, mechanically, first in the mouths of “many thousands of men” across France, then on into the future, past the fifty-­year life span that threatens to “change” and “pervert” the language with each successive generation. To “set down and order by Rule our French Language” means opening these teletechnological horizons for the vernacular. This opening is radical for Tory: it marks the possibility of an event, a “birth,” that will transform the tongue. “I would have reason to lament the sterility of our hands,” he writes, “but I hope that, God willing, some Noble Priscian, some Donatus, or some French Quintilian will quickly be born.” (Iaurois couleur de deplorer la sterilite de noz mains, mais iespere q[ue] au plaisir de Dieu quelque Noble Priscian / quel que Donat, ou quelque Qintilien Francois / naistra de Bref.)23 The here and now of 1529 appears to Tory as a period of historical infancy for the French vernacular,

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a techno-­birthdate. This does not mean that the French past disappears entirely; he will cite numerous vernacular texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in addition to ancient authors, and he will take stock of the ways in which the “language of today” (le langage dauiourdhuy) differs from the French of “fifty or so years ago”—which he refers to, in a distinct echo of the humanist philological categories we saw in Chapter 1, as langage ancien, “old” or “ancient” language.24 Tory’s auiourdhuy, the “today” of his writing, represents for him a moment of rupture, urgency, and transformation: a moment when the future of French can and must be reinvented. He places his call for technological reinvention here in 1529; over the following decades, it will be echoed and repeated in varying iterations by printers and writers like Étienne Dolet, Jacques Peletier, and Joachim Du Bellay. We might say that, starting with Tory and his teletechnological imaginary, the vernacular “revolution” takes shape as a concern for the survival of the vernacular. As we have seen, historicity and technicity are intertwined in the humanist techno-­philologico-­ontology of language: the tongue that “begins” and is “perfected” over time is also one that is manufactured, an object of technē. The survival of language emerges as a technological question: indeed, it is technics that marks the surplus of life in the sur-­vival of language, its living on. Tory’s project looks to guarantee the technical conditions by which another kind of archivization can take place; his survival requires a more radical introduction of “rule” and “order.” Tory wants a tongue that will live on by staying alive—that will seem to flourish across time and space with the natural life of his titular champ fleury. This is the virtual language he sees on the horizon of the printed page. Tory thus casts the French language off into the distance and into the future, while attaching it more forcefully than ever to the living present of a body, a voice, and a tongue. In order to understand this paradoxical operation, we will need to ask once again: what does it mean to call language a teletechnology?

* * * As we saw in the Prologue, the term “teletechnology” seems to designate for Derrida a certain, yet-­to-­be-­determined historical specificity of the media of his “today.” Bernard Stiegler, who presses Derrida to affirm and define this specificity in the Echographies of Television interviews (“What then would be the specificity of what you have recently given the name ‘teletechnology’?”), will later claim that Derrida’s teletechnologies allude to “a particular epoch of supplementarity.”25 Yet, as we know, Derrida is more cautious about delimiting such

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epochality, and Stiegler himself will open this line of questioning in Echographies of Television by recognizing that “it is possible to read you [Derrida] and to understand that writing—any form of writing—is already a kind of teletechnology.”26 What Derrida suggests may be most specific about television and other teletechnologies “today” is the vividness and force with which they reproduce a “singular, unrepeatable moment” as “live” in other moments and other contexts. Their specificity would entail not just an acceleration or amplification, that is, a quantitative increase with respect to past technologies but rather, as Derrida insists, a “structural difference” that entails a certain incommensurability in relation to that past.27 “The most vivid of possible affinities seems to be asserting itself, today, between what appears to be the most alive, most live [in English in the original], and différance or delay.”28 These are technologies that operate with what Derrida describes as “a maximum of ‘tele’ ” while also seeming to capture the “greatest intensity of ‘live’ life”: “A maximum of ‘tele,’ that is to say, of distance, lag, or delay, will convey what will continue to stay alive, or rather, the immediate image, the living image of the living: the timbre of our voices, our appearance, our gaze, the movement of our hands. . . . The greatest intensity of ‘live’ life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far away as possible. If there is a specificity, it stems from the measure of this distance, it stems from this polarity which holds together the closest and farthest away.”29 This extreme polarity of différance that holds together opposite poles—of the closest and the farthest away, the “live” and the lag—would be the hallmark of teletechnologies. They reproduce and restore as “living present” what is distant and past; they make “live” what is (and remains) dead. Indeed, one major effect of the tele is to intensify the presence of death within the “live” and the “living” as a structural condition of this life being cast off into a tele-­space and a tele-­future. The teletechnological apparatus produces an echo in the now that announces a coming death. “We know now,” says Derrida to Stiegler, “under the lights, in front of the camera, listening to the echo of our own voices, that this live moment will be able to be—that it is already—captured by the machines that will transport and perhaps show it God knows when and God knows where, we already know that death is here.”30 The teletechnological apparatus ensures that no matter when we die—even if we die right here, on camera—the moment in the recording will remain “live,” “a simulacrum of life,” even as it is borne off to the most remote time and space. In the strange non-­ontological logic of teletechnologies, the more live, the more death: “a maximum of life (the most life [le plus de vie]), but of life that already yields to death (‘no more life’ [plus de vie]), this is what becomes exportable for the

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longest possible time and across the greatest possible distance.”31 The polarity of the teletechnological turns on this plus de vie that is at once “more” or the “most life” and—in the very movement of this increase and intensification— “no more life.” The teletechnological would thus plug into and amplify in an incommensurable but never wholly “new” way the structure of life that Derrida elsewhere calls survival, living on, or “life death” (la vie la mort). From the start, life “is itself, is alive,” as Geoffrey Bennington writes, “only to the extent that it compromises its life with a principle of reserve . . . , that is also already a principle of death. .  .  . Life must reserve itself in order to preserve itself.”32 Teletechnology stretches this structure as “far” as it can go, reserving and preserving life (as) death on a virtual wire running off toward a horizon of its own making. Understood as epochally specific, Derrida’s teletechnology would seem to name a certain historical displacement of the printed book in the media landscape. And yet, as we have already seen, teletechnology, or teletechnics, also names something writing already does, and something language already is. To call language a teletechnics is to suggest that it produces virtual proximities and intimacies, that it reproduces its own specters of life, that it modulates time and space, that it participates in a structure of survival or life-­death. It also means that language has the power to act as a télécommande, or remote control, issuing desires and orders, invitations and exhortations. When Alexander Graham Bell speaks his famous first words to Thomas Watson on the other end of the telephone—“Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you”—he is relying on a certain telephonic power those words already possess. Language is already a long-­distance call to the other, and language already requires us to plug in, to put our ear to the receiver, to answer the call. What remains to be explored, then, is how printing turns up the volume on that call, how it restructures and intensifies the teletechnological force of language—both its reach in space and time and its capacity to resonate inside the receiver—in a way incommensurable with what came before.

The Herculean Tongue No figure captures both the originary teletechnicity of language and its subsequent mutation in print as vividly as the Gallic Hercules, to which we now turn. The first woodcut image to appear in Champ fleury, the Gallic Hercules launches Tory’s “exhortation” to give French order and rule; it is the icon and emblem of

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Figure 9. “Le Hercules Francois” (The French Hercules). Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 3v. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

this call (Figure 9). The myth of the Gallic Hercules, which originated in the work of the second-­century Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata, reentered the collective imagination during the first decades of the sixteenth century as an emblem of the humanist ideal of eloquence.33 In France, it gained an enormous popularity, appearing in works not only by Tory but also by Budé, Rabelais, Du Bellay, and Ronsard, as well as in emblem books by Gilles Corrozet and Barthélémy Aneau, and it became a feature of royal iconography from François I to Henri III. The humanist Gallic Hercules took on a particular iconographic force in the French context as the Hercule Gaulois, representing not only the powers of language in general but those of the French (or “Gallic”) language in particular. It comes to figure both a modern potential for the French language and its archaic force, already recognized by the ancient Greeks themselves. Indeed, from the opening pages of Tory’s Champ fleury to the closing pages of Du Bellay’s Deffence, et Illustration, the Gallic Hercules operates as the privileged myth of the vernacular movement, figuring the past and future of the French tongue. It shows this tongue extending itself, connecting to the ears of a people, reaching in, and living on. I suggest that it is also possible, then, to see in the Gallic Hercules an image of how sixteenth-­century writers like Tory imagine vernacular language as teletechnology. For this same reason, the Gallic Hercules—possessor of the most celebrated and widely circulating prosthetic tongue in sixteenth-­ century France—would be not just an emblem of eloquence or politics as is usually thought but, more subtly and also more potently, an emblem of printing, of

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its prosthetic iterability and its teletechnological effects. The prosthetic tongue of the Gallic Hercules is the tele-­tongue of print. Already in Lucian’s Heracles the Gallic Hercules is presented within a highly mediated tele-­network, related by the narrator through a game of telephone. Lucian’s narrator opens the text by reporting back to Greece, from Gaul, that “the Celts call Heracles Omigos in their native tongue, and they portray the God in a very peculiar way.”34 He goes on to describe a painting of this other Hercules that he encountered while traveling in a lengthy ekphrasis, before ­having the same image interpreted for him by a Greek-­speaking Celt who happens to be standing by. Already, then, this is a scene of travel, transfer, and translation between cultures and media in which the tele is active, transmitting across time and across tongues. But the most striking teletechnicity resides in the painting itself. In this “peculiar” image, the figure of Hercules appears not as the robust hero with which the Greek narrator is familiar but as a visibly older man, recognizable only by the characteristic lion skin he wears and the club and bow he carries. What is “most surprising” about the picture is that the Gallic Hercules “drags after him a great crowd of men who are all tethered by the ears!”35 These men are attached by “delicate chains fashioned of gold and amber,” weak enough that the men could escape, and yet they “follow cheerfully and joyously, applauding their leader and all pressing him close and keeping the leashes slack.”36 But the “strangest thing of all” is what is happening to Hercules’s tongue: “Since the painter had no place to which he could attach the ends of the chains, as the god’s right hand already held the club and his left the bow, he pierced the tip of his tongue and represented him drawing the men by that means!”37 The Celt who appears at the narrator’s side interprets the image, explaining that for them the god of eloquence is Hercules, not Hermes as it is for the Greeks, and that they “consider that the real Heracles was a wise man who achieved everything by eloquence and applied persuasion as his principal force.”38 The Gallic Hercules would thus represent the superiority of the mediated force of language—as a social or political technē, a force that acts at a distance—over the physical force exemplified by the Greek Heracles. It is this interpretation of the Gallic Hercules that will prevail in sixteenth-­century emblem books, including in Alciato’s immensely popular Emblemata (1531), where the Gallic Hercules appears under the heading “Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior” (or, as the first French translation of the Emblemata has it, “Eloquence vault mieulx que force”). This superior, mediated force operates without the hands—the paradigmatic site of technē, as we have seen—and instead technologizes the tongue. Indeed, the tongue piercing is no accident; that is, it

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is not merely because his hands are full (as the narrator ironically suggests when gazing upon the painting) that the chain attaches at this site but because of the privileged place of the tongue in the circuit of voice and ear, as Lucian’s Celtic interpreter explains: “If old Heracles here drags men after him who are tethered by the ears to his tongue, don’t be surprised at that, either: you know the kinship between ears and tongue.”39 The force of language is exercised from afar, along a chain that runs between tongue and ear according to their “kinship,” what Tory will translate, as we saw above, as their acointance (intimacy, familiarity, friendship). This force of language makes itself heard, from the mouth of the Celtic native in Gaul, through Lucian’s narrator, to his Greek reader on the receiving end. The Gallic Hercules makes its way to France through a similar set of relays. It is Tory who brings the Gallic Hercules into French: both the first French translation of Lucian’s narrative and the first French woodcut image of the mythic figure appear in the opening pages of Champ fleury.40 On the second folio, Tory copies out the long passage from Lucian: first in a Latin translation by Erasmus, then in his own vernacular translation, which is set off by quotation marks in the margins—quotation marks that make their first appearance in French here (Figure 10). The quoted passage itself, copied out from another printed book, figures in Tory’s text as the voice coming in from elsewhere; it is this teleprinted effect that the inaugural usage of the quotation marks is meant to show us. Tory’s translation makes the connection between languages and epochs, bringing the Gallic Hercules “home” to France and into French. He arrives over the line, passing from one text, one time, and one language to another. The passage concludes with the woodcut, bordered by Latin text on one side—the side of the past, the sender, the transmitting teleprinter—and French on the other side: the future, the receiver, the side that prints. And when it arrives in French, this “fiction” shows not just the force of artful language in general but the particular force—both archaic and still to come—of the French tongue in which it is spoken. “We see, then, through Lucian’s words,” writes Tory, “beneath the husk of this fiction, that our language .  .  . has such great power that it persuades more and better than Latin or Greek. The Latins and Greeks admit as much when they say that this Hercules was Gallicus, not Hercules Latinus or Hercules Graecus.” (Nous voyons doncques par les motz de Lucien soubz lescorce de ceste fiction, que nostre langage . . . a si grande efficace, quil persuade plustost / & myeulx que le latin, ne que le Grec. Les latins & les Grecs le confessent quant ilz disent que cestuy Hercules, estoit, Gallicus, non pas Hercules Latinus, ne Hercules Graecus.)41

Figure 10. The first quotation marks in a French text, marking Erasmus’s Latin translation of Lucian’s Heracles. Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 2r. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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Figure 11. “Eloquence vault mieulx que force” (Eloquence is better than force). Andrea Alciato, Livret des Emblemes (Paris: Chrestien Wechel, 1536), 200. N7710 .A35 1536b. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Tory’s woodcut, like the myth it illustrates, is by now well-­known: within the frame of the image on the left-­hand side, we see the figure identifiable as the Gallic Hercules, with the chain extending from his mouth; this somewhat slackened chain leads toward a crowd of subjects, splitting midway into a number of separate chains (a point-­to-­multipoint system); we see each of these chains leading to a different member of the crowd, attaching at the ear. What is remarkable about this image is how close the Gallic Hercules is to the crowd—a group that Tory encourages us to view as a crowd of specifically French subjects. The closest man in the crowd—seen stepping forward, his chain especially slack—seems ready to transcend the chain and touch Hercules directly. This proximity is especially noteworthy when compared to the French edition of Alciato’s emblems printed in Paris in 1539, in which what is ostensibly the same scene shows a crowd receding backward into a perspectival horizon, around a bend, as if their line might continue indefinitely (Figure 11). Tory’s scene, by contrast, is strikingly intimate. What it figures, I suggest, is both the virtual

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proximity that the teletechnology of printing brings into being and the imagined intimacy of vernacular language and its community. A space that is in fact large—the space of France—becomes small. Walter Benjamin points us to the role of mechanical reproduction in producing this closeness: “Technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain,” writes Benjamin. “Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a phonographic record. The cathedral leaves its square to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room.”42 The Gallic Hercules shows us the French language itself coming to meet the reader, along a slack typographical chain that brings the tongue—as mystical origin and force of language—right to them, to the “private room” of their ear. It is from this position that the tongue commands. “There is much to say about the fact that the native unity of the voice and writing is prescriptive,” writes Derrida in Of Grammatology. “Arche-­speech is writing because it is a law. A natural law. The beginning of the word is understood, in the intimacy of self-­presence, as the voice of the other and as commandment.”43 What is so remarkable about this inaugural appearance of the Gallic Hercules at the opening of Champ fleury is that, as we have seen, Tory’s book is concerned precisely with the teletechnological possibilities of the French language. Tory’s book orients his French readers to this project within the allegorical switchboard of the Gallic Hercules: they are inside the image, following the Gallic Hercules—who will soon be explicitly associated with King François I, the “Father of Letters.” The image itself places a call, it opens the ears to the call of technology. “He stops his ears to the call of technology, or whatever modern thing is calling him, appropriating him in the mode of a command,” writes Avital Ronell; her “he” here is Heidegger, who will not take the call of technology.44 But Tory is Heidegger’s negative image: he is the one who takes the call, who lets himself be appropriated and commanded by printing technology. Having answered, he then forwards the call, transferring it and greeting all those who, like him, are “true and devoted lovers of letters.45 He calls them up and says Salut! in a call to the future: to the French grammarians and technicians to come, whom he calls into being with his address. For Tory this is an emergency call, since the survival of the French language is on the line. He calls up French readers so that he can lead the way to the flowering field. In this sense, the Gallic Hercules operates as a figure for Geoffroy Tory himself: the typographer who, with his treatise on letters, will lead the French people via his alphabetic chain.

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We see this role emerge in the closing lines of his epistle to the reader, where Tory casts before him an imagined scene of what “our Language” could become “if [it] were duly Regulated and Polished [Reiglee et Polye]” (regulated and ruled, but also polished and shiny like pieces of metal type, or a “hand of brass”).46 This process appears as a collective undertaking in which Tory’s own book would mark a first step toward the collective construction of the tongue—a process that unfolds over time, and in print: So I implore you, let’s all give each other courage. . . . All things had a beginning. When one person treats letters, and another words, a third will come to declare expressions, and then another still will arrive to order fine oration. In this way we will find that, little by little, we will make way, so that we will come to the great poetic and rhetorical fields full of beautiful, good, and fragrant flowers of speaking and saying honestly and easily anything we might want. (Parquoy je vous prie dononnous tous courage les ungz aux aultres . . . ! Toutes choses ont eu commancement. Quant l’ung traictera des Lettres, & laultre des Vocales, ung Tiers viendra / qui declarera les Dictions. & puis encores ung aultre surviendra qui ordonnera la belle Oraison. Par ainsi on trouvera que peu a peu on passera le chemin, si bien quon viendra aux grans Champs Poetiques et Rhetoriques plains de belles / bonnes / & odoriferentes fleurs de parler & dire honnestement & facillement tout ce qu’on vouldra.)47 The path to Tory’s titular champ fleury turns out to be a sequence of technical operations (“treating,” “ordering,” etc.) that will transform French into a more efficient, more productive language built to operate on a national scale.48 Production occurs in discrete stages, through the efforts of multiple inventors who also resemble the workers of the printing shop, each performing a discrete task in the manufacture of the language-­book. The assembly line of printing provides the (re)production model—the modern technological mode of poiesis— that opens the way to the flowering field. An agricultural imaginary here grafts onto the print shop as the space of a modern “cultivation” of vernacular language. The national “garden of France” will be made to burst with technological reproduction as it becomes a workshop of letters.49 Tory’s field seems to be close while nevertheless hovering on a far-­off horizon. He creates an intimacy with his readers—a French je addressing and

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imploring a French nous—and yet Champ fleury simultaneously takes the long view: this is a historical program with one eye on antiquity and another on posterity, in which Tory self-­consciously positions himself as a point of departure. Just as he will see the historical perfection of Latin from the philological perspective of “today,” Tory sees the French tongue extending from Champ fleury as if from a geometrical point—as if from the cross at the middle of his letter grids—into a quasi-­infinite perspectival distance, into a space temporalized as the future.50 As a rhetorical “exhortation” to cultivate the vernacular, Tory’s call is a finger pointing toward new arrivals, further striving, and future becoming. It is a call for the “new,” for invention, for what arrives or is to come, which is bound up with a pedagogical project: I would seem here to be a new man, in that teaching the fashioning and quality of Letters in written French is something that has not yet been seen, but wanting to illuminate our language somewhat, I am happy to be the first little sign to excite some noble spirit who will apply himself more, as the Greeks and Romans once did, to set down and order the French language to certain rule of pronunciation and good speaking. (Ie sembleray cy par avanture estre nouvel homme, pource quon na point encores veu enseigner par escript en langage Francois la facon & qualite des Lettres, mais desirant enluminer aucunement nostre langue, ie suis content estre le premier petit indice a exciter quelque noble esperit qui se evertura davantage, comme firent les Grecs jadis & les Romains, mettre & ordonner la langue Francoise a certaine reigle de pronuncer & bien parler.)51 Advertising himself as a “new man,” Tory invokes the Renaissance figure of the homo novus, the self-­fashioner who rises from lowly origins to become lettered and exercise cultural influence. Beings that are “small” and “poor”—Tory, the French language—are set on a course of growth and improvement, repeating the historical arc of Rome, growing proportionally with time and space. Language and writer are hitched together in a joint becoming. “So I will write in French according to my little style and mother tongue, and I will not fail, even though I come from a small and humble family and am poor in worldly goods, to please devoted lovers of good letters.” (Donques Iescripray en Francois selon mon petit stile & langage maternel, & ne lairay, combiem que je soye de petitz /

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& humbles Parens, & aussi que je soye pouvre de biens caduques, a faire plaisir aux devots amateurs des bonnes lettres.)52 French appears in Tory’s work as a “new language,” which, like the “new man,” can grow and extend itself through the fashioning of letters. Tory writes of his letter designs that the principle of proportionality allows the student-­reader to make each character as small or as large as the tools will allow, “as far as the Compass and Ruler can extend.” We sense that the French language, too, is imagined to obey a principle of proportional growth, extending teletechnologically as far as its tools will take it. Teletechnologies “make space” and “make time.”53 They modulate in particular the space and time of the political, as Derrida insists in both Echographies of Television and Specters of Marx. Derrida suggests that public space today is “profoundly upset [bouleversé] by techno-­tele-­media apparatuses and by new rhythms of information and communication.”54 Indeed, this disruption represents a veritable “deconstruction” of the political: “What the accelerated development of teletechnologies, of cyberspace, of the new topology of ‘the virtual’ is producing is a practical deconstruction of the traditional and dominant concepts of the state and citizen (and thus of ‘the political’) as they are linked to the actuality of a territory.”55 If contemporary teletechnologies are in the process of disrupting and “deconstructing” political space, this would suggest, following Derrida’s own supplemental logic, that such space—that of the state or the nation-­state—is always already a teletechnologically constituted phenomenon. The “actuality of a territory” is always already an artefactuality, an artefactual space generated out of a prior teletechnological disruption. This line of thinking corresponds, to a large extent, with Benedict Anderson’s argument about the crucial role of what he calls “mechanically reproduced print-­languages” in the formation of the nation-­state and early national consciousness in Imagined Communities. According to Anderson, the vernacular languages assembled by print capitalism “created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars,” such that, within multilingual proto-­national spaces, “speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper.”56 Printing both delimits the national language territory and creates a consciousness of the “particular language-­field” that groups together one reading public while distinguishing it from its neighbor. Fellow readers—all those who can understand this print-­language—come to constitute a vernacular language community not of the tongue but of the page, the prosthetic tongue-­ear. “These fellow-­readers,” writes Anderson, “to whom

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they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”57 It is tempting to view this “imagined” nature of the national-­language community, which was brought into being in print, as Anderson’s historicist take on what we have seen Derrida calling “spectrality.” Both work to counteract the claims to naturalness, nativity, originality, and so on, that traditionally ground nationalism and the national language community. The same would necessarily be true of the vernacular language itself. As Hélène Merlin-­Kajman provocatively suggests, during the sixteenth century, “La langue française did not exist” in the sense that languages (or langues) are thought to exist today, but was rather an “Idea,” a “juridical fiction,” or a “virtual language.” Geoffroy Tory shows us the process by which this virtual language is technologically (re)produced; he shows us a French language being constructed in print. Tory approaches the diversity of French vernacular languages as a problem but one that is “easy” to resolve through the (technological, alphabetic, print-­based) principles of regulation and “good order”: “Our language,” Tory writes, “is as easy to regulate and put in good order as the Greek language once was, in which there are five varieties of language . . ., which have certain differences between them.” (Nostre langue est aussi facile a reigler et mettre en bon ordre, que fut jadis la langue Grecque, en la quelle  ya cinq diversites de langage.)58 There were, of course, far more than five “varieties” of French spoken and written in the early decades of the sixteenth century—according to Tory’s contemporary Charles de Bovelles, “There are today in France as many ways of speaking as there are peoples, regions, and towns”—but Tory cuts down this quasi-­infinite variety into a finite number that can be ordered and assembled into discrete types: “the language of the Court and Paris, the Picard language, the Lyonnais, the Limousin, and the Provençal” (la langue de Court & Parrhisienne, la langue Picarde, la Lionnoise, la Lymosine, & la Prouvensalle).59 These languages become parts in Tory’s French machine, pieces of type to be arranged in the printer’s frame, organized in view of their future reproduction—with the “language of the Court and Paris” occupying the initial position. The model here is ancient Greek, which also has five varieties that Tory names (Attic, Doric, Aeolic, Ionic, and “Common”), which “have certain differences among them in Declensions of nouns, in Conjugations of verbs, in Orthography, in Accents, and in Pronunciation” (qui ont certaines differences entre elles en Declinaisons de noms, en Conjugations de verbes, en Orthographe, en Accentz & en Pronunciation).60 This diversity was managed by Greek grammarians, who “treat and teach” the matter “in a very detailed way” (traictent

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& enseignent tresamplement), and Tory affirms that “we could very well do the same” (tout ainsi pourrions nous bien faire).61 Indeed, Tory writes that he could do it himself but instead leaves it for others “more expert than I” (plus expertz que moy) to try their hands in the future.62 Tory helps call a virtual French language and its political space into being. His Gallic Hercules is an emblem of contemporary language politics, in which everything calls out Francois: the common and proper name of tongue, king, subject, and nation; archaic and mythical source of the voice, birthplace and native origin, source of the French language, origin of language itself. Francois comes to name a prosthetic, more-­than-­human force of language: a sovereign force. And yet, in keeping with the supposedly “gentler” force of the Gallic Hercules, Tory explicitly rejects the imperialist ambition implicit in the teletechnological, the idea that the extension of the Herculean tongue carries with it an inherent project of territorial expansion and political domination. In this respect, Latin is a model to be at once appropriated and disavowed: When Donatus, Servius, Priscian, Diomedes . . . and other similar good authors came, they polished the language [i.e., Latin] and put it in such good order, that from that point forward it increasingly augmented in its perfection, such that the Romans who dominated the greater part of the world prospered more and obtained more victories through their tongue than their lance. Would to God that we could do the same, not in order to be Tyrants and Kings over all, but, having our language well regulated, we could compose and put down knowledge and art in memory and in writing. (Quant Donatus, Servius, Priscianus, Diomedes . . . & les aultres bons Autheurs semblables furent venus, ilz la polyrent & mirent en si bonne ordre, que depuis a tousjours de bien en myeulx augmente en sa perfection, si bien que les Romains qui ont eu domination sus la plusgrande partie du monde, ont plus prospere, & plus obtenu de victoires par leur langue que par leur lance. Pleust a Dieu que peussions ainsi faire, non pas pour estre Tyrans & Roys sus tous, mais en ayant nostre langue bien reiglee, peussions rediger & mettre bonnes Sciences & Arts en memoire & par escript.)63 Tory recognizes the political force inherent in the prosthetic tongue—it was the langue more than the lance that brought victory and domination for the

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Romans—and its potential to create political space. But like the printing press that acts as the “divine” double to the “diabolical” machines of war for sixteenth-­ century humanists, the technology of the letter acts for Tory as the positive counterpart to the violence of imperial expansion. The printer buries the potential violence of his tele-­techno-­culture and its trajectory of domination, repressing the Roman model as quickly as it surfaces. If the field of battle continues to lurk beneath his field of flowers, Tory does not want to acknowledge it. The metal chain that extends from the Herculean tongue is slack: we want to be pulled along by it. Francois is the language in which we want to be bound and enframed; François is the father-­king whose voice we want to receive. Tory’s pedagogy is gentle, his politics nontyrannical. His Francois tongue is a good machine, a “mother” tongue. Yet the disconnect remains, and this prosthetic tongue feels uncanny not only in its teletechnological spectrality but also, by the same stroke and by the same logic, in its wavering between maternal umbilical cord and paternal law—a simultaneity, then, that would obey the same non-­ontological coincidence of near/far, present/absent, life/death that marks the teletechnological. What the Gallic Hercules illustrates is the teletechnological spectralizing of state sovereignty—and national language as law—in print. Both Alciato’s Emblemata and Jean Lefevre’s 1536 French translation of the emblems make clear that the Gallic Hercules is a lawgiver, and that the tongue-­ear chain is also that of law itself: But his greatest mark of glory / Is that he leads people enchained to his tongue. / Which means that he produces such good oration / That for his marvelous speech the French people / Were thus caught by their ears. / If, then, he has by laws and ordinances / Rather than by courageous deeds gotten people in order / Can’t we say (as is true) / That the sword yields to books? (Mais ce quil a marque de si grand gloire: / Que mener gens enchainez a sa langue. / Entendre veult, quil feist tant bien harengue, / Que les Francois pour ses dits de merveilles, / Furent ainsi que pris par les oreilles. / Si donc il a par loix & ordonnances / Range les gens, plustost que par vaillances, / Dira lon pas (comme est verite) / Que lespee a lieu aux livres quicte?)64 The law of the state comes in through the ears—or, spectrally, through the book-­ears that now take over for the “sword” (in Lefevre’s rendering of Alciato’s

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paraphrase of Cicero’s Cedant aram togae, concedat laurea linguae, “Let weapons yield to the arts of peace, let laurels yield to eloquence”—literally, “to the tongue”). The emergent nation-­state is nothing other than this prosthetic chain reproduced by the press. In the text “Otobiographies,” Derrida quotes Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, decrying the cold monstrosity of the state that passes itself off as a people: “State? What is that? Well, then, open your ears to me. For now I shall speak to you about the death of peoples. State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the State, am the people.’ That is a lie!”65 Glossing this passage, Derrida points to what is so scandalous for Nietzsche: “Not only is the State marked by the sign and the paternal figure of the dead, it also wants to pass itself off for the mother—that is, for life, the people, the womb of things themselves.”66 The ear, site of susceptibility and alterity, is the point of passage for this mother-­father state. For the state we open our ears wide, transforming ourselves into “high-­ fidelity” receivers; for the state, we become all ears. Nowhere is this relation more apparent for Nietzsche than in the pedagogical scene of the university. He stages in Zarathustra a dialogue reminiscent of Lucian’s Gallic Hercules, as a foreigner comes to marvel at the attachment of a people by the ears: “If a foreigner desires to know something of our university system,” writes Nietzsche, “he first of all asks emphatically: ‘How is the student connected with the university?’ We answer: ‘By the ear, as a listener.’ The foreigner is astonished: ‘Only by the ear?’ he repeats. ‘Only by the ear,’ we again reply. The student listens.”67 This pedagogical attachment—as an attachment to the mother-­father state—is on display not only in Tory’s Gallic Hercules but also in the whole of Champ fleury, a book that calls, exhorts, and above all instructs (as we shall see further below), dictating the movements of the student-­reader’s hands. It is in 1530, the year after Champ fleury appears, that François I will found the Collège royal— the institution that later becomes the Collège de France—with royal lectors in Greek, Hebrew, and mathematics funded by the state. For Derrida reading Nietzsche, this pedagogical link appears both as the umbilical cord of the “mother” tongue and as a “teleprinter.” The student listens and takes notes, writing a writing that comes in through an ear that is no longer one’s own ear, strictly speaking, but the ear of the other in this pedagogical state apparatus. “This writing links you,” writes Derrida, “like a leash in the form of an umbilical cord, to the paternal belly of the State. Your pen is its pen, you hold its teleprinter like one of those Bic ballpoints attached by a little chain in the post office—and all its movements are induced by the body of the father figuring as

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alma mater. How an umbilical cord can create a link to this cold monster that is a dead father or the State—this is what is uncanny.”68 The tongue of the Gallic Hercules figures the imaginary of vernacular print culture that will develop during the 1530s and 1540s, and which Tory helps invent. It shows us a powerful myth of printing as a prosthetic extension of speech, and thus as an augmentation (Tory will write of “adornment,” “enrichment,” etc.) of the biological tongue: an apparatus that lends that bio-­tongue rhetorical force but also pedagogical and political potency. The prosthesis forges the national “imagined community.” Tory’s Gallic Hercules thus also shows us the spectral nature of that community and its langue maternelle, which operate through a series of relays and delays, fantasies and desires, emerging as a virtual “artefactuality” more than a reality. As one of the many faces of François I and his successors, the Gallic Hercules shows us the prosthetic tongue becoming an apparatus of the French state—that is, as a prosthesis of a new kind of linguistic and technological sovereignty. It shows us, finally, a fantasy of printing as living presence of the voice and the word: bringing language across a distance that is no longer perceived as distant, in an act of mediation that no longer feels mediated, putting the tongue right inside the ear of the French people. For Tory, the Gallic Hercules is the French tongue—or, rather, what the French tongue might become if French readers hear his call. The technological project Tory sets forth will—this is his hope, his promise—allow vernacular language to rise above the contingencies of its natural life to become an enduring, Herculean, more-­than-­human tongue. In this way, the Gallic Hercules represents a new species of teletechnological life for language, produced by the mutation of printing. It is a vision from the ancient past cast into a vernacular future, a vision that imagines how far the tongue might reach—if it is properly pierced.

The Maternal Phantom In Champ fleury, Geoffroy Tory engages the French language and the (French) human in a technological co-­evolution. They live and die together in the same grid—the same “field” (champ), their common medium. For Tory, this co-­ evolution is grounded in an originary identity, one that dictates not only the harmonious proportion of letter and human forms but also Tory’s decision to write in the vernacular and for the vernacular: it is the language that aligns with his being, the language in which he hears himself speak. As he proclaims in the opening pages of Champ fleury, defending himself against detractors who argue

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that French is not a sufficiently learned idiom for the matter at hand, “No matter what they say, I will not fail to write in French as a French man” (Pour chose qu’ilz puissent dire, je ne lairray a escrire en Francois comme homme francois).69 The underlying principle that operates across Champ fleury is one of correspondence or analogy. Each field must map onto the other: letters onto the body, writing onto speech, language onto subject, book onto national space. As we saw earlier, the proper name Francois—which names simultaneously language, nationality, and the king—acts as a tireless negotiator between these different fields, figuring as a mystical promissory note for their eventual convergence. It is, moreover, this mapping of fields that underlies the possibility of the teletechnology. “Je ne lairray a escrire en Francois comme homme francois”: between the first Francois and the second francois runs a wire connecting the French writer to “his” vernacular language—that same Herculean umbilical cord we have seen that also extends to the king François and makes Tory an “homme francois.” The identity of Francois and francois (and of both with François I) depends on the teletechnological relay. Encouraging his readers to follow in the footsteps of the mathematician Charles de Bovelles who composed a Geometrie en francois, a text often considered to be the first scientific work printed in French, Tory writes: “Let it please God that many others do the same, not to scorn the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages, but in order to advance more assuredly along our domestic way, that is to say, to write in French [en Francois] like the Frenchmen [comme Francois] we are.” (Pleust a Dieu que  beaucoup  d’aultres feissent ainsi, non pas pour contemner les Langues Hebraique, Creque [sic], & Latine, mais pour cheminer plus seurement en sa voye domestique, Cest a dire, escripre en Francois, comme Francois que nous sommes.)70 To write en Francois as the Frenchmen (Francois) “we are” means to cut a “domestic” path, a French “way” (voie); this writing is an onto-­nationalistic path-­breaking that extends forward, like the Herculean tongue or the alphabetic sequence of letters, toward the flowering field. The French language to come for which Tory sketches a blueprint in Champ fleury is meant to be more rigorously technological than the vernacular of the past but also, at the same time, more radically intimate, internalized, and identified with the proto-­national speaker it comes to define. Tory looks to reproduce in the vernacular the artificial qualities of Greek and Latin—the prosthetic iterability of rule and order—that would extend the language “outward,” while simultaneously turning “inward,” toward intimacy, maternality, nature, nativity, and corporeality. These apparently contradictory gestures in fact go hand in hand, following the teletechnological logic we have seen. The tongue is pulled

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out of the mouth while the externality of technics and writing are brought in. We can see this double movement at work in the striking figure of the “Lettered Man,” where we discover that the perfect human is divided into iterable parts labeled with letters, which are brought inside via a surgical cut—as if they had always been there, originarily and naturally, cut into the mother tongue (Figure 12). The French langue maternelle was in some sense ripe for technological reinvention in the age of print, given that its emergence as a cultural category during the medieval period is already defined by its place in a media system. The idea of a “mother tongue” first comes into the world as an idiom that is not Latin and, for that very reason not “lettered.” The earliest associations of language and maternality can be found in Latin texts of the twelfth century, with expressions such as lingua materna and materno sermone. The first use of such a phrase has been traced to Guibert de Nogent’s chronicle of the First Crusade, the Dei Gesta per Francos, in which Pope Urban II is lauded for having spoken as well in Latin as any layman in his maternal language (materno sermone). Classical Latin knows no such term; for Roman writers, Latin was the sermo patrius, the paternal and ancestral language. Expressions like lingua materna are neologisms of medieval Latin forged within the specific context of what Renée Balibar describes as the Latin-­vernacular “colingualism” of the period. For several centuries, materna lingua and its semantic cousins were used almost exclusively to distinguish the vernacular, which was learned at home and in the family, from Latin as the language of schooling and letters, as well as of ecclesiastical authority. These domains were perceived as distinct enough that Pierre Dubois, writing in the early fourteenth century, expressed amazement that Hebrew for the Apostles might have been a lingua tam litterata quam materna, that is, a “lettered” language that was also “maternal.” “Fiebat autem res non materno sermone, sed literis,” Guibert de Nogent writes in his autobiography Monodiae (c. 1125), “the conversation took place not in our maternal language, but in Latin.”71 “In Latin” is literis, literally, in “letters” or “letters of the alphabet.” Litteratus means Latin, as does grammatica. “All words associated with writing converged in the popular mind with the meaning Latin.”72 The “mother tongue” begins, then, as language nongrammatized and nongrammatizable language, not reducible to letters. Materna, Renée Balibar affirms, “designated a low language excluded from all inscription.”73 The language called materna is not a given tongue but a function in a media system, a metaphysical place outside of representation. “The figure of the mother,” Elissa Marder argues, “tends to be both excluded from the realm of representation on the grounds that she is ‘natural’

Figure 12. “Lhomme letre” (The lettered man). Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 22v. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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and simultaneously inscribed into representational practices as the very name for that which cannot be represented.”74 The medieval materna signifies that which will not or cannot be marked, externalized, or phenomenalized; that which leaves no trace of itself. It marks a primary orality of the vernacular, or rather a cultural fantasy thereof.75 This status undergoes a shift in France in the mid-­fourteenth century as French is assigned new textual roles and endowed with a new prestige status in the court of Charles V. This shift will coincide with the translation of the Latin lingua materna or materno sermone into the French langage maternel by Nicole Oresme, the scholar commissioned by Charles V to produce vernacular translations and commentaries for the royal library. In the preface to his landmark translation of Aristotle’s Ethics (1370), Oresme observes a historical analogy between the colingualism of ancient Rome and that of medieval France: So is it that in that time Greek was with respect to Latin, in relation to the Romans, as Latin now is with respect to French in relation to us. And at the time students in Rome and elsewhere were instructed in Greek, and the sciences were commonly written in Greek; in this country, the common and maternal language was Latin. (Or est il ainsi que le temps de lors, grec estoit en regart de latin, quant aux Rommains, si comme est maintenant latin en resgart du francois quant a nous. Et estoient pour le temps les estudiants introduiz en grec et a Romme et ailleurs, et les sciences communement baillees en grec; en ce pays, le langage commun et maternel, cestoit latin.) When the expression langage maternel appears for the first time in the vernacular, it thus refers not to French—not directly, at least—but instead to Latin. Although Latin was never represented as “maternal” during the classical period, Oresme can reimagine it in this way precisely in its relation to Greek as the dominant medium of knowledge and cultural inscription. What is striking about this inaugural appearance of the langage maternel in French is that it appears precisely not to designate the “mother tongue” of today but instead to describe a language that was once maternal but has since become lettered, authoritative, textual, paternal. The notion that today’s language of letters (Latin) was once maternal with respect to another serves to legitimate Charles

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V’s desire to have “good and excellent books translated into French.” The translation into French would mark a shifting of the media terrain: not only the passage into French but also a shifting status, the overturning of a hierarchy, a historical becoming—which is also a coming into letters. Between the lines of the translator’s preface lies a promise: today’s mother tongue can, like Latin, become a lettered language. Oresme’s translation of lingua materna into langage maternel thus not only announces a new cultural status for the French language but also assigns the “maternal” a new place in the media system: no longer an ungrammatizable language that leaves no historical trace, maternel signifies a language undergoing a translation into a new medium. The old (nonlettered, excluded, oral) sense of the maternal nevertheless lingers in the tripartite linguistic culture of late medieval France. As francois establishes itself as a prestige vernacular and administrative idiom over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, less prestigious vernaculars from elsewhere in France come to be marked as “mother” tongues. As early as 1325, a poet from Meung asks to be forgiven for his “savage” use of French given that he is not from Paris but instead speaks “in the language my mother taught me” (au parler que m’aprist ma mere), a language acquired at home and from the breast (a Meun quand je l’alatoie). These verses testify to a “growing ambiguity in the notion of langue maternelle” as French begins to assume a status previously reserved for Latin.76 As late as 1526, Clément Marot narrates in his Enfer how, upon coming to the French court from Quercy as a child, he “forgot” his langue maternelle and “crudely learned” the paternelle Langue Francoyse, the language of a father-­king named François. During this transitional period in the French history of the “mother tongue”—which corresponds roughly to the phase in the development of the French language that linguists commonly designate as moyen français, or Middle French—maternality operates as an ambiguous and relational (as opposed to absolute) category in a complex landscape of languages and writing technologies. “Maternal” can name francois as a language becoming lettered on the model of Latin; but it can equally designate a nonwritten or nondominant regional vernacular perceived as inferior to francois, as it was for the poet from Meung. Not only can “mother tongue” refer to different idioms (depending on writer and context), it also can designate different cultural trajectories (ascending, descending), different values and affects (for king and community, for domesticity and the breast), and different media technological modalities (textuality, orality). What remains constant throughout this period, however, is the phantasmatic status of the mother tongue. Whether a

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nostalgic projection of the past or an idealized projection into the future, the mother tongue is never the language of these letters on this page. It is the idiom of a lost orality and an abandoned corporeality; it remains unseen, internalized, or buried. “No matter what they say, I will not fail to write in French as a French man, reminding them that Vitruvius was reprimanded and mocked because, not being Greek by birth, he wrote in Greek.” (Pour chose quilz puissent dire je ne lairray a escrire en Francois comme homme francois, les avertissant que Vitruve fut jadis reprins & mocqué pource que luy nestant Grec de nativité, escrivoit en vocables Graecz.)77 Writing in French for Tory is presented as logical and natural, a fact of birth, ontologically ordained—despite the fact that most of his humanist contemporaries were modern incarnations of Vitrivius, writing in Latin rather than French. Tory’s call exhorts a return to nativité, a more “proper” ontological and deeply logocentric alignment of language and the human. As we have seen, he appeals to his readers to write what “we” “are”: Francois (escripre en Francois, comme Francois que nous sommes). Rather than “stealing” from the languages of the ancients, Tory insists French writers choose the language that is “theirs,” that is, most proper to them as confirmed by the proper name. French is ours, Tory insists, the language of our birth and our life. This bid for the proper can be read as caught up in the teletechnological spectrality Tory helps set in motion. French can be (re)claimed as “native”—rooted in birth, blood, body—precisely because it is in the process of being cut into, divvied up, cast off into the future, mechanized and materialized as the Gallic Herculean telephone line that extends over the horizon. In this sense, printing technology generates and (re)produces the “mother tongue” that Tory claims in the pages of Champ fleury: not as a biographical or biological reality but, first, as a teletechnological phantasm of natural possession. Printing is simultaneously a technology of amputation and attachment, the Herculean chain that connects even as it disconnects. The ideologically charged langue maternelle that takes shape in proto-­nationalist discourse of the mid-­ sixteenth century, most potently in the work of Jacques Peletier, Joachim Du Bellay, and other Pléiade writers, will thus also be a kind of phantom limb. As it happens, Ambroise Paré is the first person in medical literature to describe the phenomenon of the phantom limb. In his Dix livres de chirurgie (1564), he writes that “for a long time after amputation, patients still think they have the limb in its entirety that has been amputated (as I said)” (Or il est ainsi que long temps apres l’amputation les patientz pensent encore auoir en son entier le membre qui leur a esté amputé (comme i’ay dit)).78 The French mother tongue—as proper or

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natural possession, as “native” and “living” language—will be a phantom whose presence only makes itself felt belatedly, in the moment of a cut.

Rule and Order By 1529, the language called Francois—the language of Paris and the Court—was already a prestige vernacular with a long textual history. Established as a written language since the ninth century and as a literary idiom by the twelfth, French had undergone a first “renaissance” in the fourteenth century during the reign of Charles V (1338–1380), who amassed a prestigious royal library and commissioned vernacular translations of authors like Aristotle and Augustine. From the late fourteenth century through the early sixteenth century, the language called Francois maintained a powerful but ambiguous status within a tripartite language hierarchy in France. It occupied a social and symbolic middle ground between the Latin of church and school on the one hand and, on the other, less prestigious vernaculars—some of which were only spoken, while others were written in more circumscribed regional or generic contexts.79 This status as prestige vernacular and “middle” tongue became an asset in the emerging print market, which, according to Benedict Anderson, served to consolidate new vernacular “print-­languages” as “languages of power.” Yet it took several generations for French to dominate this market. While the first French books appeared from the press of Guillaume Le Roy in Lyon between 1473 and 1476, more than twice as many books were printed in Latin as in French during the incunabular period.80 That proportion still largely held for the production of Paris presses in 1528, the year before Champ fleury appeared. Most vernacular texts printed around 1530 were literary, religious, musical, or historical, in contrast to the classical and humanist works, medical treatises, grammars, and other educational texts published in Latin. During the 1530s and 1540s, the publication of French texts began to increase markedly, in both number and generic breadth, thanks in part to vernacular translations encouraged by François I, as well as to the accumulating cultural capital of the language; it was not until 1559, almost a hundred years after the first press arrived in Paris, that the vernacular overtook Latin as the majority language of print production in France. In 1521, Pierre Fabri’s Le grant et vray art de pleine rethorique (1521), an enormously popular manual reprinted numerous times throughout the sixteenth century, launches the genre of “how-­to” models for French vernacular writing, but it does not undertake, as Tory’s book does, to reimagine the vernacular through print technology.

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Geoffroy Tory thus intervenes at a turning point in the rise of the French language. Tory shares with contemporaries like Charles de Bovelles a sense that French is lacking in spatiotemporal fixity. “The language of today,” he writes in his opening epistle to the reader, is different in a thousand ways from the Language that existed fifty or so years ago. The author of the Livre des Echecs in his time said Neantplus and we say Non plus. He said Bien est voir and we say Bien est vray. . . . He said a thousand others that I will omit for the sake of brevity. One could find ten thousand such words and expressions that have been left behind and changed, which a hundred other authors used in the past. (Le Langage daujourdhuy est change en mille facons du Langage qui estoit il ya Cinquante Ans ou environ. Lautheur du Livre des Eschecqtz disoit en son temps Neantplus & nous disons, Nonplus. Il disoit, Bien est voir. & nous disons Bien est vray. . . . Il en disoit Mille aultres que je laisse pour brevete. On porroit trouver Dix Milliers de telz motz & vocables laissez & Changez / Desquelz Cent aultres Autheurs usoient au temps passe.)81 The variability of the vernacular over time, implicitly contrasted to the perceived stability of ancient languages, is framed as contingency: a vulnerability to time, space, materiality, and mortality. French needs to be corrected. Just below the woodcut of the Gallic Hercules, Tory declares his own desire to introduce “certain rule” (Reigle certaine) into the “fecundity” of the French language, piercing the naturally reproductive body of the vernacular: “If with our fecundity there were certain Rule, it seems to me that, upon correction, the language would be richer and more perfect.” (Si avec nostre facundite, estoit Reigle certaine, Il me semble soubz correction, que le langage seroit plus riche, & plus parfaict.)82 This appeal to a practice of correction situates such reproduction squarely within the universe of the print shop. Correction is the proofreading stage of printing. The corrector reads over page proofs to look for errors and omissions; he works quill in hand, eyes trained to catch typesetting glitches and other mistakes before the page gets copied hundreds or thousands of times. The historian Estienne Pasquier vividly describes the Corrector’s role from an author’s perspective in a letter from 1586: “One sends to the printer the most correct copies one can, which first pass through the hands of the Compositor. It

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would truly be a miracle if he could assemble all the letters without fault; that is why he is given as a controller a man who takes the title of Corrector, to whom is given the first proof.”83 Tory had begun his own career working as a corrector and an editor in Parisian printing houses. Correctors during this period came to represent a new mode of “linguistic and textual precision,” what Anthony Grafton has called a “culture of correction.” While some of the corrector’s skills were inherited from the ancient and medieval manuscript worlds, Grafton suggests that the corrector fundamentally constituted “a new social type,” and that his practices were “called into being by the printing-­press.” The laboratory of the printer’s shop becomes the material and metaphoric scene in which French language will be fashioned and perfected, its teletechnological future opened. This “correction” means introducing “certain Rule” into the body of French. The phrase mettre & ordonner par Reigle will reappear insistently and in various iterations in Champ fleury. In each instance, putting “our French language” in order through print is a technical practice that will reorganize the social and political sphere from the page.84 From the start, the prosthetic tongue is a technology of sovereignty. Tory’s project is a techno-­culture and a techno-­politics of the vernacular conceived from the print shop. His “regulating” terms Reigle and reigler point to two different sets of instruments: the grammarian’s metalinguistic apparatus for regulating language (the grammatical or orthographic “rule”) and the typographer’s straightedge (the “ruler”), which is used along with the compass to fashion letters. Both kinds of Reigle—from the Latin rego (“I rule,” “I govern,” “I guide,” “I manage”)—are instruments for giving law to the unruly vernacular tongue, of transforming nature through the application of art. And both kinds of Reigle evoke political principles of governance and sovereignty. “Amongst all the manual tools,” writes Tory, “the Compass is the King, and Ruler the Queen. That is to say, the two most noble and sovereign [tools], beneath which all other tools and things that are well ordered and duly made are reasonable.” (Entre tous les utilz manuelz Le Compas est le Roy, & la Reigle la Royne. Cest a dire, les deux plus nobles & souverains, & soubz lesquelz, tous les autres utilz, & toutes choses bien ordonnees / & deument faictes, sont raisonnables.)85 Together, Tory demonstrates, these instruments combine to form an A: the first letter in the alphabet, the one that marks and signifies the “beginning” of letters, logos, and human sovereignty. In a playful but striking moment at the opening of Champ fleury, Tory weaponizes the ruler and compass, whose “certainty” as instruments of measure will do violence to any would-­be critics of his book: “I see over there someone who would gladly grumble and would try to harm me if he could or dared to, but . . . I would make him shut up quickly,

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Figure 13. “Le A. dun Compas & dune Reigle” ([The letter] A made of a Compass and Ruler). Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 34v. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

piercing his tongue with my sure Compass and beating him with my certain Ruler.” (Ie voy la derriere quelcun qui grumeleroit vouluntiers, & se forceroit comme enuyeux me nuyre sil pouvoit, ou s’il osoit, mais .  .  . Ie le ferois taire soudain, luy perceant la langue de mon asseure Compas, & le batant de ma certaine Reigle.)86 However Rabelaisian avant la lettre this threat may be, it encourages us to take seriously the force of the ruler and compass in keeping Tory’s vernacular readership in line and maintaining social order. Technics here becomes the master, not only of language but also of the unruly or disagreeable tongues of French-­speaking subjects. Tory’s new accents and punctuation are designed to represent the sounds of speech on the page— marking elided consonants with the point crochu (“hooked period”) of the apostrophe, for example—while the typographer provides a “sure rule of pronouncing and speaking well.” Not all speech, and not just any speech, finds itself represented in the new medium. “Here I would like to teach the true and

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correct pronunciation of all the letters of the alphabet, in which matter I see a thousand people make errors.” (Ie veulx bien en cest endroit enseigner la juste & deue pronunciation de toutes les lettres Abecedaires, en la quelle chose ie voy mille personnes errer.)87 The movements of the tongue get dictated from the page in the same pedagogical-­regulatory gesture that dictates the movements of hands and the placement of tools. In his description of the letter S in Book III, Tory begins, as with all letters, with an anatomy of the uppercase form: “The letter S drawn here is higher than it is wide. Its width is only six units minus two-­thirds of a unit. . . . This is for the width of the belly on the bottom, since the one on the top is only three units and two halves, as one can clearly see in its aforementioned design.” (La lettre S. cy pres deseignee, est plus haulte que large. Sa largeur nest que de six corps moings deux tiers de corps. . . . Et ce pour la largeur de la panse d’embas, car celle d’enhault nest que de trois corps & deux demyz, comme on peult clerement veoir cy en son dict deseing, ou iay signe huit centres es lieux ou le pied du Compas veult estre assis a la bien faire.)88 If the typographer insists on this discrepancy between the top and bottom of the S, it is “because I see a thousand people who unwittingly write the letter S wider on the top than on the bottom” (pource que ien voy ung millier qui inscientement escripvent la dicte lettre S. plus large par le hault / que par le bas).89 What’s more, it is the erect human form that governs this anatomy: “We see the natural Man standing up straight on his feet . . . is wider at his feet than at his head” (Nous voyons que lHomme naturel se tenant tout droict sus ses pieds, comprent plus en largeur, & est plus espatte par les pieds / que par sa teste).90 These mechanizing anatomical principles and practices will be equally applied to pronunciation, as the mouth is broken down into grammatical parts on the model of the letter. Following the late classical Latin writer Martianus Capella (which is also to say, following an authoritative text written in an ancient tongue), Tory instructs the reader that “S is pronounced by making a whistling between closed teeth” (le S. est pronuncee en faisant ung sifflement entre les dents serrees).91 He notes that in French S can be juxtaposed with many different letters, but that, for the sake of brevity, he will leave the work of describing those instances to “some noble mind who will want to help order and set the noble French tongue to sure rule of speaking and writing properly according to the virtues of perfect letters, syllables, and words” (quelque noble esperit qui vouldra aider a ordonner & mettre la noble langue Francoise par certaine reigle a deument parler & escripre selon la vertus des lettres, syllabes, & dictions parfaictes en la dicte langue Francoise).92 The langue Francoise remains faulty, imperfect, and unruly, but Tory lays it out on a grid where it can await the application of some ruler to come.

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Tory will propose a new mark to indicate an S that goes unpronounced. He suggests using a point crochu (apostrophe) when writing verses that require a letter, such as a final S, to be elided for the sake of meter—a practice that would indeed be adopted by certain Parisian printers during the 1530s and 1540s. Tory takes the time to observe that Parisian women (les dames de Paris) tend to drop the S’s at the ends of words that do not precede a vowel (the same practice observed in modern standard French usage). “Instead of saying, Nous avons disne en ung Jardin & y avons menge des Prunes blanches et noires [we have dined in a garden and eaten black and white plums] . . . , they say and pronounce, Nous avon disne en ung Jardin: & y avon menge des prune blanche & noire.” Such pronunciation would be “excusable,” Tory affirms, except that “it comes from woman to man” and it entails a “complete abuse of properly pronouncing while speaking.”93 This deviancy confirms that Tory’s own instructions follow the proper pedagogical order: from man to woman. Shifting the scene of vernacular language instruction from the breast and home to the printer’s page also means, then, a masculine appropriation over the production and reproduction of French, over the flow of language between generations. The body of the machine takes over for the maternal body as the privileged site of vernacular reproduction.94 This control over the flow of sound will also extend to the sociopolitical space of the French kingdom. Condemned in the same breath as les dames de Paris are speakers of the Toulousain and Gascon vernaculars who, when speaking Latin, add (preposent) an e to the beginning of schola and scribere, saying eschola and escribere, which constitutes a “great vice in Latin.” Their Latin is contaminated, Tory suspects, by the French escripre and escole. (Linguists today refer to a pre-­posed letter of this type that come to attach itself to the beginning of a word as a “prosthesis,” from the Greek “placing before.”) Tory’s Reigle extends outward, reproducing itself with the dissemination of printed texts; at the same time, it reaches inside the mouth, reforming the tongue and seeking “perfection.” A royal privilege issued in the months after Champ fleury appeared shows that Tory had written (or intended to write) a text titled Reigles generales de Lorthographe du langaige francoys (“General Rules of the Correct Writing of the French Language”). No copy of this text has been preserved, and perhaps none was ever produced; nevertheless, the existence of the privilege indicates Tory’s desire to generalize and codify new “rules” of the French language. This gesture signals a major techno-­cultural movement that will mark the culture of the French language for five centuries: the printed page becomes the space where the speaking subject is formed and governed. Before Tory, vernacular speech had symbolically found its source in the nurse’s breast,

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in a domestic scene of immediacy and imitation. Tory looks to maintain this intimacy even as he mechanizes and mediates vernacular speech. In Tory’s wake, French speech will come to act in tandem with—as the regulating mechanism for—the vocal apparatus. Tongue, teeth, and palate are activated as technical instruments operating in the image of printing technology. As we saw in Chapter 1, this mechanization of speech is always already at work as the arche-­ printing of the articulating tongue. But like Ambroise Paré’s langue artificielle, the printer’s prosthetic tongue is a technology that radically mobilizes this mechanicity, reaching inward, making cuts, governing the inside from the outside. And, like Paré’s artificial tongue, the printer’s technology will lay bare a technicity already at work in the mouth by mechanizing it according to new protocols, externalizing it, and setting it loose with a prosthetic iterability. “Order” founds both the technology of the alphabet and the material universe of the print shop, where characters are selected from neatly segmented cases and placed one at a time in rows, line after line. Tory’s vocabulary of order (ordre, ordonner, mettre en bon ordre, etc.) conjures these and other techniques of spatial, material, and political organization—including, like the verb reigler, the setting of the mechanism of a clock. As we saw above, the map of France is figured as a vast language machine whose parts are different vernacular dialects. (“Our language . . . is as easy to regulate and put in good order as the Greek language once was.”) All France needs is the horologist-­grammarian to order them, a language technician on the model of the Greek Ioannes Grammaticus (John VII of Constantinople, “the Grammarian”). This is Tory’s program: to transform an organic, unruly, and contingent vernacular tongue into an instrumentalized national medium that functions like clockwork, “ordered” over space and time. An analogous principle of ordonnance will be at work in sovereign codifications of language like the Edict (or Ordonnance) of Villers-­ Cotterêts. It is also the defining feature of modern technology from printing to cybernetics and the computer (ordinateur in French). Modern technology, according to Heidegger’s influential definition, is defined by the Gestell (or “enframing”) of nature that transforms it into a “standing reserve” to be exploited for human use. Printing technology treats language itself as such standing reserve, exploiting the mother tongue as a natural resource to be ordered and organized. Indeed, the principle of organization—as epitomized in Tory’s graphic grids or in the printer’s compartmentalized case of metal type—is what transforms language into such a resource. “For nature to be thus exploited and consigned, it has to be considered as ground, reserve, available stock for the needs of the system that modern technics forms.”95

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The typographer’s metal letters—the very letters Tory teaches us how to design and reproduce—materialize language as “available stock”; the body of the vernacular accordingly becomes a ready “reserve” of metal type waiting to be deployed—metal itself mined from the ground as standing reserve before being melted down and cast into shape with the hand mold, and finally organized in a wooden case. This principle of organization first announced in Champ fleury will reappear as the underlying principle of vernacular grammars, dictionaries, and spelling reforms in the decades that follow. “Rule” and “order” designate a command of nature and life, of time and space: control over the French of “today” and tomorrow. The technological mastery of language is thus also a form of political and social mastery; the two converge in an imagined dominion exercised on the page. Tory’s desire to introduce “certain rule” (Reigle certaine) into the “fecundity” of the French language, regulating the symbolically natural and maternal body, situates us in that originary (agricultural/technological) moment where nature becomes culture, where the fertile body of nature is made to yield new fruits through the application of a certain care that is ultimately indistinguishable from a certain violence. Natural fecundity must be artificially “corrected”—grammatically, typographically, orthographically—in order to become “richer and more perfect.” A “native” French language is born through artificial reproduction.

How to Make a Prosthetic Tongue Tory writes that he conceived Champ fleury in 1523, lying in bed on the morning after Epiphany with “a thousand little fantasies” swimming in his head. The memory of a particular set of “Attic” letters he had once designed combined, he reports, with the memory of a “sententious passage” from Cicero regarding our duty to serve our friends and country, and the result was Champ fleury: a useful book for the French public on the art and science of letters. The guiding ethos of Tory’s book is pedagogical; he announces from the opening pages his intention to “demonstrate and teach” how letters should be fashioned, insisting that he does so for the “utility of the public good.” The subtitle of Champ fleury (“In which is contained the Art and Science of the True Proportion of Attic Letters .  .  .”) already advertises it as a how-­to manual for printers and other graphic artisans. Flipping to the backside of the title page, the reader finds a table of contents explaining that Champ fleury contains three parts, culminating in step-­by-­step instructions for writing and speech.96 The teleprinter is a machine

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for issuing instructions: it commands, it directs, it teaches from afar. Already in paratextual threshold of the book, Champ fleury prepares its vernacular reader to become a future producer of letters. Following the royal privilege, the reader next encounters the dedicatory epistle addressed not to the king or another esteemed personage but to “all true and devoted Lovers of good letters.”97 Here, Tory explains that instead of offering his book to “some great Lord of the Court or the Church,” he has opted to “make a present to you all, O Devoted Lovers of good Letters, without preferring great to small” (de vous en faire a tous ung present O Devotz Amateurs de bonnes Lettres, sans preferer grant a petit).98 In a similarly democratizing vein—one that sends the teleprinter’s text out to as many points as possible, like the multiple ears receiving the Herculean message— Tory announces on the first page of Book I that while he is learned enough to have written Champ fleury in Latin (as the reader can judge for herself or himself from the “little Latin works I have had printed and put before the eyes of good students”), he has chosen to write in the vernacular to “decorate our French language somewhat” (volant quelque peu decorer nostre langue Francoise), but also “so that along with people of good letters the common people might be able to use it” (afin que avec gens de bonnes lettres le peuple commun en puisse user).99 Like the compass with a hinge that allows it to open and close, making the radius of its arc grow or shrink, Tory’s book can open up to all student-­readers in the French realm—“lettered” and “common,” great and small—as he traces the contours of a new vernacular field defined by his teleprinting. Champ fleury is designed with usefulness for the student in mind. Tory offers his book to the reader as an instrument to be handled, appropriated, and above all used. His “reader” is a student-­user of the technology of the printed book; this reader reads with both hands. “With the help of God and this book,” Tory explains early on, “one can make and design the Attic Letter in its due proportion as small or as large as one wishes.” (A laide de Dieu, & de ce present Livre cy, on pourra faire & designer Lettre Attique en sa deue proportion tant petite & tant grande quon vouldra.)100 He fills the margins of Champ fleury with helpful hints, guiding notes, and proper names that refer the reader to nearly two hundred different source texts. At the front of the book is a Table listing the names of all the authors quoted or mentioned; Tory’s canon is largely classical (Aulus Gellius, Homer, Lucian, Ovid, Quintilian) and humanist (Alberti, Budé, Erasmus, Petrarch), though he also cites medieval authors (Chrétien de Troyes, Dante). This table is followed by a longer index of French and Latin sayings (Dictions) in alphabetical order with corresponding page

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numbers that allow readers to search and find what they are looking for with ease (one of the hallmarks of the technology of the codex). For the first time in a French book, quotation marks appear, dotting the margins (already occupied by notes and proper names) to indicate the presence of borrowed text—usually in Latin, which Tory cites in the original before translating into French to facilitate the vernacular reader’s use and appropriation. Each of his majuscule designs is meant to be replicated by the hands and tools of his readers, the “printers and writers” (Imprimeurs & Escripvains) of France.101 His woodcuts of letters are visual aids showing would-­be typographers where to place their compass, and his verbal instructions specify how many turns are needed to produce the desired letter form. At the end of Champ fleury, more than a dozen pages are filled with woodcuts of different alphabets for the reader’s use: the humanist’s Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but also Arabic, French (i.e., scripts traditionally used in French text), and “fantastic” letters composed of various instruments (compass, scissors, etc.). The book-­object Champ fleury is, like the printing press itself, a lettering machine that will allow the user-­student-­reader to produce language in a new—ordered, regulated, clear, correct, proportional, harmonious, repeatable, prosthetic—way. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio have argued that early modern printed books in general were understood as primarily instrumental, “directing their readers and users, within particular fields of practice or knowledge, toward some more or less practical end.”102 Early printed books were not meant to be read in the immersive sense later popularized by the novel; they were “intricate tools that needed to be used in order to become useful.”103 The how-­to genre, which flooded the sixteenth-­century print market, would be a particular case of this more general instrumentality of the printed book. Elizabeth Eisenstein describes a veritable “avalanche” of treatises that sought to “explain by a variety of ‘easy steps,’ (often supplemented by sharp-­edged diagrams) just ‘how to’ draw a picture, compose a madrigal, mix paints, bake clay, keep accounts, survey a field, handle all manner of tools and instruments, work mines, assay materials, move armies or obelisks, design buildings, bridges, and machines.”104 In French, such texts most often went by the name Art, following the Latin ars, and advertised themselves to the reader-­buyer as “useful” (utile), “very-­useful” (tresutile), or “profitable.” The first decades of the sixteenth century in France witnessed the publication of a “useful” art of archery (Art d’archerie, tres noble et utile traicte parlant de la maniere d’apprendre a tirer larc, 1506), a “profitable” art of arithmetic (Œuvre tressubtile et profitable de lart et science darithmetique, 1515), and a “very-­useful” and “profitable” art of music (L’Art, science et pratique

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de plaine musique tresutile, profitable et familiere nouvellement composee en francois, c. 1510). The “art” represents not only a new genre but also a new technical form of knowledge distinct from science or craft that emerges at the turn of the sixteenth century. The Latin phrase ad artem redigere, to “reduce into art” a human activity or practice, describes an epistemological project that is at once systematic, methodical, and fundamentally textual.105 The phrase was translated into French during the Renaissance by the two synonymous expressions rédiger en art and réduire en art.106 Jean Nicot’s Trésor will define rédiger variously as to constrain, to assemble, or “to put in order and in writing some art or other matter” (rediger aussi est mettre par ordre et par escrit quelque art ou autre matiere). To “reduce” a given practice “into art” means to constrain its free movement with rules and precepts, to assemble the fragmented, confused, and heterogeneous into an ordered and finite form. It means to break it down into its constituent parts, gestures, or steps in a standardized or repeatable way. In this way, the “art” constitutes a mechanization of human practice—be it archery, arithmetic, poetry, or pronunciation. As Hélène Vérin suggests, the reduction into art is not a simple “conservatoire des savoirs”: it valorizes efficient and correct action; it schematizes; it aims at mastery via rational, geometrical, serial form.107 It also therefore marks a certain “perfection,” a fixing of practice in time such that it no longer evolves. Francis Bacon writes in this vein, in 1605, of an “overearly and peremptory reduction of knowledge into arts and methods” that prevents knowledge from continuing to grow. By contrast, the French humanist Louis Le Roy will testify in 1575 to the wealth of new material “first known in this time” that still awaits its mechanization: “new lands, new seas, new forms of men, mores, laws, customs; new herbs, trees, roots, gums, liquors, fruits; new illnesses and new remedies, new routes of the sky and ocean not tried before, new stars sighted.” Of all these “difficult and latecoming [tardives à venir]” matters, Leroy asks, “how many are there not yet reduced into art?” This vision of the natural world—and the “new world” of the Americas in particular—as virgin terrain to “reduce into art” points to the ways in which the ad artem redigere participates in a project of technological mastery: of non-­European peoples, of nature and natural reproduction, of life itself. We are not far here from Descartes’s declaration in his Discours de la méthode that method will make men into the “masters of nature.” Printing was instrumental in producing this new, mechanized form of knowledge. Although instructional manuals of various kinds were penned before the advent of movable type, the reproductive possibilities of printing and

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its scale of dissemination effectively brought the how-­to book into being as a new, medium-­specific genre. Movable type allowed for detailed verbal instructions to be repeated with precision and disseminated in mass quantities; at the same time, printed books provided a media context for the “exactly repeatable pictorial statements” of woodblock printing (which predate movable type in Europe by about fifty years) to become a knowledge technology on a mass scale.108 As the above list of activities that received the how-­to treatment suggests, printing encouraged and generalized the step-­by-­step method and the principle of repeatability. The ars imprimendi, itself a “perfection” and “reduction into art” of the practice of writing, remakes other practices in its own image. The standardized gestures of the compositor, beater, and puller in the print shop will become the model for the totality of human activity. Speaking and writing French was no exception. There will be no meaningful separation, I suggest, between the art of printing the grammatical-­ orthographic “reduction into art” of vernacular language; they work in tandem as part of the same mechanizing operation. In 1540, the humanist scholar and printer Étienne Dolet affirms that his treatise on translation technique, La Maniere de bien traduire dune langue en aultre, represents a first step in the project to “reduire en art” the French language. Like Tory, Dolet presents his project as a collective “labor” (labeur) that can only happen over time through a series of discrete steps, one edition at a time. Dolet asks his reader to receive his treatise “not as perfect in the demonstration of our language, but only as a beginning of it.” He continues: “I know that when one desired to reduce the Greek and Latin languages into art, it was not accomplished by one man but by many. Which will similarly be done in the French language, and little by little by the means and work of learned people it will be reduced into the same perfection as the aforementioned languages [i.e., Greek and Latin].” His brief treatise on translation, which outlines five “rules” (reigles) for the would-­be translator, are followed by two additional short texts: a guide to French punctuation (La punctuation de la langue francoyse) and a manual on accents (Les accents de la langue francoyse), both of which would be reprinted many times during the sixteenth century, and both of which draw on Tory’s innovations, as well as the anonymous Briefve doctrine of 1533. As we will see in Chapter 4, Dolet offers all three treatises to the reader as only the first installment of a systematic technical work to come, his comprehensive Orateur francoys that will instruct readers in all aspects of vernacular language—a language thereby entirely reduced into art. The status of the printed book as a “useful” object of technical know-­how provides the framework for Tory’s teletechnological program. When, just below

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his woodcut of the Gallic Hercules, he offers the reader a sample of what a French “rule of grammar” (Reigle de grammaire) might look like (his example is the third-­person singular endings for different types of verbs in the passé simple, which he refers to following Latin convention as the “preterite”), Tory explains that he has “made this little demonstrative digression so that some studious spirit might take the handle of the matter I put before his eyes” (j’ay faict icy ceste petite demonstrative digression, affin que quelque studieux esperit preigne l’anse de la matiere que je luy mets devant les yeulx).109 The Reigle de grammaire operates as a mental instrument, the “handle” of which the reader can grab and use in the collective project of constructing a more perfect grammatical tongue. What Tory models for the reader is the process of (tele-­)technologization itself. He then provides a syllabus of other book-­tools the reader might “use” to produce further instruments: “Whoever would like to have a good foundation in this matter could in my opinion use the works of Pierre de Saint-­Cloud and the works of Jean Linevelois . .  .  . One could also use the works of Chrétien de Troyes.” (Qui se vouldroit en ce bien fonder, a mon advis porroit user des oeuvres de Pierre de sainct Cloct. & des oeuvres de Jehan Linevelois . . . . On porroit aussi user dez oeuvres de Chrestien de Troyes.)110 Tory tells the reader that he has himself “seen and held” all these “ancient authors written on parchment” (anciens Autheurs escriptz en parchemain), which his “good friend” René Masse “used so well to perfect the Chronicles of France.”111 The manuscript past does not disappear for Tory; it is put to new “use” in the French-­language machine.

* * * As a pedagogical Art and teletechnology, Tory’s book marks a move away from “cult value” to a mode of “exhibition value”—a cultural and aesthetic shift Walter Benjamin famously associates with the technological reproducibility of the artwork. Tory writes at the beginning of Champ fleury that certain unnamed parties urged him to keep knowledge of his craft “secret” rather than communicating or “manifesting” (manifester) it in print, but that he felt it was his duty not to jealously guard his art.112 Throughout his book, Tory unflaggingly performs this exhibitionist pedagogical practice, foregrounding the act of demonstration or exhibition itself. He regularly breaks the fourth wall of the book, his authorial je a constant presence that reaches out to address and make contact with the reader: telling, showing, writing, saying, naming, returning, seeing, hearing, figuring, not forgetting, asking. The word je appears some 800 times in the book’s 80 folios. Also insistently present is the reader, “vous,” for whom this

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demonstration is performed. Everywhere, Tory tells us that he has written, designed, drawn, exhibited for us: “And in order to better understand and know it, I have drawn and written it for you in the form that follows” (Et pour la myeulx entendre & cognoistre, je la vous ay designee & escripte en la forme qui s’ensuyt ).113 The decision to write and publish the book in French would participate in this same gesture: it is an exhibition of knowledge to the vernacular reader—rather than a concealment of knowledge in the more “secret,” erudite idiom of Latin—but also an exposure of the author in print, in his mother tongue, that uses this tongue as a line directly to the reader. Champ fleury also engages the reader in a constant back and forth between text and image, directing us to look above, below, to the side, or on the following page to discover his “design” (deseing) intended to “better present the matter to the eye” (myeulx bailler la chose a l’oeuil).114 The printed page becomes a space not only of imaginative play but also of graphic display, tendencies that manifest themselves most provocatively in the nude male figures situated inside letter grids, or else in the “Lettered Man” we have seen, sliced open to show the reader which organs correspond to which characters. Indeed, Champ fleury treats the reader to a veritable anatomy of both letter and human as the principles of typographical composition are laid bare. This anatomical display would mimic the treatment of language in the printer’s workshop, where an integral body of text is produced only by cutting, dismembering, and reconstructing language. In this sense, Tory is not only an exhibitionist in a scene of teletechnological reproducibility, he would also be, like Ambroise Paré, a surgeon—the same figure Walter Benjamin proposes to explain the difference between the painter and the camera operator or cinematographer. The painter for Benjamin resembles a magician who “maintains the natural distance between himself and the person treated”; the surgeon, by contrast, “makes an intervention in the patient” and “diminishes the distance from the patient by penetrating the patient’s body.”115 Likewise, Benjamin explains, the painter “maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue.”116 The printer’s workshop would thus anticipate Benjamin’s film studio, where “the apparatus has penetrated so deeply into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment, is the result of a special procedure.”117 In cinema, Benjamin writes, “the equipment-­free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology.”118 The “flowers” of Tory’s title would likewise be the effects of the apparatus, the fantasmatic result of a cutting procedure. When the French language blossoms in the hands of Tory’s readers, its flowers

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will be produced by modern technē. The medieval garden of France comes to fruition as the printer’s champ fleury, a “land of technology” in which nature and immediacy are produced using woodblock prints and metal type.

* * * Tory’s book finds its first user in short order. John Palsgrave, whose Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse appears in London in July 1530 (or, perhaps, 1531), picks up the call of the teleprinter.119 Dedicated to Henry VIII, the Esclaircissement announces itself as the first proper French grammar. In language that directly echoes Tory, Palsgrave affirms that he has “at the last brought the frenche tong under any rules certayn and preceptes grammaticall, lyke as the other . . . parfite tonges be.”120 Although its title is in French, Palsgrave’s book is written in English and is designed to grant English readers “parfit knowledge of the frenche tong.” Perfection here not only is a historical stage in the life cycle of language but also is a state of language reduced into art, the state of language inside the grammar book. Latin and Greek are “parfite tonges”; now French is, as well. The Esclaircissement inscribes itself from the start in the wake of Tory, opening with a Latin epistle addressed to “the author of Champ fleury” (Campi Floridi authorem) and declaring itself to be the fulfillment of Tory’s project: “Learned Geoffroy, the wish you so often expressed in your Champ fleury is fulfilled; for here, with rules duly authorized, French is taught completely. Neither Palaemon nor Gaza in his work, nor any of their illustrious predecessors better treated Greek or Latin grammar than Palsgrave here treats French. He has the erudition, clarity, and concision required for this matter; thus do we prevail, learned Geoffroy, in finally seeing the wish you so often expressed in your Champ fleury fulfilled.”121 Inside the text, Palsgrave introduces his grammatical project by invoking “maister Geffray Tory de Bourges” and the figure of the Gallic Hercules that appears “about the beginnyng of his boke.” This Hercules appears as a chain between the two books—Champ fleury and the first French grammar—alongside Tory’s wish that a reader would hear his exhortation and take the French language “in hande”: “spekyng of Hercules Gallicus or Francois, shewynge the naturall inclination that the frenche men have unto eloquence and facundite, and howe theyr tong for the most generall is corrupted for want of rules and preceptes grammaticall, and whisshynge that some studious clerke shulde, by mean of his exhortation nowe take the thyng in hande.”122

Chapter 4

Phonography Accents, Orthography, Typography

If the voice could be everywhere, and perpetually audible, we would have no need to put anything into writing. That is the intended use of writing, which is derived from speech, as everyone knows. Si la voęs pouoę´ t ´ę tre/ par tout, e pęrpetuęlle/mant antandible/: nous n’aurions que/ fęre/ de/ męttre/ rien par ecrit. Voila l’usage/ auquel ´ę t destinee/ l’Ecritture/, qui ´ęt de/puis le/ parler, comme/ chacun sèt. —Jacques Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/ The violence of writing does not befall an innocent language. . . . “Usurpation” has always already begun. —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

French Phonography “Phonography” predates Thomas Edison’s device for recording and reproducing sound. Before the phonograph was introduced in 1877, the term referred to a spelling system that represents the sounds of speech. As the Greek etymology suggests, “phonography” is sound-­writing, from phōnē (“sound”) and gráphein (“to write, express by written characters,” from the earlier sense “to scratch, scrape, graze”), and the “phonograph” is a writer of sounds. Phonography scratches sound into a surface to make it iterable, replayable, reproducible; it marks sound, which is to say, it makes it into a machine. Before Edison,

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phonography referred to an ideal of orthography (“correct” writing), one model for what alphabetic writing is or should be. In 1701, a British physician named John Jones published his treatise Practical Phonography, which taught a phonetic method of spelling and advertised itself as “the new art of rightly spelling and writing words by the sound thereof, and of rightly sounding and reading words by the sight thereof.”1 Writing as phonography imagines a perfect coordination between letters and the vocal apparatus. Not only does it presuppose that writing is a faithful (or “high-­fidelity,” to use the language of the phonograph) representation of speech, it also fantasizes a “play-­back” function according to which this speech can be reactivated—“sounded,” as Jones has it—through reading. “Phonography” as an orthographic system already names a mechanical—artful, methodical, systematic, repeatable—recording of the sounds of speech. In 1837, Sir Isaac Pitman devised a system of phonetic shorthand that he likewise marketed as “phonography.” Pitman’s system, which broke speech down into phonemic, or syllabic, chunks and devised characters—“phonographs” or “phonograms”—for representing each sound, became at one point the most commonly used shorthand system in the Anglophone world.2 Users of Pitman’s shorthand were known as “phonographers.” At the height of its success, phonography was adapted to a number of other languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Welsh, and Esperanto. The 1882 volume French Phonography details the technique for representing French “with reasonable exactitude” and provides a series of sample passages, starting with the opening of the Book of John: La parole était au commencement . . . (“In the beginning was the word . . .”).3 As we saw in Chapter 1, Derrida will also use the term “phonography” in Of Grammatology to talk about a certain idea of phonetic writing. “Pure phonography,” suggests Derrida, is an “idea of pure presence”; it is the fantasy of “the self-­presence of speech itself ” in writing, according to which the signifier “would tend to be effaced in the presence of the signified.”4 This writing would be not artificial but natural, not grammatological but “pneumatological,” “immediately united to the voice and to the breath.”5 As a logocentric fantasy, such writing would write not only speech but also thought and interiority: “the voice one hears upon retreating into oneself: full and truthful presence of the divine voice to our inner sense.”6 This is a conception of writing not as dead letter but as living word. Reading back phonographic writing promises to deliver presence itself. It is with this history—what we could call a prehistory of “phonography” in the usual sense—in mind that I turn in this chapter to the new accents and phonetic spelling reforms introduced in French books starting around 1530.

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What these typographical and orthographic reforms reveal, I will argue, is the widespread deployment of printing technology as a phonographic apparatus for recording and reproducing vernacular speech. We have already seen this effect anticipated in Chapter 3, with Geoffroy Tory’s emphasis on the pronunciation of letters, his desired alignment of the visual and aural fields, and his imagining of the Gallic Hercules, whose tongue extends into the ears of his subjects via a metal chain that comes to resemble Tory’s own chain of reproducible characters. As we shall see in this chapter, Tory is the first to suggest that the absence of accents in French represents a “defaut,” a lack, fault, or defect that calls out to be prosthetically supplemented. I will suggest that the project of vernacular teletechnicity—the ability to reproduce language as “living presence” over space and time—is intimately bound up with phonography, a conception of writing as the recording of a “live” and “native” French voice. It is the orthographic reformer Jacques Peletier who, in a set of prefaces to his 1545 translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, first makes explicit the link between phonography and French “nativity”—the link between phonocentrism, logocentrism, and linguistic nationalism. In a first epistle to the reader (“Au lecteur”), Peletier announces that in this “little book” (livret), the reader will find “the French spelling somewhat different from what is vulgarly practiced” (l’orthographe françoise aucunement diverse de celle qui est vulgairement prattiquée).7 Writing in this unconventional orthography, he outlines the three principles underlying it. First, the Aristotelian logo-­phonocentric principle: “just as speech signifies thought, likewise the orthography does speech, which it must obey faithfully: such that writing otherwise than one pronounces is like speaking otherwise than one thinks” (tout ainsi que la parolle est significative de la pensée, semblablement l’orthographe de la parolle, alaquelle elle doit obeir fidelement: de sorte que ecrire autrement qu’on ne prononce, est comme si on parloit autrement qu’on ne pense).8 Second, to avoid the “superfluity” (superfluité) that “holds our French language in subjection” (tient nostre langue Francois en subgetion) and prevents it from traveling abroad (passer aux nations etranges) due to the enormous build-­up or accumulation of letters (entassement de lettres). Third, to begin to “regulate and make fair our language” (regler & mettre au net notre langage) so that words that are pronounced the same way do not have different spellings—which is the most “expedient” (expeditif) means of bringing honor to the French language.9 In the second preface, a dedicatory epistle, Peletier affirms that, in contrast to Greek and Latin, French is “our native language”: notre langue native, the word notre spelled without the unpronounced s (as in “nostre”) that would have been standard for Peletier’s

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contemporaries, signaling that the valorization “native” language goes hand in hand with the primacy of speech and the duty of writing to “obey” pronunciation. For Peletier, affirming French as the “native” language of the French writer will in fact entail a whole series of values. French emerges as a language of nature, self, property, originality, and self-­presence. Latin and Greek—but especially Latin, as a favored language of writing by Peletier’s contemporaries—assume in turn the opposite values: artifice, borrowing or theft, otherness, exteriority, copying, death. Writing in Latin or devoting excessive attention to Greek represents a drift away from the writer’s origin, his proper affective place, resulting for Peletier in error, forgetting, and perversity. Peletier laments that he sees many learned Frenchmen who, because their vernacular goes unused while they write in Latin, “commit serious and unbearable errors, not only in their daily speech but also in French composition, so much so that they seem to take deliberate pleasure in forgetting their own primary language” (commettent erreurs lours & insupportables, non pas en parler quotidien seulement, mais aussi en composition Francoise: si bien qu’ilz semblent prendre plaisir expres a oublier leur propre & principal langage).10 A parallel metaphysical schema will undergird Peletier’s phonetic spelling reforms: phonetic writing promises a return to voice as the proper origin of writing, while rejecting the graphic excesses of unpronounced consonants (letters that typically indicate Greek and Latin etymologies, and thus “foreign” and “dead” letters). The improper usurpation of the place of French by Greek and Latin is for Peletier structurally analogous to the usurpation of pronunciation by writing; what is at stake in both cases is a return of power to a supposedly full and fully present origin. The native French voice is what must be transmitted in printed books and carried over the Herculean wire: such is the conviction of Peletier and his fellow reformers who animate the famous orthographic debates of the mid-­sixteenth century. If Tory already sets in motion a certain phonographic thinking in Champ fleury, it is Louis Meigret who, before Peletier, launches a sustained reflection on vernacular phonography in 1542 with the publication of his Traité touchant le commun usage de l’escriture francoyse, .  .  . auquel est debattu des faultes & abus en la vraye & ancienne puissance des lettres (“Treatise on the common use of French writing, . . . in which is debated the faults and abuses in the true and ancient power of letters”). For Meigret, who also authored the first vernacular grammar in 1550, the condition of possibility for any French grammar—the condition of prosthetic iterability—is to “make letters and writing align with voice and pronunciation” (fę´ re qadrer lę’ lettres, ę l’ecrittur’ ao’ voęs ę a la prono[n]çíaçíon).11 Meigret’s phonographic system looks to eliminate all .

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“confusion,” “usurpation,” and “superfluity” of letters, thereby ensuring that “each vowel and consonant maintains a sound that is always uniform” (çhacune voyęll’ ę consonante, garde vn son tousjours vniforme).12 Each character should, in short, act as a phonographic technology, replaying the same sound everywhere and at all times according to what Meigret, following Priscian and other Latin grammarians, calls its “power” (puissance, from the Latin potestas, “force, sound value”). It is only with such a system in place that, as Meigret suggests in a recurrent analogy, French writing will be able to represent the voice in the same way a painter portrays le vif, the live subject or model.13 And yet phonography would promise to go beyond this representational economy by reactivating or reanimating the voice through reading; it would be caught up in the teletechnological polarization we saw in the previous chapter, which creates “the most vivid of possible affinities . . . between what appears to be the most alive, most live, and différance or delay.”14 Indeed, the litmus test for any orthographic system, according to Meigret, is the act of reading, which should—if the text acts properly as a precise encoding of sound—reactivate native pronunciation. The vernacular printed book enters here into the loop of the système du s’entendre-­ parler, the system of hearing-­oneself-­speak, that grounds both phonetic writing and the fantasy of speech as unmediated living presence. After explaining in the opening pages of his Traité that “articulate voice” (voix articulée, a term he borrows from Priscian) is composed of distinct “elements,” (i.e., sounds, or what modern linguistics calls “phonemes”), he affirms that “the letter is the note of the element, and almost like a kind of image of a formed voice” (la letre est la note de l’element, & comme quasi vne façon d’image d’une voix formée). Reading, for Meigret, should occur as a playback of these notes, a conversion of image into sound that will be exact as long as each character cuts the right groove: “This is the touchstone by which we must test our writing, to see if it is such that we find the same number of letters that pronunciation requires, following their long-­established powers, such that reading it can be easy, without confusion, and without disorder.” (Or voyla la touche à la quelle il nous fault faire l’epreuue de nostre escriture, pour voyr si elle est telle, en qui nous trouuions les letres en mesme nombre, que requiert la prononciation, suyuant leurs puissances de tout temps receues: de sorte que la lecture en puisse estre aisée, sans co[n]fusion, & sans desordre.)15 If reform is so urgently needed, this is because French is perceived to be singularly abusive in its use of letters. It thus generates a singular amount of static on the line, be it through one letter “usurping” the power of the other— which comes about from a “corruption” of the power of letters and leads to

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“reading one voice for another, and consequently [producing] bad and false pronunciation” (faire lecture d’une voix pour autre, & par consequence mauuaise, & faulse prononciation)—or else through the accumulation of “superfluous” letters, which is “a vice so great in our French language that there is hardly a letter in the alphabet that we don’t sometimes abuse by superfluity: like the a in aorné, the b in debuoir, doibt, doibuent, the c in infinite words like faict, parfaict, dict, the d in admonestemens, aduis, aduerse” (vng vice si grand en nostre langue françoise qu’il n’y a letre quasi en l’alphabeth do[n]t nous n’abusio[n]s quelquefois par superfluité. Comme de l’a, en aorné, du b, en debuoir, doibt, doibuent, du c, en infiniz vocables, comme faict, parfaict, dict. Du d, comme admonestemens, aduis, aduerse.)16 The underlying “corruption,” “usurpation,” or “superfluity” is that of the graphic itself, which Meigret and his fellow reformers actively look to repress in order to get the system of hearing-­oneself-­ speak back up and running in French. Meigret thus strikingly anticipates the phonocentrism that Derrida will locate in Saussure’s thinking in Of Grammatology, from Saussure’s claim that writing has “usurped” the spoken word, to his understanding of writing as an “image” or “representation” of speech, to his claim that speech entertains the only “natural” relationship to thought, to his pathologization of etymological consonants and of writing as such. Like Saussure, Meigret participates in the “historico-­metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language.”17 But, like Saussure, Meigret—along with Jacques Peletier and others from the sixteenth-­century phonographic cohort—also offers resources, as we shall see toward the end of this chapter, for “liberat[ing] the future of a general grammatology.”18 As Derrida affirms, deconstructing this phonocentric tradition does “not consist in reversing it,” that is, of valorizing writing over speech or “making writing innocent.”19 Instead, it consists of “showing why the violence of writing does not befall an innocent language.”20 As we have seen with the logic of arche-­writing and arche-­printing, there is “an originary violence of writing because language is first . . . writing.”21 “Usurpation,” as a violent force of perversion, is not something that befalls language. As Derrida insists, “‘Usurpation’ has always already begun.”22 We will have to ask of Meigret, Peletier, and the entire phonographic project—as Derrida does in relation to Saussure’s anxiety about the takeover of etymological consonants—not only Où est le mal? (Where is the harm?), but also “What has been invested in the ‘living word’ that makes such ‘aggressions’ of writing intolerable?”23 The singular “corruption” of French orthography with respect to its pronunciation will be commented on by a number of French writers throughout

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the sixteenth century, including the physician and phonetic spelling advocate Laurent Joubert, for whom it transforms French writing into a “cacography” (a “bad” or “defective” writing). In the opening lines of his Dialogue sur la Cacographie Fransaise (1579), Joubert asks “how it happened that only the Frenchman pronounces his language differently than he writes it” (d’où il æt avenu, q[ue] le seul Fransais prononce autremant son la[n]gage, qu’il ne l’ecrit).24 Like other reformers of the period, Joubert claims that Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are all “written as they are pronounced” (ecris comme on les prono[n]ce), as are “the vernacular languages of today: Italian, Spanish, and German” (les langues vulgaires d’aujoudhuy, l’Italiene, l’Espagnole, & l’Alemande).25 French is exceptional among languages, alone in its cacographic “vice” (vice) or “evil” (mal): “only French does not observe in its writing its proper pronunciation” (la seule Fransaise, n’observe an son ecriture sa duë prolacion), writes the doctor Joubert. The rest of his dialogue is dedicated to diagnosing this mal of the French tongue, which results from the influence of the German language brought by invading Frankish tribes in Gaul. The graphic excess of nonphonetic writing appears to come from the outside: it presents as a foreign body, a contaminating sickness that must be purged. Bringing French writing into its “proper” alignment with speech thus means restoring not only the sovereignty of the voice over writing but also an imagined purity of the French tongue that would supposedly reside in pronunciation. Phonography thus represents an attempted “return” to a fantasmatic origin of purity, health, and full presence of the French tongue, a logic already present in Meigret’s seminal arguments for reform. Meigret, too, presents himself in his 1542 Traité as a physician coming to diagnose and repair the mal of French writing: “That is why considering this obvious ill . . . I undertook this treatise on French writing: and just like a good doctor who has discovered the nature and circumstances of an illness, fulfills his duty to also give the means of healing in order to achieve health.” (Parquoy considerant ce mal tant appara[n]t . . . i’ay entreprins ce traicté de l’escriture Françoise: Et tout ainsi qu’ung bon medecin apres auoir bien decouuert la nature, & circonstance d’une maladie, fait son deuoir de don[n]er dauantage le moie[n] de guarison pour peruenir à la sante.)26 Meigret likewise insists that French writing has been “estranged” from pronunciation, its powers corrupted; he seeks to put down the “rebellion of writing” (la rebęllion de l’ecritture) by reinstituting its proper role as “image of the voice” (imaje de la voęs) and restoring to letters their “original” (premiere) or “native” (nayve) power.27 For Meigret, aligning writing with pronunciation guarantees that a “pure Frenchman” will always know how to write his language without

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recourse to the foreign, to what is outside “pure” French—a purity here fully identified with pronunciation: “a pure Frenchman would not have to go ask a Latin why one puts a p in recepvoir” (ne seroęt vn pur Françoęs ęn peine de s’ęnqerir a vn Latin, pourqoę on męt vn p, ęn recepuoir), and “whoever would have pronunciation could (knowing the power of letters) write correctly without having recourse to the Greeks or Latins” (qiconq’ aoroęt la prononçíaçíon, pourroęt (saçhant la puyssançe dę’ lęttres) ecrire corręctement sans recourir ao’ Gręcz, ne ao’ Latins).28 Phonography promises self-­presence and self-­sufficiency for the French speaker, the sufficiency unto itself of vernacular speech as living word that no longer has need for the dead letter of dead tongues—which is to say, for “writing” as such. This chapter explores the various ways in which—through a series of prosthetic devices, including new accents, characters, and typefaces—printing technology is called upon to restore and (re)produce the French voice, even as printing qua technical or graphic supplement, qua material signifier, is effaced and disavowed. The line quoted as the epigraph to this chapter from Jacques Peletier’s Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ (1550), the major manifesto for phonetic reform alongside Meigret’s Traité, already shows this phonocentric dynamic at work. Peletier affirms that writing is secondary in relation to speech: it “is derived from speech, as everyone knows” (ę´ t de/puis le/ parler, comme/ chacun sèt), a supplement necessary only because the voice cannot extend itself in space and time. “If the voice could be everywhere and perpetually audible we would have no need to put anything into writing.” (Si la voęs pouoę´ t ´ętre/ par tout, e pęrpetuęlle/mant antandible/: nous n’aurions que/ fęre/ de/ męttre/ rien par ecrit.)29 And yet this very affirmation—which already hints at a fault inherent in the voice that would undermine the fantasy of speech as full self-­presence—is written in an orthography that relies on brand-­new characters cut and cast especially for Peletier’s book. The tongue needs the technological prosthesis in order to (re)produce itself as presence. Peletier’s spelling of the word for “voice,” voęs, itself simultaneously calls attention to and effaces the materiality and technicity of the signifier. On the one hand, it insists on the signifier by changing the usual spelling of the word “voix” and by introducing the ę, a character scarcely seen before in French. On the other hand, this spelling simultaneously tends to efface this same signifier by conjuring the voice—the voice that says “voęs”—and thereby dissolving the visual mark.30 Something of this same tension would persist in Peletier’s text today: since his orthography ultimately gained little traction, it still reads as an insistently material signifier even to a reader well versed in sixteenth-­century French. And

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yet it does conjure a spectral voice: in voęs we can “hear” the auditory trace of a voice no microphone ever captured, speaking in an accent we have never actually “heard.” Something of sixteenth-­century French pronunciation does get replayed in Peletier’s voęs—spectrally, as a present absence, a posthumous voice. In this sense, Peletier’s characters do act like Edison’s phonographic record, playing French voices at an uncanny distance of almost five centuries. And this is precisely how Peletier envisioned his orthography: as a mechanical tongue that would keep speaking on its own, repeating what he calls “our living voice” (notre/ viue/ voęs) long after we are gone.31 Unlike Joubert, Peletier does not assume that Greek and Latin were originally pronounced as they are written. This assumption would be the lure of phonetic writing that ensnares every “learned man”: “There is not a single learned man who, when he pronounces Latin or Greek, does not think he pronounces well and does not believe this to be the power of letters—and that to say otherwise would be reckless conjecturing.” (Il n’i à pas un homme/ docte/, quand il prononce/ le/ Latin ou le/ Grec, qui ne/ s’estime/ bien prononcer, e qui ne/ panse/ que/ la puissance/ des lętre/s ne/ soę´ t tele/: e que s’on disoę´ t autre/mant, ce/ se/roę´ t trop hardimant de/uinè.)32 Phonography takes on its full significance when only letters remain, that is, in the scene of the dead language whose native speakers are extinct. We think we should pronounce Latin as it is written, Peletier suggests, because “we have today no man who can pronounce Latin, except as Books teach him to do” (nous n’auons aujourdhui homme/ qui prononce/ Latin, sinon comme/ les Liure/s lui anseigne/t).33 Phonography becomes a cultural imperative as an archival technology, for a time when our books will survive us and teach others to speak our tongue. In this sense, phonography always treats its “living” language as a future-­dead language. French has the chance to succeed where Latin and Greek failed, creating a writing that will survive—in print—better than they have. French has the chance to cut new grooves in the tongue: “And now that we have the leisure to do so, why don’t we give our French the form, character, and state that must perpetually keep? Let us not suffer that a thousand years from now, or more (for we aim, or should aim, to make it as durable as possible), our pronunciation be bastardized when the vernacular has come to an end.” (E meinte/nant que nous auons loęsir, pourquoę ne/ balhons nous la forme, le/ caractere/ et l’etat a notre/ Françoęs, qu’il doet tenir pęrpetuęlemant. Ne/ soufrons point que/ d’ici a mil ans e plus (car nous visons ou de/uons viser a la render durable plus que/ nous pourrons) on abátardice/ notre/ prolacion, quand le/ vulgere/ sera falhì.)34 “The phoneticization of writing must dissimulate its own history as it produces itself,” suggests Derrida on the opening page of Of Grammatology.35 The

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power of phonocentrism lies in the dissimulation of the historical and technical conditions of its production. As we saw in Chapter 1, Derrida glimpses a certain “trembling” of this power in 1967, a phenomenon he links to the modern technological “extension of phonography and of all the means of conserving spoken language, of making it function outside the presence of a speaking subject.”36 We saw how modern phonographic devices “extend” phonography but also, for that very reason, show its limits or cause it to “tremble” precisely because they reveal that différance is already affecting speech and the voice from the beginning. Printing similarly “extends” phonography—bringing about an intensification of phonographic effects, a veritable phonographic “turn” in French writing—but it also, for that very reason, makes apparent the limits of phonography, and thus already acts as the machinery for something like deconstruction. “One already suspects,” writes Derrida in his reading of Saussure, “that if writing is exterior ‘image’ and ‘figuration,’ this ‘representation’ is not innocent. The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as always, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always there in the inside, prisoner outside the outside, and vice versa.”37 In the sections that follow, we will track how printing comes to condition and produce not only the phōnē but also its attendant values of presence, voice, nativeness, and Frenchness. In this sense, “phonography” should be heard with emphasis not on the phōnē—that is, not in the phonocentric, ethnocentric, ultimately nationalistic register that imagines a pure or fully present voice—but on the graphein, the repressed supplement of writing, and the repeatable prosthetic mark that makes that voice audible. By shifting our attention to the graphic, we begin to see that even those systems that aim at the most radical and “pure” phoneticism cannot, as Derrida suggests, “totally eliminate within their system elements of a non-­phonetic type.”38 The voice cannot do without the printer’s devices. We may then begin, in a deconstructive fashion, to call into question the supposed purity or originality of a constellation of values: voice, Frenchness, and the nativeness of the so-­called native speaker whose voice echoes over the spectral loudspeaker of the printed page.39

Little Devices In 1920, an essay on the work of Geoffroy Tory appeared in the April issue of the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The author of the piece was William M. Ivins Jr., the director of the museum’s newly formed Department of

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Prints. Three decades later, Ivins would publish his classic Prints and Visual Communication (1953), which argued for the revolutionary impact of woodblock prints as “exactly repeatable pictorial statements” and proved to be an influential work for media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. In the spring of 1920, the Metropolitan Museum had just acquired a Book of Hours with woodcuts by Tory, and Ivins took the opportunity to introduce his readers to the Renaissance printer, engraver, and author of Champ fleury. Ivins saw in Tory’s book a landmark moment in the history of French as a print language. We saw in Chapter 3 that Ivins described Champ fleury as “one of the most important books ever issued in French,” in part because it is the source of “many of the little devices by which French printing even of today is distinguished from that of the other western nations.”40 Modern French is a language marked by its accents, yet accents were virtually nonexistent in French text before 1530. By 1550, only two decades later, new accents and auxiliary marks were being used to print vernacular books in nearly every printing shop in France. Although these marks were far from standardized at mid-­century, we can say that Tory’s Champ fleury marks a watershed moment for the marking of French with “little devices.” What is so curious about this fact, however, is that not a single accent or diacritic actually appears in the pages of Tory’s book. What does it mean, then, for Champ fleury to be the source of the “little devices” that mark the French language? In Book III of Champ fleury, as Tory instructs readers in the composition and pronunciation of the letter O, he notes that the letter can operate as a vocative adverb in Greek, Latin, and French, but that French alone does not use an accent. He notes that the Greeks have a circumflex, and that the printer Aldus Manutius uses the acute accent in his Latin texts. By contrast, “In our French language, we have no figures of accent in writing, and this is due to the fault that our language is not yet set down and ordered to certain Rules like Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. I wish it were, as we could indeed do.” (En nostre langage Francois n’avons point d’accent figure en escripture, & ce pour le default que nostre  langue n’est encores mise ne ordonnee a certaines Reigles comme les Hebraique, Greque, & Latine. Je vouldrois qu’elle y fust ainsi que on le porroit bien  faire.)41 For Tory, the absence of accents in French is a default—a fault, defect, or lack—that falls under the same general techno-­logic as the absence of “order” and “Rule.” He affirms that this “imperfection” can and must be remedied: “In this absence of accent, we have an imperfection that we must remedy by purifying and setting down our language, which is the most gracious one known, to sure Rule & Art.” (En ce passage d’accent, nous avons imperfection a

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la quelle doibvrions remedier en purifiant & mettant a Reigle & Art certain nostre langue qui est la plus gracieuse qu’on sache.)42 Reigle and Art, which we saw in Chapter 3, here apply to auxiliary marks: devices that will “perfect” French as a prosthetic supplement. This supplemental project is announced in terms of textual ornamentation or adornment, participating in Tory’s wish to “illuminate” and “decorate our French language” (decorer nostre langue Francoise).43 Accents will augment the cultural value of French, rendering it illustrious like the ancient languages; they are visual ornaments designed to make the vernacular look and feel—aesthetically, graphically—like Latin or Greek. At the same time, they participate in Tory’s broader logic of intervening in the natural life of the vernacular and supplementing a deficient French nature with technē. For Tory, French is naked, embarrassing itself next to the more fully adorned ancient languages. Du Bellay will echo this sense of embarrassment in the Deffence: “Our ancestors,” he writes, “left us our language so poor and naked that it needs the ornaments and (so to speak) the feathers of others.”44 Tory, who had spent the 1520s engraving woodcut borders, initials, and illustrations to decorate texts, arrives with his tools to adorn the vernacular alphabet with “Art.” Giving accents to the French language is a cultivation of the vernacular field, an illustration with flowers. The initial cultivation of accents by French printers began not with vernacular text but with Latin. Humanists began experimenting with accented Latin text around 1500, and in 1508 Aldus Manutius published his rules for Latin accentuation in his Institutiones grammaticae. It was largely through Aldus’s text and his imprints that French humanist printers took up these accents in turn—and thus not surprising that, as we shall see, the introduction of accents corresponds to the turn to Aldine-­style types around 1530.45 As early as 1509, Tory had proposed using an e with a cedilla-­like hook to represent the Latin diphthongs ae and oe in a text published by Henri Estienne, the father of Robert Estienne who will print the first French accented text.46 During this same period, Erasmus and other humanist scholars drew renewed attention to Latin and Greek orthoepy (the “correct” or customary pronunciation of words). Erasmus’s Right Way of Speaking Greek and Latin (De Recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus) outlined rules for pronunciation as well as the principle that writing “is just silent speech.” For Erasmus, speaking Latin and Greek “correctly” means speaking as the ancients did—recovering and reviving their silent voices. First published in 1528, the De Recta was reprinted in Paris by Tory’s associate Simon de Colines and widely read in France during the same period when French accents were being introduced and French humanists first

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became interested in orthographic reform.47 This movement led to an increased sensitivity to nonphonetic elements in French. Because Latin and Greek were generally considered to have been written phonetically by most writers (though not all, as in the case of Jacques Peletier), the divergence of French writing from pronunciation, like the lack of accents for Tory, came to be perceived as a mark of vernacular “barbarism.” For Erasmus, for one, the fact that “spelling does not agree with pronunciation” in French contributes to its devaluation as “barbarous and irregular.”48 Although medieval French writers were also sensitive to this inadequacy of the Latin alphabet to represent the sounds of French speech, the humanist interests in pronunciation and typography provide the cultural imperative and the technological possibility for a phonographic—that is, phonocentric—movement that will accompany and, in many ways, carry the vernacular movement. Diacritics of course predate movable type printing, but the status of the letter as a discrete material character in typography forms the media context for a proliferation and an eventual codification of new accents and characters. By allowing for new characters to be cut and identically reproduced, printing gives rise to the “little devices” of modern French. Just as important, it gives a renewed power to the individual character that revives and supports a phonographic understanding of writing. In this way, as we have already begun to see with Tory, typography produces an alignment with speech, and thus a new (virtual) “immediacy” and (technologically reproduced) “presence” of the voice. The first French accents should thus be understood as a prosthesis of the voice, a graphic supplement attached to the letter that better enables writing to “speak.” Indeed, accents are explicitly conceived as a technique for teaching ­w riting—and the reader—to speak. They are pedagogical teletechnologies for making the tongues of others move from a distance and into the future. The humanist pedagogue Mathurin Cordier makes this function clear in his book of Latin declensions for French children published by Robert Estienne, Les declinations des noms et des verbes (1540). “The teacher must have him [the child] pronounce each word clearly and audibly, making him raise his voice when pronouncing the syllable on which he sees an acute accent, like dóminus, or a bit more when he sees a circumflex, like dominôrum. And he must show him what the marks mean that he finds printed in his books, whether accents, punctuation, or other distinctions.” (Le maistre luy [à l’enfant] doibt faire prononcer chasque mot clerement & entendiblement, luy faisant vng peu esleuer sa voix en prononceant la syllabe sur laquelle il voira l’accent acut, co[m]me dó minus: ou vng peu plus, quand il trouuera vng circonflexe, comme dominô rum. Et luy

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doibt monstrer que signifient les marques qu’il trouue imprimees en son liure, soit des accens, ou des poincts, & autres distinctions.)49 The accent, like the gramophone after it, speaks with the master’s (or the master printer’s) voice. In the same moment that accents are being introduced in France, they also appear in the French grammars published in England by John Palsgrave and Gilles du Wes (or du Guez), where they demonstrate French pronunciation for English readers. With the introduction of accents, printed vernacular text becomes an increasingly auditory space, each ornamental diacritic acting as a tiny loudspeaker—or a telephone line—in this new prosthetic apparatus of presence. Even as practices of reading tend increasingly toward the solitary and the silent, these diacritical marks mean that the reader does not see vernacular text so much as hear it in a kind of auditory hallucination of the voice of the other that gets confounded with one’s own voice. Thanks to accents, that voice—an increasingly “national” voice—speaks to me as if from inside of me, inside my own ear.

* * * Today there are five accents in French: the acute accent or accent aigu (´), the grave accent or accent grave (`), the circumflex or accent circonflexe (ˆ), the dieresis or tréma (¨), and the cedilla or cédille (ç). Each of these glyphs comes to supplement the Latin alphabet, placed above (or below, in the case of the cedilla) a letter to distinguish it from its non-­marked counterpart. In French, diacritical marks can play a range of roles: phonetic (distinguishing mange, “eat,” from mangé, “eaten”), semantic (distinguishing ou, “or,” from où, “where”), or etymological (recalling that an s used to occupy the middle of hôte, host or guest). The dictionary of the Académie française defined “Accent” in 1740—the year the circumflex was officially introduced—as follows: “Accent means .  .  . a little mark that is placed over a vowel, either to make the pronunciation known, or to distinguish the meaning of a word from that of another word that is written the same way. Accent aigu ´. Accent grave `. Accent circonflexe ˆ.” (Accent signifie . . . une petite marque qui se met sur une voyelle, soit pour en faire connoître la prononciation, soit pour distinguer le sens d’un mot, d’avec celui d’un autre mot qui s’écrit de même. Accent aigu ´. Accent grave `. Accent circonflexe ˆ.)50 These little marks are imprinted on the French language. They originate in the printer’s shop and would in this sense be the marks of no human hand but rather the prosthetic printing apparatus. Not one of the above accents had appeared in a French text before 1529, as Tory observed in Champ fleury. By the

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end of 1531, every one of the accents of modern French had been introduced in some form (even if, in certain cases, their modern uses would not be fixed for several centuries). This remarkable fact of language and media history is too often overlooked: all the accents of modern French appear in the space of just two years and from the presses of just two celebrated printers, Geoffroy Tory and Robert Estienne. By 1533, the ç, é, and apostrophe (a diacritical mark) were being used essentially as they are today, with à (as a preposition) soon to follow. Other printers in Paris and Lyon began to adopt these accents over the course of the next several years. By 1540, a how-­to manual on accent use—Étienne Dolet’s treatise on accents published alongside his Maniere de bien traduire—appeared from Dolet’s press in Lyon; this manual was reprinted and copied, imitated and even pirated more than a dozen times over the course of the century as accents emerged as the trademarks of a new French graphic system. As the historian of French orthography Nina Catach demonstrates in her essential study L’Orthographe française à l’ époque de la Renaissance (1968), printers were the major actors in determining the graphic form of the modern French language.51 Catach does not hesitate to define the orthographic system of le moyen français, or Middle French, as the “manuscript system” (système manuscrit), while Modern French would be the “print system” (système imprimé).52 For Catach, the sixteenth century marks a “transitional path” (voie transitionnelle) between the two systems. Between these two “systems,” the French language undergoes a creative and experimental—thus also halting and uneven, contested and messy—redefinition initiated in the printer’s workshop. Along with Tory, a corps of printers in Paris (Robert Estienne, Antoine Augereau, Galliot du Pré, Denis Janot, Louis Cyaneus, the Angeliers, Olivier Mallard, and others) and Lyon (Étienne Dolet, François Juste, Sébastien Gryphius, and others) popularized the use of accents in vernacular text. All of the modern French accents were initially borrowed from the type cases of other languages (the accent aigu from Latin, the circumflex from Greek, the cédille from Spanish, etc.). Their very presence was meant to better represent French pronunciation on the page—the phonographic project—but also, as we began to see with Tory, to “decorate” French with the graphic ornaments of ancient languages. As part of the collective project to “illustrate” the vernacular, accents do important political and cultural work. In Paris, a striking number of the printers at the forefront of accent use had connections to François I and his court: the diacritical innovators Geoffroy Tory, Robert Estienne, Denis Janot, and Olivier Mallard all at one point held the title imprimeur du roy; the author of an important early manual on accent use, Antoine Augereau, had ties to

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Marguerite de Navarre and printed her works. As we shall see below, Tory’s first accent, the cedilla, appeared in an occasional work celebrating the coronation of the new French queen, Eleanor of Austria, and his first text to use accents systematically appears during his tenure as imprimeur du roy for Clément Marot, a poet in the royal circle. Accents and diacritics are thus inseparable from royal cultural politics and the figure of the king, who (as will become more apparent in Chapter 6) is increasingly celebrated during the 1530s and 1540s as the origin, possessor, and ur-­speaker of the langue Francoyse. Accents also form part of the larger typographical movement that has been termed the “Aldine revolution”; that is, a turn to lighter Roman types based on imprints from the renowned Venetian printer Aldus Manutius.53 It is also at this moment, around 1530, that French-­language books begin to be regularly printed in Roman type rather than in Gothic-­style bâtarde typefaces, which mimicked the traditional writing of vernacular manuscripts and dominated vernacular printing through the incunabular period and early decades of the sixteenth century. It is no coincidence that the first accents appear at this moment of typographical renewal that Romanizes French text. Accents constitute one pillar of a media program by French printers in the 1530s and 1540s to create a modern graphic system that would be specifically French—and bound to a “living” vernacular voice—while simultaneously imitating Latin and Greek. While this program may seem paradoxical, it follows the teletechnological logic we have already seen: at the moment of their first appearance, accents mark simultaneously the present and the past, the living and the dead, the voice and the machine. Accents are spectral from the start. Indeed, the reanimated spectrality of the ancient languages—which are made to “speak” and “live” again in printed books, as so many humanists of the period insist—is precisely what accents bring to the French page. They transform French script into a reanimation of the voice that imitates the resuscitation of a “dead” tongue. As a period of intensive typographical innovation, the 1530s and 1540s are also a period of heterogeneity and flux. Over the course of the 1530s, more than forty new Roman typefaces appear in Paris alone.54 Robert Estienne, the leader in the Aldine typographic revolution, is also the first to print French accents. As Aldine-­style types become the aesthetic norm, accents increasingly make their mark on French. Along with the accents still in use today, printers introduced a host of other diacritical marks and new characters that have not survived, such as e/, ę, á, ó, í, and u-­. The French books populating booksellers’ boutiques during these two decades would have displayed a startling typographical and orthographical diversity by modern standards. As a rule, the introduction of accents

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occured in books printed in Roman type, or occasionally in italic. (Jacques Peletier’s Dialogue de l’ortografe, for example, would be printed by Jean de Tournes in Lyon entirely in an italic typeface meant to mimic the flow of handwriting, privileged over the more “typographical” Roman according to the phonocentric and logocentric thinking we saw typified by Martin Heidegger in the twentieth century.) Many French books continued to be printed in Gothic-­ style bâtarde type during the 1530s and 1540s, but—with a few notable exceptions, such as François Juste’s 1537 edition of Rabelais’s La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua—always without accents. Alongside the new accents, texts from the 1530s and 1540s (and even much later) often continued to feature scribal abbreviations and sigla held over from manuscript practice: the tilde for nasal consonants; the symbol 9 for the letters us (as in vo9 for “vous”); the abbreviation q; for the word “que”; the siglum & for the word “et,” etc. Even in French books printed in Roman type, which increased dramatically in number over the course of these two decades, the use of accents varied significantly; many texts during this experimental period appeared in Roman type but with no accents or with certain scribal abbreviations, or with both. The typographic volatility throughout these decades is such that editions of the same text could appear in markedly different ways—with different type, different accents, different orthography—from different printers or the same printer; over the course of several years or at the same time; in different cities or in neighboring print shops. The most common and consistent diacritics of the period are é, à, and the apostrophe, which are adopted by a number of printers. A handful of poetic and musical texts are printed with more elaborate diacritics (e.g., e/ for the silent e at the end of words preceding a vowel, an apostrophe at the end of words to mark apocope, etc.) in order to render verse metrics, underscoring their relation to oral performance. As early as 1530, but beginning in earnest in the 1540s, a handful of books will require readers to learn an entirely new, idiosyncratic graphic code in order to decipher the diacritics proliferating—cutting, marking, sounding, spectralizing—in the French text.

Circumflex, Syncope, Cut This early technological history long forgotten, accents have come to define the identity of modern French to such an extent that the introduction of an orthographic reform for French schoolbooks in 2016—a reform first recommended by the Académie française in 1990 to make the circumflex optional over i and

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u—sparked a national outcry. The reform even gave rise to its own impassioned hashtag campaign on Twitter: #jesuiscirconflexe, or “I am circumflex,” a twist on #jesuischarlie, the viral hashtag that served as a national (and international) slogan of solidarity in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks. However tongue-­in-­cheek #jesuiscirconflexe may have been for some, the hashtag tacitly recognizes that the removal of an accent is tantamount to an act of symbolic violence against the French language and the French body politic. In the face of widespread reports of the “death” of the circumflex, media outlets rushed to produce headlines featuring the circumflexed verb disparaître (“disappear,” “die out,” “go extinct”), offering readers orthographically overdetermined reassurances in the vein of “Non, l’accent circonflexe ne va pas disparaître.”55 French diacritics— devised and popularized by sixteenth-­century printers—operate as graphic sites of affect and identification. They are tiny machines of national identity.56 But what kind of a mark is the circumflex accent? It is caught up from the start in a play of traces and historical substitutions; it is the mark of a disappearing act. Unlike in ancient Greek, where it signals a rising or falling tone, the circumflex in French is a “sign of lack.”57 The accent appears where another character has passed its historical expiration date. What it most often marks in modern French is the site where a letter s formerly appeared before another consonant, as in côte (coste) or hâte (haste). These s’s left over from Latin had ceased to be pronounced sometime around the eleventh century, yet they managed to survive in written form through the early modern period. Less frequently, the circumflex marks a disappeared e (dû, formerly deu) or a (âge, formerly aage). Disappeared letters—letters deemed outmoded, “dead” because unpronounced—live on as ghostly halos hovering over the vowels of some of the most everyday words in modern French (même, arrêter, fête, bête, sûr, connaître). Wherever there is a circumflex, an old letter announces itself as gone but not entirely forgotten (whence the title of linguist Bernard Cerquiglini’s book devoted to the circumflex, L’accent du souvenir, or “The Accent of Memory”). The circumflex would seem, then, to mark a strange kind of negotiation between the two ideological currents that animated the orthographic debates of the sixteenth century and have pulled at French spelling ever since: the phonographic (the sound-­writing of Meigret, Peletier, and others) and the etymological (the idea that French spelling ought to bear traces of its Greek and Latin roots, regardless of contemporary pronunciation).58 Even when the etymological s is cut away in même to bring writing into alignment with speech, that cut leaves a historical remainder and a graphic trace in its wake. This negotiation or tension—between phonography and etymology, ear and eye, voice and trace,

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modern and ancient, vernacular and Latin/Greek, domestic and foreign, and so on—will, in various forms and with varying inflections, affect all the new accents, characters, and orthographic reforms that emerge in the sixteenth century. We see once again with the circumflex that producing an ostensibly more “phonetic” writing by eliminating the unpronounced s (a “superfluous” that Meigret and Peletier both target) comes into being only through the addition of a nonphonetic, irreducibly graphic element. The same is true for the major diacritics introduced by printers in the 1530s: the é, ç, and apostrophe. There is no phoneticism, then, without the graphic, typographical, mechanically repeatable supplement. If the period around 1530 can be said to constitute a phonographic “turn,” it is because a new collective attention—at once technical and theoretical—to representing the sounds of French speech emerges. French writing of the late medieval period had been characterized by a distinct proliferation of nonphonetic elements, especially etymological consonants and abbreviations, which took shape out of the material, technical, and aesthetic demands of manuscript production. During the 1530s and 1540s, French text came to be characterized instead by a proliferation of diacritics, auxiliary signs, and new typographical characters, which are designed primarily (if not exclusively) to represent the sounds of French speech. The very first circumflex accent makes its appearance in French at this moment, in the In linguam gallicam isagōge of Jacques Dubois (also known as Sylvius) published in Paris in 1531. Dubois was a physician and an anatomist who performed public dissections and composed anatomical studies. His Isagōge is the first grammar of French to be published in France, though it is written in Latin, the language of grammatical tradition and humanistic learning. In this inaugural grammar, Latin serves as the metalinguistic apparatus for mastering the vernacular, which operates in Dubois’s text as the unruly body to be studied and analyzed. Although his spelling of French remains largely etymological, Dubois seeks to mark a distinction on the page between different French sounds. His tools for this distinction are diacritical (from the Greek diakritikos, “that separates or distinguishes”) marks, and he offers the reader an impressive array of lines, letters, and dots placed above and beside the letters of the Latin alphabet. This is the anatomist’s approach to French writing: a dissection of sound that multiplies marks and cuts in order to render the “living” body of language. At the front of the book, between the printer’s errata and the first page of text, there appears a guide to the “new letters and characters” that the reader will find within designed to perfect the “representation” of the “French voice” (Figure 14). Here we learn that, diverging from standard typographical practice of the period, the consonant forms of i and u (i.e., our modern j and v) will be

Figure 14. “Varii, iidémque noui literatum, & notarum characters, quibus nobis ad perfectiorem vocum Gallicarum repraesentationem vtendum fuit.” Jacques Dubois, In linguam gallicam isagōge, una cum eiusdem Grammatica latino-gallica, ex hebræis, græcis et latinis authoribus (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1531), n.p. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

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distinguished from the vowels i and u by means of an appended diacritical hyphen (i-­and u-­); the same will be true of the soft g (g-­, as in “ je”). Dubois also offers a new set of characters never before seen: characters cut and cast especially for this first “introduction to the French language.” These characters include three different accents (acute, grave, and macron) to mark the three phonemes typically represented in French by the letter e; three different c’s with superscript letters; three g’s; and a series of diphthongs and vowel combinations marked by the dieresis and circumflex. There are accents novel in French but familiar to humanist readers of texts printed in Latin and Greek (acute and grave accents), as well as accents that riff on scribal abbreviations in Latin, like the miniature h superposed over c to represent the soft ch as in cheval. Dubois’s characters represent a bricolage of ancient and modern languages and old and new media regimes. In all, he offers eighteen new characters with diacritical marks; inside the book, he will also make diacritical use of the apostrophe for the first time in French (t’amie, etc.). In this landmark appearance, the circumflex accent represents two vowels that were formerly a diphthong but now combine to produce one sound (mai, pour). Itself formed from the merging of the acute and grave accents, Dubois’s circumflex is situated not over one vowel but between two to signify their joining. In scholarly work on the history of the French language (and in this book) this character cannot be adequately reproduced because there is no equivalent in modern typography or in Unicode; all our circumflexes fall squarely over one vowel. In order to produce Dubois’s circumflex today, we would need to do what he did, that is, find a printer willing to fashion the piece of type. The same is true for the final diacritic on Dubois’s list: another circumflex, this one with a macron (straight bar) over the top, designed just to represent the “weakened” eu sound in words like meurt and cœur. The elaborate macron-­circumflex character is fashioned, per the anatomist’s wish, for this single sound needed to speak the words for “[he/she/it] dies” (meurt) and the “heart” (cœur). Several lines above the circumflex, one also finds another strange little character: a long s ( ſ ) with a grave-­accent-­like mark protruding from its back. This glyph indicates what Dubois refers to as “s sono obscuro,” that is, an s with a sound that is “obscured” in words like “maistre.” (In modern French, this word, meaning “master” or “teacher,” is written maître.) The glyph is an s under erasure, a mark for a sound that is “obscured”—darkened, secret, forgotten but still marked. Printed alongside the circumflex, this character would be the spectral ancestor to the modern circumflex.

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All these characters are dictated by the maistre Jacques Dubois, as well as by his accomplice, the master printer. The Isagōge was printed by Robert Estienne, the son of noted humanist printer Henri Estienne and a collaborator of Geoffroy Tory and Simon de Colines (the latter was Robert Estienne’s father-­in-­law). Although Robert Estienne would later prove to be an orthographic conservative, rejecting phonetic reforms and ultimately setting French on a decidedly etymological course with his influential dictionary (the Dictionnaire francoislatin of 1539), he was an early adopter of diacritics in French. For Estienne, the use of accents in French represented an extension of his Latin publications; by the time he published Dubois’s grammar in 1531, Estienne was regularly using accents, including the circumflex, in Latin texts. In 1530, he printed the first accents in French: a handful of é’s in the pages of Mathurin Cordier’s De corrupti sermonis, a manual on how to correct “corrupt” or incorrect speech. Like Dubois’s grammar, De corrupti sermonis is a pedagogical work written primarily in Latin that includes a significant amount of French text (translating the Latin). The first accents materialize in French as if they were merely copied from the line of Latin above the French—translating themselves from one language to another—or, perhaps, as if the compositor’s hand had strayed into the compartment holding Latin é’s in the type case. More important, as with Dubois’s grammar, the accents participate in the corrective and regulating project of the work in which they appear. In the pages of De corrupti sermonis, we find é’s (the so-­called “masculine” e) at the end of past participles like aimé and donné to distinguish them from their present-­tense counterparts (aime, donne), which are pronounced with a “feminine” e. The very first appearance of the acute accent in the history of French writing comes at the end of the admonition “Watch out for being deceived” (Donne toy garde destre trompé)—as if the accent were introduced, precisely, to guard against the potential deceptions or corruptions of writing. Dubois’s In linguam gallicam isagōge is a major work of typographical innovation even beyond its nineteen diacritics. Its typeface, inspired by turn-­of-­the-­ century Aldine imprints, was a novelty that had been introduced in an edition of Cicero’s Orator the previous year. This typeface would quickly become the model for Roman type in France, influencing punchcutters like Claude Garamond and setting the industry standard for more than a century. Dubois’s semi-­ phonetic orthography and his eighteen new characters meet up with this new typeface, operating as part of a conjoined typographical initiative. What’s more, the large number of new signs that had to be cut, along with the need for split

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sizes to allow for superscripts, points to the existence of “substantial type-­casting facilities” at Estienne’s press.59 No accents, then, without the printer’s shop, the printer’s equipment, and the printer’s capital. The project to represent French speech—to reimagine French phonographically through diacritical marks—is a material and technological undertaking. The example of the Isagōge also shows that this project cannot come into being—not on this scale, with this degree of experimentation and innovation, with this level of diacritical distinction that requires extensive typographical material—without in-­house type production and the willingness of the printer to take on what is essentially a bespoke, one-­ off typographical project. The phonographic project belongs, in short, to a “new media” moment when typographical conventions have yet to be established, markets are not yet set, and printers are willing to invest in an uncertain future. Many—even most—of the first generation of orthographical and typographical reforms will fail. They entail significant financial and cultural risk. The Isagōge itself will never be reprinted and Dubois’s characters will gain no traction. As for his inaugural use of the circumflex to signal the joining of two vowels, it will be ignored and quickly overwritten. The circumflex makes its next appearance in 1533 in a famous and famously puzzling text that has come to be recognized as a landmark work in the history of French writing: the Briefve doctrine pour deuement escripre selon la propriété du langaige françoys (“Brief doctrine for correctly writing according to the property of the French language”). Published anonymously by Antoine Augereau in Paris, the Briefve doctrine appeared in multiple editions in 1533 following texts by Marguerite de Navarre and Clément Marot (works that were later censored by the Sorbonne). In addition to being a master printer, Antoine Augereau was a punchcutter active between 1532 and 1534 and, notably, the mentor of the celebrated typographer Claude Garamont. Scholars have variously attributed the Briefve doctrine to Augereau, Marot, and Tory; the work certainly bears the marks of Tory’s influence but goes further than Champ fleury or any of Tory’s own imprints in its diacritical elaboration. Here, the reader is warned to be careful to distinguish between two “opposite characters” (characteres contraires) used in the printing of Marguerite de Navarre’s text (Figure 15): “Moreover, it is necessary to take note of the fact that, in the printing both of this booklet and in the Miroir of the Queen of Navarre, we have sometimes used these two opposite characters ˆ ¨ noted over the vowels, as in â ê î ë ï. The first is a sign of conjunction, the second of division. The first gathers, unites, and joins divided parts: and in the following three ways.” (Dauantaige fault pre[n]dre garde, qu’en l’impression tant de ce liuret, que du Miroir

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Figure 15. “ˆ & ¨ sur les lettres” (ˆ & ¨ over letters). Epistre familiere de prier Dieu Aultre epistre familiere d’aimer chrestiennement. Item, Briefve doctrine pour deuement escripre selon la proprieté du langaige Françoys (Paris: Antoine Augereau, 1533), 15r. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

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de la Royne de Nauarre, on a vsé aulcuneffoys de ces deux characteres contraires ˆ ¨ notéz sur les voyelles, ainsi â ê î ë ï. Le premier est signe de conionction, le second de diuision. Le premier r’assemble, r’unit, & conioinct les parties diuisés: & ce en troys façons.)60 The accent explicitly figures here as a character specific to printed books—that is, specific to the metal caracteres of the printer’s shop— and as a clarifying, or distinguishing, mark. Clear, easy, distinct: these are the watchwords of the printer’s accents, and even the instructions on how to read and use accents are themselves mechanized. The author of the Briefve doctrine asks us to distinguish between two characters with opposing functions—the gathering circumflex and the dividing dieresis—then to observe three distinct uses of the circumflex. In the section devoted to the apostrophe, the author of the Briefve doctrine addresses printers directly, calling on them to be the technicians of clarity. The advertissement aux Imprimeurs begins with an asterisk (a mark used throughout the text to divide paragraphs and provide emphasis) and features a gathering circumflex (which still does not sit on top of a letter but now between them, dividing as it gathers): “And it would be good for Printers of books in French henceforth to mark the aforementioned apostrophes, as we have done. For the French language would be more distinct and easier to understand, so it seems to me, and as anyone (at least those who have some wit) can clearly see and understand, by thinking about it a bit.” (*Et seroit bon, que les Imprimeurs des liures en François d’oreˆenauant notassent lesdictz Apostrophes, ainsi qu’auons faict. Car la langue Françoyse en seroit plus distincte, & facile a entendre, anisi qu’il me semble: & que chascun (au moins de ceulx, qui ont quelque esprit) peult clairement veoir & entendre, en y pensant ung peu.)61 In fact, these instructions will be copied almost verbatim by Étienne Dolet in his far more popular 1540 treatise on accents, and then copied in turn in the pages of a treatise on epistolary writing in the 1550s, Le Stile et Maniere de Composer, Dicter, et Escrire toute sorte d’Epistres. In all three texts, the circumflex will be called syncope, the skipped beat of a heart, or, in French, couppure: the “cut.”

Sounding Françoys Geoffroy Tory is the initiator of this cutting, the first to want to carve out a graphic system particular to the French language and mark French as a distinct subspecies of Roman alphabetic writing. It is not surprising, then, that Tory’s first and perhaps most distinctive diacritical innovation is the cedilla: the accent

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that distinguishes between hard c (pronounced k), and soft c (pronounced s), and thus the mark that allows the name François to look how it sounds. The cedilla is the accent that makes the very name of French phonographic. Even the current Wikipedia page for “Cedilla” notes that, while the accent appears in a number of modern languages (including Catalan, Galician, Occitan, and Portuguese), in French alone “ç appears in the name of the language itself, français.”62 In the section of Book III of Champ fleury dedicated to the letter C, Tory had already observed that the letter is susceptible to multiple pronunciations. Before o, he writes, “sometimes c is solid, like when we say coquin [scoundrel], coquard [idiot], coq [rooster], coquillard [miscreant]; sometimes it is impov­ erished, like when we say garcon [boy], macon [mason], facon [way], francois [French], and other similar words.” (C. devant O. en pronunciation & langage Francois, aucunesfois est solide, comme en disant Coquin, coquard, coq, coquillard. Aucunesfois est exile, comme en disant Garcon, macon, facon, francois, & aultres semblables.)63 The tiny technology of the cedilla serves at once to orient the reader’s vocal apparatus—distinguishing between the solide (hard) and exile (soft) pronunciations of c before a letter like o—and, perhaps more insistently, to encode auditory data on the page. The cedilla makes its entry into French in a prestige occasional work printed by Tory shortly before his appointment as royal printer. The text documents and celebrates the coronation of Eleanor of Austria—the sister of the king’s great rival, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—as the new French queen. On March 16, 1531, just six days after he is issued an indefinite royal privilege to print and sell the work, Tory completes his printing of Le Sacre et Coronnement de la Royne, Imprime par le Commandeme[n]t du Roy nostre Sire (“The Coronation of the Queen, Printed by the Command of the King Our Lord”). On the third page, in the middle of a description of the scaffolds constructed before the altar at Saint-­Denis to hold the nobles attending the coronation, the word façon appears with its new accent. It reappears further on in the word commença and the proper name Luçon (Figure 16). This newly invited character sits uneasily in the text, angular and odd. Although it is a novelty in French, the cedilla has something decidedly “old” about it: it is a Gothic-­style c, the points of which stick out amid the gentle curves of a brand-­new Aldine Roman type cut by Simon de Colines. This character is, in short, a stranger in the French text. In fact, like the new queen who had arrived in France in 1529, the ç comes to France from Spain. Scholars have speculated that Tory borrowed the character from a fellow Parisian printer who would have used it to print a Books of Hours or other text in Spanish.64 The accent that will strikingly mark the French

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Figure 16. The first cedillas in French text. Guillaume Bochetel, Le Sacre & Coronnement de la Royne (Paris: Geoffroy Tory, 1531), n.p. [Bivr]. *FC5 B6313 530s. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

language in its very name would be not a native invention but a graft, appropriated from a rival vernacular to the south and plucked from a foreign case of type.65 In this way, the cedilla marks the graphic attachment of technē in the body of the French language: it comes from the “outside.” The ç will have to wait two years, until Tory’s edition of Marot’s Adolescence Clémentine, dated June 7, 1533, to be more fully naturalized into the body of the French language. Here the cedilla appears on the title page of the book in question, in an unusual announcement advertising the novel use of new accents. Below the fleur de lys in the middle of the page, we find the following text: “With certain accents noted, namely on the Masculine é that is different from the Feminine, on words joined together by sinalephas [i.e., elisions], and under the c when it has the pronunciation of the s. Which previously due to error in judgment was not done in the French language, even though it was and is very necessary” (Auec certains Accens notez/ Cest assouoir sur le é Masculin different du Feminim [sic], Sur les dictions ioinctes ensemble par sinalephes/ Et soubz le.ç, quant il tient de la prono[n]ciation de le.s. Ce qui par cy deua[n]t par faulte daduis/ n’a este faict au la[n]gaige françoys, co[m]bien q’uil [sic] y fust & soyt tresnecessaire.)66 Tory’s first Roman ç—which, like his é, still looks somewhat disjointed and ad hoc compared to his other characters—thus makes its first appearance in the word françoys, naming the language that had been deficient until a little accent under the c came to supplement it. Starting with ç, Tory’s “little devices” found a new French type binding vernacular writing to vernacular speech. Although these accents are imported

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from other languages (the é from Latin, the ç from Spanish, etc.), they establish a graphic identity for the French language. Indeed, the very identity of the language as such comes to be defined as a set of characters, modeled on the font of type purchased (or produced in-­house) by the printer. This identification of type and language is most clearly on display in the final section of Champ fleury, which contains woodcut illustrations of different sets of “letters”—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Persian, Arabic, and others, but also “utopian,” “flowering,” and “fantastic”—each illustrated as a full alphabet, A to Z. Some of these we would today identify as different alphabets (Hebrew and Greek letters), some as typefaces or fonts (French letters), others as decorative (“flowering” letters) or fanciful inventions (his “fantastic” alphabet composed entirely of tools), and still others as codes for communities still only imagined (the “utopian” letters based on Thomas More’s encoded alphabet). For each species of language, we find a different type, a finite set of characters that act as idiomatic parts in each language-­machine. Before long, the modern printing convention of distinguishing foreign-­language words in the body of a text using a different typeface (usually italic) will be established. In his landmark Dictionnaire, Robert Estienne will use various sizes of type to organize his book conceptually but will distinguish between Latin and French by using different typefaces. Around 1590, Montaigne will instruct his printer that “it is necessary to put the Latin, Greek, or other foreign prose within the French prose in a different typeface [caractere].”67 For each language, its caractere.

New Roman The phonographic writing project goes hand in hand, as we have seen, with a typographical shift: not just the introduction of diacritics but also the broader turn to Roman type for French text. This relationship is not self-­evident and demands further exploration. The default types for French text during the first half century of vernacular printing (roughly, 1475–1525) were the lettre bâtarde and lettre de forme, two Gothic-­style types based on manual scripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although Roman-­style typefaces date to the inception of printing in Paris (Fichet and Heynlin’s first editions from 1470 through 1471 used a Roman-­style humanist type), Gothic-­style types that more closely resembled established French hands became the norm when printed books entered the mainstream Parisian book market during the late 1470s and 1480s. For both Latin and vernacular texts, Parisian typography of this early

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period was “as Gothic as the cathedral of Notre-­Dame.”68 Already, however, in this all-­Gothic scene a distinction was often made between Latin texts printed in the formal Gothics (lettre de forme or lettre de somme) and vernacular texts, for which printers used the French Gothic hand known as the lettre bâtarde. Throughout this early period, medieval Latin was being reinvented as an ancient-­modern language of writing—what historians now call “neo-­Latin”— through a return to the stylistic and rhetorical models of Antiquity.69 In France, this reinvention sparked the so-­called “Ciceronian” debates, that is, the question of whether modern, neo-­Latin writers should strictly adhere to the style and lexicon of Cicero (the Latin that the Italian humanist Castellesi, a partisan of Ciceronianism, deemed “perfect”). Printing, viewed as a technology of restoration, became instrumental in this humanist project to revive ancient style, and Roman typefaces came to serve as the graphic embodiment of the humanist project. “Write a speech of Cicero’s in Gothic letters, and even Cicero will seem uneducated and barbarous,” Erasmus writes of the deleterious effects that bad letters, like poor pronunciation, can have. “The content will lose its appeal and the reader will either throw the whole thing away or at best find it excessively laborious. . . . On the other hand it is quite unbelievable how the contents of a piece of writing are improved by an elegant, clear, and readable script which presents Latin words in the Latin alphabet.”70 Initially based on humanist hands, Roman typefaces were not only tied to the new learning but were the graphic expression of the modern revival of antiquity. The origins of this association can be traced back to the fourteenth century, when Petrarch (1304–1374), arguably the first humanist, sought to revive ancient Latin language and literature.71 As part of a broader project of cultural renewal that rejected the scholastic model of learning and turned to ancient sources, he advocated a new script: a “pure and clear” hand that would “lend itself spontaneously to the eye, and in which no mistakes of an orthographical or grammatical kind may be found.”72 (We can hear in this desire for a clear writing the formulation of a humanist ethos that will, a century later, champion early printing technology as both a bodily and an orthographic prosthesis.) In a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch praised the Carolingian miniscule for its “majesty, harmony and sober decoration.”73 Humanists of the fifteenth century came to refer to this script as litterae antiquae. The types of the French-­born Venetian printer Nicolas Jenson—the first now recognized as properly “Roman”—were likely modeled after the hand of a contemporary humanist, though no single exemplar has been identified.74 The typeface used by Fichet and Heynlin in their first Paris editions is clearly in the litterae antiquae style. Printing thus began on a Roman note in France, only to

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fade in favor of Gothic-­style types. Around 1490, Roman type made a more robust entry in Paris as publishers adopted the practices of their Italian counterparts and began using Roman type to print classical and Neo-­Latin texts. Most of these Romans were modeled after typefaces designed in Venice, including those of Nicolas Jenson. In Lyon, meanwhile, printers generally continued to use the round Gothic lettre de somme even for Latin until 1530. Between 1500 and 1530, typography played a crucial role in distinguishing various features of a book in the Parisian marketplace: its prestige, its genre, its ties to the new humanist learning. By the 1520s, type clearly distinguished Latin books from French ones, allying the vernacular graphically with an increasingly distant “Gothic” manuscript tradition and separating it from what Gilbert Gadoffre calls the humanist “cultural revolution” underway in France. Tory comments on this typographic branding of the vernacular in Champ fleury, noting that while “in printing there are many different styles of letters” (en Impression ya maintes diverses manieres de Lettres), the “Lettre Bastarde” is the typeface “with which books in French have always been printed until now” (de la quelle on a tousjours par cy devant Imprime livres en Francois).75 Tory likely wrote this sentence sometime before 1526. The first French book printed in Roman type was a vernacular translation of Platina’s Vitae Pontificum (Les genealogies, faitz et gestes des sainctz peres papes, empereurs et roys de France), printed by Pierre Vidoue in 1519 for the bookseller Galliot du Pré; Vidoue was an important Parisian printer who contributed to the “move from the gothic to the humanist book.”76 As of 1527, however, only two vernacular editions had been printed using Roman characters in France; both were published by Galliot du Pré and closely tied to the court of François I.77 Between 1527 and 1529, when Champ fleury was in production, a series of vernacular books appeared in Roman type from du Pré and the prolific printer-­bookseller Josse Bade (or Badius). This uptick would seem to indicate, as William Kemp suggests, the existence of a burgeoning Parisian readership prepared to engage with vernacular text in a visual presentation strongly associated with both humanist learning and Latin. Although Champ fleury is not the first French book printed in Roman type, Tory is clearly at the avant-­garde of a typographical refashioning of the vernacular. Tory’s “Attic” letters create, as Tom Conley has suggested, a national, humanist, vernacular space “set in front of what he ascertains to be a recently murky, incunabular past that is visualized in the angularities of gothic type.”78 The specific type he uses for the body of Champ fleury had originated in Paris in 1499 and was “the usual Roman of Paris printers” for four decades, appearing

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in books issued by prestigious houses like those of Henri Estienne and Josse Bade.79 In the context of Champ fleury—a text that not only is written in the vernacular but also “exhorts” French authors to write in French and transform their language—this vernacular appropriation of a familiar Latin font is all the more striking. Roman type participates in both the teletechnological and the phonographic projects Tory lays out: it is the font of his call. What can, today, risk appearing as an incidental material feature of Tory’s book in fact represents a radical statement about the cultural and technological possibilities of French in print. At the same time, even though Roman typefaces were, like Gothic ones, based on manuscript hands, Tory’s “Attic” letter designs in Champ fleury mark an effort to divorce printed text from the contingencies of the writing hand. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, Tory’s square grid and “sovereign” tools represent a form of prosthetic iterability that situate the production of letters within a technological Gestell of rationality, proportion, and reproducibility— if also a more profound logocentrism based on an intimacy between the human and the letter. The majuscules of Champ fleury move French printing away from a mimetic relationship to any “original” hand; his typography is no longer a mechanical reproduction of any handwriting. Instead, the “agreement of our letters with the human body in general” (accord de noz lettres au corps humain en general) is based on a geometrically abstracted and proportioned, idealized, and original “human” fitted onto the geometer’s grid.80 On the one hand, then, “modernizing” French text means appropriating the graphic aesthetics of Antiquity. Roman capitals (the style Tory refers to as “Attic”) are the cornerstone of this aesthetic, evoking the stony inscriptions of ancient monuments and obeying the geometric and architectural principles of ancient authors like Vitruvius. To write French in Roman letters is to make the vernacular monumental or Herculean; French becomes a copy or simulacrum of an ancient tongue. Vernacular text printed with metal Roman type would represent a fantasy of a carving in stone, a kind of future anterior ruin. On the other hand, the turn to the clean lines and open spaces of Roman letters signals a break—in print, through print—from the more immediate manuscript past. The “new” appears only as a resurrection of the “old.” As we saw with the introduction of accents, a French book printed in Roman type during the 1520s and 1530s advertises itself as belonging at once to a new media culture and to an artistic and intellectual restoration that manifests itself typographically. Printing mobilizes the uncanny rebirth of an ancient alphabet—an alphabet in which French printers will begin to write their own living-­dead tongue. In this

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way, the turn to Roman type goes hand in hand with phonography as a reanimation of the voice. Paradoxically, then, a turn away from the typefaces traditionally identified with French books and the French language will constitute one of the opening gestures of the vernacular movement and the so-­called “rise” of French. Another early and well-­documented cornerstone of this movement, which should be viewed in conjunction with phonography and the turn to Roman typography, is the effort to translate Greek and Latin texts into the vernacular, as well as to compose original scholarly works in French.81 (We can recall, for example, Tory invoking the example of Charles de Bovelles’s Geometrie en francois and calling upon his readers to “write in French [en Francois] like the Frenchmen [comme Francois] we are” (escripre en Francois, comme Francois que nous sommes).)82 Tory’s desire to bring the “art and science” of Roman letters into the vernacular participates in this broader ethos already taking root in France during the 1520s and 1530s not only in the humanist milieu but also, with a somewhat different inflection, in Reformist circles. Tory’s address to all “lovers of good letters,” great and small, along with his desire to share typographical know-­how with the “common people” echo in particular the evangelical rhetoric of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–1536), whose landmark vernacular translation of the New Testament (1523) was printed by Tory’s associate Simon de Colines around the time Tory returned to Paris from Italy and began to conceptualize Champ fleury.83 In an Epistre exhortatoire at the head of his translation of the Gospels, Lefèvre addresses “all Christian men and women” and justifies the publication of the sacred text in the vernacular: “So that each person who knows the French language but no Latin will be more receptive to the gift of grace, . . . the Gospels are put at your disposal [vous sont ordonnées] in the vernacular. . . . With this translation, simple members of the community of Jesus Christ, having him in their own language, can be as certain of the truth announced in the Gospel as are those who have it in Latin.”84 For Lefèvre, it is an ethical, theological, and political necessity that both “great and small [grans et petis] know the Gospels.” In another epistle that appears in the second part of the New Testament later that year, Lefèvre addresses himself specifically to “[you] who are simple and unlettered [sans lettres] and not clerics.” We do not need to view Tory’s letters or his “little devices” as evangelical to see that his typographical project—and the phonographic project in general—shares this vulgarizing ambition, as well as its underlying understanding of the vernacular printed book. This ambition will be echoed in the Briefve doctrine, a treatise whose ostensible purpose is to

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explain the use of diacritics in the texts it accompanied: Marguerite de Navarre’s biblical poem Le miroir de l’ame pecheresse and Marot’s vernacular translation of Psalm 6 and several prayers. (Indeed, it is for the Reformist content of these texts that Antoine Augereau will be condemned by the Sorbonne and executed in 1534.) As we saw, the author of the Briefve doctrine encourages French printers to use diacritics so that French will be “distinct, and easy to understand” (distinct, & facile a entendre). In the case of the apostrophe (first introduced by Tory), the Briefve doctrine explains that this mark exists not for readers trained in classical languages or even for authors but for those who are “crude and ignorant” (les rudes & ignorantz): those who don’t yet know how to read but have the “courage to learn and know” (courage d’apprendre & savoir). This is a new writing destined not for the educated few but for every vernacular reader—a writing that is “facile a entendre,” easy to hear. We will see further in Chapter 6 how phonography comes to be politicized, especially in Meigret’s work and in his polemic exchange with Guillaume des Autels in particular, as a writing dictated by the “ear of the people.”

French by Number In the digital age, all media—all language, all letters—have become numbers. For Friedrich Kittler, this generalized numbering means nothing short of the end of “media”—that is, the end of media as distinct realms of material and sensory experience: “The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface . . . . Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. With numbers, everything goes.”85 Digitization means a generalized translatability of all media; when everything can be translated into numerical form, the “medium” as such becomes obsolete. With numbers, everything goes. “Modulation, transformation, synchronization, delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping—a total media link on a digital basis will erase the very concept of medium.”86 This intimacy of letters and numbers in contemporary new media may not, however, be anything new. Recent work in the history and theory of writing suggests that mathematics, numerical notations, and counting media, such as pebbles, tallies, tokens, and clay containers,

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may be the precursor to writing systems. Lydia Liu points out that the Phoenician word spr, from which we derive words like “scribe” and “script,” originally means “to count.” Phoenician script is, of course, the oldest alphabetic writing system. “This shared ancestry in the word spr for ‘inscription’ and ‘counting’ sheds . . . light on the alphabet as an alphanumerical system in addition to being a phonetic tool.”87 As Tory unpacks the meaning of the letter A, he notes that there is “one other secret reason why Alpha means ‘beginning.’” The Greeks, Tory writes, “count and make their numbers with their letters. Their letters, as is also done in Hebrew, serve as their Figures and signs for counting. Alpha, A, is used for the first number, and for one. Vita, B, is used for two. Gamma, Γ, for three.”88 As we saw in Chapter 1, Derrida points in the late 1960s to the increasing importance of “logico-­mathematical writing,” in computer programming and elsewhere, as a sign of grammatological liberation—that is, as the closure of phonocentrism, insofar as mathematical writing opens the possibility of nonphonetic writing. We can already begin to see here that a thinking of letters as numbers reveals what is already nonphonetic within any so-­called phonetic system, in much the same way that spacing, punctuation, and, indeed, diacritical marks reveal the dependence of any phonetic system on graphic elements that exceed and precede it. It is within this double horizon of letters and numbers—between the numerical origins of the alphabet and the numerical erasure of media happening quite literally before our eyes, between the invention of the alphabet and the transformation of writing into binary code that for Kittler marks the “end” of media and for Derrida signals the closure of a logo-­phonocentric epoch—that we turn back to the spelling reforms of Jacques Peletier du Mans. Peletier was a Renaissance man in the colloquial sense: humanist, mathematician, poet, poetic theorist, translator, orthographic reformer, and perhaps the unsung media theorist of sixteenth-­century France. Peletier was already putting his orthographic reforms in practice in the 1540s, but it is in his 1550 Dialogue de l’ortografe that he engages in a prolonged reflection on the question of vernacular writing as a technological medium. This text, in two “parts,” stages a dialogue between four humanist interlocutors: Jacques Peletier, Jean Martin, Denis Sauvage, and Théodore de Bèze. The topic of their debate is whether the French graphic system should be reformed to make French writing accord with pronunciation. The scene of the dialogue is the rue Saint-­Jacques in Paris’s Latin Quarter, at the house of printer Michel de Vascosan, which all four interlocutors did in fact frequent. As Susan Baddeley notes, “the ‘dialogue’ is presented as the transcription of a genuine discussion that took place between the four men.”89 As a book,

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it offers itself as the recording of a live event, printed in an orthography designed to reactivate the living presence of the speakers. The conversation is said to have taken place “the year and month after King François passed from life to death,” that is, March 1547; at the time, Michel de Vascosan was printing Peletier’s Oeuvres poetiques, his first collection of poetry. The dialogue opens on Peletier discovering a freshly printed copy of his book sitting on a table. He picks it up, begins flipping through; suddenly, a shadow passes over him. His friends naturally want to know what has provoked this mood swing. After a page or two of playing coy, Peletier admits that what caused his humor to change so abruptly was this: “What I saw in my Œuvres that was not my own” (ce/ que/ j’è vù de/dans mes euure/s qui n’etoę´ t pas mien).90 Jean Martin is skeptical: if Peletier was present for the printing, how could anything appear in his book that wasn’t his? Théodore de Bèze—who will be Peletier’s main opponent in the ensuing debate—intervenes: “I understand well now: . . . you’re upset, he said, that the Compositors in the print shop did not want to accommodate your manner of Orthography” (I’antans bien meinte/nant: .  .  . vous vous pleignèz, dit il, que/ le/s Compositeurs de/ l’Imprime/rie/ n’ont pas voulù complere/ a votre/ maniere/ d’Ortografe/).91 This orthographic drama works as a clever opening gambit for Peletier, but it is worth taking seriously. Peletier is distressed at finding his orthography altered. This distress is, to be sure, part of a new set of authorial anxieties brought on by the heightened mediation of print culture. With the production of the book dependent on the printer, typesetter, and corrector, control is literally out of the author’s hands. In this same passage, Peletier affirms the printer’s responsibility to the author: “It seems to me that when one brings a book to a Printer, the least amiability he can show is to follow the manuscript draft of the one [i.e., the author] who has made it and is giving it to him” (Il me/ samble/ que/ quand on apporte/ quelque/ liure/ a vn Imprimeur, le/ moins de/ gracieuse/te qu’il puisse/ fęre/, ´ęt de/ suiure/ la Minute/ de/ ce/luy qui l’a fę´ t, e qui le/ lui donne/).92 The dialogue on orthography takes shape out of this moment of disappointment—this gap or rift that is at once social and technological—between the manuscript draft and the printed book. Even more interesting, however, is that this insistence on the printer’s responsibility to copy the author’s manuscript precisely—and that word for draft, minute, already evokes a kind of mathematical precision—this responsibility on the part of the printer echoes the phonographic principle at the heart of Peletier’s spelling reforms. Peletier affirms, for example, that “writing must have no use or power except that which speech gives it.” Writing must follow speech, just as the printer must follow the author,

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and the printed book must follow the manuscript. What Peletier’s own “manner of orthography” will attempt to guarantee is precisely such a correspondence between media, a one-­to-­one correspondence between speech and writing at the level of the letter in which the author sees himself, and in seeing himself, hears himself speak. Like Geoffroy Tory, Peletier inserts himself—and his media historical moment—into the history of the world’s scripts and the history of the alphabet. He affirms his license to invent new characters by reminding us that the Greeks, too, innovated in their alphabet. “As for our French, where we have so many different sounds with respect to ancient languages, we would need new letters and of more than one sort: so much so, that I am counted among those who would adopt them if they were invented by someone else, rather than inventing them myself.” If French requires new letters for Peletier, it is because writing is conceived here as a precise inscription of speech. In the context of sixteenth-­century French writing, this marks a significant redefinition of the ortho-­of orthography, what makes writing right: the exactitude of writing comes to be thought here as an exact recording of the human voice in the moveable metal characters of print.93 To better understand the polemical nature of this proposition—and what it owes to printing technology—we could look to the Tres utile et compendieulx Traicte de lart et science dorthographie gallicane (“Very useful and compendious treatise on the art and science of Gallican [i.e., French] orthography”) of 1529, an anonymous orthographic treatise published the same year as Tory’s Champ fleury. Here, a very different definition of orthography is at work. The anonymous author announces his intention to restore the “original and antique integrity” (premiere et antinque [sic] integirte) of French writing, and defines orthography as “the science and industry of knowing how to write well” (une scie[n]ce & industrie de scauoir bie[n] escripre).94 Pronunciation is not taken into account; instead, his orthos looks to Latin for its principle of correctness. He affirms in his conclusion: “We must carefully return to Latin and perfectly regard Latin orthography in order to conform our French writing.” (Nous debvo[n]s songneuseme[n]t retourner au latin et regarder parfaictement lorthographie latine pour nous reigler en nostre escripture franchoise.)95 By way of example, the author points out the faulty etymological letter that often implants itself in the word for writing itself: “we write escripre, escripuoit, etc., with a p, even though the Latin scribere, scribebat has no p. In this way one is deceived because escript, which comes from scriptus, is written with a p” (nous escriuo[n]s escripre, escripuoit, &c. par p combie[n] que latin scribere, scribebat na point de p. Ainsi on est deceupt, pour

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cause que escript lequel vient de scriptus sescrit par p).96 Correct French writing (ortho-­graphy) is dictated here by the good Latinist—the one who knows scribere from scriptus—rather than the writer who, like Rabelais’s écolier limousin, would only make a mess of French by Latinizing ignorantly.97 Most important, correct French writing here is dictated not through its relationship to modern French speech or pronunciation but to another, more ancient and authoritative graphic system. This is a writing that has no concern for the ear but only for the eye. (We will see below how Peletier and Louis Meigret deal with this same overdetermined word, écrire.) The Tres utile et compendieulx traicte and the various phonographies of Tory, Meigret, and Peletier represent two camps in a battle over the future of the French page. Both look to “correct” French, and both look (in divergent ways) to Latin as a model; both share an emergent orthographic sensibility and the notion of the orthographic faute, a mistake of the kind one might find on the printer’s page of errata. (The author of the Tres utile et compendieulx traicte writes that his “intention” in his treatise is “primarily to animate and inflame the engines [i.e., the minds and spirits] of gentle agents and true zealots of our French language” [principalleme[n]t de animer et aygrir les engins des ge[n]tilz facteurs & vrays zelateurs de nostre la[n]gue franchoise] so that they might “come clarify and clean the rust, faults, and obscurities greatly blackened, corrupted, and perverted by corrupt ways of writing” [viennent esclarcir et nettoyer la rouillure, les faultes, et obscuritez grandeme[n]t noircies, corrumpues, et peruerties par les faulses scriptures]).98 Where these two camps differ is in their media program: the phonographers look to create a French for the eye and the ear, for the page and the mouth. They are the fashioners of a prosthetic tongue. A visual comparison of Tory’s Champ fleury and the Tres utile et compendieulx traicte, which appeared within months of each other, further illuminates both the difference between these media programs and the relation of phonography to printing. Whereas Tory’s text uses Roman type (a novelty for vernacular books, as we have seen), the Traicte uses a Gothic bâtarde. Even more striking is the identity of the orthographer: Tory’s book presents itself as the work of a printer-­engraver-­typographer, the “new man” who reimagines vernacular orthography for the print age. While the Tres utile et compendieulx traicte is anonymous, a woodcut image on its cover shows unambiguously that its ideal orthographer is a scribe poised over the desk, quill in hand (Figure 17). The orthographer-­scribe sits before the page of vernacular text, ready to “clean up . . . the mistakes” of a poorly written French language. The Traicte presents itself as a manuscript book put into print rather than once conceived for and

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Figure 17. The orthographer as scribe. Anonymous, Tres utile et compendieulx Traicte de lart et science dorthographie gallicane (Paris: 1529), title page. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

within the print medium. Not aiming to correct language through typography or print production, this author seeks to scrape away the mistakes of French with the scribal knife. As orthographic technology, the printing press is imagined as recording a reproducible “living present” engraved in its metal letters. It promises to create

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new access to the past and to open another temporal horizon—one in which the voice never dies. In 1877, Scientific American published a piece on the recent invention of the phonograph, observing that it would ensure going forward an “immortality” of speech: That the voices of those who departed before the invention of the wonderful apparatus . . . are forever stilled is too obvious a truth; but whoever has spoken into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose words are recorded by it, has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust. The possibility is simply startling. A strip of paper travels through a little machine, the sounds of the latter are magnified, and our grandchildren or posterity centuries hence hear us plainly as if we were present. Speech has become, as it were, immortal.99 Jacques Peletier will propose his phonography as an analogous technology of immortality: “It is for the time to come that we must cultivate our language” (C’est donc principalement pour le temps à venir qu’il faut pollicer notre langue). He goes on to cite debates among his contemporaries about the correct pronunciation of Greek and Latin as evidence that writing must be made to serve as a “mirror” of the voice for the sake of “posterity”: “If, then, we think that our language should last after the maternal way of speaking is abolished, let us relieve posterity of the trouble we find ourselves in with acquired languages [i.e., Greek and Latin]. Let us give [to posterity] while we are still able the truest and surest mirror we can.” As on a phonographic record, French voices will echo in the ears of readers after the bodies that originally uttered them have turned to dust. Orthography stores language as an audiovisual archive. For Peletier, who had translated Horace’s Ars Poetica, this understanding of language as image mobilizes an aesthetic principle of ut pictura poesis: writing should be a “mirror of the voice.” Yet this notion of phonetic storage and the radical convergence of media streams on the printed page goes beyond a mere analogy of media, I suggest, and toward an erasure of the difference between media in a way that simultaneously intensifies phonocentrism and shows its limits. Every exteriorization of the trace, as Derrida suggests following André Leroi-­Gourhan, “from the elementary programs of so-­called ‘instinctive’ behavior up to the constitution of electronic files and reading machines, enlarges difference and the possibility of putting in reserve,” and thus “at once and in the same movement constitutes and effaces so-­called conscious subjectivity, its logos, and its theological attributes.”100

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Peletier’s phonography is in fact a kind of alphanumeric system that subjects language to quantitative logic and even algebraic reasoning. Peletier is rewriting French by number—and he does so from the printer’s shop. The Dialogue was first printed by the Marnef brothers in Poitiers in 1550 and reprinted in 1555 by Jean de Tournes in Lyon. In the period between these two printings, Peletier moved to Lyon and took up residence with Jean de Tournes, his printer; there he served as mathematics tutor to Tournes’s son and worked as corrector (or proofreader) in his print shop. Tournes had new type cast specially for Peletier’s books printed in the 1550s, which, in addition to the Dialogue, included original poetry and treatises on poetry and mathematics: the highly successful Arithmetique (first printed in 1549, reprinted in 1554 by Tournes; seven total editions were printed during the sixteenth century) and the Algebre of 1554. Peletier himself acted as corrector for these texts. Peletier’s motto, featured on the title page of the 1550 edition of his Dialogue on orthography or at the end of the 1555 edition, is “Moins et Meilleur”: Less and Better or, through homophonic wordplay, Less Is Better. For Peletier, aesthetics is quantitative; it is an aesthetics of reduction. The motto itself reads aloud like a verbal equation, or rather, two different equations: “Less plus Better,” or “Less equals Better” (Moins et/est Meilleur). Since the modern plus and minus signs were not yet in use, in Peletier’s mathematical treatises he uses the letters p and m to designate “plus” and “minus”—or, rather, moins. “Moins et Meilleur” thus reads as: “M and M,” or “minus and minus,” or “less and less.” But this “less” is also better. For Peletier, working as corrector at Tournes’s print shop for nearly a decade, reduction is improvement and correction. We could imagine Peletier’s orthographic reforms as an application—as Tory had suggested already in 1529—of the copy editor’s pen to the entire French language, page by page. In an earlier passage, we saw Peletier idiomatically describe the orthographic rewriting of the French language as with the expression réduire en art that we have already encountered. In Peletier’s case, this reduction could be read literally, that is, materially and alphabetically, at the level of the letter as a quantitative element. While adding new characters to the French alphabet, Peletier sought above all to eliminate unpronounced letters—like the t in the et (“and”) at the middle of his motto—which he, like Meigret, viewed as “superfluous.” Fewer letters equals a truer writing: including the word for writing itself. “There are many other words,” he writes, “where the superfluity is even more unreasonable: such as when you amass so many consonants; and do you think [it is nice to see written] the plural word ‘escriptz,’ which is pronounced ‘ecriz’? Similarly, ‘contractz,’ ‘contreinctz,’ which are pronounced ‘contraz,’ ‘contreins,’?

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Figure 18. “Les nombre/s Radicaus e leurs Sines” (Radical numbers and their Signs). Jacques Peletier du Mans, L’Algebre/ de Iaque/s Pele/tier du Mans (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1554), 8. *FC5 P3625 554a. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

And if you said them as you write them, it would sound like some High German.” The project of reducing French orthography is evidently bound up with questions of aesthetics, Frenchness, and an abstract principle of reason. But all of these—rationality, aesthetics, Frenchness—depend on what we could now more rigorously call not just a correspondence between media but a media equation. Peletier’s willingness to use the letters p and m to stand for “plus” (plus) and “moins” (minus) in arithmetic operations already suggest a conception of letters as moveable symbols that can operate in a mathematical register. His Algebre of 1554 does not yet use letters as parameters in equations; nevertheless, we find him using a variety of characters to represent algebraic expressions, some of them of his own invention. He defends this innovation, just as he does his new French letters: “And whoever would reproach my book for containing new Signs or Characters, let him think that for a new art, there are new beginnings and new matter.” Even arithmetic requires its characters: 1, 2, 3, 4. . . . What these algebraic characters share, by and large, is their foundation in the alphabet. Peletier’s sign for the second power, for example, he refers to as “çans”; he calls square numbers as “nombre çansique” (Figure 18). This sign is composed of Tory’s character ç combined with a smaller s. These algebraic signs allow the reader to solve increasingly complex problems involving exponents; they allow us to find unknowns. Characters intermingle here, numbers and letters side by side

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sharing a syntax. Peletier tells readers that in the first row they will find an “arithmetic progression” and in the third row a “geometric progression”; between the two are the “Characters of the radical numbers that belong to Algebra” (caractere/s des nombre/s radicaus qui appartiene/t a l’Algebre/).101 Peletier’s prose with his singular orthography, with its characteristic barred e character—e/—cuts in playing back the phonograph of an absent voice. And each letter suddenly seems to represent some unknown number, characters that allow us to solve increasingly complex problems, growing exponentially at the speed of Gutenberg’s press, racing toward a future media age.

Powers of the Letter If the project to introduce diacritics in French met with broad success, however uneven and stilted, the more radical phonetic spelling reforms of Jacques Peletier and Louis Meigret were short-­lived revolutions. As we saw earlier, Meigret’s Traité touchant le commun usage de l’escriture françoise first laid out (using traditional orthography) the “means by which one could make a writing such that its complete reading would sound out only French pronunciation” (les moyens, suyuant les quelz on pourroit faire vne escriture telle, que sa lecture entiere ne sonneroit que la prononciacion Françoyse) in 1542.102 By 1555, when Peletier’s Dialogue appeared, the phonetic moment was already coming to a close, even if it would experience sporadic revivals over the next several decades in the work of Laurent Joubert and (as we will see in the next chapter) the pedagogue Ramus. This movement lives and dies on its ability to summon the “power” (puissance) of the letter, and I would suggest that it is a certain impuissance inherent in this puissance that causes phonography, in its more radical iteration, to break down or break itself. We saw above how, for Meigret, putting down the “rebellion of writing” means restoring the phonetic “power” of each letter or how, for Peletier, writing “must not have any use or power, outside that which pronunciation gives it” (ęlle/ [l’Ecritture/] ne doę´ t auoę´ r autre/ vsage/ ni puiſſance/. Fors cęlle/ que/ la prolation lui donne/).103 This evocation of a “power” of writing relies on a phonocentric “power”—as fullness, presence, self-­sufficiency—of speech, yet speech here is also characterized precisely by its impotence, or impuissance. Indeed, it is because speech is limited in its power that writing would come to “supplement”—Peletier uses the word before Rousseau—the voice in the first place.104 Peletier walks us through this (im)puissance of the voix in this crucial passage, quoted here in full:

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It seems to me, then, that pronunciation is nothing other than a movement of the tongue and other suitable instruments, by which words make themselves understood [se font entendre] to the sense of hearing. And because its effect is of a short duration, and is not even sufficient to penetrate the distance of spaces [lieux], except a very small one [i.e., distance], it was necessary to invent some means of supplementing such a lack [défaut], so that those who are absent [les absents] and those who survive [les survivants, survivors or heirs] might be able to have some communication [communication, communication or message] of that which the distance of space and time did not allow. For which it would not have been possible to imagine anything more practical than Writing, which is an arrangement [disposition] of letters representing the meaningful words of any language, which takes the place of speech, such that if the voice could be everywhere and perpetually audible we would have no need to put anything into writing. That is the use for which writing, which is derived from speech, as everyone knows, is intended. (Prononciation donques ce/ me/ samble/ n’ę´ t autre/ chose/ qu’un mouue/ mant de/ langue/ e des autre/s instrumans a ce/ duisans, par le/quel les moz se/ font antandre/ au sans de/ l’ouye/. E par ce/ que/ l’effęt an ´ęt de/ petite/ duree/, e mę´ me/s n’ę´ t suffisant pour penetrer la distance/ des lieus, sinon qu’ęlle/ soę´ t bien pe/tite/, il à etè necessere/ d’inuanter quelque/ moyen pour supplir tel de/faut: a ce/ que/ les absans e les suruiuans púße/t auoię´ r cõmunication de/ ce/ que/ l’elongne/mant des lieus e du tans ne/ leur pouoę´ t pęrmęttre/. An quoę n’út etè poßible/ d’imaginer chose/ plus commode/ que/ l’Ecritture/, qui ´ę t vne/ disposition de/ lęttre/s represantant le/s moz sinificatíz de/ quelque/ langage/ que/ ce/ soę´ t: laquele/ tient la place/ de/ la parolle/, de/ sorte/ que/ si la voęs pouoę´ t ´ętre/ par tout, e pęrpetuęlle/mant antandible/: nous n’aurions que/ fęre/ de/ męttre/ rien par ecrit. Voila l’usage/ auquel ´ę t destinee/ l’Ecritture/, qui ´ę t de/puis le/ parler, comme/ chacun sèt.)105 Writing is only “necessary” because speech is not fully present but already affected by a defaut, an inability to extend itself in time and space. The very possibility of writing “usurping” the power of speech—the usurpation that supposedly transgresses its proper role—would be derived from this originary fault at the heart of pronunciation. The supposed self-­evidence of the derivativeness

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of writing (“as everyone knows”) would itself be a product of writing, as Derrida suggests in Of Grammatology. “The system of speech, the hearing-­oneself-­speak, the auto-­affection that seems to suspend all borrowing of signifiers from the world and thus to render itself universal and transparent to the signified, the phone which seems to guide the hand, was never able to precede its system nor, in its very essence, to be alien to it.”106 The self-­evidence of the voice to itself already relies on its visualization as phonography. “La voix se voit,” as Derrida writes. Within its own self-­representation, its own system of hearing-­itself-­ speak, the voice is seen and sees itself. In this way, the voice “has always already been invested, solicited [sollicitée], requested, and marked in its essence by a certain spatiality.”107 This originary dependency of speech on the mark will make itself felt on the page. Louis Meigret devises a system for imprinting the voice in a supposed one-­to-­one correspondence between sound and character. For this reason, however, his orthography will entail a hyperabundance of diacritics compared to contemporary vernacular texts; the same will be true of Peletier’s. The accent enters as part of an elaborate representational machinery for making writing an “image of the voice.” Meigret and Peletier will thus have new typographical characters fashioned or will introduce other characters not used by other French writers (e.g., ę, the e caudata or “tailed e” character used to represent the syncope of the Latin diphthong ae) (Figure 19). The (re)production of the voice on the page brings about a proliferation of type and is supported by a sophisticated technological apparatus, one that involves the cutting of new type (or the borrowing from the cases of other languages) and, we must imagine, a not insignificant capital investment on the part of the printer. Indeed, nowhere is the technical, material, and graphic nature of print more on display than in the pages of these phonetic reformers. Like Jacques Dubois’s grammar, then, the phonetic reform of French will require the willing participation and the material and financial support of printers like Chrétien Wechel in Paris (for Meigret) or Jean de Tournes in Lyon (for Peletier). In fact, both Meigret and Peletier repeatedly express their frustrations with French printers to take on their reforms. Meigret complains that his printer—an unnamed printer who, twelve years earlier (around 1531), had asked Meigret to devise a reformed orthography—got a case of cold feet when it came time to print his phonetic writing: “But when I addressed myself to the Printer . . . I found him marvelously changed and discouraged, giving the excuse that all sorts of men were criticizing me and unhappy with my treatise, which truthfully I always expected.” (Mais ainsi que ie me suis addressé a l’mprimeur [sic] . . . ie le

Figure 19. “Dę’ Consonantes” (Of Consonants). Louis Meigret, Le Tretté de la Grammere Françoeze (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1550), 11v. *FC5 M4757 550t. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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trouuay merueilleusement changé, & refroydi, en s’excusant sur le blasme que toute façon d’homme me do[n]noit, mal contans de mon traitté: & auquel veritablement ie me suis tousious attendu.)108 Meigret managed to have a handful of works published using his reformed orthography between 1548 and 1552 with the typographical innovator Chrétien Wechel. In his preface to the first text to feature his reforms, his translation of Lucian’s Le Menteur, published by Wechel, Meigret offers—as Dubois had in his grammar—a code to help the reader decipher and learn his new signs. In 1550, Meigret will publish with Wechel his landmark Trętté de la Grammęre Françoęze (1550). Both of the first grammars of French—one in Latin, the other in French—are published as acts of orthographic experimentation and phonetic reform. After a brief period of seeing his works published according to his system of writing, Louis Meigret’s willing printer dies. Chrétien Wechel’s son André Wechel takes over the shop in 1554, and Meigret finds himself obligated to resort to the common writing, as he laments in an opening epistle to his reader: “But if the construction of the writing seems to you other and different from the doctrine I previously put forth, blame the printer who preferred his profit to reason, hoping to increase it and make quicker work of it with his cacography than with my orthography.” (Au demeurant, si le bastiment de l’escriture vous semble autre et different de la doctrine que autrefois je mis en avant, blasmez-­en l’imprimeur qui a preferé son gain a la raison: esperant le faire beaucoup plus grand et avoir plus prompte despesche de sa cacographie que de mon orthographie.)109 The opening gesture of Peletier’s Dialogue, as we saw, is the rift with his printer; he reiterates this “displeasure” in his Apolojie to Meigret: “And it displeased me greatly when I published my Œuvres poétiques that they were not printed, in part, according to my intention. But . . . when the time comes to reprint them, I will see them written as I wish, or else I will be disobeyed by the Printers.” (E me/ deplęsoę´ t beaucoup quand je/ publiè mes Euure/s Poetique/s, qu’íz ne/ fure/t imprimèz an partie/ se/lon mon intantion. Męs . . . quand viendra a les rimprimer, je/ les ferè voę´ r ecrìz a mon gre, ou je/ se/rè de/sobeì des Imprimeurs.)110 The same printers who will produce and reproduce the phonetic text can—and inevitably will—disappoint, displease, and disobey the author. As agents of the letter—that is, of mediation, repetition, writing—they can, and indeed must, always betray the authority of the voice. If printing provides the technological support for the phonetic turn, printing (and print capitalism in particular) also sets its limits according to what we have seen Derrida calling the logic of the supplement. More fundamentally, then, this tension between the phonographer and the printer would be symptomatic of the dependency of phonography on

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the technological supplement of writing that phonography imagines it can efface or overcome.

* * * This brings us back to the circumflex. The preconsonantal s’s of French had been silent for roughly seven hundred years by the time they were officially removed and replaced by the circumflex accent in 1740. There is some debate among historical linguists today as to whether this s took on a diacritical function after it ceased to be pronounced, indicating in words like coste or mesme that the preceding vowel (e.g., o or e) was long.111 One orthographic treatise from the late thirteenth century, the Orthographie Gallica, describes this s as a mark of “bele escripture,” suggesting that it may in fact have served a graphic, aesthetic, or cultural—and not phonetic or diacritical—function.112 By the late medieval period, the preconsonantal s appeared alongside a variety of other silent etymological consonants that had come to populate the pages of scribes. These letters, which created a graphic symmetry between French and Latin, often featured visually prominent downstrokes (b, f, p, l) that made French more legible to readers, who were typically versed in Latin (since literacy was, as a rule, acquired in Latin). They created a “graphic skeleton” for a French language that had over time dropped many of its consonants. As the orthographic historian Charles Beaulieux suggests, it is precisely during the period when the fewest letters are pronounced in French that the most are written.113 As we have seen, the words for “to write” and “writing” were often written escripre and escripture well into the sixteenth century, creating visual analogies with the Latin scriptus (“written”) and scriptura (“writing”), even though, as with the modern écrire, the s and p were not pronounced. In a polemical exchange with Guillaume des Autels, a critic of Meigret’s reforms and a member of the pro-­etymology camp, Meigret picks out this overdetermined example to ridicule his interlocutor’s suggestion that pronunciation should in fact be based on spelling, and not vice versa. “Guillaume if you live until the French come to have a taste for the pronunciation escripre for ecrire, I believe you will live a life longer than any man who has ever been.” (Gyllaome si tu vis juqes a çe qe lę’ Françoęs prenet gout ęn la prononçíaçíon d’escripre pour ecrire, je croę qe tu viuras d’une víe plus longe qe d’home qi a jamęs eté.) That the etymological p or s could enter the mouth marks the height of absurdity for Meigret, at least for any foreseeable or calculable human future; writing will never be pronounced as it is written. For Peletier, this proposition is equally absurd; refusing to drop the s (oter un s)

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from words like étre, pétre, or connoétre amounts to affirming that “one’s language resides in a paper, and not in speech, in writing and not in pronunciation, in the eye, and not in the ear” (son langage/ gìt an un papier, e nompas au parler[,] an l’Ecriture/, e nompas an la prolacion[,] en l’eulh, e nompas an l’oreilhe/).114 The s becomes a lynchpin in the very definition of the “native language” (Figure 20): “I would like to know why a native speech of each county is called not only langage, but langue [tongue] itself, if it is not because it is an object of hearing.” (Ie sauroę´ voulontiers pourquoę un parler natif de/ chaque/ païs à etè ape/lè non seule/mant Langage/ męs Langue/ mę´ me/: sinon par ce/ qu’il ´ęt obgęt de/ l’ouïe/.)115 In the preface to its dictionary in 1740, the Académie française introduces and justifies the circumflex accent as a phonetic marker: “In words where the S used to mark the elongation of the syllable, we have replaced it with a circumflex accent [accent circonflêxe].” (Dans les mots où l’S marquoit l’allongement de la syllabe, nous l’avons remplacée par un accent circonflêxe.)116 Taking over the supposedly diacritical role of the s, the circumflex does what the Académie française says an accent is supposed to do: “to make the pronunciation known.” It enters as a technique specific to the writing of a “living” language. “It is nearly impossible,” write the members of the Académie in their preface, “that in a living Language, the pronunciation of words would always [toûjours] remain the same [la même]: yet the change that occurs in the pronunciation of a term brings about another in the way of writing it.” (Il est comme impossible que dans une Langue vivante, la prononciation des mots reste toûjours la même: cependant le changement qui survient dans la prononciation d’un terme, en opère un autre dans la manière de l’écrire.) A langue vivante is that kind of language for which pronunciation must give the orthographic “law.” “As variable as [pronunciation] is, it therefore does not fail to give in some places the law to orthography.” (Toute variable qu’elle [la prononciation] est, elle ne laisse donc pas en quelques rencontres, de donner la loi à l’orthographe.) The “power to give and break the law” (la puissance de donner et casser et la loi) is defined by Jean Bodin in his Six livres de la République as one of the true “marks of sovereignty.” The circumflex thus arrives in the name of the voice, to mark the “living language” as that type of language in which the pronunciation is sovereign. Curiously, in the Académie’s announcement officially welcoming the circumflex into French, the word for the accent itself, “circonflêxe,” gets garnished with a circumflex over the first e, even though no s (or any other letter) had disappeared. At the very moment it is codified, the circumflex would seem to disobey its own law: “Dans les mots où l’S marquoit l’allongement de la syllabe, nous l’avons remplacée par un accent circonflêxe.” The accent or diacritical mark,

Figure 20. “Un parler natif . . . ´ęt obgęt de/ l’ouïe/” (A native speech . . . is the object of hearing). Jacques Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/ (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1555). Rare Books 3206.704. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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which first emerges as a technique of regulating this waywardness of the letter and the tongue, can itself go rogue. Is this a compositor’s error, or a symptom of the inherent ambivalence of the diacritic? Impossible to say. Opening the dictionary and turning to the entry for “circonflexe,” we find not only a different spelling—the circumflex giving way to an accent grave—but also a different, and decidedly more graphic, logic of its function in French: “CIRCUMFLEX. adj. It is used only with the word Accent, and it is One of the three accents of the Greek Language. . . . When speaking of the French Language, one calls Circumflex [Circonflèxe] an accent that is made like an upside-­down v, which is placed on words from which a letter has been cut away [retranché], like on the word âge, which was formerly written aage.” (CIRCONFLEXE. adj. Il n’est d’usage qu’avec le mot d’Accent, & c’est Un des trois accens de la Langue Grecque . . . . En parlant De la Langue Françoise, on appelle, Circonflèxe, Un accent qui est fait comme un v renversé, & qu’on met sur des mots dont on a retranché une lettre, comme sur le mot âge, qui s’écrivoit autrefois aage.)117 Even in the pages of the official dictionary meant to fix orthography and define the accent, we encounter hesitation and ambivalence, a circumflex hovering—as in Jacques Dubois’s original usage to indicate the joining of two letters—between the phōnē and the graphein.

Chapter 5

Grammatization Pedagogies of the Mother Tongue

The tongue is of a fleshy, rare, loose and soft substance; it enjoyes flesh of a different kind from the rest of the flesh, as chiefly appears when you cut it from the first originall of the muscles. —Ambroise Paré, “Of the Tongue” For never was I able to call French, this language I am speaking to you, “my mother tongue.” These words do not come to my mouth; they do not come out of my mouth. —Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin

Monolingualism The first installment of Pierre de La Primaudaye’s encyclopedic work L’Academie Françoise, published in Paris in 1577, offers a pedagogical prescription for the mother tongue that would have been highly unusual, even unthinkable, only half a century earlier. Commenting on and adapting Plato’s curriculum in the Republic to a modern French context, La Primaudaye recommends that children begin with an education in their langue maternelle before turning to Latin: “And it seems to me that it would be profitable to young people to begin, at the aforementioned age of six years, to show them the perfection of their mother tongue, reading, pronouncing, and writing it well. Then at eight years old teach them the Rudiments of the Latin language, and pursue this language until it is

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familiar, as much so or a bit less than the mother tongue.” (Et me semble qu’il seroit bien profitable à la ieunesse, de commencer au susdit aage de six ans à luy monstrer la perfection de sa langue maternelle, en la bien lisant, prononçea[n]t, & escriuant. Puis à huict ans luy enseigner les Rudimens de la langue Latine, & la luy faire poursuyure iusques à ce qu’elle luy soit familiere, autant ou peu moins que la maternelle.)1 However much La Primaudaye’s recommendation is announced as a pedagogical ideal—one that does not necessarily reflect contemporary practice—it nevertheless reveals a remarkable shift taking place in the cultural status of the “mother tongue” in France. As we saw in previous chapters, the first grammars and other treatises that codify French as a technical and pedagogical object—“reducing” its speech and writing into an “art”— begin to appear en masse around 1530, many composed by printers and all engaging in a technological, or “artificial,” approach to vernacular language encouraged by printing. La Primaudaye’s curriculum of 1577 suggests that, just a generation later, the following may all be more or less taken for granted by French readers: (1) Latin, long synonymous with “grammar” and the first language in which students learned to read, is no longer considered the exclusive or even default language of literacy and education; (2) the “mother tongue” has been codified as a pedagogical object to the point that the reading, writing, and pronunciation of French are regarded as arts that can—and must—be “perfected” by the French student; (3) the cultural category of the langue maternelle no longer designates, as it did for Dante in De Vulgari Eloquentia, a language that can be mastered without the mediation of texts, rules, or pedagogical institutions—in other words, the scene of vernacular learning shifts from the home and the breast to the classroom and the book; (4) the acquisition of the mother tongue is therefore no longer rigorously differentiated from the acquisition of “foreign” languages or “grammatical” idioms; and (5) the langue maternelle nevertheless retains an aura of nativeness, or singular “familiarity,” such that other languages, especially Latin, are perceived as secondary or non-­native and can only asymptotically approach its level of mastery. As it acquires the status of a pedagogical object, an irreducible tension is thus introduced into the status of French as a langue maternelle. The vernacular tongue is identified as a native idiom, the French speaker’s “own” language, and yet this same idiom still remains to be appropriated—studied, acquired, mastered, perfected—through a series of social, institutional, and textual apparatuses. This langue maternelle emerges, then, as both “natural” and “artificial,” native and foreign, internal and external, one’s own and other, essentially inalienable and yet nevertheless alienated.

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It is precisely this tension that Derrida takes up in his Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, a largely autobiographical text that traces his own singular relationship with the French language while also setting out what he describes as a “universal” structure that affects and conditions every relation to language. The paradoxical refrain that runs through Monolingualism of the Other—“I have only one language; it is not my own”—announces this general structure of expropriation that keeps language from ever being one’s “own” in any absolute, natural, or pure sense. “There is no natural property of language,” Derrida affirms.2 Language cannot ever be totally or “properly” assimilated—that is, it cannot be appropriated as one’s own proper belonging; as Derrida will write elsewhere, language as such does not belong.3 Indeed, it is precisely this non-­belonging that sets appropriation in motion. “It is of the essence of language that language does not let itself be appropriated. Language is precisely what does not let itself be possessed but, for this very reason, provokes all kinds of movements of appropriation.”4 Paradoxically, then, every gesture of appropriation—linguistic nationalism, for example, which seeks to ground itself in a “natural” alignment between language and nation—would affirm precisely that language does not “naturally” belong. This non-­belonging, or non-­appropriation, would derive first from a non-­ belonging of language in relation to itself. We can begin to understand this non-­ belonging by way of the general mechanism of iterability: any identity is cleaved, made different from itself by virtue of the same repeatability that makes identity possible. As we saw in Chapter 1, every tongue must be cut in order to speak. If every language is affected by a disseminating force, then “a” language—the French language, for example—is never just “one” language, a pure idiom identical to itself in the present. “No such thing as a language [une langue] exists,” Derrida affirms. “Nor does the language [la langue]. Nor the idiom or dialect. That, moreover, is why one would never be able to count these things and why, if .  .  . we only ever have one language, this monolingualism is not at one with itself.”5 Indeed, it is precisely what is most “idiomatic,” and therefore supposedly most “proper” to each language, that most resists appropriation.6 And yet this uncountable, nonidentical language is affected by another force, what Derrida describes in Monolingualism of the Other as a “promise,” that tends to gather together difference into a uniqueness of the idiom that would be a “uniqueness without identity.” 7 It is this second, gathering force that institutes the monolanguage as single and singular—even as it continues to be divided, different from itself, inassimilable or non-­appropriable. The “of ” in the “monolingualism of the other” thus signifies less property—since language never belongs, even to

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the master, teacher, or so-­called native speaker—than a provenance that gathers language into a uniqueness located in the other to whom it is promised: “language is for the other, coming from the other, the coming of the other.”8 In the particular and personal “case” that Derrida relates in Monolingualism of the Other, this non-­belonging of language would be violently exacerbated by his history with the educational system of French Algeria, which taught French as the “mother tongue,” and his exclusion from school during the Vichy regime, which abolished the Crémieux Decree and revoked the French citizenship of Algerian Jews. Derrida affirms that his alienation with respect to any notion of the “mother tongue”—the marking of the mother tongue as a certain impossibility—first emerges in school through a “pedagogical mechanism [dispositif pédagogique].”9 “For the pupils of the French school in Algeria,” he writes, “French was a language that was supposed to be maternal but whose source, norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere.”10 The educational system of colonial Algeria dispossessed students of one set of “native” languages—Arabic, for example, was taught as a “foreign” language; Berber was not taught at all— while imposing another “mother tongue” that did not belong to them and could not be fully appropriated. The natural possession implied in the notion of the langue maternelle is thus foreign to Derrida: “Never was I able to call French, this language I am speaking to you, ‘my mother tongue.’ These words do not come to my mouth; they do not come out of my mouth. I leave to others the words ‘my mother tongue.’ ”11 And yet, Derrida will insist, these “others”—the ones to whom he leaves it to say “my mother tongue”—are no more the natural possessors of a langue maternelle than he is. Even for the so-­called native speaker who speaks only one “mother tongue,” even when one is “rooted in the place of one’s birth and in one’s language,” language still does not belong.12 In this sense, the colonial situation is not exceptional as much as it is a “high point [relief ],” an “increasing buildup of violence” of an essential coloniality of culture that affects every mother tongue. Anyone, Derrida insists, should be able to utter his monolingual refrain, even someone whose experience of the mother tongue is “sedentary, peaceful, and without any historical drama.”13 Anyone should be able to say: “I have only one language and it is not mine; my ‘own’ language is, for me, a language that cannot be assimilated. My language, the only one I hear myself speak and agree to speak, is the language of the other.”14 Even the master—the sovereign, colonizer, or teacher, the supposed source and model of mastery—does not have natural or exclusive possession of “his” language. “Contrary to what one is often most tempted to believe,” writes Derrida, “the master is nothing.”15 Every expression of “natural, national,

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congenital, or ontological” property or identity with language on the part of such a master is achieved only by means of “an unnatural process of politico-­ phantasmatic constructions.”16 It is precisely because language is not his natural possession that the master can “historically pretend . . . to appropriate it in order to impose it as ‘his own.’ ”17 Any appropriation by a master—any claim to “natural, national, congenital or ontological” property—requires an artificial mechanism, the production of a political phantasm that imagines this master as the source, model, or proper possessor of the tongue. We have already encountered a sixteenth-­century imagining of this structure in the figure of the Gallic Hercules, which operates as both a political and a pedagogical figure. The period between 1530 and 1550 will witness an unprecedented effort—instigated by printer-­pedagogues—to teach French to the French, to transform the “mother” tongue into a pedagogical object. In this chapter, I will examine how printing technology works to denaturalize, externalize, and alienate French by producing a new series of pedagogical mechanisms. Following Derrida’s analysis in Monolingualism of the Other, however, I will insist that this mother tongue was never a natural property to begin with. If printing technology comes to generate linguistic alienation through the pedagogical apparatuses it produces, in doing so it only redoubles and intensifies a more originary “alienation” that “institutes every language as a language of the other” and marks the “impossible property of a language.”18 Every instance of alienation in language would be, strictly speaking, an “alienation without alienation,” since there is never any full or absolute possession to be had. Rather than neutralizing any specific historical or technological effects of alienation, however, this recognition in fact acts as the condition, as Derrida suggests, of a more rigorous politicization of, in our case, the formation of linguistic nationalism during the sixteenth century: “Where neither natural property nor the law of property in general exist, where this de-­propriation is recognized, it is possible and it becomes more necessary than ever to identify, sometimes in order to combat them, impulses, phantasms, ‘ideologies,’ ‘fetishizations,’ and symbolics of appropriation.”19 The affirmation of an originary non-­belonging allows us to analyze historical phenomena of appropriation and expropriation without falling into or reconstituting the very phantasms (of “pure” or “natural” belonging) it relies on and motivates. “Can the poet ever be perfect who is denied the perfection of the language in which he should write?” asks Jacques Peletier du Mans in his Art Poétique of 1555. “For it is certain that an acquired language never enters into the understanding like the native one. Art may imitate nature as well as it can, but it will

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never attain it.”20 While Tory, Peletier, and others will come to champion the vernacular during this period as a “domestic” and “native” language—a privileged, pure, and natural language of my “own” language in which I hear myself speak—I will suggest that French emerges here instead as a print native language. This expression borrows from today’s “digital natives,” a term that names those born after the widespread adoption of digital technology. “Our students today,” writes educational theorist Marc Prensky in his 2001 article that coined the term, “are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet.”21 Starting in the 1530s, as we shall see, French readers and students became “native speakers” not of any “natural” idiom but of a print language: a language simultaneously given—as their “own”—and withheld—as the language of the other—in a new technological medium.

The Art of the Letter New genres of pedagogical texts in and on the vernacular—grammars and dictionaries, as well as manuals on orthography, accents, punctuation, verb conjugations, translation, poetics, and more—begin to appear at an accelerated rate around 1530. These treatises offer themselves to vernacular readers as new and indispensable instruments for speaking and, especially, writing the mother tongue. Vernacular pedagogy—predominantly and by definition a matter of oral transmission up to this point—is given a textual body. This had already been the case since the late thirteenth century for the French language in England, where texts such as John Barton’s Donait francois (often considered the earliest French grammar) taught Anglo-­Norman to the English. Starting in the sixteenth century, however, the learning of French in France for so-­called “native” speakers will be—like Latin, or a “foreign” language—externalized, instrumentalized, and codified in printed books. These books come to constitute a pedagogical apparatus for the appropriation of French, a textual memory that soon exceeds what any one individual can be expected to internalize or master.22 In order to learn French, the “native” vernacular speaker now needs not just a wet-­nurse (as Dante had suggested) but an entire library of grammars, dictionaries, orthographies, and more. In 1572, the celebrated pedagogue Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus) will take stock of this new bibliography in the preface to his own Grammaire, cataloguing all the books that have treated “Gallic or French grammar” (la Grammaire Gaulloyse ou Francoyse).23 Ramus begins by citing the grammar of Jacques

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Dubois, “who . . . attempted to reform the abuse of our writing and make it agree with speech, as is shown by the characters fashioned at that time by Robert Estienne” (qui . . . tascha de reformer labus de nostre escripture, & faire quelle couint a la parolle, comme appert par les characteres lors figures par Robert Estienne). He goes on to name Geoffroy Tory (“at that time Royal Printer” [lors Imprimeur du Roy]), Étienne Dolet, Louis Meigret, Jacques Peletier, Guillaume des Autels, and himself (referring to the 1562 edition of his grammar printed with a reformed orthography), followed by a host of newcomers: Jean Pilot, Jean Grenier, Antoine Caucie, Robert Estienne, Joachim du Bellay (“an illustration of the French language” [vne illustration de la langue Francoyse]), Henri Estienne, and Antoine de Baïf.24 In the pages of the copy of the Grammaire owned by the Bibliothèque nationale, one contemporary reader has taken pains to note the names of each of these authors in the margins, creating a reading list of his own.25 Arriving at the end of his bibliography, Ramus dates the moment when the French language was reinvented as a grammatical object to around 1530, or “forty years” before the publication of his own Grammaire in 1572: “Thus we see that for the last forty years, this process [proces] for writing truly has been on the desk.” (Par ainsi nous voyons que depuis quarante ans enca, ce proces pour vrayme[n]t escripre, a este sur le bureau.)26 The historical phenomenon of grammatization—the production of dictionaries and grammars—constitutes a veritable technological revolution, as the linguistic historian Sylvain Auroux has argued.27 The grammar and the dictionary are technologies that allow language to be described and instrumentalized.28 If the invention of writing during the third millennium bce is the first “technico-­ linguistic revolution,” the “massive grammatization” of the world’s languages between the sixth and nineteenth centuries is the second.29 The production of grammars and dictionaries represents, Auroux suggests, a technological revolution “as important for the history of humanity as the agrarian revolution of the Neolithic period or the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.” The Renaissance, which constitutes a “decisive turning point” for linguistic sciences, would form the “axis” or “point of inflection” for this technico-­linguistic revolution across Europe.30 Auroux’s definition of grammatization (as the production of grammars and dictionaries) is clearly more restricted than the sense we saw this word take on earlier, coming out of the work of Bernard Stiegler (itself coming out of the work of Jacques Derrida). We may recall that, for Stiegler, “grammatization” is a generalized historical evolution of technics stretching from the Neolithic age to our own time, a process “whereby the currents and continuities shaping our lives

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become discrete elements.” Grammatization for Stiegler entails discretization, reproducibility, and the creation of what he calls (following Edmund Husserl) “tertiary retention”—that is, a form of externalized memory that exceeds and transcends the individual. All reproducibility, according to Stiegler, entails the existence of “retentional grains that one can call grammes,” the basic elements of grammatization, which are—not coincidentally—named after the letters of the alphabet.31 Auroux’s more restricted definition of grammatization can be understood as a particular historical moment within this Stieglerian horizon: grammars and dictionaries would act as forms of tertiary retention, that is, as a kind of collective “external hard drive” by which language becomes reproducible over space and time (across a nation, across generations). Printing enables the production of these new forms of tertiary retention, creating an unprecedented archive of vernacular language. Each piece of metal type comes to act as a gramme in the grammatization of the vernacular—a process which, after Stiegler, we must see not only as entailing the production of dictionaries and grammars but also more profoundly as affecting the way the language is recorded and reproduced, taught and learned, experienced and lived. Auroux himself devotes very little space to printing but does hazard the following hypothesis— which also is the thesis of this chapter: “We think it is plausible to make the hypothesis according to which grammatization and printing are part of the same techno-­linguistic revolution.”32 Grammatization is thus also exteriorization. Printing technology and grammar jointly externalize the individual memory of language. The widespread exteriorization of individual memory with the advent of printing is observed by the anthropologist and paleontologist André Leroi-­Gourhan, who situates this movement within the longer history of human memory, technics, and homonization (the becoming-­human of the human). Human memory is already, “like tools [comme l’outil],” an externalized phenomenon; just as technicity entails an “exteriorization of the organs,” human memory according to Leroi-­Gourhan is “stored within the ethnic group.”33 The primary form of this externalized memory would be language. With printing—and the concomitant phenomenon we are here calling the “grammatization” of the vernacular—language undergoes an exteriorization of a different order. Medieval manuscript books were a very different kind of learning tool, largely designed to be memorized and internalized. Printed books, cheaper and available to a far wider readership, are always at hand for ready consultation; they also offer a rapidly expanding corpus of linguistic mastery, as Ramus’s reading list—or, even more tellingly, the contemporary reader’s efforts to copy and assimilate it—indicates.

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“Readers not only obtained access to an enormous collective memory whose entire contents they could not possibly register but were also frequently confronted with new material,” suggests Leroi-­Gourhan. “A process of exteriorization of the individual memory then began to take place. The work of finding one’s way around printed material was done from outside [par l’extérieur].”34 Mastering French, like Latin before it, will increasingly mean navigating the pages of grammars, dictionaries, and technical treatises of all kinds—pages that are “linearized and fragmented,” indexed and alphabetized. Speaking one’s “own” language will require “finding one’s way around printed material,” a process that happens par l’extérieur. Grammars and dictionaries give me (back) my own tongue to handle. The new pedagogical dynamic is already on display in Étienne Dolet’s Maniere de bien traduire (1540), which appeared alongside his treatises on punctuation and accents. Dolet’s book, the first installation of his Orateur francoys, sells itself as the inaugural guide for initiating French subjects into their “own” language. In the epistle to the reader, Dolet outlines the various components of his Orateur to come: For six years (O French people), stealing a few hours away from my primary study (which is the reading of the Latin and Greek languages) wanting to illuminate you by all means, I composed in our language a Work titled the French Orator, which contains the following treatises:  Grammar.  Orthography.  Accents.  Punctuation.  Pronunciation.   The origin of certain words.   The manner of translating from one language to another.   The Art of Oration.   The Art of Poetics. Given that this Work is of great importance, and it requires a great labor, knowledge, and extreme judgment to achieve, I will defer the publication (in order not to rush it) for two or three years. In the meantime, you will make use of the instructions in the present Book.

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(Depuis six ans (ò peuple Fra[n]coys) desrobbant quelcques heures de mon estude principalle (qui est en la lecture de la langue Latine, & Grecque), te voulant aussi illustrer par tous moyens, i’ay composé en nostre la[n]gage vn Oeuure intitulé l’Orateur Francoys: duquel Oeuure les traictés sont telz.   La grammaire.  L’ortographe.   Les accents.   La punctuation.   La pronunciation.   L’origine d’aucunes dictions.   La maniere de bien traduire d’vne langue en autre.   L’art oratoire.   L’art poëtique. Mais pour ce, que le dict Oeuure est de grande importa[n]ce, & qu’il y eschet vn grand labeur, scauoir, & extreme iugeme[n]t, i’en differeray la publication (pour ne le precipiter) iusques a deux, ou troys ans. Ce pendant tu t’ayderas des instructions, qui sont en ce present Liure. Dolet promises a comprehensive, even encyclopedic, pedagogical manual for the entirety of the French language: a project so grand he must break it up into parts and “defer” the rest of its publication. In fact, Dolet will be executed (in 1546) before having the opportunity to publish (or perhaps complete) this project. In 1549, Du Bellay is still anticipating its arrival as a companion to the “amplification and adornment of our language” (l’amplification et ornement de notre langue) that he undertakes in the Deffence: “I am not ignorant that Étienne Dolet, a man of good judgment in our vulgar tongue, has written The French Orator, which perhaps someone, a friend to the memory of the author and to France, will soon and faithfully bring to light” (je n’ignore point qu’Étienne Dolet, homme de bon jugement en notre vulgaire, a formé l’Orateur français, que quelqu’un (peut-­estre) ami de la memoire de l’aucteur et de la France, mettra de bref et fidelement en lumiere).35 The rules found in Dolet’s published Maniere—for translation, punctuation, and accents—promise to allow French writers to “return” from Latin, Greek, and other foreign languages, to where they more “properly” belong, in a realignment that is affective and political but also textual and technological. A

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short poem by Charles de Sainte-­Marthe (“Au lecteur Francoys”) found inside the pages of Dolet’s book addresses French writers, admonishing them for being excessive “admirers” of foreign languages (soon to become a stock feature of vernacular advocacy). Sainte-­Marthe suggests that the French only admire languages other than their “own” because there has been no French “instructor” to “show [them] how to use it.” Dolet—the printer-­instructor to whom François I had granted an unconditional ten-­year privilege for all works he would author or publish—arrives with the “noble invention” of his book to give them an “introduction” to their own tongue: Pourquoy es tu d’aultruy admirateur, Vilipendant le tien propre langaige? Es ce (Francois) que tu n’as instructeur, Qui d’iceluy te remonstre l’usaige? Maintenant as à ce grand advantaige, Si vers ta Langue as quelque affection: Dolet t’y donne une introduction Si bonne en tout, qu’il n’y à que redire Car il t’enseigne, (ò noble inuention) D’escrire bien, bien tourner, & bien dire.36 (Why are you the admirer of the other, scorning your own language? Is it (Frenchman) that you do not have an instructor to show you how to use it? Now you have this great advantage, if you have some affection toward your Tongue, Dolet gives you an introduction so good in all respects that there is nothing to reproach, for here teaches you (O noble invention) how to write well, translate well, and speak well.) The printer-­instructor invites the vernacular writer to learn and love his own language as if it were foreign, that is, as a textually mediated set of rules to be practiced and perfected. Far from alienating the French reader, this “reduction into art” is advertised as a technique of appropriation and “affection.” Language acquisition gets caught up in the technological movement of mechanical reproduction. French speaking and writing will increasingly, like a printed text, be subject to correction, standardization, and mechanized repetition. The French tongue, like a piece of metal type, will be formed and hardened. As it is externalized, the learning of French will also be projected onto a

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new cartographic space: a proto-­national space on the scale of print dissemination in an increasingly centralized French kingdom. Even as literacy remains restricted to the elite, France gets reimagined as a national classroom of “good students” and “lovers of good letters” (according to Geoffroy Tory’s Champ fleury) ready to be formed by their master-­printer. Once again, the Gallic Hercules illustrates the new media scene for us, this time as a pedagogical scene: a nation of eager students with their ears chained to the teacher’s tongue—a metallic tongue that now extends outside the body. Not surprising, then, royal sovereignty also gets inflected pedagogically in this moment. The courtly poet Bonaventure des Périers will herald François I in 1537 as the “noble teacher” of French poetry, that is, poetry in his own tongue (O Roy Francoys . . . le noble enseigneur / De Poesie en ta Francoyse langue). François, proprietor of the tongue, is also the schoolmaster and source of French language. The exteriorization of French—as pedagogical object, as grammar, in print—goes hand in hand with a political expropriation of the vernacular, with the institution of linguistic sovereignty. In his 1572 Grammaire, Ramus will similarly remember François as having the most “proper” and “pure” French but will cast him now as the superlative pupil, the most studious student of his own language: “the great King François . . . was himself so studious in his language, that there was no man in this Kingdom more knowledgeable, or better versed in the properness and purity of the French [Francoys] language” (le grand Roy Francoys . . . a este luy mesme si studieux de sa langue, quil ny avoit homme en ce Royaulme mieulx entendu, et mieulx exercé en la proprieté et pureté du langaige Francoys).37 As monarchic absolutism takes shape in France, “grammatical absolutism is constituted alongside it.”38

* * * In order to better understand the emergence of the vernacular as a grammatical object, it is worth briefly retracing the status of grammar as a discipline leading up to the sixteenth century. For much of the medieval period, grammar held a central place in European scholarly culture and curricula. In a study examining the role of grammatica in Europe between the years 300 and 1100, Martin Irvine argues that this term names less a distinct discipline than “the central node in a larger network, the gravitational center of several other institutions and practices—schools, libraries, scriptoria, commentaries, canonical texts and languages.”39 Grammatica was widely considered by early medieval literati to be the “source and foundation” of all other arts and textual production, the

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constitutive art of Latin literacy and textuality themselves. As such, Irvine argues, grammatica was supported by dominant social and political institutions; it “functioned to perpetuate and reproduce the most fundamental conditions for textual culture, providing the discursive rules and interpretive strategies that constructed certain texts as repositories of authority and value.”40 From its Hellenistic and Roman origins through the twelfth century, grammatica was an essentially textual discipline that maintained a privilege of writing over speech and derived grammatical rules from classical literary texts. This function largely waned during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With the development of speculative and theoretical grammar, the comprehensive and foundational nature of grammatica splintered; schools and universities throughout Europe deemphasized grammar and rhetoric in favor of logic, as epitomized in Alexander of Villedieu’s Doctrinale (1199), the dominant, logic-­based grammatical textbook of the era.41 With the development of humanism in Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany during the fifteenth century, grammar regained significance as a scholarly discipline in its own right and, simultaneously, came to be applied to Greek and Hebrew as the study of these languages gained currency. Valla’s Elegantiae linguae latinae, written in the 1440s and published in Venice in 1471, emphasized questions of style and usage, and returned to Donatus and Priscian, the Roman grammarians whose work had been central to the culture of grammatica in the early middle ages. Humanist grammarians of the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including Niccolò Perotti with his popular Rudimenta Grammatices (1473), followed Valla’s example by insisting on usage, rather than the logical and even metaphysical structures of late medieval speculative grammars. For Erasmus and his followers, grammar was a central and iconoclastic term, representing “a new approach to educational practice, and at the same time a reform of the intellectual disciplines.”42 Liberated from the logic and dialectic with which it had been burdened in scholastic education, and reformed in line with usage, a grammar-­based education would, according to Erasmus, bring about eloquence and a true philosophy. In France, new humanistic textbooks of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic began to replace medieval ones in the early sixteenth century. The founding of the Collège Royal institutionalized this learning at the university level, while the establishment of a number of municipal collèges by French town councils created a structure of secondary Latin grammar education. The sons of the local elite throughout France thereby had access to the humanistic education that would prepare them for university and, later, careers in law and royal administration.43

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Indeed, educational reform of the Renaissance broadly speaking aimed at a secularization of the medieval curriculum to suit the needs of a new kind of state. At every level of education, however, the pedagogical emphasis into the seventeenth century remained resolutely—and, in general, exclusively—on Latin, even as the use of French was codified at the state level. In 1576, Louis Le Roy, author of De la vicissitude ou varieté des choses en l’univers and royal professor of Greek, made an appeal to teach in the vernacular, a complementary effort to his numerous vernacular translations and a desire to introduce politics to the curriculum.44 This initiative was put into practice in his own French-­language lectures on Demosthenes, but it otherwise gained little traction. What is crucial about the vernacular pedagogical turn starting in the 1530s, then, is not its immediate institutional success but rather the grammatizing techno-­logic it inaugurates in the body of the French language. The project of French grammatization finds a “beginning” in Geoffroy Tory’s Champ fleury. Tory announces himself in 1529 as a “Grammarian” (Grammairien). Yet his book is effectively devoid of any features that we would expect today when we open the pages of a French grammar. What is the “grammar” of this Grammairien? Tory describes his primary pedagogical role as “teaching to write and pronounce the letters of the alphabet well” (enseigner a bien escrire & pronuncer les lettres Abecedaires).45 In this inaugural moment of French grammatization, the roles of grammarian and typographer are intertwined, joined in the figure of the letter that must be produced—in the mouth and in writing— “well.” A first definition of la grammaire might then be: an art or technē of the letter. The Grammairien is the one who teaches this technē—that is, the one who writes it down. It is worth recalling that a technē does not denote only the “art,” it also is the written text that teaches that art, as in the Tekhne grammatike of Dionysus Thrax (170–90 bce), the earliest Greek grammar. (This sense is retained in any number of early modern and modern “The art of . . .” titles.) No technē without writing, without text. The technē is both the technique and the text that transforms that technique into a pedagogical object and instrument; the two go hand in hand. It is no coincidence that the development of printing brings about a proliferation of technical treatises and the invention of the new genre of the how-­to book, including the vernacular treatises under consideration here. A “grammar” would be that specific genre of technē (the “tekhne grammatike”) that transforms language into a pedagogical object and instrument, a concrete set of techniques to be mastered—starting with the letter. Tory also declares, in the opening pages of Champ fleury, that he will enumerate each letter and its virtues “in order according to their accustomed place

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[situation] one after another” (par ordre selon leur acostumee situation de l’une apres l’autre), that is, “according to the art of grammar” (selon l’art de Grammaire).46 The art of grammar is also, then, an art of order or place, an assured, regulated and spatialized disposition of language as alphabetic signs. Latin grammars begin, quasi-­ritualistically, by proceeding through the alphabet in order, as a prescribed sequence or chain. Grammar would be an instrumentalization of language as a series of elements (elementa), a chain of individual units. Tory further speaks as a grammarian when he “deplore[s] the sterility of our hands, which are too careless [trop mal soigneuses] in writing well.”47 It is as a grammarian that he advises against writing on scrolls because they break up syllables in improper ways, which goes against the “art of grammar.” Tory writes as a grammar master when he condemns the Normans who substitute n for m at the ends of Latin words, pronouncing templum as templun, which is not in observance of the “reason [raison] of Latin Grammar.” Similarly condemned under the law of grammar are the “skimmers of Latin”—later made famous by Rabelais—who stuff their vernacular speech with Latin words, along with the “Jargoners” and “Jokers” who look to “corrupt” and “disfigure” the vernacular rather than “regulating” or “decorating” it. Not all humanists of the early sixteenth century shared Tory’s technological optimism. For the French mathematician and early sociolinguist Charles de Bovelles, the French language of the 1530s is not merely lacking in “rule” and “order,” it is fundamentally ungrammatizable. Bovelles shares with Tory an interest in geometry and a spatial conception of French language and grammar; he had in fact published the first vernacular treatise on geometry, the Geometrie en francoys (1511), which Tory praises and cites repeatedly when providing geometrical definitions and principles for his letter designs in Book II of Champ fleury.48 In 1533, Bovelles published his Liber de differentia vulgarium linguarum et Gallici sermonis varietate (“On the difference of vernacular tongues and the variety of the French language”) with Robert Estienne, who had printed Jacques Dubois’s French grammar, the In linguam gallicam Isagōge, two years earlier. Written in Latin and printed in Estienne’s elegant Aldine Roman characters, Bovelles’s treatise sets out to survey the French linguistic landscape and to demonstrate that all vernacular language is essentially plural and unstable. In opposition to the ancient fixity of Latin, vernacular language is continually altered by time, space, and the “hesitant lips” of its speakers.49 For Bovelles, any vernacular speech is exposed to difference; it is too material, too contingent, too human, too corporeal, and too politically diffuse to become “articulate.” With each passing day, he writes, “human faults of articulation amputate, diversify, and

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alter the unregulated languages spoken by the vulgar people.”50 Grammatical “rule” is for Bovelles, as for Tory, what makes language impervious to difference from itself—impervious to time and space, to contingency and corruption. Indeed, the very origin of what we now call the Romance languages lies, according to Bovelles, in the “non-­observance of rules, distance, and faults of pronunciation.”51 From the start and by definition, as it were, the French vernacular is a language produced through difference and a constitutive “non-­observance of rules”; it is by definition agrammatical. These same forces have allowed the French vernacular to “admit in itself a great diversity, to such an extent that . . . there are today in France as many ways of speaking as there are peoples, regions, and towns.”52 For Tory, as we saw, this diversity presents itself as “easy to regulate” (facile a reigler) using both the Hellenic model and a technological attitude toward language as material to be organized in a typographic frame. Bovelles, meanwhile, discounts the possibility of ever locating a single French vernacular that could serve as an “archetype” for proper pronunciation or grammatical elaboration. His France is embedded in a thoroughly post-­Babelian scene: no language that lives in the mouths of men can be “unique unto itself.”53 The agrammaticality of vernacular language is, Bovelles insists, celestially ordained.54 As we have seen, Tory’s grammatical project is marked by a future-­oriented not yet. He recognizes that French does not yet have grammar: it is a deficient language, imperfect and in need of technē. Tory calls for the arrival of a grammarian—a quasi-­messianic coming—who will know how to engineer the tongue. Making the vernacular “grammatical” means redefining it as a language made of letters, composed of discrete and repeatable alphabetic parts. The ancient grammarians that Tory draws on and cites—Donatus, Priscian, Diomedes—define grammar’s object as “articulate” speech: speech that, as we saw in Chapter 1, is representable by letters and already mechanized by an effect of arche-­printing. Any sound that cannot be written down is considered “inarticulate,” not reducible to discrete parts and therefore not the object of grammar. The articulate speech (vox articulata) that grammar takes as its object is by definition scriptable and thus already marked by the principle of alphabetic writing.55 Donatus, Diomedes, and Priscian all begin their grammars with a definition of the letter. For Donatus, the letter (littera) is “the smallest part of articulate utterance” (pars minima uocis articulatae).56 Diomedes elaborates on this definition: a letter is “the smallest part of articulate utterance; it takes its beginning from an element [unit of sound] and can be marked in a figure [written character].”57 Diomedes also underscores that the letter is a rendering discrete or finite— through writing—of the medium of speech: “There are twenty-­three figures of

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all the letters, but the phonic values (potestates), which we term elements, are understood to be very many.” For Priscian, the letter is an atomic “indivisible particle”: “A letter is the smallest part of composite speech sound (vox), that is, what exists by the composition of letters; it is the smallest part with respect to the whole comprehension of scriptable speech sound . . . or because it is the briefest of all divisible things, it being indivisible itself. We can define it this way: a letter is a speech sound that can be written as an indivisible particle.”58 Grammar is an art of the smallest part, or the smallest “indivisible particle.” It presupposes a “theory of letters as minimal phonic/graphic units.”59 By the same token, the category of vox articulata assumes that phonic units (elementa) and written characters (litterae, figurae) are distinct but “convertible” terms. This mutual convertibility of speech and writing via the letter is a foundational principle in Champ fleury, appearing most strikingly in Book III, where Tory systematically outlines what the Latin grammarians define as three “properties” of each letter: name, figure, and phonic value. Each set of instructions for geometrically fashioning a majuscule letter on a grid by means of tools—“made and designed by Number and Measure of Points, Lines, and Turns of the Compass”—is followed by an equally precise set of instructions for pronouncing each letter using the tongue, teeth, and palate.60 Tory describes how the letter is pronounced—properly or improperly—in French, Latin, and Greek, and sometimes in other French dialects (Picard, Gascon) and European vernaculars (German, Spanish). Tory teaches us, quoting Martianus Capella, that the letter F “is pronounced well by the tongue touching against the palate, and . . . the teeth pressing down the lower lip a bit” (est doulcement proferee de la langue touchant contre le palaix, & que les dents depriment un peu la lefvre de dessus ).61 Name, figure, and phonic value: Tory casts the unruly body of French as discrete and reproducible letters. With a few notable and sporadic exceptions prior to the early sixteenth century, grammatica had previously been the domain of Latin. However literary, cosmopolitan, or prestigious French may have been through the fifteenth century, it was not a grammatical language from a cultural or technical standpoint. We have seen how, for Dante, the very category of vernacular language (as natural, immediate, etc.) is defined through its binary opposition to grammatica. “Vernacular” signifies precisely a state of language prior to the arrival of grammatica—or, according to the lapsarian imaginary of writers like Bovelles, after its irremediable collapse. Sylvain Auroux has suggested that the knowledge base necessary to grammatize the vernaculars was in place long before the sixteenth century, but that the relatively low social status of the vernaculars—as

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well as the power structure of the Church—meant that there was no “interest” in vernacular grammatization. One fourteenth-­century translator, writing in the regional vernacular of Lorraine, describes the difficulty he has in translating the Latin text of the Psalms since “Latin maintains its rules of grammar . . . , which in romans or in French one cannot properly keep because of the varieties and diversities of the languages and the lack of understamding of many, who more often form their words and their speech according to their will and as they like” (li latin warde ses rigles de gramaire . . . que on romans ne en francoiz on ne puet proprement wardeit. Pour les uarietez et diuersiteiz des lainguaiges et lou deffault d’entendement de maint et plusour, qui plus souuent forment lour mos et lour parleir a lour uolentiet et a lour guise).62 The absence of “certain rule” (rigle certenne) leads to a “corrupted” (corrumpue) language in which there is no common tongue but only the vagaries of individual desires. The same Lorraine translator writes that “one can scarcely find anyone today who knows how to write, speak, or pronounce in one and the same way; instead one person writes, speaks, and pronounces in his own way, and the other person in another.”63 In the mythological origin of grammar offered by Adelard of Bath in the eleventh century, grammar appears as a rationalizing technique for rendering language—which he views as itself a discretization or finitization of the universe—even more discrete and more finite. Grammar is a scientific frame laid down upon language: “But having clothed things with names . . . , she gave different names [voces] to the names themselves, so that even their difference amongst themselves should not be hidden and that multi-­faceted infinity, having been brought under a finite number, should not lack the [ability to be] grasped by a scientific discipline. Thus with wonderful sagacity she subjected that total multiplicity to the number of the eight parts of speech.”64 The culturally distinct spheres of Latin and the vernacular prior to the sixteenth century thus maintained a social and even ontological separation between these two moments: between the discrete and grammatical domain of Latin and the “multi-­faceted infinity” of the vernacular. The massive and widespread project of vernacular grammatization during the sixteenth century, which serves to articulate these previously distinct categories, will call upon the resources of the printer’s workshop. As we shall see, the vernacular becomes “lettered” one piece of metal type at a time. The vernacular grammatization project will also present itself, then, as the formation of a properly human tongue. In French grammars and other pedagogical texts of the 1530s and 1540s, it is indeed the humanity of the vernacular language—and its speakers—that is at stake, as evidenced by the persistent

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metaphors and images found in these texts of infant children, raw material, uncultivated plants, and “barbarous” tongues. Grammatization emerges in humanist France as a project of hominization. Intimations of this process can already be found in the preface to the first vernacular grammar printed in France, Jacques Dubois’s In linguam gallicam isagōge of 1531. Dubois, also known as Sylvius, published his grammar in collaboration with Robert Estienne, several years before Estienne’s bilingual dictionary and more than two decades before Estienne’s own Traicté de la grammaire Francoise. Dubois was a physician and an anatomist with mastery of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; he studied with Guillaume Budé, corresponded with Erasmus, and was a teacher of Vesalius in Paris. Unlike his contemporary Charles de Bovelles, Dubois believed that underlying rules can be discovered for a seemingly unruly French. For Dubois, French is presently in a “corrupt” and “confused” state, but this is only because its “art” is yet unknown. The Latin-­language grammar promises to have a humanizing effect on French vernacular tongues through the introduction of technē; it will, Dubois affirms, allow speakers of French to “learn fully the system of their own [language] so that, as might magpies and starlings, they avoid uttering the words of their own kin without remarking, appreciating, or understanding them, since it would be shameful for a person to appear as a stranger in his native language.” The magpie is not just any nonhuman animal: it is an animal that deceptively imitates human speech. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies describes the magpie as a tongueless imitator of human voice: “Hanging in the branches of trees, resounding with harsh garrulity, they imitate the sound of the human voice, even if their tongues are unable to unfold in speech.”65 Dante similarly affirms in the De vulgari eloquentia that the magpie produces not properly human speech but “noise”: “And if it be claimed that . . . magpies and other birds do indeed speak, I say this is not so; for their act is not speaking, but rather an imitation of the human voice—or it may be that they try to imitate us in so far as we make a noise, but not in so far as we speak. So that, if to someone who said pica [magpie] aloud first, this would only be a reproduction or imitation of the sound made by the person who uttered the word first.” Embedded in the vernacular/Latin distinction, then, is a certain concept of the human—and the articulate human “voice,” distinct from mere animal “noise”—that rejects the automatism or mere repetition of naked biological life. Grammar is in this sense the triumph of technology over biology, artifice over nature—in the name of the “human.” Like Tory, Dubois sees French not as agrammatical or ungrammatizable (and thus nonhuman) but as not-­yet-­g rammatical (and thus not-­yet-­human).

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Dubois’s printed grammatical text—with its elaborate apparatus of diacritics and new characters controlling the production of speech—promises full entry into humanity. At the same time, however, this properly human language would be haunted by its mechanical constitution: grammatization seeks to overcome vernacular speech as repetition (the mimicry of magpies), yet it must deploy mechanically reproducible characters in order to do so. Between the lines of the grammatical projects of Dubois and the vernacular grammarians that follow in France, we can read the influence of Erasmus, the dominant voice in the humanist pedagogical universe during the first half of the sixteenth century. For the Dutch Erasmus, whose work was reprinted and widely read in France during the 1520s and 1530s, vernacular language posed a threat to properly human speech and thus to the proper constitution of the human in language. In the opening lines of his De Recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione dialogus (“The Right Way of Speaking Greek and Latin”) of 1528, we find a lion (Leo) and a bear (Ursus) discussing the education of the lion’s young son. Although the tone of the dialogue is playful, the stakes of the cub’s education are high: Leo: My little lion has me worried already. Ursus: What is wrong? Is he ill? Leo: Not at all. But I am anxious for him to turn out like a human cub. Ursus: He is not deformed in any way? Leo: Not at all. No, if you saw him you would say he was a splendid child. But the outward form does not make a man. . . . Ursus: Have you any particular reason for your anxiety? Leo: I have learnt from Galen that what differentiates man from the other animals, or brutes as they are called, is not reason, but speech.66 The central irony and strange performative tension of Erasmus’s dialogue quickly become apparent: two animals, speaking elegant Latin and citing classical sources, discuss how to turn a little lion into a human through the education of his tongue. At the same time, the “right way of speaking” announced in Erasmus’s title is revealed to be bound up with anxiety about humanity, and about the human as a pedagogically constituted subject. The dialogue continues: Ursus: I understand. You are afraid your infant will always remain an infant (infans)—that he may not learn to talk.

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Leo: By no means. It looks as if he is going to be quite talkative enough. Already he talks so much that he reminds me of his mother. Ursus: Then what are you afraid of? Leo: That he will not talk like a man.67 If the lion fears not muteness but incorrect speech (the babbling of an animal or a mother), this is because proper humanity is not a given of language—even if language is what is proper to man. The Erasmian model of education, in many respects echoing an earlier scholastic model, entails leading the child out of the realm of the home and the mother’s language and into the social and patriarchal domain of Latin, grammar, and school. In his treatise on education De pueris instituendis (“On Education for Children”), Erasmus makes explicit that a becoming-­human is at stake in his humanist pedagogy: “The child that nature has given you is nothing but a shapeless lump, but the material is still pliable, capable of assuming any form, and you must so mold it that it takes on the best possible character. If you are negligent, you will rear an animal; but if you apply yourself, you will fashion, if I may use such a bold term, a godlike creature.”68 The human of humanist education is a product of technē, an artificially fashioned object of pedagogical craft.69 The child is raw material to be “formed,” “fashioned,” and “shaped” into a “godlike” techno-­human (Erasmus’s verb is fingere, the meanings of which range from shaping and teaching to dissembling and deceiving). Erasmus’s recurrent term for the child-­material is rudem massam, an undeveloped or wild lump to be formed by the humanist hand. He invokes a series of ancient media that insist on the child’s softness and pliability: wax, moist clay, precious liquids.70 But he also compares the child, following the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, to “a new book, a new pen, and a fresh writing tablet” (libro .  .  . novo, stylo novo, tabella nova).71 The child is a medium—a “new” medium—awaiting its human inscription. Yet this moment of pliability and inscriptability, Erasmus insists, is fleeting: “You cannot preserve this quality of rawness and freshness forever; if you do not mold your child’s soul to become fully human (in homines speciem), it will of itself degenerate to a monstrous bestiality.”72 The child, like the typographer’s molten lead, must be quickly molded and hardened into its human type, lest it be deformed into another species.73 What is so striking in Erasmus’s pedagogical philosophy is that it not only maps this pedagogical formation onto a becoming-­human of natural material but also localizes this formation in the child’s tongue. It is in the tongue that a

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proper human will be fashioned. The tongue, we might say, is the medium where humanity as such gets decided. Just as we “exercise care about straightening children’s legs,” and “shape their faces with bandages to increase their beauty,” Erasmus’s lion affirms, “surely we should be even more concerned about their tongues and the proper formation of them. There is no other part of the body so quick and so pliable and so ready to take up different shapes, nor any other on which a man’s acceptability and success so much depends. In short it is the tongue which distinguishes human from animal.” 74 There is something about the tongue—as the very organ capable of constituting humanity—that makes it susceptible to being turned or folded in an animal direction. Humanist education for Erasmus would be, above all, a technē of this overly susceptible organ: a fashioning or crafting—above all, a straightening—of the (maternal, vernacular) animal out of the tongue. The Latin title of his treatise on pronunciation gives us a more palpable sense of this straightening; following the Greek ortho (correct speech) is recta (right, ruled, straight). The soft and unruly tongue must become hard, molded into a durable form. It would also be up to the tongue to draw a straight and hard line between human and animal, to seal tight what Donna Haraway has called that “leaky distinction” between them. In this sense, the tongue becomes the ultimate instrument of the “godlike” techno-­human: that body part capable of overcoming embodiment, as long it remains recta.

A to Z: French for Beginners Typography furnishes both a material condition and the technological imaginary for French grammatization and the pedagogical turn: it proves the metal chain of letters linking the Herculean tongue to a nation of ears. Elizabeth Eisenstein points to an increased importance of the alphabet—its order, its linearity, its phonetic principle—as an entry into education with the development of printing: “Ever since the sixteenth century, memorizing a fixed sequence of discrete letters represented by meaningless symbols and sounds has been the gateway to book learning for all children in the West.”75 In addition to the well-­ known development of alphabetic cataloging, referencing, indexing, and so on, in printed books, printing also gives the alphabet an enhanced symbolic role as both the gateway to and model for education. To master the alphabet, in alphabetical order, is to master the totality of knowledge—a knowledge ordered and contained, as if in the compartments of the printer’s wooden type case: such is

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the alphabetic fantasy. The formation of the tongue will have to begin, then, at the beginning of the alphabet: with the letter A. In Tory’s Champ fleury, A’s proliferate in large woodcut prints. In one woodcut, A is mapped onto the body of a human man—the male figure appearing minuscule and the letter larger than life as they are brought into proportion with one another in the space of the typographer’s grid (Figure 21). Another A is composed of a ruler and compass, the “queen and king” of manual tools. Yet another is shown in mirror image, “a lenvers,” and as a white-­on-­black negative image for the benefit of “printers, goldsmiths, and engravers” (Figure 22). Addressing these technicians directly as readers, and admonishing them for being prone to carving their letters the wrong way (a gauche), Tory digresses into a vertiginous description of the back-­and-­forth required to print a legible letter.76 Twice backward (a lenvers) and twice the right way (a lendroit), he says: once backwards in the steel punch, once the right way in the matrix, then the cast “tin” letter (lettre destaing) backwards again, “then finally on the printed paper the whole letter is encountered in the right way, in the view required to read in line [tractivement].”77 As the typographer begins in Book III to make his way through the alphabet, offering detailed descriptions of how each letter should be composed using a ruler and compass, A is twice more illustrated and explicated as a rationalized and technical object: “The letter A, twice here drawn in its Square . . . is as broad as it is high, namely, ten bodies wide and ten more high, contained between the eleven perpendicular and transversal lines” (La lettre A, cy pres deux fois designee en son Quarre .  .  . est aussi large que haulte, C’est a scavoir de dix corps de largeur, & dix aultres de haulteur, contenus entre les unze lignes tant perpendiculaires que traversantes); to form an A correctly, Tory instructs his reader to make “five turns of the Compass,” the centers of which “I have indicated .  .  . with the sign + where the foot of the Compass should be seated to make the circumference” (cinq tours de Compas, pour lesquelz faire j’ay signe les lieux & centres de tel signe .+. ou le pied Centrique du Compas veult estre assis pour faire sa circunference).78 The letter A represents for Tory not just the beginning of the alphabet but beginning as such. It is an ontological and a theological figure of origin. As Tory explains in Book III: “A is called Alpha in Greek, and is often, both in holy Scripture and in the works of Poets, used for the beginning. In the twenty-­first and penultimate chapter of Apocalypse there is ‘Ego sum Alpha & ω.’ Which is to say in Latin ‘Ego sum initium & finis.’ And in French ‘Je suis le premier et le dernier [I am the first and the last].’ ” (A. est appelle en Grec Alpha, & est souvantesfois, tant en la saincte Escripture, que es Poetes, mis pour commancemant.

Figure 21. “Du traict traverceant en le A. accorde au me[m]bre genital de Lho[m]me” (Of transversal line in the A in agreement with the genital member of Man). Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 18v. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Figure 22. “Le A, a lenvers. Pour Imprimeurs Orfevres, & Graveurs” (A reversed. For Printers, Metalworkers, and Engravers). Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), 34r. South East (RB) RHT 16th-98. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

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Il ya au .XXI. & penultime Chapistre de l’Apocalipse. Ego sum Alpha & ω. C’est a dire en Latin. Ego sum initium & finis. Et en Francois. Je suis le commancemant & la fin.)79 The letter will appear insistently in Tory’s treatise as a figure of “entry” and “beginning” into the domain of letters. Oversized and over-­determined woodblock A’s open the first sentences of Books II and III of Champ fleury; both openings comment precisely on A as the beginning of an education in letters: “Before I begin to teach our first letter A . . .” (Avant que je commence a enseigner notre premiere lettre A); “At the beginning of the little Book that good Fathers give their little children to begin to go to school . . . there is usually a Cross and three A’s” (Au commancemant du petit Livre que les bons Peres baillent a leurs petits enfans pour commancer a aller a l’escole).80 A is a figure of childhood, pedagogy, and cultural transmission. It inaugurates the passage from the state of being enfans (from the Latin infans, “nonspeaking”) into school, literacy, and the realm of letters. If alphabetization appears here as a gift from “fathers” to “their little children,” A would also mark a passage from the maternal breast—language as orality, corporeality, femininity—to the paternal book. What we witness in Tory’s A is a major historic shift: the scene of vernacular instruction moving from the mouth to the page. As Tory inaugurates his project to invent the French language—insisting that “all things had a beginning”—the letter A marks not only a historical opening but also a site of historical transmission. Just as A is passed from fathers to children in books, the letter itself has passed from Greek through Latin into French. To invent French means to begin again: to become “little,” to return to the alphabet, to start back at A. It is no coincidence that Tory’s typographical project launches the vernacular pedagogical movement. The effort to teach French to the French entails an imagined, collective return to “infancy.” A will thus constitute a unique point of entry into the realm of logos as a technical, rational, human, and sovereign space. As the first letter en l’ordre abecedaire, it is the signifier of “order” itself—an order that is opened and guaranteed by the alphabet. A grants access to the alphabetic principles of linearity, “good order,” sequentiality, the chain of signification. A is a threshold from the world into alphabetic mediation. Concealed in the very graphic form of A, Tory finds a man “crossing over” into the alphabet: “A has its legs lengthened and spread, like a man has his feet and legs while walking and crossing over, to signify to us secretly that from him, who is the first in alphabetic order, one must proceed to B, to C, and to all the other letters according to their disposition and order.” (A. a les jambes elargies et epattees, comme ung homme a ses pieds & jambes en marchant & passant oultre: pour nous signifier segretement que de luy qui est le

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premier en lordre abecedaire, fault proceder au B. au C. & a toutes les aultres lettres selon leur disposition & ordre.)81 A is the human standing up and walking forward, the bipedal hominid whose hands are liberated to grasp tools, to write, to arrange the letters of the alphabet in a composing stick according to their proper “disposition and order.” A would be the monogram of the human in the age of typography. In a striking allegorical figure from Book II, Tory’s nude male body is inscribed inside the square grid and covered with the capital A. The bar of the A crosses the male genitals in a gesture of “modesty” that recalls not only Genesis but also an originary techno-­cultural moment in which media come to supplement the human body. The “transversal line” of the A, Tory writes, “covers precisely the genital member of man to signify that Modesty and Chastity before all else are required of those who request access and entry into good letters, of which A is the entry point [lentree] and the first in all the abecedaria” (Celluy travercant traict couvre precisement le membre genital de lhomme, pour denoter que Pudicite & Chastete avant toutes choses, sont requises en ceulx qui demandent acces & entree aux bonnes lettres, desquelles le A, est lentree & la premiere de toutes les abcedaires).82 Those who seek entry into good letters cannot pass through the gateway of A in their natural state but must undergo a second technological birth, which is also a symbolic (and graphic) castration. As we pass through A, we are put under the knife. We soon discover that the tools of this techno-­castration are those of the typographer himself. The fact that the ruler and compass combined form the figure of an A demonstrates for Tory another “secret doctrine” of the Ancients: our ancestors designed their first letter using the shape of these tools not only because a ruler and compass are required to form letters properly but especially because the ruler and compass are the “most noble and sovereign” of manual instruments, under whose domain all other “well ordered” and “reasonable” things fall.83 The realm reveals itself to be governed by instruments and ruled by the technological hand. The French subject in the age of print must situate himself (and this subject would seem both de facto and in principle to be a him) within this “sovereign” realm. I pass through A in order to submit myself to this new order; I pass through A in order to be subjected to this new rule. This is how I find myself, as “French” and as “human”: in proportion to letters. I have only one language, but it is not my own. As a unique entry into both human culture and French culture, Tory’s A would be a testament to the “alphabetic monopoly,” which, according to Friedrich Kittler, characterized European media before the nineteenth century. Until the invention of the gramophone and cinematograph, which allow chaotic

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temporal flows of acoustic and optical data to be recorded and reproduced, all data had to “flow .  .  . through the bottleneck of the signifier.”84 Under this “grammatology,” time and sensory data are transposed and ordered according to the alphabetic chain. Media, Kittler reminds us, “define what is.” What is only is insofar as it passes through Tory’s A. Alphabetism is totality, theological and sovereign, alpha and omega: “I am the first and the last.” If this alphabetic monopoly predates movable type, it will be radicalized by the development and spread of printing—most especially and most radically, I want to suggest, by the technologization of vernacular language. By the time Michel de Montaigne announces in 1580 that “I am myself the matter of my book” in his groundbreaking record of experience in the Essais, it is clear that whatever “I” am (or whatever the I is) must now—symbolically, metaphysically—pass into type in order to constitute itself. We may also see this monopoly as part of a techno-­ political mediation of subjectivity and experience, of life itself, which coincides with a major centralization of power during the first half of the sixteenth century. The gold chain of the Gallic Hercules, which begins in the mouth of the sovereign and extends to the ears of the people, would depict precisely a coincidence of the alphabet with the apparatus of monarchic sovereignty: they are one and the same “chain,” fashioned out of metal. Just as all mediation passes through A, all language passes through the mouth of the sovereign. Francoys writes itself as the name of this linguistic and technological monopoly.

* * * The pedagogical experience—passing through A—is thus imagined typographically. As we have begun to see, many of the earliest vernacular pedagogues are also humanist printers, the same printers fashioning and regulating the production of new characters and diacritics: Geoffroy Tory, Robert Estienne, Étienne Dolet. It is not surprising, then, that their pedagogical fashioning of the French tongue—molding, hardening, correcting, forming the French type—would borrow from and mobilize the technological universe of typographical production. Like Tory’s “new,” “little,” just “beginning” French language, the new French student of the first generation of grammars and other pedagogical treatises is likewise treated as unformed or uncultivated: childlike, natural, even animal. French vernacular speakers, like their language, are cast by the pedagogue in a state of historical infancy: they are just learning to speak their “own” language, foreigners in their own tongue. In this emergent discourse, language and speaker are both infans: that Latin word for child that also means

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nonspeaking, inarticulate. What the humanist printer-­pedagogue offers is a way to properly “human” speech through his new technologies of the tongue. A brief digression is in order, then, on the fashioning of metal type. In the sixteenth century, type founding involved pouring molten type metal (an alloy of lead, antimony, and tin) into a matrix held in place by a hand mold. Once the metal had cooled and solidified, the type founder (or type caster) would unlock the mold and remove the sort (i.e., the individual metal character). He would then be ready to cast the next piece of type. It is this repeated process of heating, pouring, cooling, and hardening that produces the letters of the letterpress. A well-­known image from the 1568 book of trades by the Swiss artist Jost Amman shows the type founder mid-­pour; at his feet are a basket of sorts, ready to be delivered to the printer. The type founder’s trade emerges historically alongside the grammatical and pedagogical French tongue. Before 1500, type casting and founding were essentially an in-­house operation. During the first half of the sixteenth century, typefaces generally remained proprietary, that is, owned and used by a single master printer (even if the printer was not himself the punchcutter); by the end of the sixteenth century, commercial type foundry would become the norm. In August 1539, in the same edict that regulates the printing trade and just days after the more famous Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts codifies French as a legal idiom, François I recognizes for the first time fondeurs des lettres as a trade related to but distinct from that of printers. This recognition arrives amid a revolution in typographical culture and commerce. Claude Garamond in Paris and Robert Granjon in Lyon were establishing their own foundries where they produced punches, matrices, and strikes to order for printers. More broadly, there was a surge in the number of working punchcutters and in the production of type. Between 1519 and 1559, more than 250 new typefaces were designed and used in France.85 This proliferation corresponds, unsurprisingly, to a marked increase in the number of books produced in France. It also corresponds, as we saw in Chapter 4, to the aesthetic revolution in typography—the so-­called Aldine revolution—and a period of collective experimentation with vernacular orthography. The human, as Marsilio Ficino affirms in his influential Platonic Theology (1482), is unique among creatures in his technological fashioning of the material world “into many forms and figures,” employing “the elements, stones, metals, plants and animals, . . . as though he were lord of them all.” The Renaissance human imagined by Ficino is a sovereign who “uses all the world’s materials and uses them everywhere as though they were all subject to him.” The promise first articulated by Tory in Champ fleury is that the vernacular—that language

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bound to the organic movements of the tongue and the mortality of a people— can be molded through this sovereign technē. The French language, like the vernacular student-­speaker, appears during this moment as raw material in need of formation: a soft tongue to be shaped and hardened. The printer’s shop is, in this respect, a scene of the human dominion over language—and over other humans. What accompanies this subjection of the vernacular to technē is, as we have seen, a social and political will to order. In this context, typography is a practice not only for the material and technological fashioning of the French language but also for the fashioning of a proto-­national French-­speaking and French-­writing subject. Across texts of this period—those of Tory, Dolet, Estienne, Du Bellay, and others—can be found representations of the collective French tongue as young, wild, and raw. These texts share a didactic aim: they are manuals teaching would-­be vernacular technicians how to cultivate (regulate, order, reduce into art, etc.) the tongue, their own tongue. Educating the vernacular reader and cultivating the vernacular language function as one and the same mechanism in this emergent cultural machinery. Through a strange prosthetic metonymy, the collective langue is instantiated in the tongue of each would-­be producer of the French language—and on the page of every printed book. The printer who manufactures the French language is also—at the same time and in the same stroke—an educator, a former, and a reformer of tongues. The printer would also therefore be a technician of identity: the one who brings speech into alignment with writing, the one who brings the French subject into proper alignment with his or her “own” language. Perhaps no printer was a more prolific educator than the Parisian humanist Robert Estienne, who was born into an illustrious Parisian printing family. His father, Henri Estienne the Elder (1470–1520) printed important humanist works—mostly in Latin, but some in French, like the Geometrie of Charles de Bovelles—and was among the first printers to include errata sheets at the end of his books.86 Three of Robert Estienne’s sons (Henri, Robert, and François) would also become printers. Robert Estienne, named Imprimeur du Roy by François I in 1539, was an innovator in typography and accents. As we saw in the last chapter, Estienne was the first printer to use accents in French (1530) and issued the first French grammar written by a French author, Jacques Dubois’s In linguam gallicam isagōge (1531).87 Estienne was himself the author of an impressive number of vernacular pedagogical manuals and tools, often issued from his own press: manuals for translating Latin verbs and nouns into French (La maniere de tourner en langue francoise les verbes actifz, passifz, gerondifz, supines

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et participes, 1526; La maniere de tourner toutes especes de noms latin en nostre langue francoyse, 1537); the first major vernacular dictionary (the Dictionnaire francoislatin, 1539, which built on the Dictionarium Latinogallicum of 1538); a book of verb conjugations (Conjugations latines et francoyses de verbes, 1540; De gallica verborum declinatione, 1540); a book on the “agreement” of French with Latin (L’accord de la langue françoise avec la latine, 1540); a book of noun and verb declensions (Les declinaisons des noms et des verbes, 1543); a French-­Latin dictionary designed especially for children (Les mots francois selon lordre des lettres, ainsi que les fault escrire: Tournez en latin, pour les enfans, 1544; reissued in 1557 as the Petit dictionnaire des mots francois); a bilingual dialogue on grammar (Rudiménta Latinogallica, cum accéntibus, 1553); and one of the earliest French grammars written in the vernacular (Traicté de la grammaire Francoise, 1557). Most of these works appeared in multiple editions; some, like La maniere de tourner en langue francoise les verbes, were reprinted dozens of times during the sixteenth century. As these titles make clear, the pedagogical technologization of French begins in Latin around 1530, passes through practices of translation to and from Latin, and ultimately takes on a semi-­autonomous status around 1550. Like typography and in conjunction with it, Latin acts as a technical support and framework for technologizing the vernacular. It is in Robert Estienne’s work that we can see most clearly how the technological and typographical fashioning of French is conceived and executed as a pedagogical project. In his famous dictionary, Estienne affirms in a short preface to the reader that creating the volume was dictated by his role as a printer: “Because the profession of our art enjoins us always to do something that might be useful in general to all those who have understanding in the realm of letters.” (Pour ce que la profession de nostr’art nous enhorte a faire tousiours quelque chose qui soit utile en general a tous ceulx qui entendent au faict des lettres.)88 The first edition of the Dictionnaire francoislatin addresses the “French youth, who are in their beginning of literature” (la ieunesse Francoise, qui est sur son commencement . . . de literature).89 At the same time, he insists that his dictionary itself can still be improved, and he hopes the reader can excuse him for any mistakes or omissions “thinking that this is only the plan or, in a manner of speaking, the childhood [enfance] of books of this kind, which are just beginning to speak” (pensant que c’est n’est que le pourtraict & par maniere de dire l’enfance desdictz liures qui commencent tout premierement aparler [sic]).90 Searching inside Estienne’s dictionary for the word enfance, one finds the expression apprendre a parler a ung enfant (“to teach a child to speak”),

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which Estienne translates into Latin as figurare os pueri, literally to “fashion” or “form” the mouth of a child.91 In his address to the student reader, the printer-­ lexicographer expresses a strikingly metallurgical or even typographical vision for such a process of formation, as Estienne expresses the hope that his dictionaries “will found in the future a richer language, of better alloy and better stamp than at present” (feront fond le temps advenir de plus riche langaige, mieulx aloye, & de meilleur coing qu’ilz n’ont a present).92 The French language that will be instrumentalized in the dictionary first has to be metallically enriched, but also—like standardized pieces of metal type—struck into the correct shape or “stamp” before it can form the mouths of the French youth. Fittingly, Estienne’s dictionary uses the wealth of letters at the printer’s disposal. An array of Roman and italic type of varying sizes are deployed to pedagogical and instrumental ends: to organize the space of the page, to order words, to distinguish visually between languages. To contain a language in a single book, in alphabetical order: this is the ambition of the first major French dictionary. The bilingual Dictionnaire francoislatin contenant les motz et manières de parler francois, tournez en latin was published by Robert Estienne in 1539, the same year the Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts codified the langage maternel francoys and the same year Estienne was appointed royal printer for Hebrew and Latin (Imprimeur & libraire ès lettres Hebraiques et Latines) by François. Prior to publishing his Dictionnaire, Estienne issued a Latin dictionary with French translations, the Dictionarium seu Linguae latinae thesaurus (1531), inspired by the 1502 Dictionarium latinum of Ambrogio Calepino (Calepinus). Although the word dictionarius dates to the thirteenth century, and although vocabularies and wordbooks were not uncommon during the medieval period, with alphabetical order appearing in the fourteenth century, the modern dictionary—as a general and comprehensive register of all the words in a language—does not exist before printing.93 The Latin word dictionarium first appears in 1481, formed from the noun dictio, “word” or “saying,” and -­arium, the suffix added to nouns to denote “a place where that thing is kept.” The dictionarium is a place where words and speech are kept: where language is stocked, held in reserve—as it is in the print shop. The word dictionnaire first appears in French shortly after the turn of the sixteenth century. When an updated definition of Estienne’s Dictionnaire appeared in 1549, its long title itself operated as a definition, clarifying the meaning of this new French word right on the title page: Dictionnaire francoislatin, autrement dit les Mots français avec les manières d’user d’ iceux, tournés en latin. When, much

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later, the Académie française defines it in its landmark monolingual dictionary of 1694, the dictionnaire is described as a “Vocabulary, a collection in order of all the words in a language” (Vocabulaire, recueil par ordre de tous les mots d’ une langue). Estienne’s dictionary is the first book to claim to “contain” all the words in the French language, ordering them alphabetically and inviting the reader to “use” them. The whole of language—the body of the tongue—becomes a printed book: usable and browsable, instrumentalized and totalized, externalized and linearized, ordered and enframed.

The Artificial Heart of France The appearance of French vernacular grammar suggests a major reconfigu­ ration of the French-­speaking and French-­writing subject’s relationship to language as an object of possession, knowledge, authority, and desire—a reconfiguration in which the grammar itself acts as a pivotal technology. One major performance of vernacular grammar is the formation of a singular discursive entity—la langue—whose dimensions, as metalinguistic, are also socio-­ topographic, epistemological, and even ontological as much as they are “purely” linguistic. An object of textual knowledge, the language (langue) of grammatical discourse has an “inside” and an “outside,” the boundaries of which are arbitrated and metonymically abstracted from a more diverse field of language (langage); this inside is in turn regulated in the grammar by “rules” and “order.” Grammatical discourse produces a language in or within which writers may situate and thereby identify themselves—the desire for an “inside” of the French language as (national) domesticity, territoriality, identity. And yet the grammar itself—that technology of identity called for by Tory—belongs both “inside” and “outside” its own language object. As metalanguage, it already constitutes a kind of translation of the singular language object it creates, and thus a transgression of its boundaries from “within.” Despite an “impossibility of an absolute metalanguage,” as Derrida suggests in Monolingualism of the Other, there are effects of meta-­language, “effects or relative phenomena, . . . relays of metalanguage ‘within’ a language” that “already introduce into it some translation and some objectification in progress.”94 Acting as description, relay, and re-­ presentation, the grammatical text treating its “own” language must define the language-­object by placing itself—both rhetorically and logically—“outside” the language “in” which it is written. In order for there to be one language, there

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must already be more than one, even if the languages are, necessarily, the “same.” “On the horizon, visible and miraculous, spectral but infinitely desirable, they allow the mirage of another language to tremble.”95 The language itself is thus always elsewhere, an imagined whole to which the grammatical part can only ever refer: a “pure” object it dreams it is but which it does not or cannot touch. While the grammar is a textual construction or artifice (Meigret will write of his grammatical “construction” (bastiment), Ramus of grammatization as language’s “mise en art”), the langue in whose name it speaks is abstracted or even imagined, what we might now term a virtual or spectral object created through an effect of referentiality. In the case of Meigret’s seminal Grammere, this relationship is evident in his metaphorization of the grammar as architectural project, while the language itself remains imagined as inaccessible and even immaterial, representable as a totality only to the extent that “all the stars in the sky” (toutes les etoelles du ciel) can be counted. If the text of the grammar is a Tower of Babel, language itself remains somewhere above and beyond it—desired, forbidden. This language seems to possess in itself an order and “law” of its own; what we are able to possess in grammars is a set of rules, a “reduction” onto a different plane, a translation. We are technicians, assembling the lettered “parts” of the tongue. John Palsgrave’s L’esclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530) offers an opening perspective on this metalinguistic movement. Writing in English for a non-­French audience, Palsgrave offers a definition (in English) of the object of his text, what he refers to in his work’s title (in French) as la langue francoyse: “in all this worke I moost folowe the Parisyens and the countreys that be conteygned betwene the ryver of Seyne and the ryver of Loyrre, which the Romayns called somtyme Gallya Celtica: for within that space is contayned the herte of Fraunce, where the tonge is at this day moost parfyte, and hath of moost auncyente so contynued. So that I thynke it but superfluous and unto the lernar but a nedelesse confusyon to shewe the dyversite of pronuncyacion of the other frontier countrys.”96 Palsgrave justifies his choice by noting that in Paris and in the area between the Seine and Loire rivers, which he calls “the herte of Fraunce,” “the tonge is at this day moost parfyte.” As we have seen with Tory, linguistic “perfection” implies a perspectival distance or difference (historical, national, geographic, linguistic, textual) that allows language to be perceived as an object that is complete, analyzable, and commodifiable. In Palsgrave’s text, we can better see how this perfection is related to the objectification of language, which makes the grammatical text a technology of linguistic appropriation.

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Defining a circumscribed and “parfyte” French enables Palsgrave to deliver the much-­desired “parfit knowledge of the frenche tong” to his countrymen with his book. In order to achieve this objectification, the grammarian—in this case, also a foreigner—takes up the metalinguistic position of surveyor, selecting the proper region of the language’s essence (its “herte”). Simultaneously, his text enters into a mimetic relationship with this region, such that the grammar itself seeks to represent “that space . . . where the tonge is at this day moost parfyte,” and thus passes along “parfit knowledge.” The creative or performative role of even the most apparently descriptive grammars, as suggested by Sylvain Auroux, also comes to the fore here: the grammar brings into being as object that which it seems to describe, namely that reification known in French as “la langue.” It is significant, then, that Palsgrave assures his learners of French as a foreign language that they need not concern themselves with the “dyversite of pronuncyacion” in the margins of France (“frontier countrys”); to include them would be, he affirms, “but a nedelesse confusyon.” Not other tongues in their own right, they are nonessential variations of la langue francoyse and would therefore confuse its textual identity. Anticipating the operation of Villers-­Cotterêts nine years later, Palsgrave cuts to the quick, excising “diversite” with a grammatological decision that allows one part of the French “tongue” to represent the language as a whole: a clean-­cut definition by metonymy exacted by the grammarian’s “worke.” The legitimating seal on this metonymic operation—what demonstrates for Palsgrave that his definition does not constitute an improper removal of the “herte” from the body proper—is that throughout France, this language is already chosen and recognized as a language of writing: “So that I thynke it but superfluous and unto the lernar but a nedelesse confusyon to shewe the dyversite of pronuncyacion of the other frontier countrys seyng that . . . there is no man of what parte of Fraunce so ever he be borne, if he desyre that his writynges shulde be had in any estymacion, but he writeth in suche language as they speke within the boundes that I have before rehersed.”97 In writing, the “parfyte frenche” has already extended itself, traveling beyond its own frontiers within France and, now, to England—disseminating itself in the name of all of France and claiming exclusive written rights to it. Writing already superimposes itself above the geographical differences that affect speech, and the cartographer-­ grammarian merely observes and re-­presents this hegemony of the text. Part of what Daniel Baggioni has termed the “ecolinguistic revolution” in the European linguistic landscape around 1500, the territory of the page in this way

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constitutes veritably a new set of “boundes” for where language may be considered proper, native, or at home with itself.98 Although this “tonge” originated in and belongs to a single region, “the herte of Fraunce,” as a language-­of-­writing this “true Frenche” is recognized and desired throughout France. Palsgrave would have represented the other forms of French, he assures his reader, “if there were dyversite in writyng amongest them of the french tonge lyke as there were somtyme among the Grekes dialecta, so that every man wrote in his owne tonge, lyke as the grekes somtyme dyd.”99 Any French writer already writes in the king’s language, and not “in his owne tonge.” Grammars, as Auroux suggests in his definition of “grammatization,” “are not .  .  . simple representations of languages that supposedly preexist them. They are, rather, external tools that modify spaces of communication and exercise an influence on languages.”100 What emerges from Palsgrave’s definition-­by-­metonymy is that this reconfiguration of language’s proper place, first determined by practices of writing, is both codified and made appropriable by the grammatical text—in print. Even if le langage francois is already written across France, it needs the technological effect of metalanguage to institute itself. Robert Estienne’s 1557 Traicté de la grammaire Francoise demonstrates how a “purity” of the French language is produced as a technological effect of the printer-­grammarian’s apparatus. In the opening lines of his grammar, Estienne justifies the necessity of his work by demonstrating the insufficiency of the two vernacular grammars by French writers that preceded it, those of Meigret and Dubois (the latter of which Estienne himself collaborated on and issued from his press in 1530), by presenting it as a demand from his readership for a book they could use: Many desiring to have detailed knowledge of our French language complained to us that they could not easily use [literally: help themselves with] the French Grammar of Master Louis Meigret (because of the great changes they saw there, quite different from what they had already learned, notably with respect to correct writing) nor the Introduction to the French Language composed by the doctor Jacques Sylvius [Jacques Dubois] (because he had often mixed in words of Picardy, where he was from). Having diligently read the two aforementioned authors . . . we have made a collection, primarily of what we saw to be in accordance with what we had learned in the past from the most learned people in our language, who frequented for their entire lives the Courts of France, both the King’s Court and his

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Parliament in Paris, as well as his Chancellery and Court of Accounts, places where the language is written and spoken with greater purity than any other. (Plusieurs desirans avoir ample cognaissance de nostre langue Francoise, se sont plains à nous de ce qu’ils ne pouoyent aiseement saider de la Grammaire francoise de Maistre Lois Maigret (à cause des grans changemens qu’ils y voyoyent, fort contraires à ce qu’ils en avoyent ja apprins, principalement quant à la droicte escripture) ne de l’Introduction à la langue francoise composée par M. Jacques Sylvius medecin (pourtant que souvent il a meslé des mots de Picardie dont il estoit). Nous ayans diligemment leu les deux susdicts autheurs . . . avons faict ung recueil, principalement de ce que nous avons veu accorder à ce que nous avions le temps passé apprins des plus scavans en nostre langue, qui avoyent tout le temps de leur vie hanté es Cours de France, tant du Roy que de son Parlement à Paris, aussi sa Chancellerie et Chambre des comptes: esquels lieux le langage sescrit et se prononce en plus grande pureté qu’en tous autres.)101 For Estienne, like Palsgrave, defining French as a textual object of grammar entails a determination of those sites (lieux) where the “greatest purity” of the language can be found (like Palsgrave’s “herte of Fraunce”). Robert Estienne and his son, the younger Henri Estienne, are recognized as early promoters of the notion of French-­language “purity,” which will become central to the French-­language ideology developed in the seventeenth century and later. Metalinguistic definition appears here as the opening movement of the grammatical text. Knowing “nostre langue Francoise” means knowing a certain French language, one that must be properly circumscribed before being apparently dismembered and described—and thereby instrumentalized—in the body of the grammar. Estienne’s text quarantines its object from the other texts it rejects (Meigret’s for its orthography, Dubois’s for its Picard words) and, like Palsgrave’s grammar, presents its own pages as a “pure” space. This production of an object qua reproduction of “purity” becomes the precondition of a linguistic relationship of knowing and having, of the grammar’s mediation; only by aiming straight for the heart of French does the printer-­ grammarian offer satisfaction to those who want to possess the language. Yet any such purity is not only an artificial construction, it also relies on the printer’s tools and reproductive technology. What Estienne offers his readers

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is a mechanically reproducible purity, a print native language carved out on the pages of his books.

The Grammatical Uncanny Grammatization thus brings out the uncanny in the vernacular, establishing it as a familiar and native “mother” tongue that is also, at the same time, technological, foreign, and acquired. We find the vernacular grammarian presenting himself as a “translator” between the reader and the grammatical tongue his text produces. Indeed, as Sylvain Auroux has observed, grammatical discourse does not just “describe” or “prescribe” a preexisting language, it “creates” a new linguistic object: la langue.102 Robert Estienne’s Traicté de la grammaire Francoise reveals this translative tension in the grammarian’s stance: the grammarian is an insider with privileged knowledge of the “pure” form of French and, at the same time, a surveying outsider. Offering his readers the French language as a purified object of their knowledge and desire, Estienne presents himself as that paradoxical translator who, instead of making the foreign familiar for readers, delivers the familiar back to readers by passing through the foreign. The printer-­g rammarian “treats” French and puts it “in order” using the double technique of print and Latin grammar as a metalinguistic structuring apparatus. The French language comes home to its speakers and writers in a kind of aller-­retour of translation and technologization: a circular movement that promises ipseity and self-­mastery for the vernacular writer. At the same time, Estienne offers his grammar as part of a pedagogical machinery along with his two French-­Latin dictionaries: the grammar adds itself to the set of tools for those who “use” or “assist themselves” with books when translating from one language to another. Translation and instrumentalization go hand in hand in the printer’s assemblage: “And we have put everything in order and treated it in the manner of Latin Grammars as clearly and easily as we were able, which may serve primarily those who use our Latin-­French and French-­Latin Dictionaries and undertake to translate from Latin into French.” (Et le tout auons mis par ordre, et traicte a la maniere des Grammaires latines, le plus clerement et facilement qu’auons peu: Laquelle chose pourra beaucoup servir principalement a ceulx qui saident de nos Dictionaires Latinfrançois, et Francoislatin, et sentremettent de traduire de Latin en Francois.)103 As native immediacy is transformed into

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metalinguistic knowledge, the outside of technē (Latin, grammar, printing) is invited into French. The way the two languages (ancient/modern, foreign/ native, etc.) touch each other in the grafted titles of Estienne’s dictionaries— Latinfrancois, Francoislatin—would be symptomatic of this uncanny operation. The promise of grammatical discourse, especially in Estienne’s articulation, is thus a new technical encounter with a same old familiar or familial possession, nostre langue Francoise. The grammarian’s task is to render this tongue more possessable and better known by treating it like an other. Like the ancient languages whose learning was actively promoted and institutionalized during the 1520s through the 1540s, la langue françoise could, thanks to texts like Estienne’s, be learned by those who “already” knew it—formally acquired and technically mastered just as readers had become accustomed to doing with foreign languages. At the same time, the grammar functions as part of a growing machinery of vernacular pedagogy, a set of instruments produced by the printer-­ educator on the model of his own machinery. Before grammarians take up the vernacular language as an object of scientific knowledge (as in the grammars of Port Royal and later), they first make it a pedagogical one—a cultural commodity able to be utilized and regulated by social institutions in a certain relation of knowledge and power. Ramus, whom we encountered at the outset of this chapter, was an innovative and influential figure in European pedagogy. He published more than fifty scholarly works in both Latin and French over his lifetime, most of them of a pedagogical nature. Although Ramus himself was a controversial figure, largely for his Reformist views, his work enjoyed an immense popularity throughout Europe during his lifetime. Walter Ong argues in his authoritative work on Ramus that much of the popularity of the Ramist method—whose style of analysis employed diagrams and emphasized pedagogical ease over intellectual complexity—was its appeal to an emerging epistemology, namely the objectification of knowledge into visual and spatial terms on the printed page.104 Ramus’s classroom texts were meant to be used by students; as James Veazie Skalnik suggests, they were “practical manuals and handbooks, not theoretical treatises . . . . They were intended to produce capable men rather than scholarly ones.”105 Between 1559 and 1562, Ramus composed a series of grammars of Latin, Greek, and French: Grammaticae libri quatuor (1559), Rudimenta grammaticae latinae (1559), Scholae grammaticae (1559), Grammatica graeca (1560), Rudimenta grammaticae graecae (1560), and Gramere (1562). These grammars were a foundational component of the large-­scale plan for university reform for which Ramus had

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been commissioned by Henri II and which he presented to Charles IX upon completion of his French text in 1562. In the first edition of his Gramere, Ramus praises the first generation of French grammarians—Jacques Dubois, Robert Estienne, Étienne Dolet, Louis Meigret—for each having endeavored to “give us that thing for which we valorize the Greek and Latin languages, namely, the law of speaking well” (nou’ doner sę pourcoe nou’ maŋifion’ la langę grecę e latinę, s’et a dire la loe dę bien parler).106 Grammar gives language its “law.” In the 1572 edition, presented to Catherine de Medici, Ramus offers a vision of this law-­giving grammatica that is no longer opposed to the maternal vernacular (as it was with Dante), but who is, indeed, a mother in her own right, a sovereign mother: “For Grammar is not only the first among the liberal arts, but she is the nurse mother of all of them, who nurses them as in the cradle and teaches them to speak and say what they know, and without her they would be mute and useless.” (Car la Grammaire est non seulement la premiere entre les ars liberaulx, mais elle est la mere nourrice de tous, qui les nourrit comme au berceau et leur appre[n]d a parler et declairer ce quils scauent: et sans elle seroyent muets et inutiles.)107 This mother is also a maistresse descolle, the teacher who makes other arts speak French but also speaks sovereignly of herself and her own technē, setting her own “characters” and rules of writing: “Grammar teaches the others to speak well, and she is such a good schoolmistress that she herself speaks of her virtues and praises, and gives you full account of herself, and especially of her characters, her way of writing, that she teaches her her companions [i.e., the other liberal arts] to speak French” (La Grammaire apprend aulx aultres à bien parler: parquoy si elle est bonne maistresse descolle, qu’elle mesme parle de ses vertus et louanges, et vous rende raison de tout son faict, et surtout de ses characteres, de sa facon descripre: quelle aprenne a parler Francoys a ses compaignes.”108 It is in this capacity that grammar is within the rights and responsibilities of princes, part of the legislative apparatus of the state. Addressing Catherine de Medici, Ramus recalls the Roman examples of Varro and Caesar, who not only were “great lords” (fort grans seigneurs) but also “deemed it a great honor to write the Grammar of their language, and judged it of no little worth to give men laws of speaking well” (ont estimé à gran honneur descripre la Grammaire de leur langue: et ont jugé que ce nestoit petit los de vertu de donner aux hommes loix de bien parler ).109 Ramus here makes explicit the political allegory of Tory’s Gallic Hercules: the grammatization of the mother tongue subjects the French speaker to a new sovereign law. The apparatus of printing links up with a state apparatus to form a regulative body of language.

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For Ramus, the very process of rule formation—which he, like Tory and Dolet, frames as a conversion of the vernacular into “art”—is linked to the transformation of French into a foreign language—that is, a language that can be acquired “artificially.” Unlike Robert Estienne, who pictured French readers drawing on his grammar as an aid for translation, Ramus envisions his work as a foreign-­language textbook that allows French to be learned textually like Greek and Latin. The grammar puts French “before the eyes” (devant les yeulx), thereby “invit[ing] foreigners to learn it as carefully [curieusement] as we learn Greek and Latin in our schools (qui invite les estrangers à lapprendre aussi curieusement que nous apprenons en nos escolles le Grec et Latin). Through the technology of the grammar, French can make itself understood in “neighboring nations”: it travels to Italy, Spain, and Germany, nations that likewise “are undertaking to put their language into art” (sestudient à mettre en art leur langue). The pedagogical instrumentalization of language through grammar thus comes as estrangement: a visualization and spatialization, but also the transformation of the mother tongue “into art.” This estrangement will also take place on the level of the letter. Ramus’s grammar in fact explicitly requires the French reader—however adult and literate, however French—to become a “student” of the language that is already his or her own. In 1562, Ramus published the first edition of his grammar (spelled Gramere) using a phonetic spelling system modeled on that of Louis Meigret and Jacques Peletier, hoping to “institute a one-­to-­one correspondence between print and sound.”110 After this first edition met with little success, Ramus issued the second edition of 1572 (now spelled Grammaire) that starts out using traditional French spelling before eventually dividing, on page 57, into two columns: one with traditional spelling, and the other in the orthography he has “invented” (inventee) using a series of new characters specific to French and inspired by (but distinct from) the systems of Meigret and Peletier (Figure 23). Each column contains the same dialogue of grammatical instruction between “student” and “teacher,” replicating in print the pedagogical scene of oral transmission. The traditional spelling on the left acts as a crib sheet for deciphering the new characters on the right. Ramus designates the two columns respectively as la facon vulgaire (the common way) and lescripture Grammarienne (the Grammarian’s writing), the “vulgaire” printed in Roman type and the “Grammarienne” in italic. The project of grammatization literally splits the page—and the language—in two, “translating” French into French (“as you see printers ordinarily do in translated books by putting the original across from its translation,” Ramus explains).

Figure 23. The Ramist two-columned grammar. Petrus Ramus, Grammaire de Pierre de la Ramee (Paris: André Wechel, 1572), 57. 005897928. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Ramus, the ur-­pedagogue of print, recognizes that readers will have to study this new way of writing, but he estimates it will only be “one day, or even one hour”—the same amount of time, he claims, that it took provincial legislators to learn French after François issued the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts in 1539 and “commanded over all of France to speak in court in the French language” (quand il commanda par toute la France de plaider en langue Francoise).111 Ramus relates that deputies were sent from Provence to complain to François about the great inconvenience caused by this law; when they arrived, François made them wait and had them informed that “he took no pleasure in hearing any language spoken other than his own” (quil ne prenoit point plaisir douir parler en aultre langue quen la sienne), compelling them to “carefully learn French” (daprendre songneusement le Francois) before they could speak their complaint. When the deputies obeyed and learned to speak to him in French, François informed them that they had just demonstrated how easy it was for them to learn French and comply with the law.112 “It was a mockery of these orators who had come to combat the French language, and nevertheless through this combat had learned it, and consequently had shown that since it was so easy for people of a certain age, as they were, that it would be even easier for young people.” (Lors ce fut vne risee de ces orateurs ui estoient venus pour combatre la langue Francoyse, & neantmoins par ce combat lauoient aprise, & par effect auoient monstre que puis quelle estoit si aysee aux personnes daage, comme ils estoient, quelle seroit encores plus facile aux ieunes gens.)113 This political allegory turns the grammarian into a king and his reader into the butt of the sovereign joke: “Similarly . . . the study of this orthography will not be as long as those of the orators from Provence” (Semblablement . . . lestude de ceste orthographe ne seroit de telle longueur, que des orateurs de Prouence).114 For Ramus, even if the French people (le peuple) have “sovereign authority over their language” (la souueraine authorite de sa langue), this same public needs to be reminded that “the people are not the master of writing, as they are of speech, but rather Grammarians and writers who have long been reputed wise . . . and who have taught them how to read and write” (le peuple nest pas maistre de lescripture, co[m]me de la parolle, ains que les Grammairiens & escriuains qui ont este au temps iadis reputes sages . . . & qui luy ont apris a lire & escripre).115 In the shadow of François, Ramus looks forward to the day when his writing system—which he places alongside different kinds of type (“Roman,” “Italic”) and handwriting (“like in letters and papiers journaux”)—will be nationalized: making French writing “easy for little children, for women, for all nations” (aisee aux petits enfans, aux femmes, a toutes nations) and providing a

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“great abbreviation” (un grand abbregement) of texts by cutting out an “infinite number of superfluous letters” (vne infinite de letres superflues).116 And, like Jacques Peletier, Ramus imagines his writing as the phonograph that will save French from ruin once the living body of French becomes a corpse: I will even dare to argue that this is a singular means of preserving and perpetuating our tongue: for if the Italians and Germans invaded Gaul again (as they once did) they could read our books written in this way, and pronounce our language, as we read and pronounce the Hebrew, Greek and Latin tongues, even though there is no longer any Hebrew, Greek, or Latin people. (Voire ioseray bie[n] maintenir, que cest icy vn singulier moyen de co[n]seruer & perpetuer nostre langue: Car si les Italiens ou Allema[n]s enuahissoient vne aultre fois la Gaulle (co[m]me ils ont faict au temps iadis) ils pourroient lire par nos liures ainsi escripts, & prono[n]cer nostre la[n]gue, comme nous lisons, & prono[n]ceons la langue Hebraicque, Grecque & Latine: combien quil ny aye plus de peuple, ny Hebreu, ny Grec, ny Latin.)117 Like Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, French will live on as the grammarian’s tongue. “In this way, through such an expedient, these languages survive their bodies, and speak clearly, making themselves heard after their peoples are completely extinct and abolished.” (Ainsi par telle efficace ces la[n]gues suruiuent a leurs corps, & parlent clairement se faisant ente[n]dre apres que ses peuples sont du tout estainct & abolis.)118 The grammatized tongue, turned inside out, is separated from its body, surviving.

Chapter 6

Prosthetic Sovereignty François I and the Ear of the People

This old Hercules pulls after him a marvelously great multitude of men and women all attached, each separately from the other, by the ear. —Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury We wish that, henceforth, all decisions and other procedures, pertaining to our sovereign courts or other lower or inferior courts, whether they be registers, inquiries, contracts, commissions, sentences, wills, or any other acts and writs of justice . . . should be pronounced, recorded, and delivered to parties in the French mother tongue, and not otherwise. —Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts (August 1539)

August 1539 “Given at Villers-­Cotterêts in the month of August, year of our lord one thousand five hundred thirty nine, and of our reign the twenty-­fifth. Francoys.” (Donné a Villers-­Coteret au moys d’aoust, lan de grace mil cinq cens trente neuf, et de notre regne le vingt cinquiesme. Francoys.)1 The month of August 1539: this date has become among the most monumental in the history of both the French language and the French state. It witnessed the signing of the law that has come to be known as the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts, the royal edict that institutes French as the official language of justice and administration in France. “In the month of August”: the law does not assign itself an exact date.

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Many scholarly sources say it was signed into law on August 10. Others, including Ferdinand Brunot in his Histoire de la langue française, assign it a date of August 15.2 We know that the law was presented to the Paris Parlement on August 19, 1539, and was subsequently registered with the parlement on September 6 of that year. The French government today dates the law on an official website to August 25, referring to it as the “Ordonnance du 25 août sur le fait de la justice (dite ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts).”3 This nearly five-­hundred-­year-­ old royal edict still appears on an official legislative website in France today because two articles—the two for which the edict is famous—are still en vigueur, or in effect: articles 110 and 111, the (in)famous passages decreeing that all acts of justice and administration in France will henceforth be “pronounced” and “recorded” en langage maternel francoys, et non autrement, that is, in the French mother tongue, and not otherwise.4 August 1539: a time-­stamp in the history of sovereignty. Derrida will observe in his reading of the edict that “one cannot stress enough the significance of this event,” which marks the establishment of the monarchy as state in France and constitutes a first “moment” in the “violent and interminable constitution of the French State.”5 The Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts marks an effort to consolidate and centralize monarchic power through language, while simultaneously codifying the cultural “rise” of the vernacular that is already underway. The law imprints the French language with a royal seal and signs it with the proper name FRANCOYS. Widely recognized as the first state language policy in Europe, Villers-­Cotterêts opens in a very real sense a modern era of national languages—even if, in 1539, we are still in a time before nation-­states, and even if, as Hélène Merlin-­Kajman has compellingly argued, the idea of a singular French language (a language, the French language) remains precisely that during this period: an idea, a “legal fiction” ( fiction juridique), or what we have previously described as a dislocated and spectral effect of printing technology.6 Indeed, the era it will open is precisely that of the “mother tongue” as a legal fiction. In this chapter, I propose to put this landmark law in dialogue with the development of printing and the pervasive technological effects we have been tracking up to this point. August 1539 is situated squarely in the middle of the transformative period under examination in this book. Issued a decade after the publication of Tory’s Champ fleury and his appointment as royal printer, Villers-­Cotterêts follows in the wake of the initial decade of efforts to “illustrate” and codify the vernacular in print: the Romanization of vernacular typography, the introduction of accents and diacritics, the publication of the first grammars, and other efforts. In the months following the dissemination of



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the law in print, Robert Estienne—who already held the post of royal printer— published his Dictionnaire francoislatin in Paris, while Étienne Dolet in Lyon published his Maniere de bien traduire with its accompanying treatises on accents and punctuation. The decade that follows Villers-­Cotterêts witnessed an intensified production of technical treatises, orthographic reforms, and “defenses” of the vernacular. In short, August 1539 arrived in the midst of the “new media” moment when the French language was actively being reshaped by printing technology and redefined as a print medium. While August 1539 is featured as a landmark date in almost any story of the “rise” of the French vernacular, it has generally not been interpreted as having any relationship with printing technology. Indeed, even though Villers-­ Cotterêts has long operated as something of a metonym for the vernacular revolution—which has in turn been understood as profoundly linked to the printing revolution—printing and Villers-­Cotterêts have rarely, if ever, been thought of together. Even historians like Lucien Febvre and Henri-­Jean Martin, who otherwise highlight the role of printing in producing a unified and standardized national idiom, mention Villers-­Cotterêts only in passing as part of a “policy of national unification” and a movement toward an “officially accepted national language.”7 Benedict Anderson goes further, taking pains to cordon off royal policy from the forces of print capitalism and mechanical reproducibility.8 Rightly pointing out that the emergence of administrative vernaculars in Europe “predated both print and the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century,” Anderson concludes from this fact that the establishment of new “languages-­of-­power” in the sixteenth century is a phenomenon essentially distinct from the emergence of new vernacular “print-­languages.” In Anderson’s view, the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts and other European language policies of the early modern period take shape as “a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development,” contributing to the crystallization of proto-­national communities only insofar as they elevate the vernaculars to the status of competitors with Latin, thereby fragmenting and challenging the old imagined community of Christendom.9 Anderson offers as an “agreeable confirmation” of the “unselfconscious” nature of this development—and its apparent extraneousness to printing—the fact that François I “banned all printing of books in 1535 and made French the language of the courts four years later!”10 In this chapter, I question the perceived separation between royal language policy and printing technology, resituating the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts within the context of a series of royal acts during the 1530s and 1540s that looked either to promote or to regulate the printing trade, including the attempted

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suppression by François I of a printers’ strike—an event often considered the first modern labor strike in France—that also took place in August 1539 and was likewise issued from Villers-­Cotterêts. Beyond this more explicit context of printing, I want to suggest that the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts participates in the generalized prosthetic movement that we have seen in the preceding chapters, including teletechnology, phonography, and grammatization. This law answers the call of printing, reinventing language teletechnologically and phonographically at the level of the state apparatus, in the name of the king. With the culminating injunction to write en langage maternel francoys, et non autrement, Articles 110 and 111 of the edict enact the promise of Tory’s Gallic Hercules within the juridical sphere: to connect the Francois tongue to every French ear. What is announced in August 1539, then, is the emergent status of printing as a technology of state sovereignty.

The Mystical Tongue of François I The state sovereignty that Villers-­Cotterêts announces would thus be prosthetic in nature, indissociable from its technological extension in print. The foundational act of this law is to attach a tongue—the language it calls, in that strange and idiomatic formulation, langage maternel francoys—to the administrative apparatus of the state and the symbolic body of the king. This attachment goes into effect—that is, it gains the force of law—when the king signs it with a name that is his “own” but also the name of the language and that of every subject of the kingdom who comes before the law: Francoys. Singular-­plural and proper-­ common, this name names a particular juncture. We need only recall Tory’s pledge to escrire en Francois comme homme francois (write in French as a French man) or his injunction to escripre en Francois, comme Francois que nous sommes (write in French, since we are Frenchmen) in order to understand how this name has already begun to operate, pre-­1539, as a hinge that articulates language, king, and proto-­national subject: the very articulation figured by the Gallic Hercules and his prosthetic chain of a tongue. As we saw in Chapter 3 with Tory, printing works to align language-­subject-­nation graphically and ontologically within the same “field.” In the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts, the operation by which French becomes a state idiom likewise takes place as the grafting or articulation of francoys with Francoys: a tongue ( francoys), a king (Francoys), and a set of French subjects spread across a kingdom (Francoys).



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What the proper name Francoys mobilizes but also naturalizes—what it enables and conceals, what it allows under the cover of homonymy—is, then, the prosthetic character of French as a state language. This prosthesis works in both directions, as it were, each Francoys a graft on the other. First, the monarchic state comes to supplement the natural tongue, guaranteeing its survival by erecting it as an administrative idiom. This function becomes even more apparent when one takes into account the major role François played, both symbolically and materially, in promoting the vernacular during the years before and after Villers-­Cotterêts. During his reign, François I was mythologized as the “Father and Restorer of Letters” (Père et Restorateur des lettres), the king who not only championed humanist learning and founded the Collège royal but also commissioned vernacular translations and subsidized vernacular writing through an active cultural program. The flourishing of the French language thus came to be attributed to him in the same breath as the restoration of ancient learning and letters. In the 1545 preface to a translation (the first in French) of Horace’s Art Poétique, for example, Jacques Peletier advocates for French writers to learn and cultivate their “domestic” (domestique) language over the “foreign” (peregrine) languages of Greek and Latin, and he praises François for his role in “valorizing our French language” (faire valoir notre langue Francoise), which “began not long ago to be ennobled” (n’a pas long temps commença à s’anoblir): “And now it takes on a very beautiful and rich growth under our very-­Christian king François, who through his royal liberality in favor of the Muses strives to make this very happy age be reborn in which, under Augustus and Maecenas in Rome, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, and other Latin poets flourished, so much so that to see the flowering where it [i.e., the French language] is at present, we must believe as a sure thing that if we continue on this path, we will see it soon in full maturity.”11 It is François who will bring notre langue Francoise to maturity, causing it to blossom with a life that, as we have seen, is thought as a form of technological reanimation; indeed, the “flowering” of French under François is confounded here with a “rebirth” of the age of Augustus. The Father of Letters François comes to act like the printing press, bringing languages back from the dead and producing uncanny flowers. In 1549, shortly after the king’s death, du Bellay writes in a similar vein that any productivity the French language possesses is owed to “our late good king and father François”: “But to whom, after God, shall we give thanks for such a benefit if not to our late good king and father François, the first of that name and first in all virtues? I say ‘first’ inasmuch as he first in his noble kingdom

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restored all the good arts and learned disciplines to their former dignity and thus made our language elegant, which was previously rude and unpolished.” (Mais à qui, apres Dieu, rendrons nous graces d’un tel benefice si non à nostre feu bon Roy et pere Françoys, premier de ce nom et de toutes vertuz? Je dy premier, d’autant qu’il a en son noble Royaume premierement restitué tous les bons ars et sciences en leur ancienne dignité: et si à nostre langaige, au paravant scabreux et mal poly, rendu elegant.)12 The monarch-­state produces for the tongue an afterlife, an excess of life—which endures beyond the natural life of the king himself. “The prosthesis protects,” writes Derrida of what he calls the “prosthstatic” (prothétatique) effect of sovereignty.13 The state amplifies the power of the living language: protecting and promoting it, cultivating it, defending and illustrating it with a “perpetual and irrevocable edict” (edict perpetuel et irrevocable). The state, an artificial and mimetic apparatus, appears as “a gigantic prosthesis designed to amplify, by objectifying it outside natural man, . . . the power of the living, the living man that it protects, that it serves.”14 At the same time, vernacular language—and, more specifically, as this chapter will show, the printed vernacular language—will come to act as a technological prosthesis for the state. As the Spanish grammarian Antonio de Nabrija famously advised Queen Isabella in 1492 in the preface to his seminal Gramática castellana, “Language was always the companion of empire” (Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio). Language can become for the state its supplement and its technique of survival—as long as that language has itself been artificially enhanced.15 The tongue can act as a prosthesis for the king as long as that tongue is itself in the process of becoming prosthetic, a techno-­ tongue that rises above natural and biological life. We already saw this trajectory with Tory: the tongue once “polished” (poly) and “put in good order” (mi[s] en bon ordre) has the potential to become an instrument of domination, an instrument of empire.16 Peletier echoes this humanist commonplace in the preface cited above: “Julius Caesar, who was the monarch of the world, took no less care and affection in amplifying the use of his language [langue] than in enlarging the limits of the Roman empire.” (Jule Cesar qui fut monarque du monde, n’avoit moindre sollicitude & affection d’amplifier l’usance de sa langue, que de dilater les fins de l’empire Rommain.)17 Already in 1509, before the reign of François, Claude de Seyssel had promoted this vision of language as “amplifying” and “extending” the life of the state in a dedication to Louis XII: “The people and the Roman princes, holding the monarchy of the world, .  .  . who strove to do nothing so much as to perpetuate it and render it eternal, found no more certain and sure way to do so than to magnify, enrich, and enhance their



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Latin language. . . . And in this way the majesty of this Empire and of this very great monarchy was conserved only through the use and authority of the Latin language.” (Le peuple et les princes romains, tenant la monarchie du monde, . . . qui à rien ne tâchaient qu’à icelle perpétuer et rendre éternelle, ne trouvèrent autre moyen plus certain ni plus sûr pour ce faire que magnifier, enrichir et sublimer leur langue latine . . . . Et par ainsi la majesté d’icelui Empire et de cette très grande monarchie n’a été conservée sinon en usance et autorité de la langue latine.)18 The prosthetic tongue is part of the national defense; it is the prosthstate. During the years leading up to 1539, the French language was actively mythologized as the king’s own tongue through the play of the proper name. Although onomastics of this type are exceedingly common in poetry of the period, and although, as Derrida notes, today we might “smile at the idea that it was from the ‘first François’ that our language got the name langue françoise,” this convergence acts as an indispensable poetic lever in the prosthetic attachment of language and state.19 Courtly poets in the king’s circle will mobilize homonymy as a trope to praise both Francoys, king and tongue, in a single breath. Antoine Héroët’s epistle to the king at the head of his 1536 translation of Plato’s Androgyne, “Epistre de l’Autheur au Roy Françoys premier de ce nom,” will vacillate between referring to French as “our vernacular” (nostre langue vulgaire) and “your tongue” (votre langue).20 After invoking all the “books . . . previously dead and buried” (Liures . . . / Auparauant morts, & ensepueliz) and the ancient languages that have been “restored” by François, Héroët insists on what the language “owes” the king in the French kingdom of letters that has “achieved perfection” (a acquis . . . perfection) and flourished under his “name”: Soubz uostre nom, soubz uostre bon exemple On peult uenter se [sic] Royaulme tresample De n’estre moins en lettres fleurissant, Qu’on l’a congneu par guerre trespuissant. Sur ce propos ma langue ne peult taire, Ce, que uous doibt nostre langue uulgaire.21 (Under your name, under your good example, we may boast that this very ample Kingdom is no less flourishing in letters than it has been known to be very powerful in war. On this subject my tongue cannot remain silent: what our vernacular tongue owes you.)

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The poet’s tongue (ma langue) and “our” collective tongue (nostre langue vulgaire) are also “your” tongue—the the “perfect” tongue of the king. If this play is possible, it is because the same metonymic doubleness that marks Francoys already inhabits la langue, “tongue” and “language.” Just as the corporeal tongue metonymically—and prosthetically—extends itself to become language, the king’s tongue extends to become “ours,” and “my” own. Following Ernst Kantorowicz, we could say that this French king does not just have two bodies, as most medieval and early modern kings do, he has two tongues: the bodily tongue with which he speaks exemplary French, and another, “mystical” and undying, tongue that is the French language itself.22 It is no surprise, then, that the years immediately following the death of François in 1547 will be marked by renewed concern over the life of the tongue, including Jacques de Beaune’s 1548 treatise Discours comme une langue vulgaire se peult perpetuer, which outlines survival techniques for the vernacular, or Du Bellay’s sepulchral parenthesis in La Deffence et Illustration, precisely as he expresses his hope that a French that been left “almost to die” (quasi mourir) will rise up and take on new life: “(if with François the French tongue has not been wholly buried)” ([si avecques Francoys n’est du tout ensevelie la langue Francoyse]).23 The French tongue itself here is made to obey the uncanny logic of monarchic succession. The royal funeral of François I, like most in early modern France, ended when the procession (which included a wax simulacrum of the king following his corpse) reached the Basilica of Saint-­Denis. Royal symbols like the banner of France, the royal scepter, and the “hand of justice”—symbols that Jean Bodin will soon call “marks of sovereignty”—were lowered into the sepulcher until a herald cried the famous cry “le roy est mort!” It was only with the cry “vive le roy Henry deuxiesme de ce nom!” that the objects were raised back up again, figuring the undying succession of monarchy through the “mystical body” of the king. After the death of François, the French language, too, must be lowered into the grave and given a supernatural survival. The mystical tongue—that prosthetic device we already see figured in the Gallic Hercules—emerges as the immortal organ of an emergent French body politic. The poet Bonaventure des Périers will go so far as to suggest in a 1537 poem to François that the king has so enriched “his own” language (le tien parler) that it will in future generations be named after him—as will the French people: Si que de toy, O noble Roy Francoys, Nommé sera la langaige francoys,



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Voire le peuple en immortel renom, Veu que tu es le premier de ce nom. (So that after you, O noble King François, The French language will be named, And even the people in immortal renown, Since you are the first of this name.) The proper name Francoys here acts as its own language machine, productively generating referents and repetitions into perpetuity, founding a community by giving a name to people-­tongue-­king. The proper name they have in common is a name that will last—it is a nom that (re)produces (renom), rising above and surviving natural life. If this is possible, it is only because François has already so “enriched” his language (recalling Tory’s insistence in 1529 that French would be “richer” (plus riche) with correction and rule, and anticipating Du Bellay’s call in 1549 to “enrich and illustrate” (enrichir et illustrer) the French language through poetic artifice). But the real force of this naming comes from imagining future generations for whom the present of Renaissance France will be an ancient past—or, rather, recorded history. As the history of Rome is to the French reader of the Renaissance, the history of François will “one day” (ung iour) become for the future French reader the “old chronicles” (vieilles chroniques) found in the pages of printed books: O Roy Francoys, qui as tant enrichi Le tien parler, & si bien affranchi, Que tout ainsi que le Latin langage Retient le nom (comme pour dot & gage) Du Roy Latin, aussi en verite Il sera dict par la posterite Lisant vng iour en ses vieilles Chronicques Tes faictz presens, qui luy seront antiques, Que les fra[n]coys de Fra[n]coys leurs nom pri[n]dre[n]t Et osera affermer quilz en vindrent. (O King François, who have so enriched Your own language, and so liberated it, That just like the Latin language Retains the name (like as a dowry or deposit)

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Of the Latin King, so in truth It will be said by posterity Reading one day in its old Chronicles Your present deeds, which will to it be ancient, That the French took their name from Francoys And they will dare to affirm that they come from him.) The name Francoys is a technological medium destined for posterity. It is a memory trace, as well as a deposit on the future (comme pour dot & gage), a form of retention that lives on in/as the French language.24

Sovereign Printing In order to understand how printing operates as an emergent technology of sovereignty in France, we will need to return to Villers-­Cotterêts during August 1539. The famous Ordinance was not the only law issued from the royal residence at Villers-­Cotterêts during that month. On August 31, François issued lettres patentes addressed to the printers of Paris: We have received the humble request of our well-­loved master printers of books of our good city of Paris, containing that for the acquisition of knowledge to the honor and praise of God our Creator, the upholding, sustaining, and spreading of the holy Catholic faith and holy Christianity through the universal world, and the decoration of our kingdom, the art and science of printing good books and good letters have always in our time been favored and upheld, especially in our good City of Paris; and until recently that the compagnons and workers of the aforementioned estate of printers working under the aforementioned masters, by means of a particular confraternity that they have established among themselves have, by conspiracy and indirect means, deliberated not to labor with the apprentices, which could bring about the loss and discontinuation of this estate, make banquets with the deniers they get from the apprentices, make them swear oaths such as it pleases them, and by means of the aforementioned confraternity, assemblies, and conspiracy, that which [i.e., the printing trade] had previously been



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growing is falling into discontinuation and decline, and books [are] incorrect and poorly printed. Receu avons l’humble supplication de noz bien-­amez les maistres imprymeurs des livres de nostre bonne ville et cyté de Paris, contenant que pour acquérir science à l’honneur et louange de Dieu nostre Créateur, manutention, soustenement et dylatation de la saincte foy catolicque et saincte chrestienté par l’universel monde, et decoration de nostre royaulme, icelluy art et science de ymprimer les bons livres et les bonnes lettres ayent toujours de nostre temps esté favorisé et maintenu, et mesmement en nostre bonne Ville et cyté de Paris; et jusques puis aucun temps en çà que les compaignons et ouvriers dudit estat des imprymeurs besongnans soubz desdiz maistres, au moyen de certain confrarie particullière qu’ils ont esleue entre eulx, ont, par monopolle et voye indirecte, faict deliberation de ne besongner avec les apprentilz, qui pourroit causer la perdition et discontinuation dudit estat, font bancquetz des deniers qu’ils tirent des appretilz; leur font faire serment tel qu’il leur plaist, et au moien de ladite confrarie, assemblées et monopolle, qui par cy devant estoit venu en augmentation, tumbe et vient en discontinuation et destryment, et les livres incorrectz et mal imprimez.25 The summer of 1539 had witnessed a cessation of work by journeymen printers in Paris and Lyon, the two French printing capitals. According to many scholars, this event marks the first labor strike in France. Not yet known as une grève, this event was called un tric, named after the call the journeymen printers would cry out to halt work. The journeymen printers had taken issue with master printers over their pay, meals, and the role of apprentices in the print shop. The master printers—the mini-­sovereigns of their workshops—took the dispute to the king, who sided with them. He issued lettres patentes in their favor on August 31 and September 29, 1539, and again on December 28, 1541. The lettres patentes issued by François on August 31, 1539, regulated working conditions, hours, salary, and meals in the print shop. They also required that all printers use a mark: an inimitable stamp, a signature that identifies all books they print as their own.26 Above all, these letters prohibited the printshop workers from gathering outside the shop and forbade them any further tric, or cessation of labor, that would harm the French printing industry. Six weeks later, on October

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14, François was compelled to issue additional letters enforcing the initial edict, remarking that the journeymen printers were “continuing their collusion, illicit meetings, violence and carrying of weapons, . . . holding the master printers in even greater subjection, captivity and fear than before, threatening them in public and in private, troubling their houses and families, and causing printing to be discontinued.” The journeymen printers persisted, however, and the matter was not put to rest until November 1541—only to flair up again a generation later in Lyon.27 This law appears to be the first passed by a French king regulating print workers.28 It is not, however, the first act concerning writing or the printing trade. Such acts predate 1530 but became both more frequent and more consequential under François, especially during the 1530s and 1540s. Previous kings had protected the material production of texts, both manuscript and print.29 François, however, is the first king to legislate printing in a concerted way: he ordered that all printers be brought before Parlement (March 18, 1520); he prohibited the sale of any book that had not been examined by the Sorbonne (October 20, 1521); he named Geoffroy Tory imprimeur du roy (1531); he attempted to place a ban on all printing in the kingdom (January 13, 1535); he elected a committee to review and approve all books prior to publication (February 24, 1535); he ordered that a copy of each book published in France be deposited in the royal library, establishing the world’s first legal deposit system (December 28, 1537); he renewed the prohibition on printing books without permission (March 17, 1538); he appointed a series of royal printers (Conrad Neobar as imprimeur pour le grec in 1529, Olivier Mallard as imprimeur du roy in 1538, Robert Estienne as imprimeur & libraire ès lettres Hebraiques et latines in 1539); he issued the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts (August 1539); he regulated numerous aspects of the printing trade and attempted to put down the tric (also August 1539); he ordered the journeymen printers in Paris back to work (October 14, 1539); he extended this order to printers in Lyon (December 28, 1539); and he appointed Denis Janot as the first imprimeur du roy pour le francoys (1543). A survey of these acts reveals that François vacillates between promoting the printing trade and controlling it. One moment, François will celebrate the art, appropriating it as an instrument of royal power and administration, as with the appointment of royal printers. The next moment, he will attempt to control its functioning, even stopping and starting the mechanism of the presses: on January 13, 1535, he attempted to ban all printing on pain of death



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(an act ultimately thwarted by the Paris Parlement), while the lettres patentes of 1539 attempted to stop the journeymen printers’ tric so that the presses kept running (an order met with continued stoppage and violence on the part of the journeymen). Some royal acts seemed simultaneously to promote and to control or surveil, like the Ordonnance de Montpellier of December 28, 1537, which established the first legal deposit system according to a double logic: it created a national archive of printed texts for future generations, but it also ensured that all printed texts were reviewed and approved by royal censors.30 Much of this vacillation or apparent ambivalence can be attributed to the volatile religious climate and the challenge posed to royal power by reformist texts; the aborted 1535 printing ban, for example, followed in the wake of the Affaire des Placards.31 Efforts to control the diffusion of Lutheran ideas cannot alone explain, however, the proliferation of legislation around printing technology. The juxtaposition of François’s royal policies—especially the two acts issued from Villers-­Cotterêts in August 1539—demonstrates the ways in which vernacular language and print come to act, in tandem, as cultural and political technologies for the exercise of sovereignty during the 1530s. This royal double blow of Villers-­Cotterêts in August 1539 reveals that the mystical tongue of François I comes into being, first and foremost, as a mechanical tongue. It is a tongue whose nascent “mystical” force lies in the reproducibility and dissemination of print. Printing will emerge as both the technological apparatus with which this sovereign tongue (re)produces itself and the machinery in which it finds itself caught and marked in turn. If François I has a vested interest in putting down the journeymen printers’ strike in 1539, it is because printers—not just the master printers who run the shops but also, and especially, the workers who refer to themselves during this dispute as the “true printers” (vrais imprimeurs)—drove the new machine of royal sovereignty. Indeed, the power (or desired power) to start and stop the presses came to mimic nothing more than the power over life and death that defined royal sovereignty—as if printing technology were (re)producing its own form of life to be governed by sovereign power. The lettres patentes of February 23, 1535, that followed up on the attempted printing ban made this analogy clear by reiterating the desire to punish publication with hanging (sur peine de la hart), and by establishing that the prohibition on printing remained suspended in a state of indefinite deferral (demeure en suspens ou surséance), a stay of execution that would hang over the exercise of the press during this new media moment.32

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The Sovereign Idiom: En Langage Maternel Francoys Ordonnances royaulx sur le faict de la justice et abbreviation des proces is the title under which Villers-­Cotterêts was officially registered and printed, first in Paris, then across France. The edict contains 192 articles designed to enact large-­ scale judicial and administrative reform. Its aim was to centralize political authority in the French kingdom under François I in an unprecedented fashion. As its title indicates, it also sought to “abbreviate” trials by rendering the justice system more efficient—an ambition which, even before it entailed codifying the vernacular as the official language of the French state, already signaled a certain mechanization of justice and the force of the print medium in this legal scene. In fact, just two articles, numbered 110 and 111, address the question of language use for which the law has become famous: 110. And so that there should be no cause to doubt whether the aforementioned legal decisions have been understood, we wish and order that they should be made and written so clearly that there neither is nor could be any room for ambiguity or uncertainty, nor cause to ask for interpretation [interpretation: interpretation or translation]. 111. And because such things have often occurred regarding the understanding of Latin words contained in legal decisions, we wish that, henceforth, all decisions and other procedures, pertaining to our sovereign courts or other lower or inferior courts, whether they be registers, inquiries, contracts, commissions, sentences, wills, or any other acts and writs of justice . . . should be pronounced, recorded, and delivered to parties in the French mother tongue [en langage maternel francois], and not otherwise.33 (110. Et affin quil ny ayt cause de doubter sur l’intelligence desdits arrestz, nous voulons et ordonnons qu’ilz soient faitz et escriptz si clairement, quil ny ait ni puisse avoir aucune ambiguite ou incertitude ne lieu a en demander interpretation. 111. Et pource que telles choses sont souventeffois ad-­venues sur l’intelligence des motz latins contenuz esdictz arrestz, nous voulons que doresenavant tous arretz ensemble toutes autres proc.deures, soyent de noz cours souveraines ou autres subalternes et inferieures, soyent de registres, enquestes, contractz, commissions, sentences, testamens et autres quelzconques actes et



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exploictz de justice, ou qui en dependent, soyent prononcez, enregistrez et d.livrez aux parties en langage maternel francois, et non autrement.)34 The singular rhetoric of these two articles has proved forceful enough to afford them a monumental historical status. It has also served to wrest them from the integral body of the edict and its 190 other articles. Both 1539 and Villers-­ Cotterêts now signify above all a turning point in the history of the French language, namely, the institution of French as the uniquely recognized language of justice, law, and state administration in France. In this way, 1539 and Villers-­ Cotterêts are not just any kind of historical markers. They are signs of that which would seem to have happened in an instant—the instant of a decision, the affirmation of a signature, an irreversible cut—when the French language becomes law by excluding some other language (“and not otherwise”) and instituting itself. It would seem to do all this, moreover, in the very language it seeks to legislate. In an instant, the French vernacular would turn toward itself, gather itself up, and give itself its own law. No matter which “other” the law excludes (a topic of much debate, as we shall see), Villers-­Cotterêts imposes itself through its rhetoric as an inaugural text of French-­language sovereignty. Article 110 of the Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts calls for legal documents to be “written so clearly” that no “ambiguity” or “uncertainty” might impede the functioning of the state. The translator is effectively banished from the courtroom and, indeed, from the scene of justice altogether. With no “room” [lieu] for translation, a new set of demands—transparency, communicability, univocity—are placed on language. Article 111 specifically implicates Latin as the cause of misunderstanding and delay: a harmful mediator in the exercise of justice. It then proceeds to call for all administrative and legal documents in France to be written “in the French mother tongue, and not otherwise” (“en langage maternel francois, et non autrement”). Implicitly, the French vernacular is offered as the idiom capable of meeting the new linguistic demands of the state—or charged with meeting them, regardless of whether it is capable—immediately. Printing, and the mediating role of technē more broadly, would thus play an ambivalent role in this scene. On the one hand, clarity of language and efficiency of linguistic production are two major values associated with movable type technology and, especially, the orthographic and typographical reforms of the 1530s (even though the text of the Ordonnances itself will, with a few exceptions, typically be printed in bâtarde characters and without accents). The logic of writing “in the French mother tongue, and not otherwise” would be the same

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as that dictating, for example, the use of the apostrophe as explained by the author of the Briefve Doctrine to the “Printers of books in French” (Imprimeurs des liures en François): “For the French language would be more distinct, and easy to understand, so it seems to me, and as each person. . . can clearly see and understand.” (Car la langue Françoyse en seroit plus distincte, & facile a entendre, anisi qu’il me semble: & que chascun . . . peult clairement veoir & entendre).35 The Ordinance’s broader goals, implicit in Articles 110 and 111, are to “abbreviate” trials and ensure the speedy functioning of justice. Both evoke a modern machinic imaginary of the functioning of the state apparatus. The acceleration of the language of justice would in particular suggest that the court is operating on the model of the printer’s shop. Moreover, the fact that the law applies across the French kingdom not only deploys a printing logic of vernacular standardization but also addresses a proto-­national readership and relies materially on printers for dissemination and thus the enforcement of the law; we could understand the urgency to end the tric in Paris and Lyon during the late summer and early fall of 1539 as stemming from this very need. The text of the Ordonnances royaulx was nevertheless printed in Paris soon after its issuance by some of the best Parisian printers—including some of the first promoters of accents, like Denis Janot and Galliot du Pré—and sold in numerous bookshops.36 The royal privilege granted to the Parisian printers Jean Bonhomme and Jean André, and reproduced inside the book, charged them with printing a “correct” text, maintaining certain aesthetic standards, producing a useful text with ample margins, and using quality type. The king, we read, “has permitted and permits the said supplicants to print or have printed the ordinances lately issued by the King relating to the expediting and abbreviation of trials, with the task that the said printing be very correct, in a nice volume, nice margins, and good letters” (a permis et permect audictz supplians imprimer ou faire imprimer les ordonnances dernierement faictes par le Roy touchant lexpedition et abbreviation des proces/ a la charge que ladicte impressio[n] sera bien correcte/ en beau volume/ belle marge et bo[n]ne lettre). The Ordonnances royaulx were reprinted throughout France over the next several months—in Lyon, Rennes, Rouen, Toulouse, Angers, Poitiers, and Dijon—with more editions appearing in the ­following years.37 They appeared in a variety of formats (from large, formal folios to tiny, portable sexto-­decimos) and types (both Gothic-­style bâtarde and Aldine Roman), usually with a textual apparatus (table of contents and a gloss of each article) to make the text user-­friendly. The gloss of Article 43 reads: Briefuete commandee (“brevity commanded”). The gloss of Article 111 reads: De prononcer et



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expedier tous actes en langage francois (“of pronouncing and expediting all acts in the French language”).38 On the other hand, the invocation of the “French mother tongue” as the unmediated language of French law would seem to resist any such reliance on printing technology. The new idiom of justice, the langage maternel francois, would be a technological product that disavows its own birth. This block of language seems transparent enough: langage maternel francois. The text addresses a series of existing problems: ambiguity of court documents, misunderstanding by parties, lengthy and expensive trials, the need for translators, confusion and thus potential injustice brought about by language, and Latin. It then proposes a solution: say and write everything en langage maternel francois, and not other­wise. Rhetorically, the text of the law seems as “clear” as the language it attempts to prescribe. The “maternal French language” appeases the threat of injustice represented by Latin; as a naturally acquired mother tongue, this language offers—and imposes—itself as a common language, an idiom immediately intelligible to any subject placed before the law. The ironic legacy of Villers-­Cotterêts is that this unusual three-­word phrase (“langage maternel francois”) naming the language that will serve as a just and “clear” idiom of the state has itself given rise to centuries of uncertain interpretation. It has, in short, become a source of precisely the kind of confusion to which it promises to be an antidote. Legal and language historians over the past century have sought to resolve the referential problem of Villers-­Cotterêts and settle the numerous questions it raises (Which language exactly does the law codify and prescribe? And is it a question of which language, singular, or languages plural?) as well as its historical significance (Is this the beginning of restrictive, top-­down, monolingual policy in France? Or does Villers-­Cotterêts belong to a more linguistically tolerant and even multilingual early modern era?). The as-­yet unresolved nature of this question is demonstrated by a quick glance at two recent histories of the French language. In Language, Culture, and Hegemony in Modern France (1539 to the Millennium), Freeman Henry argues that “the king intentionally excluded . . . for the first time all regional languages and dialects as well as Latin. . . . The goals of the Ordinance, it is clear, were political and cultural rather than philanthropic or egalitarian.”39 On this view, Villers-­Cotterêts and 1539 stand as the foundational text in a five-­hundred-­year epoch of linguistic hegemony in France. By contrast, R. Anthony Lodge takes a more measured approach in French: From Dialect to Standard, arguing that “the chief target for the 1539 edict .  .  . was Latin” and noting that by 1539 the King’s French had already

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replaced regional languages for official purposes in most of the kingdom.40 What is clear, then, is that despite or perhaps because of the force of its rhetoric and the clarity it demands, not only the historical impact of the Edict of Villers-­ Cotterêts but the very language it supposedly—with supposed sovereignty— codifies retains some degree of ambiguity. What’s more, despite or perhaps because of the sovereign decision it seems to enact and the “cause [lieu] for interpretation” it looks to quash, the text has become a veritable interpretation machine—itself a productive and even overabundant “cause,” a generator of further texts. Most existing interpretations of the Ordinance have looked to reduce this ambiguity with an either/or genre of decision—to slice through it and impose the sovereign will that is seemingly promised by the rhetoric of the law, of which en langage maternel francois should be the most decisive expression.41 However, the broader semantic context of this utterance threatens any such clarity or decisiveness. As we have seen, the word francoys could more generally mean “French” or “of France”; all French subjects, regardless of whether they spoke francoys were called francoys because they lived in the French kingdom—the kingdom of a king also called François. The reign of François is a turning point in the history of this name. For Geoffroy Tory in 1529, the French language of the French nous he addresses (when, for example, he enjoins his readers to “write in Francoys as Francoys that we are” [escrire en Francoys comme Francoys que nous sommes]) is projected across the entire French kingdom; for that very reason, however, it encompasses other proper names and other languages. We see this most strikingly when Tory proposes that “our language” (nostre langue) will be “as easy to regulate and put in good order as Greek with its five “varieties of language” (diversite de langage): “Likewise could we do with the language of the Court and Paris, the Picard language, the Lyonnais language, the Limousin language, and the Provençal language.” (Tout ainsi pourrions-­nous faire de la langue de Court et Parrhisienne, de la langue Picarde, de la Lionnoise, de la Lymosine et de la Prouvensalle.)42 The language of Paris—the language properly called Francoys—is, for Tory, one variety of “our language.” Semantic ambiguity is equally at work in the term “maternal,” which, as we saw in Chapter 3, had been used since the late fourteenth century in France to mean either a vernacular language that was not François, or a vernacular language that was not Latin. It is a differential category that divides a media field, rather than a referent with a stable meaning. Nevertheless, in 1554, the jurist Pierre Rebuffe seized on the word maternel in his commentary on the edict to reclaim the more “liberal” interpretation of Villers-­Cotterêts. The edict, Rebuffe wrote in Latin,



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“says Maternel Francoys, not simply Francoys, to signify not wanting to force anyone to use the French language [Gallico sermone], but instead that of the country’s people [vulgari patriae].”43 Using Latin as a meta-­language allows Rebuffe to position himself above the referential troubles of Villers-­Cotterêts— to distinguish Maternel Francoys from Gallico sermone. Yet the fact that Rebuffe cites the Ordinance in its original language—in the same language the law names and codifies—suggests that it reads as an untranslatable proper name that Latin could not render. That this untranslatability of Villers-­Cotterêts would already be in effect in 1554, just fifteen years after the issuance of the law, indicates that the interpretative troubles of Villers-­Cotterêts are more than just a product of the intervening centuries and historiographical debate. Untranslatability, and thus a certain idiomaticity, would be the defining technique of Villers-­Cotterêts in its exercise of sovereignty. Langage maternel francois would be its mark, like that singularizing device François requires each printer to have as of August 1539. As we shall see below, this idiomatic phrase— langage maternel francois—results from a cut-­and-­paste job, the unfinished suture of which that final et non autrement, “and not otherwise,” comes to mask. Already, before getting into the editorial history that produces this strange name, we can see in its awkward three-­word formulation the evidence of a grafting operation: the name of king-­people-­nation and the “mother” tongue engaging in an uncomfortable coupling—a prosthetic or prosthstatic coupling— uncertain in their relation to one another at this turning point in the history of media technology and nation-­states. It is a name whose very idiomaticity signals the joining of language and state: that joining that lashes together, with a chain of letters, the tongue of François and the ear of the people. In his reading of the law in “If There Is Cause to Translate I,” Derrida will invoke precisely the same mother-­father uncanniness of the state that he had articulated in relation to Nietzsche in “Otobiographies” (which we tied in Chapter 3 to the monstrous umbilical cord of the state in our reading of the Gallic Hercules), while also anticipating the structure of nonbelonging from The Monolingualism of the Other. The edict “appears to be the release from a violent constraint . . . of the Latin language,” writes Derrida.44 Yet such liberation would be a lure: “In a strategy of assuming power, the decree would nevertheless make the concession of moving toward the language that it itself calls the ‘mother’ tongue of the nation’s subjects; it seems in fact to move them gently”—in an apparent “gentleness” that would recall the slack chain and soft violence of the Gallic Hercules— “into the trap of their own language, as if the king were saying to them: in order to be subjects of the law—and of the king—you will finally be able to speak your

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langage maternel francois; as if they were being given back to the mother in order to better be subjugated to the father.”45 The idiomatic langage maternel francois would, in short, be the sign of the prosthetic operation at work—the same operation that articulates the “mother tongue” with printing, grammar, and so on— as the founding gesture of the national language.

. . . Et Non Autrement The first measure requiring laws in France to be written (“rédigez et mis en escrit”) is a contemporary of Gutenberg’s forty-­two-­line Bible. The 1454 edict of Montil-­lès-­Tours issued by Charles VII looked to reform French justice, primarily by replacing the diversity of oral coutumes (“qui sont divers selon la diversite des pays de nostre royaume”) with recorded law.46 All legal practices (“usages, stiles, et coutumes”) were to be written and collected in books (“mis et escritz en livres”) to be overseen and administered by the royal justice (“lesquelz seront apportez par-­devers nous . . . et ainsi decretez et conformez, seront observez et gardez”).47 This law, anticipating Villers-­Cotterêts, aimed to provide judges with certainty (“certainete”) and to relieve them of “all manner of variation and conflict” (toutes matieres de varations et contrarietez); the concern for efficiency on display in Villers-­Cotterêts is also manifest here. While some coutumes had been transcribed and even collected in books since the thirteenth century, their written use had been primarily private and not publicly enforced.48 With Montil-­lès-­Tours, Charles VII ensured that only laws recorded as the edict prescribed would be recognized as legally valid. With writing comes control through the externalized archivation of the law—a centralized control, at a distance. This judicial architecture “constructed under the vigilant eye of the sovereign” was “put in place by his council and constantly submitted to the control of the Parliament.”49 The edict also established parlements in Bordeaux, Aix, Grenoble, and Toulouse to administer and adjudicate the newly recorded laws. The effectiveness of Montil-­lès-­Tours appears to have been limited, however. In 1481, Louis XI renewed the command to write in almost exactly the same terms as his predecessor. In 1497 and 1498, Charles VIII would issue lettres patentes, sending his commissaries to the provinces to aid local officials in the writing of their coutumes, a practice that continued into the first half of the sixteenth century. Along with the archiving of laws came the transcription of witness depositions and testimonies. In 1490, the Edict of Moulins prohibited the use of Latin



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in these documents in the Languedoc region so that the witnesses who had given depositions could understand them when they were read back and could confirm their validity. There, it is ordered that “depositions of witnesses who will be heard and examined henceforth . . . in the country of Languedoc . . . be set down and written in the French language or the mother tongue [en langage Francois ou maternel], such that the witnesses can understand their depositions, and one can read them to them and summarize them in the language and form they will have spoken and deposed.” (Outre est ordonne que les dicts & depositions des tesmoins qui seront ouys & examinez d’oresenavant esdites cours & en tout le pays de Languedoc, soit par forme d’enqueste ou information & prinse sommaire, seront mis & redigez par escrit en langage Francois ou maternel, tels que lesdits tesmoins puissent entendre leur dépositions, & on les leur puisse lire & recenser en tel langage et forme qu’ils aurant dit & depose.)50 This playback function was instituted, the law suggests, “in order to prevent the abuses, frauds, and harm” (pour obvier aux abus, fraudes, & inconveniens) committed in the past.51 Often cited in the prehistory of the Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts, Moulins is the first act to ban Latin and affirm vernacular use in the French judicial system. Yet here the emphasis is not on the use or abuse of Latin, per se, but rather on the establishment of a particular relationship between media: an equivalence of speech and writing, which is also the relationship between the witness and his or her own words as mediated by the system of justice. The deposition may be recorded in French or in a local vernacular (“en langage Francois ou maternel”), as long as it is the same language as the one first spoken by the witness (“en tel langage et forme qu’ils aurant dit & depose”). In terms that anticipate the “abuse” of writing alleged by Louis Meigret and Jacques Peletier half a century later, the justice of writing depends on its identity with speech. The royal justice system, now a system of writing, here becomes a “system of hearing-­oneself-­ speak” (Derrida’s système de s’entendre-­parler)—that is, a system of presence and consciousness—before the law. In a later edict for the Languedoc region, Louis XII will reiterate vernacular use as a promotion of subjects’ (self-­)hearing (“entendement”) within the legal system, extending this principle to include the pronouncement of accusations and sentences by judges. As in the Edict of Moulins, the stated purpose of this 1510 law is to correct instances of “abuse” within this system—an “abuse” now specifically linked to Latin. In order for subjects to understand the legal process in which they are engaged, the inquiries and trials are to be conducted “in the vernacular and language of the region where the criminal trials and inquiries are held” (en vulgaire et langage du païs où seront faits lesdits procés

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criminels et enquestes).52 In this case, no mention is made of the language called Francoys. In order for subjects (witnesses and criminals alike) to understand legal proceedings—both their own words and the accusations they face—the specific local or regional vernacular tongue is prescribed. This is the only condition under which such proceedings will be valid (“autrement ne seront d’aucun effet & valeur”). The identity required here in order to ensure understanding is still one of speech and writing, but also, and here more prominently, one of the subject and païs. The subject’s own language, as tied to regional geography and a specific language community, is what ensures procedural expediency and justice. Lettres patentes of 1533 issued by François I concerning private law in the Languedoc region similarly specify the use of the subject’s “own” language: “We order and enjoin notaries to . . . write each and every contract in the vernacular language of the contracting parties.” (Ordonnons et enjoignons auxdits notaires passer et escripvre tous et chascuns les contractz en langue vulgaire des contractans.)53 Here Latin is once again identified as a means of perpetrating fraud, as a medium of obfuscation, and as an abuse of knowledge and power on the part of the writer (here, the notaire). Considered alongside the preceding acts, this act suggests first that Latin’s “universal” quality as a language-­of-­writing in civil life is in the process of giving way to a principle of understanding (“entendement”) by the individual subject as well as a new concept of the role of writing, namely, as a record of spoken language. It also highlights the way in which Latin is increasingly coming to symbolize abuse of authority, especially in writing—an abuse whose remedy is the vulgaire, maternel, or langage du païs.54 The denigration of Latin as “abusive,” as much as it is rooted in the sociolinguistic reality of non-­Latin-­speaking French subjects placed before the law and a Latin-­speaking educated class that might exploit that fact, nevertheless obscures the increasing appropriation of the vernacular language by the state and, more broadly, the encroachment of the state on the life of French subjects— a movement instituted under François that accelerated during the second half of the sixteenth century. At the same time, the supposed transparency of the vernacular masks a process by which the putting into writing of the law transformed an “oral and public justice” into one that was increasingly opaque and textually mediated.55 Even as Villers-­Cotterêts prescribed the langage maternel francoys for the sake of “clarity” in Articles 110 and 111, for example, a later article (162) notoriously denied legal counsel to accused parties and even withheld the content of accusations against them until the time of trial. The association of the vernacular(s) with entendement, or clarity—which mimics not only the aesthetics of print but also the humanist and Reformist efforts at disseminating



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knowledge and authority in print and through translation—would seem above all to facilitate state access to the lives of citizens through “their” language.56 In this light, one can begin to understand why the langage maternel francoys might appear alongside articles requiring that citizens report all burials (Article 50, “registres de sepulture”) and baptisms (Article 51, “registre de baptesmes”) to the nearest royal office for entry in official state “registers,” the precise form of which the law also specifies (Articles 52 and 53). Article 55 requires a record of the exact time of death; Article 56 prohibits the keeping of corpses. Villers-­ Cotterêts—including, and especially, its two most famous articles—constitutes an effort by the French state to administrate life and the living. The grafting of the langage maternel onto the state apparatus, onto the name Francoys, was a means of controlling, maintaining, and ordering life by the sovereign whose analog can be found in the operations of the typographer, the grammarian, and the printer. The name Francoys, which had effectively dropped out of legal texts since 1490, in favor of the subject’s “own” language, reemerges in the laws issued under François regarding public use during the 1530s. The 1535 edict of Is-­sur-­ Tille concerning judicial practice in Provence, for example, essentially rewrites Louis XII’s edict of 1510 for the Languedoc region, reinserting and emphasizing the king’s language. The law orders that trials and investigations be conducted “in francoys or at the very least in the vernacular of the region” (en francoys ou a tout le moins en vulgaire dudict pays).57 Given that this edict was written only four years before Villers-­Cotterêts, the marked distinction here between francoys and the vulgaire du pays as choices for judicial practice is striking. Even more striking is how the formulation “en francoys ou a tout le moins en vulgaire dudict pays” displays an uncertain linguistic economy. With an awkward cut and paste of past edicts, this formulation takes up both the “en langage Francois ou maternel” of 1490 and the “en vulgaire et langage du païs” of 1510, combining them with a new “a tout le moins” that tips the balance toward francoys. This decade’s “anxiety about edges and borders of France”—which went hand in hand with a political momentum toward centralization and unification—is demonstrated here on the level of legal syntax as editorial process.58 This brings us back to 1539 and Articles 110 and 111 of Villers-­Cotterêts. Although Villers-­Cotterêts follows the above series of edicts addressing language use in many respects, it differs from these previous acts in two important ways: (1) in terms of its geographic scope (it applies to the entire French kingdom, not to one particular region) and (2) in its legislative breadth (it addresses administrative and ecclesiastical regulation in addition to judicial reform).

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Considering Villers-­Cotterêts in the history of these previous acts, however, reveals that, far from emerging ex nihilo, the idiomatic phrase en langage maternel francoys participates in a century-­long textual history pitting vernacular against Latin and distinguishing vernacular from vernacular in the becoming-­ written of French law. Erasing the “ou” of 1490 and the “tout le moins” of 1535, this edict’s editorial stroke of genius is the production of a singular idiom, the langage maternel francoys, from out of the previous laws as and’s and or’s, which are cut away. Article 111’s final “and not otherwise” hangs on like a remainder of those erasures, the suture recalling that a grafting of foreign elements once took place. A certain opening to the vernacular public enacted by the material reforms of typography is here re-­appropriated and closed off by state authority. We could say that French is only founded as an official language by foreclosing that other, material founding. The iconic “et non autrement” of the Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts stands as a mark of this foreclosure.

The Language Machine Goes Tric One could say . . . that it is a true mark of sovereignty to compel subjects to change their language. On pourroit dire . . . que c’est une vraie marque de Souveraineté de contraindre les subjects à changer de langue. —Bodin, Six Livres de la République

Printing in the sixteenth century required disciplined cooperation and coordinated timing. As the journeymen printers testifying in relation to the 1539 printing strike affirmed, “In the Printing Industry, the work begins when everyone is together. When one or two are absent, the work stops.”59 Or, again, in 1570: “We can’t be compared to other artisans who work independently as they choose.” It was also work that engaged the body in labor; as Natalie Zemon Davis notes, “Standing up all day pulling and pushing a noisy press required great physical stamina.”60 The hours of that labor were long, according to the documents surrounding the 1539 Lyon strike. “The poor Journeymen . . . are required to be in the houses of their masters and to begin work at two o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night, such that they have only four hours for their rest.” (Les pauvres Compagnons . . . sont tenus de se trouver ès maisons de



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leurs maistres et commencer loeuvre à deux heures du matin jusqua dix heures du soir, tellement quils nont que quatre heures pour leur repos.)61 According to Davis, these hours are the longest recorded for any craft of the period.62 But sometimes the work did stop. The defining characteristics of journeymen printers in sixteenth-­century France are pride in their work, their coordinated and collective labor that led to the formation of union-­like coalitions distinct from other craft guilds, and their use of the strike to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment. Shop-­wide strikes were not uncommon; they were so systematic a strategy, in fact, that the practice had its own term, specific to the printing trade: tric. “When something went wrong within a shop—say, the master put apprentices to typesetting or pulling the press—the journeymen would ask him three times to change his mind. If he remained obdurate, one journeyman would signal ‘tric, tric’ and the whole shop would walk out, either for the day or until the dispute was ended.”63 The events of 1539 and 1570 were industry-­wide strikes that effectively halted production in France’s major printing centers, Paris and Lyon, for weeks and months. Henri Hauser observes that this event has all the aspects of a modern strike: demands for higher wages, complaints about the premeditated debasement of labor, recourse to coalitions, and violation of freedom of labor intervention by communal power, followed by that of a central power. It is known as le Grand tric. August 1539 thus saw another untranslatable idiom make its way into the text of a law—one that can be read belatedly, I would suggest, as a kind of countersignature to the langage maternel francoys. Contemporary appearances of the word tric can be found mostly in the legal acts forbidding the practice. It does not appear in most dictionaries of the French language, early modern or modern, though it can be found in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1771) and the early Littré (1869), as well as in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. In all of these documents un tric is presented not only as a legally prohibited act but also as a word “invented” by print workers. Louis de Jaucourt’s entry for tric in the Encyclopédie qualifies the word as “Printer’s jargon” (terme d’argot d’Imprimeur) and reads: It is a word invented by the Journeymen Printers, which serves them as their signal to leave work and go engage in debauchery together. This word is mentioned in an ordinance of François I in the year 1541 and of Charles IX in 1571. A regulation from 1618, cited in the Parisian bookseller code, page 176, prohibits all journeymen printers and

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booksellers from making any tric in the print shops, that is to say, from giving the signal to leave work conjointly to go drink, or for another reason. (C’est un mot inventé par les Compagnons Imprimeurs, qui leur sert de signal pour quitter leur ouvrage, & aller faire la débauche ensemble. Il est fait mention de ce terme dans une ordonnance de François Ier en l’an 1541, & de Charles IX en 1571. Un réglement de 1618, cité dans le code de la librairie de Paris, page 176, défend à tous compagnons imprimeurs & libraires de faire aucun tric dans les imprimeries, c’est à dire, de donner le signal de quitter conjointement le travail, pour aller boire, ou pour autre raison.)64 The Littré similarly defines tric as a “signal the print workers made to stop work and go drink together” (signal que faisaient les ouvriers imprimeurs pour quitter le travail en masse et aller boire).65 The Littré also documents another argotic usage of the word: “assembly, meeting” (assemblée, réunion).66 The word tric skirts debauchery, as well as the limits of the French language in the name of some other collective. It is a not-­quite-­French word that emerges from the print shop to name the moment presses stop. When a compilation of sixteenth-­ century trade laws was printed by the Imprimerie Nationale in the nineteenth century, the article that cites the lettres patentes issued by François in 1539, the act breaking up the printers’ unions and prohibiting work stoppages, italicizes the word to mark it as argotique or even foreign.67 The questions this word poses echo those of Villers-­Cotterêts and its langage maternel francoys: What kind of a word is this? Where does it come from? To what language does it belong? Or maybe, to how many languages does it belong? Does it belong to language at all? There have been a number of hypotheses as to the origin of tric. One would have it borrowed from the German Streik, meaning “strike.” As it turns out, however, the German term is actually an Anglicism that dates to the late eighteenth century. Natalie Zemon Davis suggests that it might be related to tricher, which is an appealing hypothesis: the tric would be a trick. The tric as trick fits nicely within the spirit of playful punishment that reigned in the Company of Griffarins, the major printers’ coalition of Lyon during this period. It would represent a kind of practical joke played on print capitalism, jamming its gears. Paul Chauvet and Henri Hauser both suggest that these conflicts emerged at least in part because, with rare exceptions (such as the humanist printers we have encountered), master printers by the mid-­sixteenth century were merchants



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looking above all to profit—even to the detriment of their workers—rather than scholars and artisans (as they were in the early days); there was, then, a gap between capital and labor. Between the spring of 1539 and the end of 1542, the printing industry in Paris and Lyon was indeed seriously compromised.68 The tric would thus also be a prank that twists the mystical tongue of François, that emergent language of power. As Henri Hauser notes, François did not stop at putting down the work stoppage or the intermittent violence perpetrated by the journeymen printers. François actively and arbitrarily intervened in the conflict, modifying labor contracts and dictating the rules of the workshop.69 In so doing, Hauser suggests, François acts in his own interest, “having no desire other than to maintain the prosperity of the industry that was his strength.”70 Perhaps the most persuasive etymological hypothesis is that tric is an adaptation of the Dutch trek, meaning “pull.” Given the number of journeymen printers arriving in Lyon and Paris from Dutch-­speaking regions, this seems possible from a sociological standpoint. But trek also has a compelling media techno-­logic. The tric as trek, or “pull,” would make the strike a kind of repetition of the action of working the printing press: a repetition of the puller’s pull, but one that pulls away or pulls back from the machine—a pull that stops the machine with the machine’s own syntax. Or perhaps, we might say, in the machine’s own language. The print shop, as Davis has signaled, is a noisy place. Tric is a noise, something like that of the pull itself, the sound of the impression that repeats hundreds and thousands of times a day in the Renaissance print shop. Tric would be an onomatopoetic resistance, a call by workers for regular meals or reduced hours in an idiom somewhere between Dutch, French, and machine.

The Ear of the People In 1550, Louis Meigret published the first grammar of French written in the French language. In this landmark text, in which French becomes for the first time its own meta-­language, Meigret adopts his trademark phonetic orthography and affirms that, for him, language is not a totalizable or conquerable object. The grammarian is not a sovereign over his language; “usage” dictates the law he must follow. Introducing his grammar, he writes: “In pursuing . . . the present treatise according to the experience I have been able to have of the usage of French speech and language, I will begin with the first principles . . . and to build an understandable [entendible] language, with the rules I have managed to

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extract from a common observance, which like a Law has tacitly ordered them for us.” (En poursuyuant . . . ce prezent tretté selon l’experience qe je puis auoer de l’uzaje de la paroll’ e langaje Françoes, je comencerey ao’ premiers principes . . . e toute le’ parties necesseres a batir un langaj’ entendible, aueq le’ regles qe j’ey pu extrere d’une comun’ obseruance, qi come une Loe les nous a tacitement ordoné.) Meigret renders the presence of the French language as an entity already belonging to a determined community and already obeying silently (tacitement), a law to which his text must attempt to give voice. The grammar will give (visual) form to and (textually) codify the authority of a people that comes in through the ears. In this respect, Meigret’s work is in keeping with a certain line of contemporary political thought that limits the role of rulers in relation to language, as articulated, for example, by Abel Mathieu in his Devis de la langue françoise (1559). Kings can build castles and raise taxes, Mathieu writes, “but they cannot constitute a certain language to their people, nor prevent them from fashioning or changing it as they wish, so obstinate is the liberty of tongue and mind, and so impatient with orders” (mais ilz ne peuvent constituer certain langage à leurs peuples, n’y engarder qu’ilz ne le façonnent ou changent à leur mode et vouloir, tant est la liberté de langue et d’esprit obstinée, et impatiente de commandemens). Print culture, as David Zaret has argued, acts during the early modern period as the prototype for a political public sphere.71 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the French orthographic debates that began with the publication of Louis Meigret’s Traité touchant le commun usage de l’escriture françoise and lasted through the mid-­1550s. While Jacques Peletier engaged Meigret on the finer points of his phonetic system and challenged the radical nature of his reform, others took Meigret to task for the phonetic principle as such. One such critic was Guillaume des Autels, a poet associated with the Pléiade, who suggests in a polemical exchange with Meigret that it would be better to “regulate” (reigler) pronunciation according to writing, since phonetic writing gives undue license to “the most ignorant” (les plus ignorans) to ruin French. Above all, des Autels is anxious about the “corruption” to which a French language obeying an unchecked phonetic principle would be susceptible. Exposing the letter to speech means exposing it to the “people”: “the pronunciation taken from the people as a whole, of whom most are idiots, and uneducated, is easier to corrupt than the writing proper to learned people” (la prononciation usurpée de tout le peuple auquel le plus grand nombre est des idiots, et indoctes, est plus facile a corrompre que l’escripture propre aux gens scavants). It would be preferable in his estimation to “pronounce everything that is written” (prononcer tout ce qui



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s’escript) or to “regulate pronunciation according to writing” (reigler la pronunciation selo[n] l’escripture.”72 At the heart of this question for des Autels is the notion that a grammar based on phonetic writing—the very kind of grammar Meigret published in 1550—does not establish a sound linguistic authority because the people, as a “great crowd of idiots” (grande tourbe d’idíos) and collective of speakers, cannot be trusted as rational producers of knowledge.73 Cordoning off writing from speech presents itself, at least in des Autels’s case, as a project of social and political reform aimed at maintaining the hegemony of an elite—and male—intellectual class. The Grammarian emerges as a guarantor of an established political and social order that must not be “subjected” to the multiplicity and unreason of the masses: “And truly, Meigret, you say you are working on revising a grammatical treatise you have written: please tell me what use it will be, if all our words are as abnormal and inconstant as the brains to which we subject them, if the French Grammarians or (it would then be better to say) female Grammariennes make as many grammars for us as the Astrologers make Almanachs?” (Et voirement Meigret tut e dis ester apres à reuoir vn traitté de grammaire, que tu as dressé: ie te suppli de quoy nous seruira il, si tous noz vocables sont autant anormaux & inconstans que les cerueaux ausquelz nous les assubiettissons? sinon que les Grammariens François ou (comme lors il vaudroit mieux) Grammariennes nous fissent autant de Grammaires que les Astrologues d’almanachs.)74 By contrast, des Autels will define his “nous” as the “learned people” (gens scavants) who safeguard and maintain the French language “in its purity” (en sa pureté). His call to orthographic and grammatical reform thus takes on a tone of mounting crisis and the danger of public disorder: “Do we want to endure this excessive license? Let us make haste to establish order, and let us not wait until disgrace takes away the possibility right now so opportune to remedy it.” (Voulons nous endurer ceste tant desmesuree licence? Hastons, hastons nous d’y mettre ordre, & n’attendons que la disgrace nous oste l’occasion tant à ceste heure oportune d’y remedier.)75 For Meigret, the intervention of grammar and the status of language as a political object will be more complex. Like Geoffroy Tory, he will extend his “nous” to all speakers and potential readers of French: all those who are reachable by the telephone line of print. As an advocate of “usage” grounded in the aural dimension of language, Meigret will counter des Autels by arguing that “a language has no authority except insofar as it is agreeable to the people as a whole or, at least, to the greatest part; and even though all of them do not entertain themselves by speaking properly and elegantly, they nevertheless do not fail to have an agreeable and good eloquence, much like those who, hearing music

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and not having a graceful voice, nevertheless do not fail to take pleasure in well-­ sung music” (vn langaje n’a point d’aothorité sino[n] de ta[n]t q’il ęt aggreabl’ a tout le peuple, ou pour le moins a la plus gran’ partíe: ę combien qe tous ne s’amuzet pas a propremęnt ę elegammęnt parler, il ne lęsset pas pourta[n]t a auoęr aggreabl’ une bon’ eloquence: fezans tout einsi que çęus qi entęndans la muziqe, ę n’ayans la grace de la gorje ne lęsset pas pourtant a pręndre plęzir ęn vne muziqe bien çhantée).76 In this way, Meigret’s phonocentric linguistic politics—what Franz Josef Hausmann describes as “a certain democratic spirit in Meigret”—would seem to invert the phonocentric sovereignty of François I and the Ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts, reversing the direction in which both linguistic signal and “authority” travel along the Herculean chain.77 In responding to des Autels’s (at least somewhat ironic) proposal to base pronunciation on spelling, Meigret questions the authority, or force of law, of grammatical treatises when it comes to changing language: “I would like to know from this gentle Guillaume with what arms he conquered this authority, such that his quill would have more power over the liberty of a people to accept or reject a language, than princes themselves have, given that usage alone is the author” (je voudroę bien sauoęr de çe je[n]til Gyllaome, a qęlles armes il a conqis ęet’ aothorité, de sorte qe sa plum’ yet plus de pouuoęr sur la libęrté d’un people pour accepter ou rejetter vn langaje, qe n’ont lç’ princes męmes: attęndu qe le seul vzaje, ęn ęt l’aotheur).78 This limit on grammarians’ quills extends in the next breath to royal edicts, which must ultimately answer to the sovereign authority of the common ear as the arbiter of what counts as French: “And while a prince might force upon us the reception of a few words, if the ear does not accept it, we will judge it barbarous and rude , even though we understand it.” (Ę co[m]bien q’un prince nou’ pourroęt forçer a la reçepçíon de qleqes vocables, si toutefoęs l’oręlle ne l’açępte, nou’ l’estimerons barbar’ ę rudde quoę qe nous ęn ayons l’intellijęnçe.)79 The orthographic debate becomes an exercise in political theory as Meigret asks des Autels if he really intends to “deprive the French of the liberty common to all people to form a language for themselves as they see fit” (priu[er] . . . lę’ Françoes de la liberté comun’ a tou’ peoples a se former tęl langaje qe bon leur semblera), undermining the natural authority of “the ear of the people,” l’oręlle du peuple.80 As we saw in Chapter 4, Meigret proposes a system of strict phonetic equivalence according to which each written letter must represent a single sound in order for its full puissance to be in effect. In the Traité and, later, in his Grammere (1550), the difference between speech and writing is, for Meigret, a “confusion” of language to be restored by the phonetic principle’s “proprieté.”



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The split “usage” of French between speech and writing represents the primary problem to be resolved, and the precondition for any French “grammar.” His orthographic-­grammatical project entails above all the construction of a single, “true” usage, which also means the hierarchical subordination of writing to speech, a restoration in writing of the univocal puissance of voice. Defending his right to enact such reform, Meigret argues that the old spelling system is a mere “custom” (coutume), yet one to which the people are so accustomed that they mistake it for “law and ordinance that is just and necessary” (loix, & ordonnance iuste, & necessaire). The only reason this old writing has not been changed, Meigret suggests, despite “the difficulty we experience in the letter” (la difficulté que nous sentons en la letre), is the public’s fear of appearing too novel or breaking with tradition (“de forger nouueaux troubles à ung peuple en ses coustumes tant vsités, & de si longue main receues”). Vernacular grammar begins, then, by dethroning old “abusive” customs and restoring another justice to language. Phoneticism erects itself, in print, as the more just law of language. Against the plurality of customs and their arbitrary authority, Meigret invokes this singular law (“le devoir, & loix de bien escrire”) which binds speech to writing and restores power to language. These aligned duties toward the French language are bound, for Meigret, in a principle that is nationalist insofar as it is nativist, linking the vernacular language, phoneticism, and communal belonging in a metaphysics of identity as self-­sameness and presence. “Estranged” writing, Meigret alleges, “is derived from a great ignorance and superstition, given that it is entirely different from pronunciation, which according to its duty it must record naïvely” (et deriuée d’une grand’ iñoranc’ e superstiçion: vu q’ell’ et tout’ aotre qe la prononçiaçion, qe suyuant son deuoer ell dut rapporter nayuement).81 Those who write otherwise “think they are doing our writing no small honor by adorning it with the quills of others” (ne luy pense pas fére peu d’honneur [à notre écriture] en la parant de plumes d’aotruy).82 The other quills (plumes d’autrui) in question are revealed languages other than French: “It is true that this kind of writer hopes to show in this way that they have profited from the Latin and Greek languages.” (Il est vrey qe çete maniere d’ecriueins espere bien montrer par la q’il’ ont fort prouffitté e’ langes Latin’ e Grecqe.)83 Writing, then, is susceptible to bearing the mark of the other as a foreign power. Pronunciation, however, can only ever be native: it is where the force and life of language live. Writing, once again, will therefore only be an assured and natively French possession—it will only ever be sovereign—as “a certain writing” (une escriture certaine), when it is phonetic. By the same token, true language reform may only come from the inside, from a

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native speaker who belongs to the French community. It can only come from the nursing breast, which Meigret affirms in the Traité as the true origin of language: “For a language is of such a nature that it requires for its beginning the breast of nurses and the common usage received by almost all conditions of men in a nation; nor has it ever been the case since the world is world that men other than those of the country had the power to change the usage of a language.” (Car ung langage est de telle nature, qu’il requiert pour son commencement la tette des nourrisses, & le commun usage receu presques de toutes conditions d’homes d’une nation: ny ne fut oncques trouvé depuis que le monde est monde, qu’autres homes que ceux du pays ayent eu puissance de changer l’usage d’une langue.) The word puissance—which has otherwise only been used in a linguistic-­ metaphysical sense to designate the equivalence between speech and writing— now appears in a sociopolitical context: contrary to what Jean Bodin says of the sovereign (“One could say . . . that it is a true mark of sovereignty to compel subjects to change their language”), for Meigret, only native speakers—those who have suckled at the vernacular breast—have the power to change their language. This puissance is dually rooted in a social habitus and a natural/biological principle (the origin of language in “la tette des nourrisses”). Power and authority in language—for the first writer of a French grammar written in French—do not come from outside but from the sovereign presence of “here” and “us,” from a supposedly natural origin in the body and the voice. The Gallic Hercules, we discover, is an asymmetrical but reversible figure: power travels down the telephone wire to the ear of the people, but it can also travel back again, to its eternal source and origin. In the preface to his translation of Lucian, published in 1548, shortly after the death of François, Meigret tells us who else was on his side in the orthographic debate (or so he has heard): “Of the same opinion too was (as I once heard) our late last King, who often debated the great superfluity of letters in our writing: who was a prince that one can veritably, and without a note of flattery, confess that he was in his time the paragon of French eloquence.” (De meme auis aosi a eté (come de nageres j’ey entendu) le feu Roe dernier trespassé, en debattant souuent la grande superfluité des lettres de noutr’ ecritture: qi etoet vn prinçe q’on peut veritablement, e sans note de flatteríe, confesser auoer eté de son temps le parragon de l’eloqence Françoeze.)84 In case we had any doubt in identifying this king, his name is tagged for us, printed in the margins: Le Roe Francoes.

Chapter 7

Survival Du Bellay and the Life of Language

For languages are not born of themselves like herbs, roots, and trees. —Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living or dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival. —Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally

Beyond Life and Death In a lecture titled “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions” delivered on January 16, 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche decried the teaching of language in German schools. His wish—his demand for culture, for the future—was that language be treated pedagogically as living, that it be approached not as the object of linguistic science but as the material of a linguistic training. “Instead of that purely practical method of instruction by which the teacher accustoms his pupils to severe self-­discipline in their own language,” he writes, we find . . . the rudiments of a historico-­scholastic method of teaching the mother-­tongue: that is to say, people deal with it as if it were a dead language and as if the present and future were under no obligations to it whatsoever. The historical method has become so universal

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in our time that even the living body of the language is sacrificed for the sake of anatomical study. But this is precisely where culture begins—namely, in understanding how to treat the quick as something vital, and it is here too that the mission of the cultured teacher begins: in suppressing the urgent claims of “historical interests” wherever it is above all necessary to do properly and not merely to know properly.1 There is a rather remarkable historical irony to this demand placed on the future. As we saw in Chapter 1, the modern opposition between “living” and “dead” languages—the opposition that underlies the perceived scandal of treating a “living” language as if it were “dead”—emerges at precisely the same moment, around 1530, that the “mother tongue” begins to be treated as a scientific and technological object. The “living” language only appears as such when that same language is treated as what Nietzsche calls “dead.” The vernacular tongue comes to life in the sixteenth century by being anatomized—and by being opposed to a new category of phantom, the so-­called “dead” language. A language lives, we say in everyday language, when it is used—and, above all, spoken—by the living. It dies when it is no longer spoken, when it is only text. French is “living.” Latin and Greek are “dead.” This thinking relies on an obvious metaphysical distinction that equates speech with life and writing with death—even though talking about languages as “living” and “dead” would already seem to extend the category of “life” beyond the organic to what is historical. But the life of language, in this everyday metaphor, is attached to organic and biological life—and, specifically, human life—in a way that is curious and difficult to calculate. In France, there are currently twenty-­six languages that UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) classifies as “endangered,” including Auvergnat, Champenois, Gascon, Limousin, and Poitevin-­Saintongeais. These languages are not dead yet, however. The moment of language death is generally defined by linguists as the loss, that is, the biological death, of a language’s last “native speaker.” “To say that a language is dead is like saying that a person is dead,” writes the linguist David Crystal in his book devoted to the topic, Language Death. “A language dies when nobody speaks it any more.”2 On the way to death, when a language is spoken by only a few older people and lacks intergenerational transmission, it is said to be “moribund,” on its last legs. We see here a codependence or vital symbiosis of a language with this thing we call a “native speaker,” that vocal apparatus in which the idiom survives until its final breath. When, for example, Ned

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Maddrell died in 1974 at the age of ninety-­seven, Manx, the language of the Isle of Man, died with him. UNESCO estimates that half of the world’s six thousand languages face extinction by the end of the twenty-­first century, disappearing “unwritten and undocumented.”3 In 2012, Google launched its “Endangered Languages Project,” an information database and resource center for endangered languages, featuring an interactive language map.4 It is in this scene that a whole taxonomy of language life has sprung up to define just how alive, or how dead, a language is at a given point. As of 2010, UNESCO qualified 596 languages in the world as “vulnerable,” 646 as “definitely endangered,” 527 as “severely endangered,” 574 as “critically endangered,” and 230 as very recently “extinct.”5 To “go extinct” is the deathliest death: it means no living speakers and no active cultural use, but also no writing or half-­life. An extinct language is dead without a trace. Meanwhile, thirteen languages in the world are considered “revitalized”—that is, brought back from death through active cultural or political intervention. The most striking and successful example of modern language revival would, of course, be Hebrew, which survived exclusively as a written and liturgical language for 1,500 years and is now spoken, again, by some nine million people. But there are also smaller revivals. Manx has been revived, as has Cornish, the Celtic tongue native to the Cornwall region of England, whose last native speaker died in the late eighteenth century. After going completely unspoken for nearly one hundred years, Cornish underwent such a successful revival in the twentieth century that one can today hear Cornish on the BBC, watch Cornish tutorials on YouTube, and search online dictionaries for Cornish words. In contrast to their “revitalized” or “extinct” counterparts, what we normally call dead languages—Latin, Greek—are a distinct breed. Properly “dead” languages are distinguished by the fact that, despite having ceased to “live,” they nevertheless survive in a written form that remains legible to us. They are taught and learned, circulated and published, read and even written. Dead languages die without dying off; they perish only to persist without voices, bodies, or tongues. Dead languages live on as text, as gramme. But dead language does not wait, of course, for a natural “death” as linguists define it—that is, until the last living speaker passes away (like Ned Maddrell who died in 1974, taking Manx with him). To become a dead language, the conditions of language death have to be present in an anticipatory form long before a language makes it onto the UNESCO watchlist. The great dead languages of the West are the great self-­ archivers, the auto-­recorders. To become “dead,” an afterlife must have been anticipated, cultivated. Yet what language is not anticipating death? The very

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existence of so-­called dead languages like Latin and Greek—languages that live on without their human hosts—should alert us to the ghostliness at work in every living language during its ostensible “lifetime.” As soon as language leaves traces, consigns itself—as writing or recording, as oral history or collective memory—it has entered survival mode. It has already begun to preserve itself in an external site, to retain the past and project itself into the future. More rigorously, then, and following Derrida’s thinking of arche-­writing and the trace, we could say that in order for there to be language at all, there must be language death. No language life without language death. Even as survival techniques vary immensely across the uncountable languages of world history, death always and inevitably conditions the historical “life” of a language. Death is always underway. This would in fact be a first condition in order for a language to “live” historically: that it welcome its own death. Our language will die: this is the constant, anticipatory refrain we have seen in the preceding chapters from the first writers of French grammars, dictionaries, orthographies, poetic treatises, and from the generation that undertakes to “reduce” French “into art.” This reduction—of inscription, mechanization, reproduction—keeps language from dying off. This is the principle of Geoffroy Tory’s Rule and his accents; it is the thought of Jacques Dubois, the physician and anatomist, who published the first French grammar. It is the foundation of phonography, as Jacques Peletier reminds us in his Dialogue/ de l’Ortografe/: “We can see that [our language] will not last forever as a vernacular any more than Greek and Latin. All things perish under heaven, the grace of words could hardly live forever. And thus we must strive to reduce it into art, not for us at all, but for those who will live when it will no longer be as it is presently, except in books.” (Nous pouuons antendre/ qu’ęle/ n’est pas pour durer tousjours an vulgere/ nomplus que le/ Greq e Latin. Toute/ s chose/ s perice/ t souz le Ciel, tant s’an faut que/ la grace/ des moz puisse/ tousjours vivre/ . E partant, il nous faut eforcer de/ la reduire/ an art: non point pour nous du tout, męs pour ceus qui viuront lors qu’ęle/ ne se trouvera plus tele/ qu’ęle/ ęt de/ presant, sino[n] de/ dans les Livre/ s.)6 The “living” would be what offers itself for “reduction” and reproduction; language comes to life as it issues from the machine on its way to the archive. The modern French language might be said, then, to exist in a state of half-­life. This category is in fact introduced by the Italian philologist Benedetto Varchi, who divided the category of “dead language” (lingue morte) into two subcategories: morte affatto and mezze vive.7 By morte affatto, or “completely dead,” Varchi means the kind of language we earlier called “extinct”—languages

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of which no written records have survived and which are no longer understandable. By mezze vive, or “semi-­alive,” he means what we now call “dead”: those languages which, although they are no longer spoken naturally by any people, can nevertheless be learned from teachers, or books, and then spoken or written, like Greek and Latin, or even Provençal. “And so they are called ‘half-­alive,’ ” says Varchi, “because whereas the first ones [the completely dead] are dead in both voice and writing . . . these second ones died in voice alone, and even if they do not speak, they are understood by those who love them.”8 In this final chapter, I turn to what is undoubtedly the most canonical text of the French vernacular revolution, Joachim Du Bellay’s La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, first printed in Paris in 1549, which I will suggest offers a thinking of the “life” of vernacular language precisely as survival. As Derrida suggests, this survival does not come after life, as something added onto life; rather, it is life. “Life is living on,” Derrida affirms in his final interview with Le Monde, “life is survival [la vie est survie].”9 The survival of language that emerges in Du Bellay’s manifesto will have everything to do with the supplement of techne, which appears under various guises: as the literary technique of imitatio, as agricultural grafting, and, I argue, as printing technology. Important scholarly readings of the Deffence in recent decades, including those of Timothy Hampton in Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century and Marcus Keller in Figurations of France, have examined how Du Bellay’s text negotiates the relationship between language and national community during a moment of instability for French national identity, constructing from out of this instability an enduring model of literary nation-­building. As Keller argues, the vision of the national language that Du Bellay proposes is profoundly troubled by a lack of origin: “Neither nation nor language is original from the beginning nor can they be retraced to a fixed origin.”10 Imitation comes, Keller suggests, to stand in as a “quasi-­origin” that founds both nation and national language but simultaneously leaves them exposed as inorganic and unnatural. While drawing on this work, I will be concerned here not with the question of nation as such but rather with the way printing technology and technē more generally operate in the Deffence to bring a native French language to “life” while simultaneously fissuring that life, constitutively, with its opposites—technē, foreignness, mechanicity, death. What Du Bellay’s Deffence shows us more vividly than any other text, I suggest, is the “life” of the French language running on mechanical reproduction.

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The First Flowers of Spring We have described the nature of trees that grow of their own accord . . . and there remain those which owe what is more truly described as their formation than their birth to art and to the ingenious devices of mankind.11 —Pliny the Elder, Natural History

La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse begins with a graft. At the beginning of the first edition from 1549, before the first majuscule L of the title of Du Bellay’s famous manifesto, we find something other than a letter: a printer’s ornament that looks like this: •. This ornament goes by many names: vine leaf, ivy leaf, floral heart, fleuron, or Aldus leaf (this last name after the early Venetian printer Aldus Manutius who was the first to print italics, who introduced the comma, and who invented the small, portable octavo format books; it would seem, however, that he never actually printed the so-­called Aldus leaf). The vine-­leaf ornament first appeared in printed books in the early sixteenth century. Today you can make one on a computer in Microsoft Word (as I have done here) or using Unicode, the computing industry standard for representing and handling characters from different writing systems that assigns each character a four-­digit code. The • glyph, which Unicode refers to as a “Rotated Floral Heart Bullet” and assigns the code U+2767, is based on designs by sixteenth-­century French type designer Claude Garamond; like the popular Garamond font, • is a piece of Renaissance typography surviving in the digital world, four digits at a time. In the sixteenth century, the vine leaf was just as reproducible as it is today, though in a more material mode. The piece of type that made the impression on Du Bellay’s title page (Figure 24) was produced through a series of steps that are by now familiar: a steel punch • was designed and cut by a punchcutter, and it was then used to form a softer copper matrix •; this matrix was in turn used to cast many identical metal sorts •; in the printer’s workshop, a vine-­leaf sort • would be selected from a type case by a compositor and arranged with the other type in a composing stick; it was then transferred into a galley, locked into a form, and placed on the bed of the press, where it was inked with leather-­covered balls, and finally imprinted on paper with the pull of a lever •. The sort • was then returned to the printer’s case for reuse. Each individual piece of metal type

Figure 24. Title page. Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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could produce thousands of identical vine-­leaf impressions before wearing down, and, in principle, an infinite number of identical sorts could be created from a single copper matrix. In fact, a matrix for this very vine leaf has been preserved and resides today at the Plantin-­Moretus museum in Antwerp, so we could in principle, make an identical copy. In principle, there is nothing unique about Du Bellay’s vine leaf. In principle, there is no original. Just like the letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and other characters on this title page, it is designed from the start to be reproducible, reusable, and “movable” into other texts and other contexts. In contrast to the hand-­illuminated foliage that decorates the incipits of many manuscripts and incunabula, this leaf has been cut down to a single, letter-­like character, a reproducible unit that takes its place in the type case. This exact vine leaf had already appeared in dozens of other texts in Paris, Antwerp, and Bruges before it showed up in the Deffence in 1549; over the following decade, it would reappear on the title pages and in the chapter headings of books printed in Rouen, London, Zurich, and Heidelberg. This vine leaf was on the move, and it was not alone; by the time Deffence was printed in 1549, a vine-­leaf sort came standard with many type fonts and was considered a suitable ornament for all kinds of books. Historian of typography Hendrik Vervliet, performing a kind of typographical-­botanical study, has observed over two hundred varieties of vine-­leaf ornaments in the pages of books between 1505 and 1581.12 The vine-­leaf ornament would seem, then, to spread not unlike its organic cousin, the plant that “never stops growing,” according to Pliny the Elder. “I have,” writes Pliny in his Natural History, “seen entire country houses and mansions encircled by the shoots and clinging tendrils of a single vine.”13 The vine leaf epitomizes the boundless force of physis. In the context of France in the mid-­sixteenth century, this leaf must also be seen as an outgrowth of the Fontainebleau aesthetic that prevailed in French art and architecture beginning in the 1520s with the construction of the Galerie François I at the Château de Fontainebleau. This highly ornamental and ideologically charged aesthetic evoked at once an infinite abundance of Nature, the natural fecundity of France, and the power of François I. The vine leaf attached to Du Bellay’s title is flat and inky, an isolated piece of type in the realm of letters: this is an artificial vine that spreads via Gutenberg’s machine. Like the Langue Francoyse to be “defended” and “illustrated” in Du Bellay’s pages, it knows itself to be an imitation of life. Indeed, a wavering, uncertain relation between physis and technē will be the dark heart and driving force in Du Bellay’s Deffence, a literary manifesto for the age of print.14 As we have seen, printing blurred the lines in the sixteenth-­century imagination between natural and artificial reproduction. Printing “endowed

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writing with a reproductive system that, in its profusion, speed, and high fidelity, closely resembled the otherwise unique fertility of plants.”15 The vine leaf at the opening of the book would seem to announce, “before” the text has even begun, a reconfiguration of the relation between physis and technē—between natural or biological reproduction and mechanical reproduction—brought about in language by the new medium of print. Clinging to the title of a book concerned precisely with supplementing the natural French language with “borrowed ornaments” (ornementz . . . d’autruy), the vine leaf signals that printing is, from the beginning, grafted onto Du Bellay’s text as its own “amplification and adornment.” The vine leaf appears as the originary prosthesis or, indeed, the graft of print technology at the origin and as the origin of Du Bellay’s canonical Deffence, whose full title might more properly read: • La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse. Du Bellay’s “defense” of French starts from the premise that languages are not natural and that nature is insufficient when it comes to language. If the French vernacular needs “defending” and can be “illustrated,” it is precisely because of its historical origin in technē. We discover this origin in the opening sentence of the chapter titled “The Origin of Languages”: If Nature (of whom a person of great renown has, not without reason, wondered whether we should call her mother or stepmother) had given all men the same desire and inclination, besides the innumerable benefits that would have resulted, human inconstancy would not have had to forge for itself so many ways of speaking. (Si la Nature (do[n]t quelque Personnaige de grand’ renommée non sans rayson a douté, si on la deuoit appeller Mere ou Maratre) eust donné aux Hommes vn cõmun vouloir, & consentement, outre les innumerables commitez, qui en feussent procedees, l’Inconstance humaine, n’eust eu besoing de se forger tant de manieres de parler.)16 The origin of languages: Du Bellay offers us the origin not of “language” as such but of languages, plural. Where language is artificial it is also multiple. This manifesto for the vernacular in the age of print begins by tearing language from the domain of God and Nature, and transplanting it into the realm of technē and translation. This is also the domain of citation, a grafting of other texts and other languages into the body of this text and the French language. The “person of great renown” mentioned here is Pliny the Elder, who wonders in his Natural

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History if Nature might not be a noverca, a stepmother whose name tells us she is “new” (novus), secondary, and strange.17 This opening hesitation between Mere and Maratre, placed between parentheses, makes the natural wobble metaphysically from the outset of the Deffence, revealing “its own otherness and hence the possibility of its transformation.” This possibility of transformation would be the opening onto technē, as the parenthetical marks themselves enclose this wobbly Nature in the artificial embrace of the printer’s characters.18 At Du Bellay’s “origin of languages,” in the place where a natural birth might have been, we instead find typographical labor. “For languages are not born of themselves like herbs, roots, and trees,” writes Du Bellay, invoking Aristotle’s distinction between physis and technē, “some of them sickly and weak in their kind, others healthy and robust and more capable of bearing the weight of human conceptions, but all their strength is born of the desire and will of mortals.” In this universe, all tongues have become prosthetic tongues, each prosthesis a supplement for a natural birth that never took place. The “origin of languages” announced in Du Bellay’s chapter title thus turns out to be a nonorigin of the kind theorized by Derrida, or what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler has described as a défaut d’origine, an originary “fault” that conditions the human relation to technics. Stiegler draws on the Greek myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus to describe what he views as the originary technicity of the human: when Epimetheus forgets about humans while distributing traits to all the animals, his brother Prometheus steals arts and fire from the gods to compensate for the lack. Rather than a “full origin, followed by a fall,” in this myth “there will have been nothing at the origin but the fault, a fault that is nothing but the de-­fault of origin or the origin as de-­fault [le défaut d’origine ou l’origine comme défaut].”19 Du Bellay’s stepmother (Maratre) Nature is, like the Greek Epimetheus, a deity who has neglected humans; languages arrive in the Deffence like Prometheus’s stolen gift as a response to this neglect. Pliny’s Nature, that suspected noverca, is similarly neglectful. Du Bellay opens the future of language by reproducing at the beginning of his text—as the beginning of his text—the original fault in the natural that must be supplemented by technics. Our vine leaf appears two more times here, large and then small, a figure for this belated but originary technological supplement at the so-­called origin of languages. Meanwhile, the historiated initial S, a staple of French books of the period, imitates the aesthetic of manuscripts with a cheap and reproducible woodblock—reminding us that the vine leaf is itself a residual piece of manuscript illumination, broken down by the printer into a fragmented unit the size of a letter (Figure 25).

Figure 25. “L’origine des langues” (The origin of languages). Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, n.p. [A4r]. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Du Bellay’s book famously proposes a new paradigm of literary imitatio, the imitation of ancient and foreign authors. This program has the revolutionary ambition of throwing out the old French canon in order to found a new national literature. But this book also constitutes a radical rethinking of what language is in 1549, and what the French vernacular might become—what fruits and flowers it might produce—as an imitation of life. If languages are not natural, not “born of themselves,” but are products of technē brought into being by human hands, then French remains to be invented. As it was for Tory in Champ fleury, the mechanical reproduction of language in print is what opens this horizon of technological invention, and, however paradoxical it might seem, the invention of a vernacular poetic idiom—that untranslatable thing (Du Bellay will banish the translators from his scene of poetic production), the “native” thing, the “ je ne sais quoi propre seulement à elle” that each language worthy of the name possesses. Such would be the promise of printing. This is Du Bellay’s major intervention in the history of the French language, in what we could call the “life” of the French language. The vernacular may be a “mother tongue,” but it can be artificially enhanced: amplified, adorned, and augmented. Not only can it be enhanced, according to Du Bellay it must be enhanced in order to survive, since previous generations have left it “naked,” “without art and without ornament.” The central figure for this supplement, as we will see below, is the graft: the branches of one plant attached to the roots of another in order to produce, and reproduce, a new species of language. It is not surprising then that the Deffence situates its own arrival at the end of winter and opens with an offering of flowers. In a dedicatory epistle dated February 15, 1549, the young poet presents his text as a bouquet to his uncle, the influential cardinal and royal diplomat Jean Du Bellay. These flowers—that is, the Deffence itself—herald the coming of a new springtime in France: “Then accept with that customary goodness . . . the first fruits or, to put it better, the first flowers of spring.” (Reçois donc avec cette accoutumée bonté . . . les premiers fruits, ou, pour mieux dire, les premières fleurs du printemps.)20 In the literary and visual culture of the French Renaissance, the flower is a polysemous and overdetermined figure. It can represent reproduction, agricultural abundance, sexuality, or fertility; it can figure poetic and rhetorical copiousness; it can stand for the French state, from the fleur-­de-­lis to the image of France as a fertile techno-­garden of letters that we saw with Tory and his Champ fleury. The flower is also, however, a privileged figure for what we would now call the copying and pasting of text. Flowers in this last sense are bits of language—quotations or excerpts—reproduced outside of their original context.

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As is by now well known, the text of the Deffence is itself the product of a covert cut-­and-­paste operation. Du Bellay adapted his French text from an Italian dialogue on language, Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue of 1542, often translating it word for word while reducing its dialogic form to the monologue of a treatise.21 In his landmark analysis revealing the “Italian sources” of the Deffence, Pierre Villey concludes that “this work, essential in the history of our literature, is not at all, as was generally thought, an original work.”22 Even as the bouquet Du Bellay offers his uncle evokes natural French abundance and a future propagation of the language through imitatio, it also signals that the Deffence belongs to a culture of textual reproduction in which copying, borrowing, and stealing are common practices facilitated by printing’s mechanism of repeatability—and thus a culture in which any “nature” or “originality” in language may only be a manufactured simulacrum of the press. It turns out that Du Bellay’s bouquet is cut from the plant of another language, transplanted into France. If for Heidegger the blossoming flower is the paradigmatic figure of physis in opposition to technē, Du Bellay’s new French springtime is one in which all apparitions of physis—all flowers—are haunted by a reproductive technology with which the language “illustrates” itself, but against which it must also “defend” itself.23 “There are writers greater than Du Bellay; there is none more national,” proclaimed one member of the Académie française on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the Deffence in 1949.24 However true it may be that Du Bellay will make the relation between writer, nation, and language appear natural in the Deffence—thereby laying the ideological groundwork for national language identity and its literary expression—the sutures of technē and the joining of the graft can still be discerned at its points of articulation. Precisely because he is France’s “most national” poet, Du Bellay allows us to glimpse the machinery at the heart of a proto-­national language on the rise.

French in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction If you walked into a bookshop in Paris during the mid-­sixteenth century, Du Bellay’s title page and others like it are most likely what you would have seen: not the spines or covers of books but title pages. This is because books were often sold unbound, as loose sheets, with the title page displaying information about the book for the prospective buyer. In fact, this was the primary function of the title page when printers and publishers first introduced it in the late fifteenth century; it is the reason the colophon moved up front. The title page is,

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then, already a mark or symptom of the book as a commodity, an object reproduced many times over, a product (as Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong argued more than a half century ago) of the world’s first assembly-­line manufacture. The title page of the Deffence tells you the title of the book and, in a more enigmatic way, the name of the author: the letters I.D.B.A. stand for Joachim du Bellay Angevin, that is, the young poet from Anjou with a famous family name. The title page also tells you as the reader where you can buy the book: at the boutique of bookseller Arnoul L’Angelier in Paris, at the second pillar of the Great Hall in the Palace. This is a sales technique, but it is also a legal requirement instituted by François I along with the printer’s mark; it is part of the royal surveillance mechanism over printing. In this way, the title page exposes the book—that is, it makes it vulnerable to oversight and control. The title page also tells the reader that this book was printed in 1549 “with privilege,” that is, with a commercial monopoly granted to the printer or bookseller giving him exclusive rights to the text and guaranteeing that it cannot be legally reprinted or sold by any other printer or bookseller for a specified period of time (in this case, for three years). If we flip the page (Figure 26), we find a printed copy of that royal privilege, where the word deffence appears not only in the title of the book but also in another context—as a prohibition against printing, “deffence d’ imprimer,” a prohibition that arose in the late fifteenth century in the face of an increasingly competitive French book market and, above all, the unprecedented ease with which books were disseminated and could be copied technologically, and thus pirated or stolen (as Du Bellay is himself doing, to a certain extent, with his pirating of Speroni’s text in the pages within).25 “The concept of copyright was unknown in the manuscript era,” affirms Elizabeth Armstrong.26 It was common for French printers or booksellers to reproduce the privilege, in part or in whole, at the front or (less commonly) at the back of the work. The legal authority of the privilege for the Deffence and the collection of Du Bellay’s poetry that accompanied it, L’Olive, is marked at the end of the text with the “signature” of the King’s counsel and the declaration that it is “sealed with yellow wax”: a signature and seal that cannot be represented in this medium, and which therefore got remediated in this strange, ekphrastic way—although, following Derrida, the signature would always be affected by this reproducibility or movability into another medium (“in order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production”).27 What does not appear here, or anywhere else in the book, is the name of the printer who produced the text.

Figure 26. “Extraict du Privilege” (Excerpt from the Privilege). Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, n.p. [title page verso]. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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The most likely candidate is François Girault, who operated as a printer in Paris between 1546 and 1551. Girault produced a number of texts for Arnoul L’Angelier and his brother Charles while in Paris and is known to have been living at a house they owned, the Maison de l’Ange-­lié on the rue d’Ablon, in 1547. Nina Catach identifies Girault as the printer of the Deffence based on several idiosyncratic irregularities in the typography, the use of traditional orthography and archaisms, and the “poor typographical correction.”28 There is also the vine leaf, another signature: at least one text known to have been printed by Girault from 1547 features a liberal use of the same vine-­leaf type featured on the opening page of the Deffence.29 If the researcher or reader today consults the copy of the Deffence housed in the Bibliothèque nationale—either online or in person—she or he will find several marks the sixteenth-­century buyer in the bookshop would not have seen, including a red stamp indicating that it once belonged to the “royal library,” and pencil marks indicating its modern call number in the Rare Book Reserve, which houses two hundred thousand of the library’s “most precious printed books.”30 To access the Rare Book Reserve, one must—after obtaining a research card—access “Salle Y,” a reading room on a different floor from the rest of the research library, where the researcher fills out a paper form (in pencil, standard practice in most rare-­book rooms, so as not to leave any marks) presenting one’s “motivation” for seeing the rare book. If the book has been digitized and uploaded onto the Gallica site, as the Deffence has, it is unlikely the researcher will be able to touch the original, unless she or he has a compelling reason for needing to see the physical object—something that could not be seen from the digital copy online, something that escaped the transfer into the new medium. Once the book has been digitized, everyone has what we increasingly refer to as “access” to this book, but no one can touch it. There’s a distinct historical irony to this situation, given that Du Bellay situates his project in a media landscape where books are abundant and eminently touchable—where they must be handled and touched, and not just seen, in order for the new French language to come into being. Du Bellay addresses his instructions to the “future poet”: a poet, we could say, of a new media paradigm. This poet will be, first and foremost, a handler of reading materials. If you wish to “enrich” your tongue, Du Bellay advises, first you must read: “First then, O future Poet, read and reread. With nightly and daily hand, turn over the pages [the word here is feuillette, “leaf through”] of Greek and Latin books [exemplaires, not just books, but copies of books; an exemplaire is that which has already been copied, or else an exemplar, a model to be copied.] Then do me the

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favor of leaving [aside] all those old French poetic forms.” (Ly donques et rely premierement (ô Poëte futur), fueillete [sic] de Main nocturne et journelle les exemplaires Grecz et Latins: puis me laisse toutes ces vieilles poësies Francoyses.)31 The future poet is a reader and a re-­reader, an around-­the-­clock reader whose hand never stops leafing through copies in order to make more copies. It is worth noting that the verb feuilleter takes on this sense of “leafing through” pages at precisely this historical moment. It makes its first appearance in French around 1500 and is rare until the mid-­sixteenth century. It is, in short, a print word, emerging from and belonging to the world of folios and leaves. (An earlier sense, used as a past participle, feuilleté, meant “decorated with foliage,” like the manuscript illuminations the printer’s vine leaf imitates, fragments, and mechanizes.) In Robert Estienne’s French-­Latin Dictionnaire, the classical Latin translations he gives for feuilleter all involve the verb volvo, suggesting a rolling, unrolling, or unwrapping, that is, the continuous action of reading a scroll as opposed to the flipping of pages in a codex. The same set of gestures can be found under a different verb in the verse from Horace’s Ars Poetica that Du Bellay knowingly translates and adapts here as part of his own reading and rereading machinery. When Horace instructs the would-­be Latin poet to daily and nightly read Greek exemplars, his verb is verso, a “turning,” “turning over,” or “spinning”—all manual motions that make sense when we consider that the codex did not emerge as a dominant medium until well after Horace’s death. Yet this verso, which for Horace turns Greek into Latin, also signifies a gesture of altering, overturning, or destroying. Du Bellay’s term feuillette is a translation that not only modernizes Horace but also imitates the “turning” of Horace’s verso by proposing a revolutionary media paradigm: with a different set of gestures, with different materials and different metaphors, he turns over Horace and the ancient poets—by reading them, by imitating them—in an apparent overthrowing of one media regime by another. This passage comes from a chapter titled “What Kinds of Poems the French Poet Should Choose” (“Quelz genres de Poëmes doit elire le Poëte Françoys”). The French poet, writes Du Bellay, must choose the ancient literature published by humanist printers like Robert Estienne, not the old vernacular poets of the manuscript or early print world. The future poet here appears a student—as Du Bellay himself was while composing this manifesto—and a consumer in the literary marketplace. Paris became an early printing capital for many reasons, but it was above all because of the city’s enormous student population; it is no coincidence that, as we have seen, the first printing press was brought to Paris by two Sorbonne professors, one of them the university librarian, or that the Latin

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Quarter was home to the printing industry. The streets were packed with printers; in 1540, there were more than thirty printing workshops on rue Saint-­ Jacques alone. Students need, buy, and use books; often, they use them up. As we saw in Chapter 2, Gutenberg’s first publication was not his Bible, it was Donatus’s student grammar (the Ars Minor). Du Bellay’s future poet-­student stands in the Latin Quarter bookshop before an array of title pages, deciding which books to grab, buy, take home, mark up, and eventually appropriate and imitate in order to produce a book of his own. Du Bellay’s poet must be, like most sixteenth-­century students, an active handler and mishandler of books, a treater and a mistreater of mechanically reproduced texts. The Deffence itself is a small-­ format book, an octavo: a portable little book to carry around in a student’s satchel, pocket, or hand. The sense that printing put more books into more hands—and that this was one of its major technological achievements—is a constant refrain in fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century accounts of printing. Printing means a material profusion of cheaper books; this fact is often tied to its miraculous “restoration” of Greek and Latin letters. Du Bellay’s future poet is the print native we saw in Chapter 5, a writer coming of age as this worldwide explosion of the manuscript library was being consolidated as a new cultural norm. Some facts and figures give us a better sense of this phenomenon. The first printing press arrived in Paris in 1470. Data culled from the Universal Short Title Catalogue on the number of editions printed per year in Paris during the first hundred years of print indicates that the overall trend in book production was a constant increase until around 1540, when production leveled off. By that time, hundreds of print shops were operating in Paris. There were ten workshops located just on the streets immediately surrounding the Collège de Coqueret, where Du Bellay was studying with Pierre de Ronsard and is said to have composed the Deffence. When the manifesto appeared in 1549, the French print market was thriving. Almost one thousand different editions were published in France that year, over five hundred in Paris alone. Although we have to speculate about the size of each edition’s print run, it can be estimated that between roughly 150,000 and 500,000 copies of new books were for sale in Paris the year the Deffence was published, most of them in Du Bellay’s immediate environment in the Latin Quarter. Given the growth rate over the first half of the sixteenth century, this number may have seemed to contemporaries to be increasing exponentially, with no sign of stopping. The print run of the first edition of Du Bellay’s book—a treatise by a young, unknown author, however famous his name—was likely small, as low as four

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hundred copies, or perhaps as large as eight hundred or a thousand. Today, only nine copies survive: two in the United Kingdom, two in the United States, one in the Netherlands, three in France, one in Russia. The infinite diffusion of books promised by print now feels remarkably finite. The sixteenth-­century printed book has become a quasi-­unique and quasi-­untouchable object, a “rare” book. It has today accumulated what Walter Benjamin famously calls “aura,” that quality of uniqueness, tradition, and physical proximity or distance supposedly destroyed by the advent of mechanical reproduction. It is often forgotten that Benjamin mentions the printing press at the beginning of his “Work of Art” essay. Before the modern media of photography and film there is movable type, what Benjamin is perhaps the first to refer to as the “mechanical reproduction of writing,” and which he suggests brought about “enormous changes” in literature.32 Benjamin does not dwell on printing, citing it only as a kind of world-­historical anticipation of the media culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Du Bellay, for his part, reveals himself to be highly attuned to the auratic and eager, in a first moment, to engineer its decline—if only to manufacture it anew. The rise of the vernacular means, in a first “revolutionary” moment, the decline of the auratic literary object. Vernacularization and mechanical reproduction as Benjamin theorizes it in this sense go hand in hand. Du Bellay’s figure for aura on several occasions is the “reliquary,” that container for the holy remains of saints. He will speak of Greek and Latin being “inaccessible” languages shut up inside the “reliquary of books,” while the vernacular is a language that lives in the body, in the mouth.33 When others insist that certain disciplines cannot be taught in French, Du Bellay writes that he is reminded “of those relics that one can see only through a small window and that one is forbidden to touch with one’s hand” (de ces reliques, qu’on voit seulement par une petite vitre, et qu’il n’est permis toucher avecques la main), instead of translating them into words that “are alive and fly commonly through the mouths of men” (qui sont vives et volent orinairement par les bouches des hommes).34 “Dead” language is auratic; the irreproducible is auratic. The rise of print, which is also the rise of French, marks a shift in the realm of language from what Benjamin calls “cult value” to “exhibition value,” an exhibition whose most prominent sign may be the title page. This is a moment when the masses are called upon to “get closer to things” (Benjamin), to overcome the uniqueness of the ancient literary object in its dead language, “to get hold of an object at close range in an image or, better, in a facsimile, a reproduction.”35 Let us listen to Du Bellay, in his conclusion, invite the vernacular masses to march on tradition, to overcome the sacred nature of the literary object, to get their hands on everything they can: “Up

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then, Frenchman! March courageously on that proud Roman city and from her captured spoils . . . adorn your temples and altars. . . . Pillage for me without scruple the sacred treasures of that Delphic temple.” (Là doncq, Francoys, marchez couraigeusement vers cete superbe cité Romaine: et des serves depouilles d’elle . . . ornez voz temples et autelz. . . . Pillez moy sans conscience les sacrez thesors de ce temple Delphique.)36 The vine leaf reappears here at the conclusion like a figure for the pillaged goods, the stolen ornaments of antiquity now rendered reproducible and delivered into the hands of all French readers. The entire poetic project of the Deffence is in fact premised on a desacralization of literary language through appropriation and reproduction. Du Bellay’s project to imitate ancient authors is described, in one of the most famous passages from the book, as a violent process of innutrition, a “devouring” and “digestion.” What we will witness here is not only the massive conversion of the Latin and Greek tradition into French but also the violent passage into a new medium, through the machine that gets figured as the reproductive reading body of the poet. In the chapter “How the Romans Enriched Their Language” (“Comment les Romains ont enrichy leur Langue”), Du Bellay writes that Roman poets enriched their tongue “by imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting .  .  . the best author, all or whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed and, like shoots, grafted them and applied them to their own tongue, as I said above” (immitant les meilleurs aucteurs Grecz, se transformant en eux, les devorant, et apres les avoir bien digerez, les convertissant en sang et nouriture, se proposant .  .  . le meilleur aucteur, dont ilz observoint diligemment toutes les plus rares et exquises vertuz, et icelles comme grephes, ainsi que j’ay dict devant, etoint et apliquoint à leur langue).37 Getting hold of the text and turning its pages daily and nightly means annihilating it in a machinery of imitation whose goal is the “enrichment” of the poet’s own tongue. Like the manuscript exemplar that feeds the press, the model disappears (indeed, it was usually discarded) once the text has been reproduced. For Du Bellay’s poet, the uniqueness of the model is assimilated in a reproduction that seems to take place on the level of what we now, in a metaphor of genetic writing, call DNA, as a “conversion” into “blood and nourishment.” Du Bellay’s imitatio and the body of his poet are caught up not only in the scene of printing but also in its economy. The poetry that the Deffence will go on to inspire is characterized, as Cécile Alduy has argued, by a “lyric economy” that is “cost-­effective,” designed to maximize literary potential and artistic profit.38 If “poetics is always about production (poiesis),” as Marc Shell suggests,

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here we find a new vernacular poetics locking into printing as it generates new reproductive possibilities.39 The site where this locking-­in occurs, Du Bellay tells us in this strange mechanical-­corporeal scene, is la langue: a language-­ tongue enriched by the application of grafts.

“To Write Means to Graft” As we saw, the printing numbers in France accelerate rapidly leading up to the 1540s. If we were to break the production of those books down by language, a somewhat different picture emerges. Latin dominates the print market in France—largely with titles by ancient authors like Cicero or contemporary humanists like Erasmus—until about 1540 (the same moment when the overall book production in France levels off), at which point its market share begins to drop precipitously. In 1556, the number of editions printed in French surpasses Latin for the first time, and this reversal will prove definitive. This analysis is limited; it tells us only about the quantity of editions and not the size of print runs or actual sales. Nevertheless, it indicates a major shift taking place around 1550, a material correlate to the “rise” of the vernacular language. In the French context, Du Bellay and his Deffence are practically synonymous with this “rise” of the vernacular, its cultural “triumph” over Latin, and the emergence of the national language. Yet the relation of Du Bellay’s manifesto to printing has remained something of a blind spot in the legacy of this canonical book. Indeed, the fact that Du Bellay and his contemporaries printing do not themselves put printing explicitly at the center of their discussion of the vernacular has been taken as grounds for sidelining it as a force in the Deffence and elsewhere. In Language and Nation in the Sixteenth Century, for example, Timothy Hampton takes stock of Benedict Anderson’s claim that print-­languages come to constitute the basis of a “new form of imagined community,” and he recognizes that “Du Bellay and his contemporaries stand at a crucial moment” in this process.40 Yet Anderson and, by proxy, the historical forces of printing are just as quickly dismissed as insufficiently complex for understanding the relationship between language and nation at mid-­century, since “most of the discussions of language and nation by Du Bellay’s contemporaries focus, not on the printing trade, but on the relationship between the nation and the court, which is seen to have been invaded by Italians.”41 To read the Deffence without printing, I suggest, is to overlook the technological forces that shape Du Bellay’s understanding of language. To acknowledge the centrality of printing in La Deffence, et Illustration

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de la Langue Francoyse means to take a metaphysical risk, however, since it means acknowledging the technological origin—or nonorigin—of a national literature at this founding moment. To see printing in Du Bellay’s imitatio means to recognize the “mother tongue” as mechanical and reproducible. Du Bellay makes explicit that modern technology, and printing in particular, goes hand in hand with his project for the vernacular. He foresees a cynical reader objecting that French can never “acquire ornament and artifice” like Greek and Latin. In defense of this possibility—that is, in defense of a future vernacular—he says that he will “produce as witnesses” (produiray pour temoings) printing and artillery, the two commonplace hallmarks of modern technological achievement for Renaissance writers. The poetic “illustration” and “defense” of French belong to the same technological moment as printing (illustration) and artillery (defense): this project will be, like them, a “non-­ancient” invention. “I am saying only that it is not impossible that our language can one day acquire ornament and artifice as elaborate as in Greek and Latin.” (Je dy seulement qu’il n’est pas impossible que nostre langue puisse recevoir quelquefoys cest ornement et artifice aussi curieux qu’il est aux Grecz et Romains.)42 Du Bellay’s optimism for French is a decidedly technological optimism, and his French language— however much it imitates ancient tongues—is decidedly modern. His future poet belongs to the age of printing, to the “non-­ancient” epoch of printing and artillery in which Greek and Latin are “dead” and the French language lives. If Du Bellay borrows much from Jacques Peletier’s rhetoric of French nativeness and naturalness, Peletier will in turn borrow from Du Bellay’s imaginary of language coming to life. In his Art poëtique of 1555, printed using the author’s own phonetic orthography, Peletier traces the long history of writing materials and instruments from the “crude” writing technologies of Antiquity (tile, bark, wax, lead) to the developments of the post-­classical age (parchment, paper), culminating in printing, the invention of which is attributed to Nature (la Nature) herself: “And finally we have witnessed in our time that what she was preparing for so long was this much admirable Art of printing Books, which is so great that it seems she has not held in reserve any more beautiful or singular means, and that this is her last masterwork in the case of Writing.” (E an fin nous avons apęrçù de/ notre/ tans, que/ ce/ qu’ęle/ aprętoęt par si grand’ longueur: c’etoęt cet Art si admirable/ d’imprimer les Liure/ s, tel e si grãd: qu’il samble/ , qu’ęle/ ne/ se/ soęt resęruè moyẽ plus beau ni plus singulier: e que/ ce/ soęt son dęrnier chefd’euure/ an cas d’Ecriture/ .)43 Printing is the technē (“Art”) that Nature long held in reserve (the verb Peletier uses is se réserver), incrementally generating other media (bark, wax, lead) until producing her masterwork.

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Nature itself—as productive and inventive force—is marked both by a possibility of “reserve” and by the historical increase of this possibility. Even as printing is presented as a perfection and final stage of writing technology, then, Peletier observes in the next breath that Nature “still has something greater in store” (se/ resęue/ tousjours quelque/ chose/ de/ plus grand), namely, the emergence of the French vernacular tongue. Peletier casts this emergence in terms of a birth, affirming that the longer Nature labors in “delivering” (parturir), the more she “gives birth to” (enfante) useful and admirable things. In the wake of printing, in print, the French language is born and rises up: “How long has our Tongue been languishing in barbarism, poverty, and contempt? Until around our age when it has begun to awaken, and to rise up for all to see.” (Cõbien de/ tãs à etè notre/ Langue/ languissante/ an barbarie/ , pöure/ te e contanne/ mant? jusque/ s anuiron notre/ age/ qu’ęle/ à commancè a s’eueilher, e a s’ele/ uer tout de/ vue/ .)44 The advent of printing and the birth of the vernacular tongue are not only co-­events for Peletier, they are the latest developments—the ones that characterize “our age”—in the history of an ever-­reserving and ever-­increasing Nature that becomes indistinguishable from a history of technological invention. Such that even as language and machine are aligned with biological life (here, for example, the French language resembling a human child just beginning to stand on its feet), the supposedly “natural” acts of birth and reproduction reveal their technological affinities, their programmatic drive.45 And yet in the Deffence things are not quite as simple as Peletier’s narrative of linear progress, and the very notion of a technological “age” will be disrupted by the revolutionary techniques Du Bellay sets in motion. In this media scene, history doesn’t move linearly: it spirals and doubles back on itself; it goes spectral. The new medium of print calls old media back to the point that the emergent and the residual enter an indistinguishable zone. When a new tongue rises, it does so only by incorporating the archaic and the dead. In fact, as we have seen, Du Bellay will frame his poetic project as a reanimation: he wants to bring the vernacular (back) to life, that effect associated with the printing press. (We can recall, for example, the humanist Louis Le Roy affirming that printing “seems miraculously to have been discovered in order to make letters that seemed dead live again.”) Du Bellay’s uncannily rising French-­language plant from the grafting scene in Book I, Chapter 3, is a “cultivation of language” (culture de la langue), in the early modern sense of “culture” as “cultivation” or “agriculture,” a tending to natural life. He wants his generation of poets to become “good farmers” like the Romans who cut off the “old, useless” branches of their language and grafted branches “borrowed” from Greek onto their

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“trunk.”46 This is, we can recall, how Latin literature produced the “flowers” modern writers admire and desire to imitate—the flowers that came to appear “domestic” and “natural” but were in fact “artificial.” The result: a rising from the ground to “produce . . . Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, and Ciceros.”47 Here, it is the graft that transforms the tongue: no longer a “natural” tongue but one supplemented by technics, living off the matter of the foreign and the dead. Technics, writes Bernard Stiegler, is “the pursuit of life by means other than life”—although Du Bellay here lets us think of life as having no actual “other” but operating only as a series of grafting operations.48 An uncannily and self-­consciously “modern” French language emerges here, as the poet-­farmer cuts and grafts, like the printer, or like the surgeon amputating limbs and fashioning prostheses, engineering a super-­productive literary language that knows itself to be a copy, or even a copy of a copy, a simulacrum of originality and naturalness, a simulacrum of so-­called life. The very terms “nature” and “artifice,” “life” and “death,” cease to operate in the old way here. The natural “life” of the vernacular is reinvented as “life death” through a cut of technology: a cut that births literary authors and cost-­effective poems like so many fruits and flowers. Something like “aura” reenters the scene here, tenaciously holding on in the fascist mode identified by Benjamin, namely, as a technological production of great poetic names that presents itself as “natural.” What kind of a literary machine is this? And, more to the point perhaps, what age are we in? What kind of a linguistic “modernity” is this? Grafting is, of course, an ancient agricultural technology. Pliny devotes long discussions to grafted trees, those trees that are not born but “formed,” and which owe their formation “to art and to the ingenious devices of mankind.” Du Bellay calls us back to Rome, to an ancient poetic garden where Roman poet-­farmers craft their verse like trees.49 But grafting—as technique and as word—also bears within it a history of writing technologies. As Derrida reminds us, “To write means to graft, it’s the same word.”50 The French word for grafting here is greffer: “Écrire veut dire greffer. C’est le même mot.” The horticultural use of the term “graft,” or greffe in French, is believed to derive from the fact that a stylus (old French grafe or greffe; Latin graphium; Greek γραϕίον, γραϕεῖον) was used to make the incision needed for grafting to take place, or perhaps from the stylus-­ like shape of the scion. Writing and grafting thus share both an etymological root and a technical history; the two practices would themselves be joined in a graft-­like assemblage. The endurance of this assemblage into the sixteenth century is evidenced in L’Agriculture et maison rustique, which recommends that “for cutting and sharpening the grafts” (pour coupper & aguiser les greffes) the

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farmer use a canivet, a small knife used for sharpening writing quills (professional scribes were sometimes known in the fourteenth century as the gens du canivet).51 Du Bellay reactivates this technological history as he makes his own intervention in the life of the French language. His model of imitatio, which promises to “augment” the French language through grafting, behaves like a writing tool: it makes a cut. In a chapter of the Deffence on how to “amplify” French, the stylus appears as precisely the poet’s instrument of imitation and technological enhancement: “Let him who would enrich his language devote himself to the imitation of the best Greek and Latin authors and aim, as at a sure target, the point of his stylus at all their greatest strengths” (Se compose donq’ celuy qui voudra enrichir sa langue, à l’immitation des meilleurs aucteurs Grecz et Latins: et à toutes leurs plus grandes vertuz, comme à un certain but, dirrige la pointe de son style).52 Du Bellay’s new poet is armed with a writing/grafting stylus and ready to cut. Like the metal punches cut for movable type or the woodblocks cut to illustrate sixteenth-­century books, the French language must be incised in order to propagate. It’s worth noting that in Renaissance texts from Polydore Vergil’s De Inventoribus Rerum (1499) to Jacques Peletier’s Art poëtique (1555), the history of writing technologies always culminates in the invention of the printing press: “[Nature’s] last masterpiece in the case of writing” (son dęrnier chefd’euure/ an cas d’Ecriture/ ), according to Peletier, who nevertheless sees a possibility for even greater perfection in the rise of French.53 The stylus points to the printing press along a telos of technological perfection; its cut opens onto mechanical reproduction. The stylus, or style, appears in Du Bellay’s text as an archaic medium, a fantasmatic reactivation of a decidedly outmoded technology. Yet it also operates, at the same time, as a figure of new media. And it is this simultaneity that might make us start to feel dizzy, sick, or stuck, lost when it comes to any kind of linear time promised to us by such teleological narratives, or by alphabetic writing itself because the graft is also the printing press. During the Renaissance, printing and agriculture were linked through a complex system of “material facts and metaphorical fictions,” from the raw materials used in the production of printed books to the language of “leaves” and “sheaves,” and, of course, our vine leaf.54 This association is also reflected in the very structure and operation of the press: it has long been said that Gutenberg used a wine or an olive press to construct his first wooden printing press, making the machinery of printing a direct descendant of agricultural technology. Even if this archaeology is apocryphal, the frame of the press, its lever, and downward-­acting screw all resemble agricultural devices closely enough to have sparked an “analogical”

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link of the kind Michel Foucault suggests had “immense power” in the Renaissance.55 Du Bellay’s printing press is an agricultural poetry machine. What are the “fruits” and “flowers” produced by his graft if not literary brand names— Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, Ciceros—that filled the booksellers’ boutiques in sixteenth-­century Paris? This machine produces not just a unique “Virgil” or “Cicero” but multiples, copies: “Virgils” and “Ciceros” plural. Du Bellay’s “good farmer” poet is a producer of literary capital on the assembly line of vernacular print culture—a farmer who hopes his own name might end up on a title page, reproduced infinite times, bought, sold, consumed. Du Bellay’s ancient garden is a print shop, his cutting stylus is a printing press, and vice versa. His poetic machinery produces the modern tongue as an old-­new medium, a language whose emergence is conditioned on its incorporation of the residual and the archaic. This is its chance for survival. “The Natural is not sufficient for him who in Poetry would produce a work worthy of immortality” (“Le Naturel n’est suffisant à celuy qui ene Poësie veult faire oeuvre digne de l’immortalité”), proclaims Du Bellay in the title of Book II, Chapter 3.56 What the cut allows is the integration of the foreign and the inorganic—text, tools, artifice, the “dead words” (paroles mortes) of ancient authors—into the “life” of the vernacular but also of the poet, in what would no longer be mere or “natural” life but a reproducible surplus of life. The graft is a technology for producing “immortality,” literary afterlife. “And he who desires to live in the memory of posterity must, as though dead unto himself, often sweat and tremble.” (Et qui desire vivre en la memoire de la posterité, doit comme mort en soymesmes suer et trembler maintesfois.)57 Like the poet who desires immortality, the grafted vernacular becomes “dead unto [it]self ”; it, too, is made to sweat and tremble from the double cut that produces fruits and flowers only by letting death inside, just as the ancients did in their (non-­)originary scene. Du Bellay’s “first flowers of spring” thus herald the arrival of a new species of French language, one that is intensively affected by technicity, otherness, and the structure of survival. Indeed, the “natural” is not only engineered by Du Bellay but also revealed by him to be a technological product, the “native” likewise haunted by foreignness and artifice.58 Yet his revealing is at the same time a concealing. The graft is the technique that has the power to mask its own process, to obscure its technicity by producing natural-­seeming fruits and flowers. “The nature of the new tree becomes a simulacrum.”59 The Deffence itself, as a cut-­and-­paste copy of Speroni’s Dialogo, would be just as simulacral. Du Bellay sets in place a mechanism by which poetic “originality,” like the natural and native, turns technological. The fact that Du Bellay’s strategic adaptation of

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Speroni went undetected for almost four centuries would be a testament to the startling efficacy of this technique.

The Return of the Herculean Tongue “He who wishes to fly through the hands and lips of men must long dwell in his study. And he who desires to live in the memory of posterity must, as though dead unto himself, often sweat and tremble.” (Qui veut voler par les mains et bouches des hommes, doit longuement demeurer en sa chambre: et qui desire vivre en la memoire de la posterité, doit comme mort en soymesmes suer et trembler maintefois.)60 The “rising” French vernacular, which Du Bellay figures as biotechnology, represents not just the triumph of French over Latin or Italian: it is, like the effigy of the monarch, a triumph over death that is simultaneously a triumph over life. Print poetics take shape as an artificial extension of life through a reproductive technology that integrates into itself a piece of death (artifice, technē). The language, like the poet, must become “as though dead unto [it]self ” (comme mort en soymesmes). In this double triumph, it is perhaps not surprising, then, that Du Bellay’s language machinery sprouts warheads along with authors. The new French “Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, and Ciceros,” join the ranks alongside the “Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Themistocles, Caesars, and Scipios” that France has already “produced” (a . . . produit).61 The two inventions join forces in a techno-­poetico-­political machinery of dominion over life and death. Artillery “rises up” with the press and the French language, reminding us that Du Bellay’s text is first and foremost not an “illustration” but a “defense.” “The time will perhaps come . . . when this noble and powerful kingdom will in turn seize the reins of universal dominion and when our language, . . . will spring from the ground. ” (Le tens viendra (peut estre) . . . que ce noble et puissant Royaume obtiendra à son tour les resnes de la monarchie, et que nostre langue . . . sortira de terre.)62 As the vernacular emerges from the ground, the “reins” of “universal dominion”—that is, of the Holy Roman Empire—take on a strangely vine-­like quality, attaching to the language in the new assemblage of print. Speaking in a 1961 interview, Marshall McLuhan found it significant “that the old Greek myth has Cadmus, who brought the alphabet to man, sowing dragon’s teeth that sprang up from the earth as armed men.” In the Greek myth, these dragon’s teeth that “spring up as armed men” are the letters of the alphabet. Wherever these teeth are sown, McLuhan suggests, “we reap a whirlwind of

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violence.”63 Du Bellay, for his part, observes that “the glory of the Roman people derives no less . . . from the amplification of their language than from the extension of their borders” (La gloire du peuple Romain n’est moindre .  .  . en l’amplification de son Langaige, que de ses limites).64 This political “amplification of the tongue” is crystallized in two potent images in the Deffence. The first we have already seen: as the poet’s mouth is devouring ancient authors in a scene of orality and corporeality, their “virtues” suddenly become grafts to be “applied” to the poet’s langue. Caught up in the imitation machine, the human tongue gets cut and grafted, reproduced, and made other within itself. The second “amplified” tongue arrives in the closing line of the Deffence, in the “Conclusion to the Whole Work” (“Conclusion de tout l’Oeuvre”). Here Du Bellay recalls the Gallic Hercules whose tongue is pierced by a golden chain that is, in turn, attached to the ears of his people: “Remember . . . your Gallic Hercules, drawing the nations after him by their ears with a chain attached to his tongue.” (Vous souvienne . . . de votre Hercule Gallique, tirant les Peuples après luy par leurs Oreilles avecques une Chesne attachée à sa Langue.)65 For Du Bellay, the Gallic Hercules comes explicitly to represent the national vernacular extending and “amplifying” itself in an imperial trajectory, acting simultaneously as a prosthesis for the emergent nation-­state and an immortal graft for the poetic tongue. Remember, Du Bellay suggests to his future poet, that the poet’s tongue can no longer be an organ of flesh and blood. Going forward, it is a modern media technology. And the tongue is no longer the poet’s own; it must reach out and plug in to the community of readers forged by metal movable type—a France with newly pierced ears. This future may seem precarious and uncertain, but Du Bellay has told us from the beginning that language was never natural: our tongues have always been prosthetic. The quality of the first edition of the Deffence printed for the Parisian bookseller Arnoul L’Angelier is notoriously poor. Du Bellay would later reveal his own dissatisfaction with his first editions when he left L’Angelier for the printer and bookseller Frédéric Morel.66 In a brief epistle to the reader (“Au lecteur”) found at the back of the 1549 edition, Du Bellay frames the Deffence as merely a rough draft, a “design and plan” (un desseing et protraict) of “some great and laborious edifice” (quelque grand et laborieux edifice) that he might undertake in the future. He asks the reader to overlook the inevitable printing errors, since this is but a “first edition”: “As for the errors that might be found in the printing, such as letters that have been transposed, omitted, or added, the first edition will excuse them, as will the discretion of the learned reader who will not pause over such petty things.” (Quand aux fautes qui se pouroint trouver

Figure 27. “Fin de la Deffence, & illustration de la Langue Francoyse.” Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, n.p. [f5v]. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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en l’impression, comme de lettres transposées, omises ou superflues, la premiere edition les excusera, et la discretion du lecteur sçavant, qui ne s’arrestera à si petites choses.)67 Like the French language inscribed within a historical and technological becoming, the text of the Deffence itself can be improved and corrected in future editions, and printing represents at once the source of fautes and the possibility of perfection: it is the fault and the correction. One such error comes in the final line of the Deffence: in the 1549 edition, we find Du Bellay’s Gallic Hercules drawing his people with “une Chesne attachée à sa Langue” (Figure 27).68 Through a homophonous substitution of letters (chaine/chesne), the compositor has transformed the chain (chaine) into a leafy oak tree (chesne, from the Old French chasne, from the vulgar Latin casnus, from the Gallic cassanos), causing branches rather than metal links to shoot out of the technological Gallic mouth. This accidental image of the tongue acting as rootstock for a supplemental graft is, of course, Du Bellay’s own: it is the very image of the French language in the age of its technological reproducibility. Immediately following this sentence, the vine-­leaf ornament returns to signal the end of the text: •Fin de la Deffence, & Illustration de la Langue Francoyse. The printer’s ornament wraps itself around Du Bellay’s book like the oak-­tongue of the Gallic Hercules, exceeding the text, growing with no sign of stopping. As for the printing error, it will be corrected—in the next edition.69

Epilogue

As if I were its last heir, the last defender and illustrator of the French language. —Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origin

Epilogue: the word comes to us from the Greek epi, “in addition to,” and logos, “word.” The epilogue: the last word that comes to add itself to the logos of the book. In excess of the book but still bound within its pages, the epilogue is both inside and outside “the temporal and linear totality of a spoken discourse, of living speech” that the book represents.1 It comes to say, within the book, what the book has not yet said and perhaps cannot say on its own. Unlike those other genres of hors-­livre that come before the text—prefaces, forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues, prolegomena—the epilogue is not written in view of “[its] own self-­effacement,” erased by the presence of the logos of the book that must speak for itself.2 If anything, the epilogue may risk effacing what has come before, usurping the book as its ultimate truth, its final word. Yet the epilogue always comes too late: an afterthought that places itself behind the logos, in a lag, unable to make itself heard with the power of a full voice. The conclusion of Du Bellay’s Deffence, as we have seen, is an envoi that sends the would-­be French poet off—off to reproduce a new French language— with an injunction to remember the Gallic Hercules and his prosthetic tongue. In a repetition of Geoffroy Tory, Du Bellay calls up the Gallic Hercules as the pathbreaking figure of a “beginning,” sending his reader into the future. But what does this future hold? I began this book by delimiting a period of roughly

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two decades, from 1529 to around 1550, as an opening onto the technological formation of the modern French language: dates that correspond more or less to the publication of Tory’s Champ fleury in 1529 and Du Bellay’s Deffence in 1549 (Champ fleury will also be reprinted in Paris in 1549, in a small octavo format). This opening would be framed, then, by two Gallic Hercules: the one that opens Tory’s book and the one that closes Du Bellay’s. While we have occasionally transgressed these limits, with works like Robert Estienne’s Traicté de la grammaire françoise (1557) or Ramus’s Grammaire (1572), most of the texts we have seen, and the technological effects they produce, do in fact fall between these two Herculean tongues. I suggested that in the space of this opening, the sutures of the prosthetic tongue—its operational mechanisms, its underlying mechanicity—can be glimpsed. In this opening, we see printing at/as the “beginning” of a modern French language. This would imply that on the far side of 1550 something comes to a close: not that printing ceases to organize the field of vernacular language but rather that this organization becomes less visible, accessible, or modifiable. The mutation occasioned by printing ceases to mutate in the same way; it takes effect, locks into place, solidifies, institutionalizes and naturalizes itself, and therefore goes underground—without for all that coming to an end. It is no longer available in the same way, no longer exposed, and yet it continues, perhaps, to operate all the more powerfully for that very reason. There would be several signs of this closure. The first is the marked drop-­off in novelty after the 1550s. Nearly one hundred fifty different technical treatises on various arts of speaking and writing the French language will be published over the course of the sixteenth century, but few new genres will appear post-­ 1550 (see the Appendix). By 1550, French has seen its first rhetoric, grammar, poetics, dictionary, and orthography, as well as guides to punctuation, accents, typography, handwriting, letter-­writing, notary style, and more. There will, of course, continue to be innovations that extend the cultural and technological possibilities of French: multilingual dictionaries for other modern languages, such as Flemish, Spanish, and German; a rhyming dictionary (1572); and a thesaurus (1565). By and large, however, the explosiveness of the novelty period gives way to an elaboration, standardization, and “perfection” of what has already begun. The same is true for the typographical and diacritical innovations we have seen: Roman typefaces become the norm for French and stabilize in form around the Garamond aesthetic, no additional accents are introduced, and certain uses (of the cedilla and accent aigu over the e, for example) become established as the norm. Orthography remains variable and even volatile for decades to come, but the intense debate around orthography and the active possibility of

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radical phonetic reform essentially fade from view, despite later efforts by Ramus, Laurent Joubert, and others. Indeed, it is Jacques Peletier who offers us the most vivid contemporary testimony of this closure in the making in his Dialogue de l’ortografe of 1550. Peletier puts these words in the mouth of Théodore de Bèze, the anti-­reformist who systematically critiques the phonographic program, yet his pessimism speaks to a palpable sense that a certain epoch is coming—or has already come—to an end. When it comes to any future project to “reform Writing” (reformer l’Ecritture/ ), says de Bèze, it is already “too late” (trop tard): “For our language, which is today in its greatest strength and solidity, cannot suffer reform: it had to be done twenty or thirty years ago, when the language began to make progress. That was when no one would have been opposed, because at that time, or a bit earlier, everything was thought to be good.” (Car notre/ langue/ qui ´ęt aujourdhui an sa plus grand’ force/ e consistance/ ne/ peùt souffrir reformation: Ce/ la se/ de/ uoę´ t fęre/ il i à vint ou trante/ ans, lors qu’ęlle/ commançoę´ t a s’auancer. C’etoę´ t le/ tans que/ pęrsonne/ n’út contre/ dìt, par ce/ qu’allors, ou vn peu auparau­ ant, on trouuoę´ t toute/ s choses bonne/ s.)3 For Peletier, this opening “twenty or thirty years ago”—that is, the time of Tory’s Champ fleury—was a moment when radical reform could still be imagined. The limit he places on this possibility is, above all, social: that was the time when, rules not having been fixed and the tongue still in flux, experimentation was welcome and readers were receptive to reinvention. Things had changed by 1550: “Now that Frenchmen feel their hearts more than their grandfathers ever did, and now that every person who speaks French thinks he knows what’s what, what good is it to imagine you can win over not only a popular multitude, but also a certain number of people of sense and judgment? Who endeavor with each passing day to perfect their language.” (Meinte/ nant que/ les Françoęs sante/ t leur lzeur [i.e., keur] plus que/ leurs grans pere/ s ne fire/ t onq, e que/ chacun qui parle/ Fraçoęs [sic] an pa[n] se/ sauoę´ r ce/ qui an ´ę t, quel ordre/ i a il de/ cuider gagner non seule/ mant vne/ multitude/ populere/ , męs außi vn tel no[m]bre/ de/ pęrsonnage/ s d’esprit e de/ juge/ mant? léquéz s’etudie/ t de/ jour an jour a parfęre/ leur langue.)4 A generational shift has occurred: the Frenchmen of today “feel their hearts” more, that is, they have a certain confidence or pride in themselves and their language vis-­à-­vis ancient languages and rival vernaculars, and this feeling has come to be instilled in them as if on the inside, in relation to language as their “own”; every French speaker thinks he knows now what it means to speak French—how to write it, appropriate it, master it; and the French strive each day more than the last, studying this language and cultivating it, each speaker actively “perfecting” the

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tongue. It is too late for reform: the prosthetic tongue has already been attached. Peletier’s Dialogue turns out to be an epilogue, a word added on trop tard. Another sign of closure we have already seen: during the 1550s, the number of books printed in French surpasses the number of books printed in Latin for the first time in France, and the vernacular will continue to hold the dominant share of the market going forward. Even if a number of symbolic victories remain to be “won” in the cultural terrain—Latin remains the default language of education and much scholarship for many years, for example—the rise of the French vernacular no longer possesses the same pressing momentum. The “augmentation” and “illustration” of the tongue, its growth conceived both biologically and technologically, cease to have the same urgency that come across in the discourse of a Tory or a Du Bellay.5 What’s more, the accelerating proliferation of books of the previous decades begins to subside—and with it subsides the massive inflation of logo-­phonocentrism. The dust settles from the explosion of the manuscript library in print, the explosion that simultaneously extends phonography and makes visible its limits. Amid this settling of the dust, the printers keep printing and the tongues keep moving, but the horizon changes shape and certain possibilities—of reinvention, of liberation—disappear from view. François is dead, while the langage maternel francois remains the law of the land. Though perhaps it was always already too late for the French language to begin: in 1529, the plenitude and abundance of the flowering field that Tory sees on the horizon are already a belated effect of supplementarity, a prosthesis. The French tongue is born as an afterword, an epi-­logos, printed with metal letters.

Appendix

Technical Treatises on the French Language, 1500–1600

Jean Molinet, L’art et science de rhetorique (Paris, 1505) Pierre Le Fèvre (Fabri), Le grant et vray art de pleine rhetorique (Paris, 1521) Ung petit livre pour apprendre a parler francoys, alemant et ancloys: Pour apprendre a costere, a vendre et acheter (Lyon, 1525) Robert Estienne, La maniere de tourner en langue francoise les verbs actifz, passifz, gerondifz, supines et participes (Paris, 1526) Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury (Paris, 1529) Tres utile et compendieulx traicte de l’art et science d’orthographie gallicane (Paris, 1529) Nicole Gigantis, Art ou instruction pour apprendre a escrire en grosses lettres (Paris, 1530) Vocabulaire en troys langues, cest assavoir francoys, flameng et espagnol (Antwerp, 1530) Vocabulaire de trois langues, cest assavoir latine italienne et francoyse (Paris, 1530) John Palsgrave, L’esclarcissement de la langue francoyse (London, 1530) Jacques Dubois (Sylvius), In linguam gallicam isagoge, una cum ejusdem grammatica latino-­ gallica, ex hebraeis, gaecis et latinis authoribus (Paris, 1531) Étienne Dolet, Le prothocole des secretaires et aultres gens desirans scavoir l’art et maniere de dicter en bon francoys toutes lettres missives et epistres en prose (Lyon, 1534) Robert Estienne, La maniere de tourner toutes especes de noms latins en nostre langue francoyse (Paris, 1537) Le prothocolle ou formulaire, stille et art des notaires royaulx (Paris, 1537) Guillaume Postel, Alphabet et grammaires (Paris, 1538) Robert Estienne, Dictionarium Latinogallicum (Paris, 1538) Robert Estienne, Dictionnaire francois-­latin (Paris, 1539) Gratien Du Pont, Art et science de rhetorique metrifiee (Toulouse, 1539) Anonymous chez Colines, L’accord de la langue françoise avec la latine (Paris, 1540) Robert Estienne, Conjugations latines et francoyses de verbes (Paris, 1540) Étienne Dolet, La maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre (Lyon, 1540) Horace, L’art poetique (Paris, 1541) Dictionarum quator linguarum (Leuven, 1541) Jean Quinerit, La maniere de dicter lettres, missives aveqz les resonces (Toulouse, 1548) Louis Meigret, Traité touchant le commun usage de l’escriture françoise (Paris, 1542)

296 Appendix Quinque linguarum utilissimus Vocabulista: Vocabulaire de cinq langues, latin, italien, francois, espagnol, aleman (Lyon, 1542) Pierre Haschart, La maniere d’escrire, par abbreviations: Avec un petit traicté de l’orthographe Françoise (Ghent, 1544) Le dictionnaire des huict langages (Paris, 1546) Louis Enoc, Grammaire grecque, latine et françoise (Paris, 1546) Thomas Sébillet, Art poetique françois (Paris, 1548) Guillaume des Autels, Traité touchant l’ancien orthographe françois et ecriture de la langue françoise (Lyon, 1548) Joachim Du Bellay, La deffence, et illustration de la langue francoyse (Paris, 1549) Maniere de decliner les noms et verbes, tant latins que françois (Lyon, 1549) Louis Meigret, Le tretté de la grammere francoeze (Paris, 1550) Louis Meigret, Defenses touchant son orthographie françoeze (Paris, 1550) Vocabulaer in vier spraken duytsch, francois, latin, ende spaenisch, profiteliick allen den ghenen die dese spraken leeren willen (Leuven, 1551) Robert Estienne, Les mots françoys selon l’ordre des lettres (Antwerp, 1551) Le Quintil-­Horatian, sur la defense et illustration de la langue francoyse (Lyon, 1551) Jacques Jussy, Discipline sur les fondemens de la grammaire, entre le maitre et le disciple (Toulouse, 1552) Hector Forest de Vaison, Briefve et utile instruction pour enseigner et apprendre la grammaire en peu de temps (Lyon, 1552) Pierre Durand, Le stile et maniere de composer, dicter, et escrire toute sortes d’epistres ou lettres missives (Paris, 1553) Claude de Boissière, Art poetique (Paris, 1554) Pierre Habert, Le moyen de promptement et facilement aprendre en lettre Francoyse a bien lire, prononcer et escrire (Paris, 1554) L’ABC des enfans et la maniere de les interroger (Geneva, 1554) Traité pour apprendre à parler françois et l’anglois (Rouen, 1554) Antoine Fouquelin, La rhetorique francoise (Paris, 1555) Jacques Peletier, L’art poëtique (Lyon, 1555) Robert Estienne, La maniere d’exercer les enfans a decliner les noms et les verbes (Paris, 1555) Jean Le Moyne, L’instruction de bien parler et parfaictement escrire (Paris, 1556) Charles Fontaine, Autre art poetique reduit en bonne methode (Lyon, 1556) Étienne Dolet, La forme et maniere de poinctuation et accents de la langue francoise (Paris, 1556) Robert Estienne, Traicte de la grammaire françoise (Geneva, 1557) Robert Estienne, Petit dictionnaire des mots francois ainsi que les fault escrire: avec maniere de parler plus necessaires, tournez en latin pour les enfans et les autres (Geneva, 1557) Gabriel Meurier, La grammaire françoise (Antwerp, 1557) Gabriel Meurier, Vocabulaire françois-­f lameng, tresutile pour tous ceux qui veulent avoic la cognoissance du langage françois et flameng (Antwerp, 1557) Gabriel Meurier, Conjugaison, regles et instructions mout propres et necessairement requises pour ceux qui desirent apprendre françois, italien, espagnol. . . (Antwerp, 1558) Pardoux du Prat, Pratique de l’art des notaires (Lyon, 1558) Trilingues verborum conjugationes: Latinae, Gallicae, Teutonicae (Leuven, 1558) Robert Estienne, Gallicae grammatices libellus (Geneva, 1558) Abel Mathieu, Devis de la langue françoyse (Paris, 1559) Robert Estienne, Petit dictionnaire francois-­latin (Paris, 1559)



Technical Treatises on the French Language, 1500–1600

297

Abel Mathieu, Second devis de la langue francoyse (Paris, 1560) Pierre Hamon, L’alphabet de l’ invention des lettres en diverses escritures (Paris, 1561) Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus), Gramere (Paris, 1562) Noel de Berlaimont, Vocabulaire, colloques ou dialogues en quatre langues flamen, francois, espaignol & italien (Antwerp, 1562) Gabriel Meurier, Dialogue, contenant les conjugaisons flamen-­f rançoises, par forme de demandes et reponses (Antwerp, 1562) Gabriel Meurier, Vocabulaire francoise-­f lameng (Antwerp, 1562) Guillaume Anselare, Le formulaire des quatre conjugaisons françoises: Et y avons adjouste quelques alphabets, tant d’une nouvelle corsive franchoise, comme aussi d’une italique (Antwerp, 1563) Gabriel Meurier, Conjugaisons francois-­angloises (Antwerp, 1563) Gabriel Meurier, Communications familieres non moins propres que tres utiles à la nation angloise desireuse et diseteuse du langage françois (Antwerp, 1563) Baltasar de Sotomayor, Grammatica con reglas muy provechosas y necessarias para aprender a leer y escrivir la lengua Francese (Alcala, 1565) Pierre de Ronsard, Abbregé de l’art poétique francois (Paris, 1565) Gérard de Vivre, Synonimes, c’est a dire plusieurs propos propres tant en escrivant qu’en parlant pour montrer la richesse de la langue françoise (Cologne, 1565) Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert, Nouvel exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire (Antwerp, 1565) Gérard de Vivre, Grammaire françoise, touchant la lecture declinaisons des noms, et conjugaisons des verbes: Le tout mis en françois et allemang. . . (Cologne, 1566) Juan Luis Vives, Les dialogues. Pour l’exercice des deux langues. Ausquels est adjoustee l’explication francoise des mots latins plus rares & moins usagez (Antwerp, 1566) Jean Liébaut, Les exemplaires d’escritures Francoises (Lyon, 1566) ABC pour apprendre a escrire en francois (Antwerp, 1568) Pieter Heyns, ABC ou exemples propres pour apprendre les enfans a escrire, contenants plusieurs sentences morales (Antwerp, 1568) Gérard de Vivre, Briefve Institution de la langue francoise expliquee en aleman (Cologne, 1568) Antoine Cauchie, Grammatica Gallica (Paris, 1570) Michel Le Conte, L’art et methode de tourner noms en latin et françois (Paris, 1570) Pieter Heyns, Cort onderwys van de acht deelen der Françoischer talen tot voorderinge en projfijt der Duytscher joncheyt (Antwerp, 1571) [Published as the Brief enseignement des huict parties de la langue Françoise in 1597] Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus), Grammaire (Paris, 1572) Jean Le Fèvre, Dictionnaire des rymes françoises (Paris, 1572) Jean Thierry, Dictionnaire francois-­latin (Paris, 1572) Jean Le Frère, Dictionnaire francois-­latin (Paris, 1572) Orazio Toscanella, Dictionariolum latinograecogallicum (Paris, 1573) Henri Estienne, Dictionaire francois-­latin (Paris, 1573) Charles Estienne, Dictionaire francois-­latin (Geneva, 1573) Gabriel Pannonius, Un vocabulaire en six langues: flamen, anglois, alleman, françois, espagnol et italien (Antwerp, 1575) Claude Chaudière, Les principes et fondemens de grammaire latin-­f rançois (Paris, 1575) Léon Trippault, Dictionaire françois-­g rec (Orléans, 1577) Jacques de La Rue, Premier livre de la bonne escriture françoise (Paris, 1578) Henri Estienne, Deux dialogues du nouveau langage françois, italianizé et autrement desguizé (Geneva, 1578)

298 Appendix Alphabeth et maniere d’ortographier en la langue françoise (Paris, 1578) Petit vocabulaire en langue françoise et italienne (Lyon, 1578) Honorat Rambaud, La Declaration des Abus que l’on commet en escrivant et le moyen de les euiter, & de représenter nayuement les paroles: ce que iamais homme n’a faict (Lyon, 1578) Cesare Evoli, Exemplaire pour bien et proprement escrire (Lyon, 1579) Laurent Joubert, Dialogue sur la cacographie françoise avec annotations sur son orthographie (Paris, 1579) Mathias Sabout, Dictionnaire francoys-­f lameng (Antwerp, 1579) Jehan de Beau-­Chesne, Le tresor d’escriture (Lyon, 1580) Gabriel Meurier, Le perroquet mignon des petits enfants françois-­f lameng (Antwerp, 1580) Gabriel Meurier, La fleur de lis, contenant petites missives alphabetiques et familieres, tant en faveur de ceux qui font estat d’enseigner le francois, comme des jeunes filles desireuses d’apprendre a lire, peindre ou escrire (Antwerp, 1580) Claude Fauchet, Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poesie françoise (Paris, 1581) Jean Taye, Dictionaire francois-­flamen, autrement dict, les mots francois tournez en flamen (Ghent, 1582) Instruction a la jeunesse pour se conduire en l’art de l’escriture, sçavoir tailler la plume (Paris, 1582) Claude Mermet, La practique de l’orthographe francoise avec la maniere de tenir livre de raison, coucher cedules et lettres missives (Lyon, 1583) Mathias Sasbout (editor), Dictionnaire francois-­flameng tres ample et copieux: Avec un traicte singulier de la navigation, venerie & fauconnerie, approprie a la langue flamengue (Antwerp, 1583) Pieter Heyns, Instruction de la lecture françoise et du fondement de l’arithmetique (Antwerp, 1584) Jean Nicot, Dictionaire françois-­latin (Paris, 1585) Gérard de Vivre, Dialogues francois flamengs, traictans du faict de la merchandise (Rees, 1585) Pierre Le Gaynard, L’apprenmolire françois pour apprendre les jeunes enfans en les estrangers à lire en peu des temps les mots des escritures françoyses (Poitiers, 1585) Jean Bosquet, Elemens ou institutions de la langue françoise Ensemble, un traicte de l’office, des poincts, et accents (Mons, 1586) Blaise de Vigenère, Traicté des chiffres ou secretes manieres d’escrire (Paris, 1586) Antonio del Corro, Reglas gramaticales para aprender la lengua Espagnola y Francesca (Oxford, 1586) Petrus Andreas Lumnius, Grammatica gallica brevis, partim germanice partim Latine conscripta (Cologne, 1588) Gabriel Chappuys, L’art des secretaire et nobles parties et qualitez d’iceux (Paris, 1588) Elcie Edouard Léon Mellema, Dictionaire ou promptuaire francoys-­f lameng (Antwerp, 1589) Ramus, Grammatica latino-­f rancica (Frankfurt am Main, 1590) Guillaume du Vair, De l’eloquence françoise (Paris, 1590) Mathurin Cordier, Colloquia Latino-­gallica (Basel, 1591) Jean Nicot, Le grand dictionaire françois-­latin (Geneva, 1593) Jehan de Beau-­Chesne, La clef de l’escritvre laquelle ouure le chemin a la jeunesse (London, 1593) M. de Masparraulte, Discours de l’art general de bien parler (Melun, 1593) Levinus Hulsius, Dictionaire françois-­alemand et alemand-­f rançois (Nuremberg, 1596) Pierre de Laudun d’Aigaliers, L’art poetique francois (Paris, 1597) Jean de Serres, Grammatica Gallica (Strasbourg, 1598) Henri Hornkens, Recueil de dictionaires francoys, espaignolz & latins (Brussels, 1599)



Technical Treatises on the French Language, 1500–1600

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La technographie ou briefve methode pour parvenir à la parfaitte connoissance de l’écritture françoyse ([Paris], 1599) Gabriel Meurier, Propos puerils, ordinairement usez es escoles françoyses (Antwerp, 1599) Remacle Mohy, La prosodie francoise en trois tables, les cadences, mesures et alliances des vers (Liège, 1599) Jan van de Velde, Lettre defensive, pour l’art de bien escrire (Rotterdam, 1599) Claude Palliot, La vraye orthographe francoise. Contenant les reigles & precepts infaillibles pour se rendre certain, correct, & parfaict à bien parler François. Tres-­utile & necessaire tant aux François qu’Estrangers (Paris, 1600) Maurice Jausserandy, Le miroir d’escriture ou sont represantees plusieurs sortes de lettres et caracteres (n.p.1600) Abbregé des escritures fournies de la part de la noblesse du Dauphiné (Grenoble, 1600) Le dictionaire des six langages, c’est à sçavoir latin, flamen, françois, espagnol, italian, et anglois (Rouen, 1600)

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notes

Prologue Epigraph: Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 2001), 266. “Des estampes originaires: Tout commence par la reproduction.” Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 314. 1.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 20. 2.  This sentence paraphrases Derrida’s formulation “Blindness to the supplement is the law” from his reading of the supplement in Rousseau in Of Grammatology. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 162. 3.  Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002; Zeitgeist films, 2004), DVD. Translation modified from subtitles in film. 4.  Jacques Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 108. 5.  Arthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 94–95. 6.  Ibid., 95. 7.  Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steve Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. 8.  Simone Marchesi, Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 23–24. 9.  Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 115. 10.  Ibid., 116. 11.  Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 340. 12.  Jean-­François Courouau, Et non autrement: Marginalisation et résistance des langues de France (XVIe–XVIIe siècle) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012), 15 (my translation). 13.  Ibid., 15–16 (my translation). 14.  Following Derrida, I maintain that mechanical repetition does not preclude singular events but in fact acts as their condition of possibility. On the relationship between “the logic of the machine” and the “logic of the event” for Derrida, see Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No

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Notes to Pages 7–14

End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 35–46. 15.  David Wills, Prosthesis (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 221. 16.  Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 37–38. 17.  Ibid., 38. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007), 441–461. 21.  Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 22. Wills, Prosthesis, 12. 23.  Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), 22. 24. Wills, Prosthesis, 247. 25.  Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 58.

Chapter 1 1.  Peter Rickard, A History of the French Language (New York: Routledge, 2003), 61. 2.  The journal Le Moyen français covers only the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; a recent linguistic study of Middle French stops in 1515; another goes through the early seventeenth century; some older studies identify Middle French as “traditionally” beginning with the accession of the Valois in 1328 and ending with that of the Bourbons in 1589, but possibly beginning in the middle of the thirteenth century and going up to the “first third” of the seventeenth century; the Larousse Dictionnaire du moyen français sets its end point at 1611, which it defines as the beginning of “le français classique,” while the online Dictionnaire du moyen français (DMF) deals with the period 1330–1500. See Rosalyn Gardner and Marion Greene, A Brief Description of Middle French Syntax (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Peter A. Machonis, Le moyen français: Évolution d’une langue (New Orleans: Presses Universitaires du Nouveau Monde, 2005); Marc Wilmet, Le système de l’indicatif en moyen français (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1970); Algirdas Julien Greimas and Teresa Mary Keane, Dictionnaire du moyen français (Paris: Larousse, 2001). 3.  Joachim du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse in Joachim Du Bellay: “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” “Three Latin Elegies,” and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” A Bilingual Edition, trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 364–365. I quote from this bilingual edition throughout, occasionally modifying Helgerson’s English translation and restoring the spelling and punctuation of the French when necessary to conform with the 1549 edition. 4.  See Neil Kenny, Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 212. 5.  “Cum literae vere latinae annos plus mille intermortuae fuissent, graecae etiam co[n] clamatae citra mare Ionium, & tanqua[m]funere elatae ac conditae.” Guillaume Budé, Philologie/ De Philologia, trans. Marie-­Madeleine de la Garanderie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001), 126.



Notes to Pages 15–21

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6.  Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury: Au quel est contenu lArt & Science de la deue & vraye Proportion des Lettres Attiques, qu’on dit autrement Lettres Antiques, & vulgairement Lettres Romaines proportionnees selon le Corps & Visage humain (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1529), np [A8v]. 7. Ibid. 8. Tory, Champ fleury, 4v. 9.  Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 3. In the case of the printers and writers studied in this book, this will to break and resurrect will be diacritical: Tory’s new “beginning” for the French language entails the introduction of the cedilla, acute accent, and apostrophe; a host of other new diacritical marks, printed characters, spelling reforms, and grammatical rules will follow in the ensuing decades. 10.  Adriano Castellesi, De sermone Latino, et Modis Latinè loquendi (Rome: Marcello Silber, 1515). 11.  Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61. On Castellesi’s role in the Ciceronian controversy, see John Monfasani, “The Ciceronian Controversy” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3, The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 396. On his place within the broader thinking of language in the Italian Renaissance, see Maurizio Campanelli, “Languages” in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance, ed. Michael Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 151. 12.  R. Glynn Faithfull, “The Concept of ‘Living Language’ in Cinquecento Vernacular Philology,” Modern Language Review 48, no. 3 (July 1953), 282–283. 13.  Quoted in ibid., 282–283. 14.  Ibid., 281. 15. Ibid. 16.  Jacques de Beaune, Discours comme une langue vulgaire se peult perpetuer (Lyon: Pierre de Tours, 1548), 1v–2r. 17.  Ibid., 3v. 18.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 322–323. 19. Ibid. 20. Tory, Champ fleury, 4v. 21.  “It was in language that humanist philologists had discovered time as history. And, in turn, it was history, by observing the fact of change in all languages, that made it possible to liberate and dignify the vernaculars, to perceive their status and potency as equal to those of Latin and Greek.” Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 59. See also Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: Edward Arnold, 1970). 22.  Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 105–106. 23.  Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998), 85, 125. 24.  Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Eisenstein’s arguments have been critiqued for her monocausal and even “theomorphic” understanding of the historical role of printing, for her “progress-­oriented” view of the Renaissance, and for emphasizing historical rupture and discontinuity over continuity. One of Eisenstein’s most important interlocutors and critics has been Adrian Johns, who has underscored how the role of

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printing as a reliable instrument of standardization was actively shaped rather than technologically predetermined. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), as well as the exchange of articles between Eisenstein and Johns in the American Historical Review in 2002. In a similar vein, see David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). A helpful overview of these debates can be found in David John Harvey, The Law Emprynted and Englysshed: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in Law and Legal Culture 1475–1642 (Portland, Ore.: Hart Publishing, 2015), 8–11. 25. Heidegger, Parmenides, 85. 26.  “The typewriter is a signless cloud, i.e., a withdrawing concealment in the midst of its very obtrusiveness, and through it the relation of Being to man is transformed.” Heidegger, Parmenides, 85. 27.  Heidegger’s view of printing as corrupting has been echoed in media studies, most notably by Walter Ong for whom printing “reifies” the word by making a supposedly original “living human speech” spatial and visual instead of oral/aural, and “commodifies” language by “embedd[ing] the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process.” Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2002),116. 28.  “Un accident au fond n’arrive pas si l’essence ne peut être affectée par un tel accident. Si l’essence est accidentable, elle est a priori accidentée.” Jacques Derrida, 1984–1985 seminar, Séance 10, p. 6 (unpublished material, my translation). 29. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 127. 30.  On this question of empiricism, see, especially, Derrida, Of Grammatology, 76. 31.  Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 283. 32.  For example, the quote that serves as the epigraph to the Prologue for this book, culled from the essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” deploys the print (estampe) in order to underscore that the “unconscious text” is never present but always already deferred and supplementary, reproduced and transcribed: “The unconscious text is already a wave of pure traces . . .—a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions. Originary prints [Des estampes originaires]. Everything begins with reproduction.” Derrida, Writing and Difference, 211. 33.  Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10. 34.  Ibid., 23. 35. Ibid. 36.  Ibid., 24. 37.  Derrida’s most sustained engagement with printing technology is in “Tympan,” the text that opens the 1972 collection Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), and which puts his thinking of the “margin” directly in dialogue with print. 38. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 138. 39.  Ibid., 76 (translation modified); Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Melman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 9. 40. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 8 (translation modified). 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid.



Notes to Pages 25–30

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43.  Ibid., 66 (translation modified). “La trace n’est pas seulement la disparition de l’origine, elle veut dire ici . . . que l’origine n’a même pas disparu, qu’elle n’a jamais été constituée qu’en retour par une non-­origine, la trace, qui devient ainsi l’origine de l’origine.” Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 87. 44. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61 (translation modified). “Nous voudrions plutôt suggérer que la prétendue dérivation de l’écriture, si réelle et si massive qu’elle soit, n’a été possible qu’à une condition: que le langage ‘originel,’ ‘naturel,’ etc., n’ait jamais existé, qu’il n’ait jamais été intact, intouché par l’écriture, qu’il ait toujours été lui-­même une écriture.” Derrida, De la grammatologie, 79. 45.  Robert Briggs, “Teletechnologies,” in Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, ed. Claire Colebrook (New York: Routledge, 2015), 61. 46.  Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967). See also Ong, Orality and Literacy, esp. Chapter 5, and Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 47. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 77. 48.  Ibid., 119. 49.  Ibid., 116. 50. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 315. 51.  Ibid. (translation modified). 52. Ibid. 53.  Ibid., 8. 54. Ibid. 55.  Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (London: Polity Press, 2001), 77. 56. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 5. 57.  Ibid., 9. 58.  Ibid., 10 (translation modified). 59. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 10. 60.  Ibid. (translation modified). “Mais au-­delà des mathématiques théoriques, le développement des pratiques de l’information étend largement les possibilités du ‘message,’ jusqu’au point où celui-­ci n’est plus la traduction ‘écrite’ d’un langage, le transport d’un signifié qui pourrait rester parlé dans son intégrité. Cela va aussi de pair avec une extension de la phonographie et de tous les moyens de conserver le langage parlé, de le faire fonctionner hors de la présence du sujet parlant.” Derrida, De la grammatologie, 20. 61. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 10–11 (translation modified). 62.  Jacques Derrida, “Culture et écriture: La prolifération des livres et la fin du livre,” Noroit 130 (August‒September 1968): 1, 8 (my translation). 63.  Ibid., 11 (my translation). 64. Ibid. 65.  Erika Boeckeler, Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 12. 66.  My argument here joins up in what may be a surprising way with Gérard Defaux’s Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: L’ écriture comme présence, which argues—very much contra Derrida—that an affirmative logocentrism emerges during the sixteenth century that conceives of writing as presence. (I would suggest this work misapprehends certain key elements of Derrida’s thought, and

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therefore positions itself as a rebuttal to Derrida and a deconstruction when it in fact inadvertently confirms much of what is argued in Of Grammatology.) See Gérard Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: L’écriture comme présence (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1987). 67.  “Le livre en français courait la chance d’aller à un public plus considérable et, pour dire le mot, d’avoir plus d’acheteurs. Et c’est peut-­être la raison pourqoi des libraires comme Jean de Tournes transformèrent leur imprimerie en un véritable office de traductions. L’extension de l’imprimerie devait avoir pour conséquence nécessaire l’adoption d’une langue encore plus connue que ne l’était le latin; il fallait faire tôt ou tard, si les ateliers ne voulaient pas chômer, des livres qui allassent à tout le pulic qui savait lire. Il y a là une raison d’ordre économique qui a peut-­être contribué plus qu’aucune autre à assurer le triomphe du français sur le latin.” Brunot, Histoire de la langue française, vols. 2 and 3 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927). Febvre and Martin refer to this passage in L’apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958), 466. 68. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 91 (translation modified). 69.  John O’Brien, “Introduction: The Time of Theory” in Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary Readings of French Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16. 70.  Tom Conley, “Cataparalysis,” Diacritics 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1978): 42. 71.  Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 2–3. 72.  Juliet Fleming, Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 16. 73. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 90 (translation modified). 74.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 21. 75. Ibid. 76.  Ferdinand Brunot’s Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 would be only the most obvious example of this phenomenon, as incalculably valuable as it otherwise may be. Brunot’s phonetic preferences are inextricable from his thinking of the history of what he repeatedly calls “nostre langue” and its triumph over Latin in the sixteenth century. Before printing, Brunot writes, “pour la presque totalité des gens qui s’en servaient, la langue n’avait qu’une forme: la forme orale, le mot n’était qu’un groupe de sons qui se transmettait de bouche en bouche. Avec l’imprimerie, tout change: la langue se transmet aussi par la vue: le mot a deux formes, l’une pour les yeux, l’autre pour les oreilles. Or, par la faute de la graphie traditionnelle . . . ces deux formes ne sont pas identiques, l’une n’est pas, comme elle devrait l’être, la figuration de l’autre, et dès lors, elles vont entrer en concurrence.” (For almost all those who used it, language had only one form: the oral form, the word was only a group of sounds transmitted from mouth to mouth. With printing, everything changes: language is also transmitted visually: the word has two forms, one for the eyes, the other for the ears. Yet because of the traditional way of writing. . . these two forms are not identical, one is not—as it should be—the figure of the other, and consequently they will enter into competition.) Brunot, Histoire de la langue française, vol. 2, 242–243. 77.  See Brunot, Histoire de la langue française, vol. 1, 1–5. 78. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 80 (translation modified). 79.  Ibid., 81 (translation modified). 80.  “Définissons la langue française—sans tenir compte des dialectes ni des patois—en disant qu’elle est la continuation de ce que les savants commencent, pour plus de propriété, à appeler le francien, c’est-­à-­dire la forme spéciale prise par le latin parlé, tel qu’il s’était implanté à Paris et dans la contrée avoisinante, et tel qu’il s’y est développé par la suite des temps, pour s’étendre peu à peu hors de son domaine propre, dans tous les pays où des raisons politiques,



Notes to Pages 34–38

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économiques, scientifiques, littéraires l’ont fait parler, écrire ou comprendre.” Brunot, Histoire de la langue française, Vol. 1, v. 81.  Bernard Cerquiglini, Une langue orpheline (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2007). 82. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 80 (translation modified). 83.  Ibid., 92 (translation modified). 84. Jacques Derrida, “If There Is Cause to Translate I: Philosophy in Its National ­L anguage (Toward a ‘licterature en françois’),” trans. Sylvia Söderlind, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 8. 85.  Lucien Febvre and Henri-­Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-­1800, trans. David Gerard (New York: Verso, 1976), 319; Febvre and Martin, L’apparition du livre, 465. 86.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 43. 87.  Ibid. (translation modified). The published English translation reads, “Printing .  .  . helped mould our modern European languages.” 88. Brunot, Histoire de la langue française, vol. 2, 2. 89.  See the Introduction to Johns, The Nature of the Book, 2–28. 90.  On this use of the quasi-­transcendental, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 149. 91.  Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 279. 92.  Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (New York: Verso, 1993), 29. As Bennington points out, all transcendentals would in fact be “ ‘only’ transcendentals.” 93.  See Chapter 2 for additional background on Paré and the development of modern prosthetics. For an overview of Paré’s life and work, see Francis R. Packard, The Life and Times of Ambroise Paré (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1921) and J.-­F. Malgaigne’s introduction to his edition of Paré, Œuvres complètes d’Ambroise Paré, revues et collationnées sur toutes les éditions, avec les variantes, ed. J.-­F. Malgaigne (Paris: Chez J.-­B. Baillière, 1840–1841), v–cccli. For a more recent critical assessment, see Évelyne Berriot-­Salvadore and Paul Mironneau, eds. Ambroise Paré (1510–1590): Pratique et écriture de la science à la Renaissance. Actes du Colloque de Pau (6–7 mai 1999). Colloques, congrès et conférences sur la Renaissance 37 (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2003). Much current scholarship on Paré in literary and cultural studies tends to focus on aspects of his work other than the prosthetic (especially the 1573 treatise Des monstres et prodiges, which recently appeared in the “Folio classique poche” series edited by Michel Jeanneret), leaving discussion of prosthetics largely to scholars in the medical field. The most notable exception to this trend is the chapter David Wills dedicates to Paré and Ramus in Prosthesis; see “Cambridge, 1553” in Wills, Prosthesis, 214–249. 94.  Ambroise Paré, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London: Richard Cotes, 1649), 576. Paré titles Book XXII of his Œuvres “Vingtdeux­ iesme livre traittant des moyens & artifices d’adiouster ce qui defaut naturellement ou par accident.” Paré, Œuvres, 910. 95. Paré, Œuvres, 910; Paré, Workes, 580. 96.  This sense of “articulate” had only recently emerged in English when Paré’s translator chose to include it (not once but twice) in his description of the miraculous speech produced with the prosthetic tongue. On sixteenth-­century uses of “articulate” in English, see Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 5–6.

308

Notes to Pages 38–42

97. Paré, Œuvres, 150; Paré, Workes, 151. The published English translation stops here, but Paré continues: “This action is the most excellent one that is performed by the virtue and faculty of the soul, because it is the interpreter and messenger of the thoughts of the mind” (Telle action est la plus excellente qui se face par la vertu & faculté de l’ame, pource qu’elle est truchement & messagere des cogitations de l’esprit). 98. Ibid. 99. Wills, Prosthesis, 44. Elsewhere in his Œuvres, Paré describes patients nearly losing their tongues from falls and other accidents, but tongue amputation is also an attested punishment of Prostestants, sometimes prior to executions. On tongue amputation as a way of silencing the Protestant parrhesiastes, see Emily Butterworth, The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 122. The amputation of women’s tongues in literature is strongly associated with sexual violence, silencing, and male domination, as with Shakespeare’s Lavinia in Titus Andronicus or Ovid’s Philomela. 100.  Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12. 101. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 138 (translation modified). 102. Ibid. 103.  Ibid., 249. 104.  Ibid., 343. 105. Ibid. 106.  Wills invites us to think a generalized and radicalized sense of “prosthesis” that would be analogous to Derrida’s “writing.” 107.  Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 27. 108. Fleming, Cultural Graphology, 27. 109. Paré, Œuvres, 291; Paré, Workes, 294. 110. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 226. 111. Ibid. 112.  Ibid., 234. 113. Ibid. 114.  Ibid. (translation modified). 115. Paré, Œuvres, 7; Paré, Workes, 2. Iterability, as J. Hillis Miller says, “is neither a concept nor not a concept,” and is “a new name for what is given many different names in the course of Derrida’s work: différance, hymen, supplément, pharmakon, dissemination, writing, margin, parergon, the gift, the secret, and so on.” Yet iterability occupies a “peculiar” place within this series: “It is both a member of the series and at the same time also a feature of each member of the series. They all are marked by iterability or all are iterable or all name a form of iterability.” See J. Hillis Miller, “What Is Iterability?” in The J. Hillis Miller Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 270. Derrida himself will observe in a footnote to the Afterword of Limited Inc that the “ ‘words’ or ‘concepts’ ” in this list—a list that, he insists, remains essentially open—“share a certain functional analogy but remain singular and irreducible to one another. . . . They are all marked by iterability, which however seems to belong to their series.” Derrida, Limited Inc, 155. For Derrida’s key reading of the hymen, see Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173–286. On the iterability of circumcision, see, especially, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1–64.



Notes to Pages 43–49

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116.  Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 317; Derrida, Marges, 378. 117. Paré, Œuvres, 910; Paré, Workes, 580. 118.  As Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas have demonstrated, Gutenberg did not himself use a mold to cast identical sorts; instead, he likely used a sand-­casting process that produced letters of slightly different shapes. See further discussion in Chapter 2. 119.  Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 124. 120.  The dates of the French editions are as follows: 1575 (1st), 1579 (2nd), 1585 (4th), 1598 (5th), 1607 (6th), 1614 (7th), 1628 (8th), 1633 (9th), 1641 (10th), 1652 (11th), 1664 (12th), and 1685 (13th). There is no trace of a third edition of Paré’s Œuvres. 121.  This lettering practice was first introduced in early printed Bibles to facilitate quick and accurate referencing; perhaps the best-­k nown example is the system developed by the Parisian printer Henri Estienne for his 1578 edition of Plato’s complete works, which is still used to reference Plato today (the so-­called “Stephanus pagination”). On the development of this type of reference system in early printed Bibles, see The Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3, the West from the Reformation, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 419. My thanks to Marc Schachter for pointing me to Estienne’s edition of Plato, which had escaped my attention. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Paré, Œuvres, 911; Paré, Workes, 580.

Chapter 2 Epigraphs: “Octo bis satyras Iuuenalis perlege aquini: / Scripsit quas Iacobus aere notante manu / De Fiuizano.” In Juvenal, Satyrae (Fivizzano: Jacobus de Fivizzano, 1472–1474). Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” 36. 1.  This anecdote is recounted in an interview published in French as “Entre le corps écrivant et l’écriture.” My English translation of this interview, “Between the Writing Body and Writing,” is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in Thinking What Comes, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi. 2.  Derrida, “Between the Writing Body and Writing.” 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Heidegger, Parmenides, 85. 8.  Ibid., 81. 9.  Ibid., 85. 10.  “Presens huius Sexti Decretalium preclarum opus . . . non atramamento plumali canna neque aerea, sed artificiosa quadam adinuentione imprimendi seu caracterizandi six effigiatum.” Quoted in Alfred W. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1905), 16–17. 11. Heidegger, Parmenides, 85. 12. Ibid.

310

Notes to Pages 50–57

13. Ibid. 14.  Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Elizabeth Rottenberg in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2 (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008). 15.  For a thorough and critical treatment of writing technologies in Heidegger, see Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 16.  Quoted in Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” 41. 17.  Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” 41. 18.  Ibid., 48. 19. Ibid. 20.  Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 20. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23.  In Book IV (10, 687b) of On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle underscores that the hand’s adaptability is a result of its unique design features: its division into parts (“it is divided and has many digits”), its multiplicity (“it is possible to use the hand as one, two, or many”), its jointedness (“the joints of the fingers are well disposed for grasping and squeezing”), and its thumb (“one finger extends out of the side of the hand, and is short and thick, not long”) that protrudes sideways and allows it to “bind things together strongly, like a strong clamp, in order that, though one, it may be equal to many.” Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals I–IV, trans. James G. Lennox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 99. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27.  Galen, “The Hand” in Medicine and Western Civilization, ed. David J. Rothman, Steven Marcus, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 18. 28.  Galen, “The Hand,” 18–19 (emphasis mine). 29. Wills, Prosthesis, 215. 30.  Ambroise Paré, Les Œuvres d’Ambroise Paré . . . reveues et augmentées par l’auteur, 4th ed. (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1585), 214. 31.  Ibid., 81. 32. Ibid. 33.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand, trans. Sir Walter Scott (Paris: A. and A. Galignani, 1826), 22. 34.  Ambroise Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie: Avec le magasin des instrumens necessaire à icelle (Paris: Jean le Royer, 1564), 119v. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Paré, Les Œuvres d’Ambroise Paré, 915. 38.  See Wills, Prosthesis, 200. 39. Wills, Prosthesis, 247. 40.  This paradox has been rigorously developed by Bernard Stiegler in Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 41. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 113.



Notes to Pages 57–64

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42.  Galen, “The Hand,” 18. 43.  David Wills, “Preambles: Disability as Prosthesis,” in Derrida Downunder, ed. Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 2001), 35–-­52. 44. Ibid. 45.  André Leroi-­Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 20. 46.  W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, “Introduction” in Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), ix. 47. Paré, Les Œuvres d’Ambroise Paré, 917. 48.  On the instrumentalization of the hand by the pen in the Renaissance, see Jonathan Goldberg’s marvelous Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 57–108. 49.  See Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, “Introduction: What’s New About New Media” in New Media: 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), xi–xxii. 50.  Derrida, “Between the Writing Body and Writing.” 51.  Quoted in Christopher Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 28. 52. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 92. 53.  These terms were first coined by education writer Marc Pensky in his article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” On The Horizon 9, no. 5 (2001): 1–6. 54.  I call this image “iconic” not because it is exemplary but because it is one of the most widely circulated and reproduced images of a scribe at work, appearing, for example, on the cover of the British Museum volume on scribes (Christopher De Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 55.  Linne Mooney points out that one aspect of Miélot’s situation—the fact that he is working “at home” and not in a shop or scriptorium—may have been typical for the period, at least of vernacular scribes working in London. See Linne Mooney, “Locating Scribal Activity in Late Medieval London,” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 183. 56.  Miélot went on to serve Charles the Bold after Philippe’s death in 1467. 57.  In this sense, the scribe’s two hands figure, like Freud’s mystic writing pad, the double structure of the mark. Jacques Derrida suggests as much in The Post Card where, considering a medieval image by Matthew Paris of Socrates writing with both hands, he notes that one hand scratches, “irritat[ing] the support,” while the other inks; in fact, both hands scratch: “Il efface d’une main, il gratte, et de l’autre il gratte encore, en écrivant.” Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-­delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 31. 58.  Alfred W. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1905), xi. Pollard’s specimens serve as the primary database for my analysis in this chapter. 59.  See Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, xviii. 60.  See Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen, eds., The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61. During the twelfth century, authors began imitating this scribal practice and added colophons of their own at the end of their work, indicating authorship and (often) the date of completion. See Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 172–173.

312

Notes to Pages 64–66

61.  See Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Dáibhí Ó Crónín and David Kranz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 42. 62.  Roger Chartier, “The Practical Impact of Writing” in History of Private Life, vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Ruth Crosby, “Oral Reading in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 11, no. 1 (January 1936): 88–110. 63.  Quoted in Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, xv. 64.  Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), and T. L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 65.  Quoted in Charles Plummer, On the Colophons and Marginalia of Irish Scribes (London: H. Milford for the British Academy, 1926), 8. 66.  Derrida remarks in his last interview from 2004 that at the moment he sends a book off to be published, he becomes an “appearing-­disappearing” specter, the leaver of a trace that constitutes at once his death and his hope for survival. This survival, he insists, is “not a striving for immortality” but is structural. “I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure.” See Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-­A nne Brault and Michael Naas (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2007), 32–33. If this surviving structure inheres in every trace—every mark or piece of paper—it functions in an especially vivid and poignant way in the threshold of the colophon, a superlatively spectral genre. 67.  Robert Estienne, Dictionarium Latinogallicum (Paris: R. Estienne, 1538), 419. It is worth noting, however, that the term scriba remains more capacious, stretching across media epochs: “Scriba, scribae, m. g. Liu. Cic. Scribe, Greffier, Escrivain de livres, Imprimeur.” 68.  James Mosley, “The Technologies of Print,” in The Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. Michael F. Suarez, S.J., and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 69.  Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas have suggested that Gutenberg and other early printers used temporary matrices of sand or clay, and not the copper matrices later used to produce identical characters; the latter were not widely used until the 1470s. On Gutenberg’s process, see Blaise Agüera y Arcas, “Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg’s DK type” in Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Kristian Jensen (London: British Library, 2003), 1–12. 70.  The process is the following: Identical pieces of metal type, or sorts, were cast by pouring a lead alloy into an adjustable handmold. The handmold held a brass matrix bearing the form of the letter, which had been produced using a steel punch cut by an engraver, or punchcutter. Once a full font of metal type had been cast, the sorts were arranged in an open type case with different compartments, the placement and size of which depended on the anticipated frequency of the letter or sign it contained. Compositors, or typesetters, sat or stood before a single case or—in France and in some other countries—two cases, one for miniscules (lower case) and one for majuscules (upper case). Before the compositor’s eyes would be the printer’s copy, either a manuscript or an earlier printed text, sometimes held open in visorium. The compositor would pull sorts from the case one at a time and arrange them in a handheld composing stick, which could hold several lines of justified text at once. A practiced compositor, like a modern typist before the keyboard, could pull letters quickly without looking down at the case. These lines of text were then transferred out of the composing stick into an open galley until the full sheet, containing thousands of pieces of metal type, was completed. Each sheet contained two (for a folio), four (for a quarto), or eight (for an octavo) pages of the eventual text on each side. At this point, the text was



Notes to Pages 66–68

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tied and locked into a chase, making a completed forme that could be picked up and placed on the press. The beater holding one leather-­covered ink ball in each hand would apply ink to the forme, while the puller would place dampened paper on the tympan before folding the frisket, which protected the parts of the sheet not being printed from ink, over it. The press was a six-­foot wooden structure, likely adapted from the screwpresses used for making paper or wine. Like these other devices, the printing press was equipped with a large, flat piece of wood or metal, the platen, that would be lowered to make an impression. The puller, with his right hand, would fold the frisket over the tympan and then the tympan over the forme; with his right hand, he would turn a handle to bring the bottom part of the press holding the forme, the carriage, under the platen. With a two-­handed pull of the bar, the puller would make an impression on half of the sheet; he would then complete the printing by giving the handle another turn, thereby situating the second half of the sheet under the platen, and then pulling the bar once again. In the Renaissance print shop, each beater/puller team was generally expected to perform this action roughly 2,500 times over the course of the ten-­hour work day: 250 sheets per hour, or one impression every fifteen seconds. This technical account draws on James Mosley’s authoritative essay “The Technologies of Print,” in Suarez and Woudhuysen, The Oxford Companion to the Book. 71.  Quoted in David Shaw, “ ‘Ars formularia’: Neo-­Latin Synonyms for Printing,” The Library 6–11, no. 3 (September 1989), 225–226. 72.  Later, industrialization significantly intensified and accelerated this process, first with the cast-­iron platen press, then with steam power, the cylindrical rotary press, and finally automatic typecasting and typesetting of Linotype and Monotype; by the early twentieth century, nearly every aspect of the book, from producing paper to binding quires, was performed by machines. 73.  Andrew Pettegree and Adrian Johns have drawn attention to the fact that this period was also marked by experimentation, setback, and fragility across the industry; many printing houses were short-­lived, and the “triumph” of the new technology may have appeared less than inevitable from a contemporary perspective. See Johns, The Nature of the Book, 109, and Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 43–62. On the spread of printing and the development of the trade, see Lucien Febvre and Henri-­Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard (New York: Verso, 1997), 216–247. 74.  Polydore Vergil, De Inventoribus Rerum, II, 7; quoted in Catherine Atkinson, Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe (Heidelberg: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 144. 75. Ibid. 76.  Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes: De laudes scriptorum, trans. Klaus Arnold and Roland Behrendt (Lawrence, Kans.: Coronado Press, 1974). 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80.  A. Claudin, The First Paris Press: An Account of for G. Fichet and J. Heynlin in the Sorbonne 1470–1472 (London: Chiswick Press, 1898), 3. Jules Philippe, Guillaume Fichet: Sa vie, ses œuvres. Introduction de l’imprimerie à Paris (Annecy: J. Dépolier, 1892), 39, 43–48, 87–89. 81.  By some estimates, the Parisian commercial market was producing as many as 3,500 manuscript books per year. Eltjo Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 373–376. See also R. H. Rouse and M. A. Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500, vol. 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 2000), 11–142.

314

Notes to Pages 68–72

82.  “Ut sol lumen, sic doctrinam fundis in orbem / Musarum nutrix, regia parisius; / Hinc prope diuinam, tu qua[m] Germania nouit / Artem scribendi, suscipe promerita; / Primos ecce libros, quos haec industria finxit / Francorum in terries aedibus atq[ue] tuis; / Michael Udalricus, Martinusq[ue] magistri / Hos impresserunt ac facient alios.” Gasparino Barzizza, Epistolae (Paris: Ulrich Gering, Martin Crantz, and Michael Friburger, [1470]), np (my translation). 83.  Douglas Crawford McMurtrie, The Fichet Letter: The Earliest Document Ascribing to Gutenberg the Invention of Printing (New York: Press of Ars Typographica, 1927), 48. 84.  Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2012), 227. Hansen is glossing here Bernard Stiegler’s conception of orthography. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12–64. 85.  In Gasparino Barzizza, Epistolae, np. 86. Ibid. 87.  Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 52. On these experiments, see Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, chap. 2. 88.  On the market and book trade before print, see Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, chap. 1, and Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, chap. 1. 89.  Frederick Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8. For a thorough dispute of this often-­cited figure, see Joseph Dane, The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographic Method (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). 90.  Quoted in Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. 91.  Adrian Johns, “The Coming of Print to Europe” in Leslie Howsam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 107–124. 92.  “Any invention or technology is an extension or self-­amputation of our physical bodies.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 45. 93.  “In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. For example, in the case of the wheel as an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was the immediate occasion of the extension or ‘amputation’ of this function from our bodies.” McLuhan, Understanding Media, 42–43. 94. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 43. 95.  A Google search of the phrase yields “about 3 results,” all of which turn out to be this colophon. Jacobus is, however, adapting Johann of Speyer here. See below. 96.  Jacobus printed only this and one other text in Fivizzano. By 1476, he had moved back to Venice and began printing in the house of Marcus de Comitibus. 97.  “Quem modo tam rarum cupiens vix lector haberet, / Quique etiam fractus pene legendus eram: Restituit Venetis me nuper Spira Ioannes / Exscripsitque libros aere notante meos. / Fessa manus quondam moneo: calamusque quiescat, / Namque labor studio cessit: et ingenio.” Quoted in Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 35. 98.  In this sense, printing would not only bring about the relief from strain suggested by McLuhan, it would also seem to mark a stage in what Leroi-­Gourhan terms “manual regression” or the “liberation” of the hand that constitutes a continued stage of hominization. The “dwindling



Notes to Pages 72–79

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importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand” that will accelerate with the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century would seem to begin here in the fifteenth century with the “hand of brass.” 99.  Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young and Michael Wutz (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 184. 100.  See Paul Needham, “Haec sancta ars: Gutenberg’s Invention as a Divine Gift,” Gazette of the Grolier Club 42 (1990): 101–121. I quote here from p. 105. 101.  See Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, xviii. 102.  Richard Garnett, “On Some Colophons of the Early Printers,” Library 2, no. 16 (April 1890): 126. 103.  Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 104. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 21. 105. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 7. Hellinga, “The Gutenberg Revolutions” in Rose and Eliot, A Companion to the History of the Book, 207. 106.  “If one holds a late manuscript copy of a given text next to an early printed one, one is likely to doubt that any change at all has taken place, let alone an abrupt or revolutionary one.” Eisenstein, Printing Press as Agent of Change, 51. 107.  “The Mainz Psalter” in Jane Roberts, ed., Royal Treasures: A Golden Jubilee Celebration (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2002). 108. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 12 (translation modified). 109.  Febvre and Martin write of the first printing experiments: “So long as the technique was still in its infancy, the early pioneers (reasonably enough) did not possess an appropriate vocabulary in which to describe the instruments and materials with which they were beginning to work.” Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 51. In his article on the terminology used by early printers in Germany, Italy, and France, David Shaw writes that “the question of a suitable nomenclature was a very real one for Renaissance neo-­Latinists.” Shaw, “ ‘Ars Formularia,’ ” 220. 110.  Pollard gives “stamping” instead of “lettering.” I have followed Shaw’s translation. 111. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, ed., Rethinking Media Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 7 112.  Robert Estienne’s dictionary offers the translation “plume à escrire” (writing quill) for calamus. 113. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 13 114. Derrida, Paper Machine, 21. 115. The Catholicon of 1460, widely attributed to Gutenberg, lists a series of ancient and modern writing instruments not used in fashioning it—“without help of reed, stylus, or pen” (non calami, stili aut penne)—and advertises the “wondrous” device used instead (“but by the wondrous agreement, proportion, and harmony of punches and types, has been printed and finished”). One 1465 colophon from Fust and Schoeffer elaborates on the formula of their 1457 Psalter by adding to the list of instruments not used: “The present splendid edition . . . has been thus fashioned not by ink from the quill nor by a reed of brass, but by a certain ingenious invention of printing or lettering.” Another colophon from the same year says that this particular edition of Cicero was “not printed with ink” (non atramento); Schoeffer will insist on the novelty of this feature in 1468 by updating it to “not with ordinary ink” (non atramento communo). The colophon of a Latin-­German vocabulary printed in 1467 at Eltville, near Mainz, repeats the language of these colophons and further insists on printing as novelty and “invention” (“not by the help of stylus or pen, but by a certain new and skillful invention”).

316

Notes to Pages 79–82

116.  Pollard also observes the repetition of certain formulas. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 14 117.  “non calami per frasim, caracterum autem apicibus artificiose elementarum” Quoted in Shaw, “ ‘Ars Formularia,’ ” 222. Pollard comments on this: “The struggle of the fifteenth-­ century Latinists to express the technicalities of printing are always interesting, and the phrase ‘caracterum apicibus elementatum’ is really gallant. Following the Greek, the Romans used the word ‘elementa’ originally for the component sounds of speech and then, by transference, for the letters of the alphabet. ‘Elementatus,’ therefore, is strictly appropriate, and might be rendered ‘with the letters built up or put together,’ while ‘caracterum picipus’ of course refers to the engraving in relief which forms the face of the type.” Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 24. 118.  Quoted in Shaw, “ ‘Ars Formularia,’ ” 222. 119.  “Certain continuities characteristic of writing, both in its history and in its production, seem to be broken by this thing we call print.” Joseph Dane, Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 3. 120. For McLuhan and others, fragmentation would be the “essence of machine technology.” 121.  See Louis Holtz, Donat et la tradition de l’enseignement grammatical: étude sur l’Ars Donati et sa diffusion (IVe‒IXe siècle) et édition critique (Paris: CNRS, 1981). On the printing of Donatus, see “Donatus” in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2013), 282. 122.  The fact that no copies have survived intact is a testament to heavy use; examination of remaining fragments suggests that Gutenberg printed at least twenty-­four different editions. The Ars Minor was also the first book printed in Italy, around 1464, on a press brought to the Benedictine abbey at Subiaco from Germany by Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheim. Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy, 4. 123.  Mitchell and Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies, 70. 124. Ibid. 125. Dane, Out of Sorts, 3. 126.  Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 62. 127.  “Si quid forte litterarum immutatione: transposition: inuersione omission offenderis studiose lector: id non ulli negligentiae sed correctionis difficultati ascribes: quoniam nihil verborum praetermissum esse depraehendis.” Quoted in Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 74–75. 128.  An important counterpart exists to the Fust-­Schoeffer genre of colophon—namely, the Gutenberg tradition. Johannes Gutenberg left his name on no books at all; neither did a number of other early German printers, some of whom had trained with the goldsmith from Mainz. Alfred Pollard, observing this reticence to advertise the new art, hypothesizes that it marks an “attempt to keep the new art as secret as possible,” either to maintain a competitive edge or because they had already broken a vow of secrecy and were thus “less anxious to advertise themselves.” Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, 11. 129.  Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Handwriting and the Book,” in Leslie Howsam, ed., Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, 90. 130.  See, for example, Charles R. Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 131.  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122. 132.  Desiderius Erasmus, De Recta Pronuntiatione, in J.K. Sowards, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 4: De Pueris Instituendis, De Recta Pronuntiatione (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 391.



Notes to Pages 82–90

317

133. Ibid. 134.  In his account of the evolution of human technics, Leroi-­Gourhan describes the various stages of the hand’s “modes of action” and the process of externalization: “The hand’s modes of action became gradually enriched during the operational process in the course of human evolution. The manipulative action of the primates, in which gesture and tool form a single whole, was followed in the first anthropoids by directly motive action of the hand with the hand tool separable from the motive gesture. In the next stage, reached possibly before the Neolithic, gesture became annexed by the hand-­operated machine, the hand merely supplying its motor impulse by indirect mobility. In historic times motive force itself was transferred from the human arm, and the hand intervened only to start the motor process in animal-­operated machines or mechanical machines such as mills. Finally, in the last stage, the hand is used to set off a programmed process in automatic machines that not only exteriorize tools, gestures, and mobility but whose effect also spills over into memory and mechanical behavior. . . . In this latest stage speech and sight are undergoing the same process, thanks to the development of technics. Language, which had separated itself from the human through art and writing, is consummating the final divorce by entrusting the intimate functions of phonation and Sight to wax, film, and magnetic tape.” Leroi-­Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 216. 135.  “Lately even the printer’s hand has gone missing, since today ‘printers’ are not usually human: now the term more familiarly designates machines proper to the realm of consumer electronics. (Curiously—and unlike human hands—office printers have been almost without exception beige in color.)” Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). 136.  The expression citius quam asparagi coquantur is found in an edition of Statius printed by Stephanus Corallus at Parma in 1473; the phrase is a variation on a classical commonplace that Suetonius attributes to Augustus (“velocius quam asparagi coquantur”), The Twelve Caesars, Book II, paragraph 87. 137.  Quoted in Pollard, An Essay on Colophons. 138.  “In this latest stage,” writes Leroi-­Gourhan, “speech and sight are undergoing the same process, thanks to the development of technics. Language, which had separated itself from the human through art and writing, is consummating the final divorce by entrusting the intimate functions of phonation and sight to wax, film, and magnetic tape.” Leroi-­Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 216. 139.  Leroi-­Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 404. 140. Ibid. 141. Ibid. 142. Étienne Binet, Essay des merveilles de nature, et des plus nobles artifices (Rouen: Romain de Beauvais et Jean Osmont, 1622), 294. 143. Ibid.

Chapter 3 Epigraphs: Tory, Champ fleury, A2v. Derrida, Spectors of Marx, 66. 1.  Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), 63. 2. Ibid. 3.  Ibid., 66. 4. Tory, Champ fleury, 3r. 5.  Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference,

318

Notes to Pages 90–99

Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 33; www.storiaolivetti.it/fotogallery.asp?idPercorso=583&idOrd=19#viewfotogallery. 6.  Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book, 254. 7.  Ibid., 255. 8.  William M. Ivins, “Geoffroy Tory,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 15, no. 4 (April 1920): 84. 9. Ibid. 10.  Tom Conley, The Self-­Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Other noteworthy recent scholarly treatments of Tory include Erika Boeckeler, “Body Type, Type Faces: The Human Typography of Geofroy Tory” in Playful Letters, and Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1–10. 11. Conley, The Graphic Unconscious, 11. 12.  For additional biographical details on Tory, see Auguste Bernard, Geoffroy Tory, peintre et graveur, premier imprimeur Royal, réformateur de l’orthographe et de la typographie sous François Ier (Paris: Chez Auguste Aubry, 1857), and, more recently, Geoffroy Tory, imprimeur de François Ier: Graphiste avant la lettre (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2011). Tory served as royal printer during the short period from the fall of 1531 until his death in 1533. The printer Olivier Mallard took over the role in 1536. In 1539, the position was split: one printer for Hebrew and Latin (Robert Estienne) and another for Greek (Conrad Néobar); their titles corresponded to the newly created positions for royal lectors. In 1544, François I named Denis Janot the first printer specifically for French. On the institution of the imprimeur du roy, see Nina Catach, L’orthographe française à l’époque de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1968). 13.  “Combiem que je soye de petitz / & humbles Parens.” Tory, Champ fleury, 1v. 14.  Timothy Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37. Like Reiss, I draw most of my biographical information on Tory from Auguste Bernard. 15.  Kay Amert, “Intertwining Strengths: Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne,” Book History 8 (2005), 1. 16. Tory, Champ fleury, 33r. 17. Conley, The Self-­Made Map, 64. 18.  Ibid., 66. 19.  “Crucial to the design of this perspectival object,” writes Conley about a woodcut illustrating “Virgil’s Flute in Perspective and Morality” (Tory, Champ fleury, 16v) “is the correlation of a distance of time that is measured by a digitized treatment of space.” Conley, The Self-­Made Map, 67. 20. Tory, Champ fleury, np A3v. 21.  Ibid., A1v. 22.  Ibid., A2v. 23.  Ibid., A8v. 24.  Ibid., A8r. 25.  Bernard Stiegler, “Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 259. 26.  Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 36.



Notes to Pages 99–109

319

27.  Ibid., 39. 28.  Ibid., 38. 29.  Ibid., 38–39. 30.  Ibid., 39. 31. Ibid. 32.  Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 10. 33.  Some chroniclers and historians of the early sixteenth century marshaled the Gallic Hercules to demonstrate a mythical Trojan or even Herculean origin of the French people. For a comprehensive overview of the uses of the Gallic Hercules during the sixteenth century, see Robert E. Hallowell, “Ronsard and the Gallic Hercules Myth,” Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962): 242–255. 34. Lucian, Phalaris. Hippias or The Bath. Dionysus. Heracles. Amber or The Swans. The Fly. Nigrinus. Demonax. The Hall. My Native Land. Octogenarians. A True Story. Slander. The Consonants at Law. The Carousal (Symposium) or The Lapiths, trans.  A. M. Harmon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1913), 63. 35.  Ibid., 65. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38.  Ibid., 67. 39. Ibid. 40.  Guillaume Budé had already translated the passage into French in his Institution du prince, written for François I, but it was not published until 1547. Budé had also translated the Lucian into Latin, though Tory uses Erasmus’s translation. 41. Tory, Champ fleury, 3r. 42. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 21–22 (translation modified). 43. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 17. 44. Ronell, The Telephone Book, 189. 45. Tory, Champ fleury, np (A2v). 46.  “si nostre Langue estoit deuement Reiglee & Polye.” Tory, Champ fleury, np (A8v). 47. Tory, Champ fleury. 48.  As Walter Ong reminds us, the “first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book.” Ong, Orality and Literacy, 116. 49.  See Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), introduction. On the medieval trope of the French nation as garden, see also Colette Baune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 50.  On the importance of this perspective in Champ fleury, see Conley, The Self-­Made Map, chap. 2. 51. Tory, Champ fleury, 1v. 52. Ibid. 53.  Briggs, “Teletechnologies,” 63. 54. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 98.

320

Notes to Pages 109–125

55.  Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 36. 56. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44. 57. Ibid. 58. Tory, Champ fleury, 4v–5r. 59.  Ibid., 5r. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63.  Ibid., 4v. 64.  Andrea Alciato, Emblemes, trans. Jean Lefevre (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1539), 201. 65.  Quoted in Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 34. 66.  Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 34. 67.  Quoted in Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 35. 68.  Derrida, “Otobiographies,” 36. 69. Tory, Champ fleury, 1v. 70.  Ibid., 12r. 71.  Quoted in “Language,” Dictionary of Untranslatables, 545. 72.  R. Anthony Lodge, French: From Dialect to Standard (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108. 73. “Materna désignait un bas langage exclu de toute inscription.” Renée Balibar, L’institution du français: Essai sur le colinguisme des Carolingiens à la République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 33. “Comment les gens du bas nommaient-­i ls leur propre parler? Le concept de langue propre leur était étranger, avec celui de langue en général. Le mot de patois, d’étymologie obscure selon les linguistes actuels, attesté en français depuis 1285, est supposé avoir désigné originellement soit une gesticulation animale (celle des pattes), soit un bruit confus (claquement de mains, de pattes, de lèvres)” (33–34). 74. Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 3. 75.  On primary orality and the mother, see Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), chap. 1. 76.  R. Anthony Lodge, French: From Dialect to Standard (New York: Routledge, 1993), 100. 77. Tory, Champ fleury, 2v. 78. Paré, Dix livres de chirurgie (1564), 116v. 79.  On this history, see Wendy Ayres-­Bennett, A History of the French Language Through Texts (London: Routledge, 1996), chaps. 1 and 2. 80.  According to the Universal Short Title Catalogue, between 1470 and 1500 in France there were 3,376 books printed in Latin and 1,507 printed in French. 81. Tory, Champ fleury, np (A8r). 82. Ibid., 3v. 83.  “Lon envoie à l’Imprimeur ses copies les plus correctes que l’on peut, qui passent premièrement par les mains du Compositeur. Ce seroit certes vn vray miracle, que sans faute il peust assembler toutes les lettres: c’est pourquoy on lui baille pour controleur vn homme qui prend le titre de Correcteur, auquel on presente la premiere espreuue.” Quoted in Nina Catach, L’Orthographe française à l’époque de la Renaissance, 20 n. 23. 84.  Various iterations of this formula include reigler & mettre en bon ordre, mettre & ordonner la langue Francoise a certaine reigle, mettre par escript, and mettre en bon ordre. 85. Tory, Champ fleury, 34v. 86. Ibid., 1v. 87.  Ibid., 48v.



Notes to Pages 125–130

321

88.  Ibid., 56r. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. Tory, Champ fleury, 56v. 93.  “Les Dames de Paris pour la plusgrande partie observent bien ceste figure poetique, en laissant le S. finalle de beaucoup de dictions: quant en lieu de dire, Nous avons disne en ung Jardin & y avons menge des Prunes blanches et noires, des Amendes doulces & ameres, des Figues molles, des Pomes, des Poires, & des Gruselles. Elles disent & pronuncent. Nous avon disne en ung Jardin: & y avon menge des prune blanche & noire, des amende doulce & amere, des figue molle, des pome, des poyre, & des gruselle. Ce vice leur seroit excusable, se n’estoit qu’il vient de femme a homme, & qu’il se y treuve entier abus de parfaictement pronuncer en parlant.” Tory, Champ fleury, 57r. 94.  “La notion de ‘défaut de prononciation’ . . . a été le passage obligé vers un grammaticalisation des langues modernes, et la prise de conscience de ce qui les éloignait structurellement, sur le plan phonique, des langues de cultures antiques.” Geneviève Clerico, “Cacophonies et défauts de prononciation. Quelques relectures des anciens à la Renaissance,” in À haute voix, diction et prononciation aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. O. Rosenthal (Paris: Klincksieck, 1998), 205. 95.  Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 24. 96.  “Au Premier Livre / est contenue l’Exhortation a mettre & ordonner la Langue Francoise par certaine Reigle de parler elegamment en bon & plussain Langage Francois. Au Segond est traicte de l’Invention des Lettres Attiques, & de la conference proportionnalle d’icelles au Corps & Visage naturel de l’Homme parfaict. Avec plusieurs belles inventions & moralitez sus lesdittes Lettres Attiques. Au Tiers & dernier Livre /sont deseignees & proportionnees toutes lesdictes Lettres Attiques selon leur Ordre Abecedaire en leur haulteur & largeur / chascune a part soy. en y enseignant leur deue facon & requise pronunciation Latine & Francoise, tant a l’Antique maniere / que a la Moderne.” Tory, Champ fleury, np (title page verso). 97. Although Champ fleury is often credited as the principal reason for Tory’s appointment as royal printer, there is no evidence that he offered a presentation copy to François I. 98. Tory, Champ fleury, np (“Geoffroy Tory de Bourges, dict et donne humble Salut a tous vrayz & devotz Amateurs de bonnes Lettres”). 99.  “J’en eusse traicte & escript en latin, comme je porrois bien faire, se croy je, & comme on peut cognoistre aux petitz oeuvres latins que j’ay faict i[m]primer & mis devant les yeulx des bons estudians tant en metre qu’en prose. Mais volant quelque peu decorer nostre langue Francoise, & afin que avec gens de bonnes lettres le peuple commun en puisse user, j’en veulx escrire en Francois.” Ibid., 1v. 100. Ibid. 101.  Ibid., 32r. 102.  Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005), 4. 103.  Ibid., 79. 104.  “Even a superficial observer of sixteenth-­century literature cannot fail to be impressed by the ‘avalanche’ of treatises which were issued to explain, by a variety of ‘easy steps,’ (often supplemented by sharp-­edged diagrams) just ‘how to’ draw a picture, compose a madrigal, mix paints, bake clay, keep accounts, survey a field, handle all manner of tools and instruments, work mines, assay materials, move armies or obelisks, design buildings, bridges, and machines.”

322

Notes to Pages 130–138

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 243. 105.  On these dimensions of the ad artem redigere, see Pascal Dubourgh Glatigny and Hélène Vérin’s Introduction to their volume Réduire en art: La technologie de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris: Éditions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014), 11–16. 106.  See Hélène Vérin, “Rédiger et réduire en art: un projet de rationalisation des pratiques” in Glatigny and Vérin, Réduire en art. 107.  Vérin, “Rédiger et réduire en art,” 13. 108.  My reference here is to William M. Ivins’s classic study Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1953). On the impact of woodblock prints on knowledge production, see also Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 109. Tory, Champ fleury, 3v. 110. Ibid. 111.  Ibid., 4r. 112.  “Aucuns m’ont volu demouvoir de ce faire disant que je ne la debvoye tant manifester, mais garder en secret pour moy. Saulve leur honneur me semble que non, & que je ne doibs estre glout de science honneste & bonne.” Ibid., 1r. 113. Ibid., 12r. 114. Ibid., 3r. 115.  Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art, 35. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. 119.  Although the title page and colophon identify the book as having been printed in 1530, the royal privilege inside the volume is dated the twenty-­second year of the reign of Henry VIII, which would be 1531. This discrepancy was first pointed out by François Génin in the introduction to his 1852 edition of Palsgrave’s text. See John Palsgrave, L’éclaircissement de la langue française par John Palsgrave, suivi de la Grammaire de Giles du Guez, ed. François Génin (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1852), 12. 120. Palsgrave, L’éclaircissement de la langue française, vii. 121.  Ibid., 11 (my translation). 122.  Ibid., viii.

Chapter 4 1. John Jones, Practical Phonography (London: Richard Smith, 1701). 2. “Phonograph, n.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, January 2018), www.oed.com/ view/Entry/142654. 3. Thomas Allen Reed, French Phonography: An Adaptation of Pitman’s Phonetic Shorthand to the French Language (London: F. Pitman, 1882), 3. 4. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 327. 5. Ibid., 18. 6. Ibid. 7. Jacques Peletier du Mans, Œuvres Complètes, vol. I, ed. Michel Jourde, Jean-Charles Monferran et Jean Vignes (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011),n 92.



Notes to Pages 138–145

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8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Jacques Peletier du Mans, L’art poetique d’Horace, traduit en Vers Francois par Iacques Peletier du Mans (Paris: Michel de Vascosan), 3r‒3v. 11. Louis Meigret, Le Tretté de la Grammęre Françoęze (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1550), 3r‒3v. I have throughout the book attempted to reproduce the orthographic systems of­ Meigret and Peletier as faithfully as possible, within the technological constraints of Microsoft Word. 12. Louis Meigret, La Reponse de Louís Meigręt a l’Apolojíe de Iáqes Pelletier (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1550), 2r. 13. This analogy can be found across Meigret’s writing on writing. See, for example, Meigret, Tretté de la Grammęre Françoęze, 3r, and Louis Meigret, Response de Louís Meigręt a la Dezesperée repliqe de Glaomalis de Vezelęt, transformé ęn Gyllaome dęs Aotels (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1551), 92–93. 14. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 38. 15. Louis Meigret, Traité touchant le commun usage de l’escriture francoyse (Paris: Jean Longis, 1542), np (Aiiiv–Aivr). 16. Ibid., np (Aivr‒Aivv). 17. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 32. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 42. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 45. 24. Laurent Joubert, Traité du Ris . . . plus Vn Dialogue sur la Cacographie Fransaise (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1579), 376. 25. Ibid. 26. Meigret, Traité touchant le commun usage de l’escriture francoyse, “Proesme de Lautheur,” np (Aiiv). 27. Meigret, Repsonse de Louís Meigręt a l’Apolojíe de Iáqes Pelletier, 2r. 28. Louis Meigret, Defęnses de Louís Meigręt Tovchant son Orthographíe Fraçoęze, contre lęs çęnsures ę calomnies de Glaumais du Vezelet, ę de sęs adherans (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1550), np (Ciii). 29. Jacques Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/ (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1555), 134. 30. The spelling vois is frequently attested during the fourteenth century, but by the fifteenth century voix had become the most common spelling of the word. 31. Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/, 134. 32. Ibid., 133. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 133-134. 35. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 3. 36. Ibid., 10 (translation modified). 37. Ibid., 38 (translation modified). 38. Jacques Derrida, “Culture et écriture.”

324

Notes to Pages 145–149

39. “The first impulse of what is called ‘deconstruction’ carries it toward this ‘critique’ of the phantasm or the axiom of purity, or toward the analytical decomposition of a purification that would lead back to the indecomposable simplicity of the origin.” Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 46. 40. William M. Ivins, “Geoffroy Tory,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 15, no. 4 (April 1920): 84. 41. Tory, Champ fleury, 52r. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 1r. 44. Du Bellay, Deffence, 326. 45. See Charles Beaulieux, L’ histoire de l’orthographe française: Les accents et les autres signes auxiliaires (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1927), 19. 46. See Catach, L’orthographe française à l’ époque de la Renaissance, 32–35. 47. Desiderius Erasmus, Recta Pronuntiatione in The Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 4, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 397. 48. Desiderius Erasmus, On Education for Children in Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 4, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 320. Erasmus also remarks that French “has harsh sounds and accents that hardly fall within the realm of human speech.” As for the French pronunciation of Latin—and its detrimental effects on foreigners and students—he writes: “People back from France may speak almost unintelligible Latin, copying every French failing, letting their tongue roll about, confusing their stresses, interjecting meaningless sounds between the Latin words, and doing all they can to pass themselves off as French.” Erasmus, De recta, 409 49. Mathurin Cordier, La declination des Noms et verbes (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1540), “Au lecteur,” np (Aii). 50. Académie française, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Paris: JeanBaptiste Coignard, 1740), 11. Jean Nicot offers the following entry for “accent” in his Thresor de la langue francoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (1606), indicating how accents were conceived and what the accepted marks were in French at the end of the sixteenth century: “accent. Accent. m. Est pur Latin, et signifie l’ elevation, ou rabbaissement, ou contour de la voix en prononçant quelque diction, Accentus, et consequemment signifie les virgules et marques apposées aux mots indicans les endroits d’ iceux où il faut hausser, ou rabbaisser, ou contourner la voix: dont il y a trois manieres, accent aigu, dont voici la figure, / accent grief ou grave, ` et accent circonflex ou contourné, ^ ou ~. “Accent aigu, selon lequel la diction est dite aiguë, est assis sur la derniere syllabe de la diction, comme il l’ est en tous les noms masculins et infinitifs François, peu s’ en faut, comme banny, baston, foüet, frapper, tuer, et autres. “Accent aigu, selon lequel la diction est dite penacuta, est assis sur la penultiesme syllabe de la diction, comme en la pluspart des noms feminins François, beste, femme, Dame, foulée, et en certains infinitifs, braire, taire, frire, duyre, escourre. “Accent aigu, selon lequel la diction est dite antepenacuta, n’ a point de lieu en la langue Françoise, si lon ne le vouloit placer en ce verbe Javeler, que aucuns prononcent par ledit accent, et bien fort peu d’ autres. “Accent circonflex, ou contourné, selon lequel la diction est dite circonflexe, n’ a point de lieu en la langue Françoise, si qu’ on en ait notoire appercevance, si l’ on ne vouloit dire, qu’ il se trouvast en Neelle Chaalons, Seel, Laon, Caën, faon, Haa, et és feminins finissans en deux voyelles, foulêe, batûe, ou en une diphtongue et une voyelle, Blaye, saulsaye, playe.”



Notes to Pages 150–164

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51. Catach, L’Orthographe française à l’ époque de la Renaissance. 52. Ibid., xii. 53. Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, The Paleotypography of the French Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 171. 54. Vervliet, Paleotypography, 172. 55. See, for example, www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2016/02/04/non-l-accent-cir conflexe-ne-va-pas-disparaitre_4859439_4355770.html or http://etudiant.aujourdhui.fr/etudiant/ info/une-reforme-de-l-orthographe-inapplicable.html. 56. The irony of #jesuiscirconflexe, of course, is that the form of the Twitter hashtag itself, with its lack of spaces and its # symbol (one of the old typewriter characters that have taken on new roles in the syntax of social media), would epitomize everything that threatens to “kill” the circumflex in the media technological landscape of the twenty-first century. 57. “Le signe du manque qu’est le circonflexe joue donc secrètement en faveur de ses adversaires, les partisans immobilistes de l’s graphique.” Bernard Cerquiglini, L’accent du souvenir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1995), 55. 58. Major sources on accents and characters in this period include Catach, L’orthographe française à l’ époque de la Renaissance; Susan Baddeley, “French Orthography in the Sixteenth Century” in Orthographies in Early Modern Europe, ed. Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste (Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), 97–127, Susan Baddeley, L’orthographe française au temps de la Réforme (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1993); Charles Beaulieux, L’ histoire de l’orthographe française: Les accents et les autres signes auxiliaires (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1927). 59. Vervliet, Paleotypography, 118. 60. Briefve doctrine pour deuëment escripre selon la proprieté du langaige françoys (Paris: Antoine Augereau, 1533), 15r. 61. Ibid., 13v–14r. 62. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedilla. 63. Tory, Champ fleury, 37v. 64. See Baddeley, L’orthographe française au temps de la Réforme, 138. The same ç will reappear in works by Marot printed by Louys Cyaneus for Pierre Roffet’s widow and his son Étienne Roffet, including the 1534 editions of the Adolescence Clémentine, Suite à l’adolescence clémentine, and Marot’s translation of Ovid, Le premier livre de la métamorphose. Later texts printed by Cyaneus, even those authored by Marot, appear to abandon the cedilla entirely. 65. Another account of the origin of the cedilla has François I reading the popular Amadis de Gaule while imprisoned in Spain between June 1525 and February 1526. See Conley, The Graphic Unconscious, 105. 66. Clément Marot, L’adolescence Clémentine (Paris: Geoffroy Tory, 1533). 67. Bordeaux Copy, Title Page verso. “La prose latine grecque ou autre estrangiere il la faut mettre parmi la prose françoise en caractere different” (my translation). https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/montaigne/. 68. Vervliet, Paleotypography, 11–12. 69. Gilbert Gadoffre, La Révolution culturelle dans la France des humanistes: Guillaume Budé et François Ier (Geneva: Droz, 1998). See also Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Françoise Waquet, Le latin ou l’empire d’un signe, XVIe‒XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998). 70. Erasmus, De recta, 390–391. 71. For a history of humanism, see Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

326

Notes to Pages 164–171

72. Quoted in Martin Davies, “Humanism in Script and Print in the Fifteenth Century” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 48. 73. Ibid. 74. Jenson, the master engraver at the Royal Mint under Charles VII, was sent to Mainz by the king to discover the “new art” being developed there, but he never returned to France after training with Fust and Schoeffer. On Jenson, see Martin Lowry, Nicolas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publishing in Renaissance Europe (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). 75. Tory, Champ fleury, 72v. 76. See Catach, L’orthographe française à l’ époque de la Renaissance, 12, n. 6. On Vidoue, see David Shaw, “Book Trade Practices in Paris: Pierre Vidoue (1516–1543)” in 77. For a careful account of the introduction of Roman types for French editions, see William Kemp, “La première édition du Jugement d’Amour de Flores (septembre 1529) publiée par Jérôme Denis avec le matériel de Geofroy Tory,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 53, no. 3 (1991): 709–726. 78. Conley, Self-Made Map, 18. 79. Vervliet, Paleotypography, 25. 80. Tory, Champ fleury, 24r. 81. For an authoritative account of vernacular translation during this period, see Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and Its Humanist Antecedents (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1984). 82. Tory, Champ fleury, 12r. 83. Lefèvre, part of the Meaux circle, promoted reform but never officially broke with the Catholic church; he was protected by François I and Marguerite de Navarre. In Champ fleury, Tory cites Lefèvre, along with Erasmus and Guillaume Budé, as the three scholars who “night and day write for the utility of the public good, and fulfillment of perfect science” (comme nous voyons aujourd’huy faire trois nobles personnages, Erasme le Hollandois, Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples en Picardie, et Bude diamant des nobles & studieux Pharrisiens, qui nuyct & jour veillent et escripvent a l’utilite du bien public, & exaulcement de parfaicte Science), 8v. 84. Quoted in Margaret L. King, ed., Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 209. 85. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1–2. 86. Ibid. 87. Lydia Liu, “Writing” in Mark B. N. Hansen and W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 315. 88. Tory, Champ fleury, 31v. “Il ya encores une aultre raison segrete pour quoy Alpha signifie commancemant. Et celle est que les Grecs content & font leurs nombres par leurs Lettres. Leurs dictes lettres, comme aussi est faict en Hebreu, leur servent de Chifres, & signes de nombres a compter. Alpha. Α. est mis pour le premier nombre, & pour ung. Vita. B. est mis pour deux. Gamma Γ. pour trois.” 89. Baddeley, “French Orthography in the Sixteenth Century,” 109. 90. Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/, 53. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Bernard Stiegler has suggested that this principle of exactitude, the orthos, should in fact be understood as the essence of phonetic writing, rather than phone, as such. “The essential



Notes to Pages 171–185

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characteristic of orthographic (called phono-logic) writing is the exactitude of the recording of the voice rather than the exactitude of the recording of the voice: it is a matter of recording rather than voice.” Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2, 13. 94. Tres utile et compendieulx traicte (Paris: Denis Saint-Denis, 1529), np (Aiir‒Aiiv). 95. Tres utile et compendieulx traicte, np (Civv). 96. Ibid. 97. “Orthographie est un terme grec fait par longue espace de temps commun et comme propre à notre langue dont pour le présent nous suffira de la définition Orthographie donc est une science et industrie de savoir bien écrire. Non point que ce soit de bien farder ou peindre sa lettre mais de non changer, ajouter ou diminuer une lettre pour l’autre en son écriture.” Tres utile et compendieulx traicte, np. 98. Ibid. 99. “The Talking Phonograph,” Scientific American 37 (1877): 384. 100. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 91. 101. Jacques Peletier du Mans, L’algebre de Iaques Peletier du Mans (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1554), 8. 102. Pliny, Translation de langue Latine en Francoyse, des septiesme & huytiesme liures (de l’ histoire naturelle), trans. Louis Meigret (Paris: Denis Janot, 1544), np, “Loys Meigret Lyonnais Aux lecteurs.” Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/, 37. 103. Meigret, Reponse de Louis Meigret a l’Apologie de Iaqes Pelletier, 2r. 104. Derrida, logic of the supplement, in Of Grammatology. 105. Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/, 119. 106. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 315 (translation modified). 107. Ibid. (translation modified). 108. Ibid.; Pliny, Translation de langue Latine en Francoyse, des septiesme & huytiesme liures (de l’histoire naturelle). On the potential identity of the unnamed printer and other details on Meigret during this period—including his potential activities between 1531 and 1540—see Franz Josef Hausmann, Louis Meigret: Humaniste et linguiste (Tübingen: Narr, 1980), 81–86. 109. Louis Meigret, Discours sur la création du monde (Paris: André Wechel, 1554). Quoted in Hausmann, Louis Meigret, 95. 110. Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/, 37. 111. This phenomenon—the lengthening of a vowel sound upon the loss of a following consonant—is known in historical linguistics as compensatory lengthening. Randall Gess ­suggests that this function was in decline in the mid-sixteenth century. See Randall Gess, “The Myth of Phonologically Distinct Vowel Length in Renaissance France,” in Historical Romance Linguistics: Retrospective and Perspectives, ed. Randall S. Gess and Deborah Arteaga (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006), 53–76. See also Cerquiglini, L’accent du souvenir, chap. 2. 112. Quoted in Cerquiglini, L’accent du souvenir, 35. 113. “C’est à l’époque où l’on prononce le moins de consonnes que l’on en écrit le plus” (Histoire I, 178, quoted in Cerquiglini, L’accent du souvenir, 42). 114. Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/, 125. 115. Ibid. 116. Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, vol. 1, “Préface” (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1740), np. 117. Ibid., 284.

328

Notes to Pages 186–192

Chapter 5 Epigraph: Paré, Workes, 150. 1.  Pierre de la Primaudaye, Academie Françoise (Paris: Guillaume Chaudiere, 1577), 139r. 2. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 24. 3.  See Jacques Derrida, “Language Is Never Owned: An Interview” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 97–107. 4.  Derrida, “Language Is Never Owned,” 101. 5. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 65. 6.  See “Language Is Never Owned,” 101–102. 7. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 68. 8. Ibid. 9.  Ibid., 37. 10.  Ibid., 41 (translation modified). 11.  Ibid., 34. 12.  Derrida, “Language Is Never Owned,” 101. 13. Ibid. 14. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 25. 15.  Ibid., 23. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18.  Ibid., 63. 19.  Ibid., 63–64 (translation modified). 20.  Jacques Peletier du Mans, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Michel Jourde, Jean-­Charles Monferran, and Jean Vignes (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), 306 (my translation). 21.  Marc Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part One,” On the Horizon 9 (2001), 1. 22.  On the role of print in the constitution of external, collective memory, see André Leroi-­ Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), chap. 9, 257–266. 23. Ramus, Grammaire (Paris: André Wechel, 1572), np (A6r), “Preface.” According to Ramus, Gallic grammar is an ancient art “recently brought back from the underworld by the great King François” (nagueres comme reuoquee des enfers par le grand Roy Francoys). 24. Ramus, Grammaire, A6r‒A7v. 25.  I say “his own” advisedly here, since the pedagogical program in question is a decidedly masculine—and masculinizing—undertaking. 26. Ramus, Grammaire, A7r. Ramus conspicuously leaves off his register the English grammars of French from the medieval period, as well as English contemporaries of Dubois’s grammar like John Palsgrave’s L’esclaircissement de la langue francoyse (London, 1530) or Giles du Wes’s An introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce, and to speake French trewly (London, 1532). On this pedagogical and grammatical tradition, see Douglas Kibbee, For to Speke French Trewely: The French language in England, 1000–1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991). 27.  Sylvain Auroux, La révolution technologique de la grammatisation (Sprimont: Mard­ aga, 1994). 28.  “Par grammatisation, on doit entendre le processus qui conduit à décrire et à outiller une langue sur la base des deux technologies qui sont encore aujourd’hui les piliers de notre savoir



Notes to Pages 192–201

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métalinguistique: la grammaire et le dictionnaire.” (By grammatization, one must understand the process that leads to describing and instrumentalizing a language on the basis of the two technologies that are still today the pillars of our metalinguistic knowledge: grammar and the dictionary.) Auroux, La révolution technologique de la grammatisation, 28. 29. Auroux, La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation, 9; Sylvain Auroux, Histoire des idées linguistique, vol. 2 (Sprimont: Mardaga, 1992), 11–12. 30.  “Nous avons toutes les raisons de considérer que la Renaissance constitue un tournant décisif pour ces disciplines [i.e., language sciences] et qu’elle forme l’axe de la second révolution technico-­linguistique.” Auroux, Histoire des idées linguistique, vol. 2, 12. 31.  Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 10. 32.  “Nous pensons qu’il est plausible de faire l’hypothèse selon laquelle grammatisation et imprimerie font partie de la même révolution techno-­linguistique.” Auroux, La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation, 96. 33.  Leroi-­Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 257. 34.  Ibid., 261; André Leroi-­Gourhan, Le geste et la parole II. La mémoire et les rythmes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1965), 70. 35.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 360–361. 36.  Étienne Dolet, La Maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre (Lyon: Étienne Dolet, 1540), 39. 37. Ramus, Grammaire, np (Aiiiir‒Aiiiiv). 38.  See Marie-­Luce Demonet, Les Voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1992), 340. 39.  Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xiii. 40.  Ibid., 2. 41.  See Charles Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 95–105. 42.  Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 111–117. 43.  See Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, 117. As secular and reformist strongholds, the collèges fell out of favor during the seventeenth century, when town councils were pressured by both Church and state to turn control of them to religious orders. Under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, Nauert points out, systematic pressure was exerted to close almost all the collèges in order to prevent the education of the lower classes. 44.  See Louis Le Roy, Deux Oraisons françoises de Loys Le Roy, prononcees par luy à Paris avant la lecture de Demosthene (Paris: Frédéric Morel, 1576). 45. Tory, Champ fleury, 52r. 46.  Ibid., 1v. 47.  “Deplorer la sterilite de noz mains qui sont trop mal soigneuses a bien escripre.” Tory, Champ fleury, 7r. 48.  See, for example, Tory, Champ fleury, 11r. 49.  Charles de Bovelles, Sur les langues vulgaires et la variété des langues françaises: Liber de differentia vulgarium linguarum et Gallici sermonis varietate (1533), ed. and trans. Colette Demai­ zière (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), 75. 50. Ibid.

330

Notes to Pages 201–208

51.  Ibid., 77. 52. Ibid. 53.  Ibid., 86. 54.  “This phenomenon likewise appears in every nation under heaven, namely, owing to a small distancing, an astral and celestial influence soon provoking a change in the pronunciation of men, languages, too, are changed.” Bovelles, Sur les langues vulgaires, 77. 55. Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, 96. 56.  Quoted in ibid., 98. 57. Ibid. 58.  Ibid., 99. 59. Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, 92. 60. Tory, Champ fleury, 67r. 61. Ibid., 41r. “A Bien pronuncer .F. Martianus Capella nous l’enseigne quant il dit .F. dentes labrum inferius deprimentes lingua palatoque dulcescit.” 62.  Quoted in Kibbee, For to Speke French Trewely, 121. 63.  “a poinne puet on trouueir a ious d’ieu persone, qui saiche escrire, anteir, ne prononcieir en une meismes semblant meniere, mais escript, ante, et prononce, li uns en une guise, et li aultre en une aultre.” Ibid., 122. 64.  Quoted in Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55. 65.  Isidore of Seville, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies: Complete English Translation, trans. Priscilla Throop (Charlotte, Ver.: Lulu.com, 2005), 44. 66. Erasmus, De recta, 368–369. 67.  Ibid., 369. 68. Erasmus, De pueris, 305. 69.  The indebtedness of contemporary transhumanism to Renaissance humanism becomes apparent here, as well: this Erasmian becoming-­human is an overcoming of the limits of the mortal body, the fashioning of “a godlike creature.” As Cary Wolfe puts it, the perfectible human of transhumanism “is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether.” Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv. 70. Erasmus, De pueris, 305–306. 71.  Ibid., 306. 72. Ibid. 73.  On Erasmus’s relation to printing and typography, see Alexandre Vanautgaerden, Érasme typographe: Humanisme et imprimerie au début du XVIe siècle (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012). 74. Erasmus, De recta, 360. 75. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 89. 76. Tory, Champ fleury, 24r. 77. Ibid. “Avant que la lettre d’impression soit parachevee, elle est faicte deux fois a l’envers, & deux autres fois a l’endroit, En la premiere fois a l’envers /sont les poincons d’acier, esquelz la lettre est toute a gauche. Les matrices ont la lettre a droit. La lettre d’estaing fondu / est comme les ja dits poincons, toute a l’envers. Puis finablement au papier im-­prime toute la lettre se rencontre a l’endroit, & en sa veue requise a lire tractivement.” 78. Tory, Champ fleury, 33v.



Notes to Pages 210–223

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79.  Ibid., 31v. 80.  Ibid., 11r, 31r. 81. Ibid., 33v. 82.  Ibid., 18v. 83.  Ibid., 34v. 84. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 4. 85. Vervliet, Paleotypography. 86.  For an example of an early Estienne errata sheet, see Henri Estienne’s 1516 edition of Euclid, Geometricorum elementorum libri XV. 87.  See Chapter 3. 88.  Robert Estienne, Dictionaire francoislatin, contenant les motz & manieres de parler Francois, tournez en Latin (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1539), np (title page, verso). 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91.  Ibid., 171. 92.  Ibid., np (title page, verso). 93. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 105. “The lexical richness of grapholects begins with writing, but its fullness is due to print. For the resources of a modern grapholect are available largely through dictionaries. There are limited word lists of various sorts from very early in the history of writing, . . . but until print is well established there are no dictionaries that undertake generalized comprehensive accounts of the words in use in any language. It is easy to understand why this is so if you think of what it would mean to make even a few dozen relatively accurate handwritten copies of Webster’s Third or even of the much smaller Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. Dictionaries such as these are light-­years away from the world of oral cultures. Nothing illustrates more strikingly how it is that writing and print alter states of consciousness.” 94. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 22. 95.  Ibid. (translation modified). 96. Palsgrave, L’esclaircissement de la langue francoyse, 34. 97. Ibid. 98.  Daniel Baggioni, Langues et Nations en Europe (Paris: Payot, 1997). 99. Palsgrave, L’esclaircissement de la langue francoyse, 35. 100.  “Grammaires et dictionnaires ne sont pas . . . de simples représentations des langues qui leur préexisteraient. Ce sont plutôt des outils externes qui modifient les espaces de communication et exercent une influence sur les langues.” Sylvain Auroux, “Grammatisation,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 11 (1995), 5. 101.  Robert Estienne, Traicte de la grammaire Francoise (Geneva: Robert Estienne, 1557), 3. 102.  Grammars “décrivent et prescrivent un objet (la langue) qu’elles créent par leur existence même.” Sylvain Auroux, “Le processus de grammatisation et ses enjeux” in Histoire des idées linguistiques, vol. 2 (Paris: Mardaga, 1993). 103.  Robert Estienne, Traicté de la grammaire Francoise, 3-­4. 104.  See Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 105. “Ramus’s classroom texts were practical manuals and handbooks, not theoretical treatises which we would call ‘scientific.’ Their aim was use, not academic rigor, and they were intended to produce capable men rather than scholarly ones.” James Veazie Skalnik, Ramus and Reform: University and Church at the End of the Renaissance (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2002), 52.

332

Notes to Pages 224–234

106.  Pierre de la Ramée, Gramere (Paris: André Wechel, 1562), 5. 107.  Pierre de la Ramée, Grammaire de P. de la Ramee (Paris: André Wechel, 1572), np (iiv–iiir). 108. Ramus, Grammaire, np. 109. Ramus, Grammaire, np. 110. Skalnik, Ramus and Reform, 54. 111. Ramus, Grammaire, 49. 112. Ibid. 113.  Ibid., 49–50. 114.  Ibid., 51. 115.  Ibid., 54. 116.  Ibid., 50–53. 117.  Ibid., 53–54. 118.  Ibid., 54.

Chapter 6 Epigraphs: “Cedit vieux Hercules tire apres luy une merveilleusement grande multitude d’hommes & femmes tous ataches l’ung a part de l’autre par l’oreille.” Tory, Champ fleury, 2v. 1.  “Ordonnance du 25 août 1539 sur le fait de la justice (dite ordonnance de Villers-­Cotteret [sic]),” www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006070939. 2.  Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origins à 1900, vol. 2 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927), 30. More recently, see Jean-­Louis Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 182. 3.  “Ordonnance du 25 août 1539 sur le fait de la justice.” 4.  Ibid. On recent rulings that have invoked the 1539 edict to suppress regional languages in France, see Anne Judge, Linguistic Policies and the Survival of Regional Languages in France and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 31–32. 5.  Derrida, “If There Is Cause to Translate I,” 6–11. 6.  Hélène Merlin, “Langue et souveraineté en France au XVIIe siècle: La production autonome d’un corps de langage,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 49 (2): 369–394. On the relation of Villers-­Cotterêts to this fictional character of the French language in the sixteenth century, see Merlin-­Kajman’s more recent article, “L’étrange histoire de l’ordonnance de Villers-­ Cotterêts: force du passé, force des signes,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 33, no. 2, (2011): 79–101. I discovered while writing this chapter that Merlin-­Kajman’s analysis of Bodin and language as a mark or (her preferred term) “sign” of sovereignty in this latter article anticipates my own analysis here, which comes as no surprise given that her work has been foundational for this project and my research more broadly. 7.  Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 272. 8. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44. 9. Ibid. 10.  Ibid., 44, n. 17. 11. Peletier, Œuvres Complètes I, 101–102. 12.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 330–331.



Notes to Pages 234–238

333

13.  Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 46. 14.  Ibid., 28. 15.  This technique had already been suggested by the humanist jurist Claude de Seyssel to François’s predecessor, Louis XII: “Qu’ont fait le peuple et les princes romains quand ils tenoient la monarchie du monde et qu’ils taschoyent a la perpetuer et rendre eternelle? Ils n’ont trouue autre moyen plus certain ne plus seur que de magnifier, enrichir et sublimer leur langue latine, qui, du commencement de leur empire, estoit bien maigre et bien rude, et apres, de la communiquer aux païs et prouinces et peuples par eux conquis, ensemble leurs lois Romaines couchees en icelle.” (What the Roman people and princes do when they held the monarchy of the world and strove to perpetuate it and render it eternal? They found no means more certain or more sure than to magnify, enrich, and enhance their Latin language, which, at the beginning of their empire, was quite meager and crude, and after, to communicate it to the countries and provinces and peoples they conquered, along with their Roman laws written in this language.) Quoted in Brunot, Histoire, vol. 2, 30. 16. Tory, Champ fleury, 4v. 17. Peletier, Œuvres complètes, vol. I, 98–99. 18.  Quoted in Claude Longeon, Premiers combats pour la langue française (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1989), 23–24. 19.  Derrida, “If There Is Cause to Translate I,” 9. 20.  Antoine Héroët, “Epistre de l’Autheur au Roy Françoys premier de ce nom,” in La parfaicte amye (Lyon: Étienne Dolet, 1543), 64–69. 21.  Ibid., 67–68. 22.  See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 42–60 and throughout. 23.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 328–329. 24.  On September 28, 1989, on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts, Académie française member Alain Peyrefitte took note of this convergence of names as he proposed a historical interpretation of the law as uniting the king with French subjects through their common language – though Peyrefitte urged his fellow immortels not to take too seriously the etymological validity of this convergence: “L’Ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts n’est qu’un épisode, mais un épisode essentiel, d’une politique de soutien à la langue du pays. Le roi ne veut parler que français, comme la plupart de ses sujets, contre les grands corps qui entendaient garder le privilège du latin et contre les provinces rétives. . . . Plusieurs écrivains comme Du Bellay, Clément Marot, Amyot, Henri Estienne ont exprimé leur enthousiasme à la royauté pour cet appui. Jusqu’à déclarer que c’est du nom de François Ier que notre langue a pris le nom de françoise! Étymologie sujette à caution.” (The Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts is only one episode, but an essential episode, in a politics of support for the language of the country. The king wants to speak only French, like the majority of his subjects, against the great community that intended to maintain the privilege of Latin and against the recalcitrant provinces. . . . Several writers, such as Du Bellay, Clément Marot, Amyot, and Henri Estienne expressed their enthusiasm for this support, to the point of declarer that it is from the name of François I that our language took the name françoise ! An etymology subject to caution.) Alain Peyrefitte, “450e anniversaire de l’Ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts,” http://www.academie-­francaise.fr/450e-­a nniversaire-­de-­lordonnance-­de -­villers-­cotterets.

334

Notes to Pages 239–246

25.  Reproduced in René de Lespinasse, Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1897), 707–709. 26.  Today a user can browse these marks on the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France for sixteenth-­century Parisian editions, which it is tempting to see as the digital culmination of François’s initiatives during the 1530s. 27.  Major scholarly sources on the tric include Henri Hauser, Ouvriers du temps passé (XVe–XVIe siècles) (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1899); Paul Chauvet, Les Ouvriers du livre en France, des origins à la Révolution de 1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959); Natalie Zemon Davis “A Trade Union in Sixteenth-­Century France,” Economic History Review 19, no. 1 (1966): 48–69. 28.  This claim is made compellingly by Paul Chauvet in Les Ouvriers du livre. 29.  Charles VIII issued multiple acts (in 1485 and 1488) protecting booksellers (libraires), parchment makers (parcheminiers), paper makers (papetiers), manuscript illuminators (enlumineurs), book binders (relieurs), and scribes (escrivains), making no specific mention of printers; Louis XIII issued lettres patentes focused on libraires in 1513. 30.  On this history, see René de Lespinasse, Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris: XIVe-­X VIIIe siècles (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1897), 694–720. and Ambroise Firmin-­Didot, Essai sur la typographie (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1855), 760–761. 31.  Benedict Anderson, for his part, points in Imagined Communities to the juxtaposition of François’s “panicked 1535 ban” and the Ordinance of Villers-­Cotterêts to argue for the “unselfconscious” and “pragmatic” nature of the transformation of administrative vernaculars into new “print-­languages” and “languages-­of-­power” during the sixteenth century. 32.  “Combien que des le treizième jour de janvier 1534, par nos autres lettres patentes et pour les causes et raisons contenues ensemble, nous eussions prohibé et défendu que nul n’eut des lors en avant à imprimer ou faire imprimer aucun livre en notre royaume, sur peine de la hart, toutefois, pour aucunes causes, raisons et occasions qui à ce que nous ont depuis mu et meuvent, nous avons voulu et ordonné, voulons et ordonnons et nous plait que l’accomplissement d’icelles nosdistes lettres, prohibitions et défenses soit et demeure en suspens et surséance jusqu’à ce que par nous autrement y ait été pourvu.” Letters dated February 23, 1535, brought before the Paris Parlement by the king’s advocate Jacques Cappel on February 24, 1535. Quoted in Firmin-­Didot, Essai sur la typographie, 760–761. 33.  English translation adapted from Lodge, French: From Dialect to Standard, 126. 34.  Ordonnances royaulx sur le faict de la justice (Paris: Jean André, 1539), 11r. 35.  Briefve Doctrine, 13v–14r. 36.  The bookshops include those of Galliot du Pré, Denis Janot, Jean André, the Angeliers, and Poncet Le Preux. 37.  Another edition from 1539, the printing location of which is not specified, is held in the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-­en-­Provence and the Bibliothèques municipales in Grenoble, suggesting circulation of the text in the Provence/Alps region. 38.  Ordonnances royaulx sur le faict de la justice, 11r. 39.  Freeman Henry, Language, Culture, and Hegemony in Modern France (1539 to the Millenium) (Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 2008), 12. 40. Lodge, French: From Dialect to Standard, 126–127. 41.  Major interventions in the Villers-­Cotterêts debate include Henri Peyre, La Royauté et les langues provinciales (Paris: Presses Modernes, 1933); Auguste Brun, “ ‘En langage maternel



Notes to Pages 246–250

335

François,’ ” Le Français moderne 2 (1951): 81–86; Danielle Trudeau, “L’Ordonnance de Villers-­ Cotterêts et la langue française: Histoire ou interpretation?” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 45, no. 3 (1983): 461–472; Gilles Boulard, “L’Ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts: Le temps de la clarté et la stratégie du temps,” Revue Historique 609 (1999): 45–100; Paul Cohen, “L’imaginaire d’une langue nationale: L’état, les langues et l’invention du mythe de l’Ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts à l’époque moderne en France,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 25, no. 1 (2003): 19–69; Hélène Merlin-­Kajman, “L’étrange histoire de l’Ordonnance de Villers-­ Cotterêts: Force du passé, force des signes,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 33, no. 2 (2011): 79–101. For my previous take on the Villers-­Cotterêts question, from which the current account borrows in part, see Katie Chenoweth, “The Force of a Law: Derrida, Montaigne, and the Edict of Villers-­Cotterêts (1539),” Comparatist 36 (2012): 67–85. For recent in-­depth study of the relationship between French and other dialects during this period, see two books by Jean-­François Courouau: Moun lengatge bèl: Les choix linguistiques minoritaires en France (1490–1660) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2008), and Et non autrement: Marginalisation et résistance des langues de France (XVIe-­X VIIe siècle) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012). 42. Tory, Champ fleury, 5r. 43.  Pierre Rebuffe, Commentarii in Constitutiones Seu Ordinationes Regias (Lyon: Sennetonii fratres, 1554). Cited in Trudeau, “L’Ordonnance de Villers-­Cotterêts et la langue française,” 464. 44.  Derrida, “If There Is Cause to Translate I,” 11. 45.  Ibid., 12. 46.  Quoted in Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis l’an 420, vol. 30 (Paris: Plon, 1825), 252. 47.  Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 253. 48.  Douglas Kibbee cites Le très ancien coutumier de Normandie (c. 1200), Li livres de jostice et de plet (1254–1260), Les Coutumes de Beauvais of Philippe de Beaumanoir (c. 1283), L’ancien coutumier de Champagne (c. 1290–1300), La très ancienne coutume de Bretagne (1312–1325), Le grand coutumier de France by Jacques d’Ableiges (1387–1389), La Somme Royale by Jean Boutillier (1395). Douglas Kibbee, “Présentation: l’autorité de l’état et l’autorité linguistique,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 24, no. 2 (2002): 12. 49. Albert Rigaudière, “Charles VII ordonne la rédaction des coutumes en France,” Archives Nationales de France, https://francearchives.fr/commemo/recueil-­2004/38645. 50.  Quoted in Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, vol. 20 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1840), 279 51. Ibid. 52.  Quoted in Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 11 (Paris: Plon, 1827), 596. 53.  Quoted in Douglas Kibbee, “Meigret et les politiques de la langue française,” in Lyon et l’illustration de la langue française, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: ENS Éditions, 2003), 67. 54.  Auguste Brun observes that, unlike Villers-­Cotterêts, this 1533 edict does not seem to have had any discernible effect: “en aucun lieu on ne constate l’abaondon systématique du latin pour le vulgaire des contractants, comme on constate après 1540, l’abandon de l’un et de l’autre pour le français. C’est que l’édit de Villers-­Cotterêts implique une prohibition, et qu’on s’incline devant une défense plus aisément qu’on n’exécute un ordre positif. La forme négative de cette prescription en a assuré le succès.” Auguste Brun, Recherche historiques sur l’introduction du français dans les provinces du Midi (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1923), 257n.

336

Notes to Pages 250–259

55.  See Kibbee, “Présentation: l’autorité de l’état et l’autorité linguistique,” 25. 56. As Gilles Boulard suggests, “La monarchie sert moins la clarté qu’elle ne s’en sert.” Boulard, “L’Ordonnance de Villers-­C otterêts: Le temps de la clarté et la stratégie du temps,” 70. 57.  Quoted in Kibbee, “Meigret et les politiques de la langue française,” 67. The edict reads: “Pour obvier aux abbus qui sont ci devant advenus au moyen de ce que les juges de nostre dict pays de Prouvence ont faict les procès criminels dudict pays en latin, ordonnons, affin que les tesmongs entendent mieux leurs dépositions et les criminels les procès faits contre eux, que doresnavant tous les procès criminels et les enquestes seront faictz en françoys ou a tout le moins en vulgaire dudict pays.” 58. Hampton, Literature and Nation, 14. 59.  Archives Municipales de Lyon, AA 151, 69r. Quoted in Natalie Zemon Davis, “A Trade Union in Sixteenth-­Century France,” 52n. 60.  Davis, “A Trade Union in Sixteenth-­Century France,” 51. 61.  Quoted in Davis, “A Trade Union in Sixteenth-­Century France,” 53n. 62.  See Davis, “A Trade Union in Sixteenth-­Century France,” 53n, and Hauser, Ouvriers du temps passé, 79–80. 63.  Davis, “A Trade Union in Sixteenth-­Century France,” 62. 64.  Louis de Jaucourt, “Tric,” Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 16 (Neufchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), 632. 65.  Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 4 (Paris: Hachette, 1873), 2342. 66. Ibid. 67.  Collection des ordonnances des rois de France: 1er janvier 1535–avril 1539 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1872). 68.  William Heubi, François Ier et le mouvement intellectuel en France (1515–1547) (Paris: F. Rouge, 1913), 89. “L’imprimerie parisienne et lyonnaise fut sérieusement compromise par une grève fomentée par les compagnons imprimeurs.” 69. Hauser, Les ouvriers du temps passé, 233. 70. Ibid. 71.  David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-­Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 72.  Guillaume des Autels, Replique de Guillaume des Autels aux furieuses defenses de Louis Meigret (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1551). 73.  Louis Meigret, Defęnses de Louis Meigret touchant son orthographíe françoęze, contre lęs çęnsures ę les calõnies de Glaumalis Du Vezelet ę de sęs adhérans (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1550), NP [Biir]. 74.  Des Autels, Replique, 21. 75. Ibid. 76. Meigret, Defęnses, NP [Biir]. 77.  Franz Josef Hausmann, Louis Meigret: humaniste et linguiste (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1980), 102. 78. Meigret, Defęnses, NP [Biv]. 79.  Ibid., NP [Biv–Biir]. 80.  Ibid., NP [Biiiv]. 81. Meigret, Grammere, 4r. 82.  Ibid., 3v.



Notes to Pages 260–270

337

83.  Ibid., 3v–4r. 84. Lucian, Le menteur, ou l’incredule de Lucian, traduit de Grec en Françoes par Louis Meigret Liones, aueq vne ecritture q’adrant à la prolaçion Françoeze: e les rézons, trans. Louis Meigret (Paris: Chrétien Wechel, 1548), 5.

Chapter 7 Epigraphs: Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse; Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 17. 1.  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, trans. John McFarland Kennedy (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909), 49–50. 2.  David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 3.  A more dire estimate from 2004 predicted that 90 percent of the languages spoken globally would go extinct halfway through this century. 4.  As of August 2017, the project catalog boasts information on 3,407 languages. www. endangeredlanguages.com. 5.  Christopher Moseley, Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Paris: UNESCO, 2010). 6.  Jacques Peletier, Dialogue de l’ortografe e prononciation francoese, 79. 7.  R. Glynn Faithfull, “The Concept of ‘Living Language,’ in Cinquecento Vernacular Philology,” Modern Language Review, 48, no. 3 (July 1953), 286. 8.  Quoted by Faithfull, “The Concept of ‘Living Language,’ ” 286–287. 9. Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 17. 10. Marcus Keller, Figurations of France: Literary Nation-­Building in Times of Crisis (1550–1650) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 12. 11.  “Natura arborum terra marique sponte sua provenientium dicta est; restat earum quae arte et humanis ingeniis fiunt verius quam nascuntur.” Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. V: Books 17–19, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 2–3. 12.  Hendrik Vervliet, Vine Leaf Ornaments in Renaissance Typography: A Survey (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2012). 13.  Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. IV: Books 12–16, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 193. 14.  For an excellent treatment of the relation between nature and culture in the Deffence and the significance of this relation for Du Bellay’s concept of the “nation,” see Keller, Figurations of France, 11–40. 15.  Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-­Century Plants and Print Culture (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 10. 16.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 322–323. 17.  Pliny’s stepmother appears in the opening of Book VII: “The first place will rightly be assigned to man, for whose sake great Nature appears to have created all other things—though she asks a cruel price for all her generous gifts, making it hardly possible to judge whether she has been more a kind parent to man or more a harsh stepmother. First of all, man alone of all animals she drapes with borrowed resources. On all the rest in various ways she bestows coverings—shells, bark, spines, hides, fur, bristles, hair, down, feathers, scales, fleeces; even the trunks of trees she has protected against cold and heat by bark, sometimes in two layers: but man alone on the day of his birth she casts away naked on the naked ground, to burst at once into wailing and weeping,

338

Notes to Pages 270–276

and none other among all the animals is more prone to tears, and that immediately at the very beginning of life; whereas, I vow, the much-­talked-­of smile of infancy even at the earliest is bestowed on no child less than six weeks old. This initiation into the light is followed by a period of bondage such as befalls not even the animals bred in our midst, fettering all his limbs; and thus when successfully born he lies with hands and feet in shackles, weeping—the animal that is to lord it over all the rest, and he initiates his life with punishment because of one fault only, the offence of being born. Alas the madness of those who think that from these beginnings they were bred to proud estate!” Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. II: Books 3–7, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 507–509. 18.  David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 29. 19. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 188. 20.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 320–321. 21.  See Pierre Villey, Les Sources italiennes de la “Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise” de Joachim Du Bellay (1908; Paris: Honoré Champion, 1969). Ignacio Navarrete has challenged the claim that Du Bellay’s work lacks originality; see Ignacio Navarrete, “Strategies of Appropriation in Speroni and Du Bellay,” Comparative Literature 41, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 141–154. More recently, Hassan Melehy has read Du Bellay’s appropriation of Speroni as a performance of the literary practice of appropriation he advocates, a reading I find sympathetic and to which my analysis is indebted; see Hassan Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 24–29. 22.  “Il en résulte que cette œuvre, capitale dans l’histoire de notre littérature, n’est pas du tout, comme on le pensait en général, une œuvre originale.” Villey, Les Sources italiennes, np, “Avant Propos.” 23.  Martin Heidegger, from “The Question Concerning Technology”: “What presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-­forth, for example, the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself (en heautoi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, for example, the silver chalice, has the bursting open belonging to bringing-­forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or the artist.” Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 10–11. On the complicated relation between nature and technē in the Renaissance, see Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), esp. chap. 5. 24.  “Il y a des écrivains plus grands que du Bellay; il n’en est point de plus national.” Édouard Herriot, “Quatrième Centenaire de la ‘Défense et illustration de la langue française’ par Joachim Du Bellay,” Académie française, www.academie-­francaise.fr/quatrieme-­centenaire-­de-­la -­defense-­et-­i llustration-­de-­la-­langue-­francaise-­par-­joachim-­du-­bellay. 25.  On the origins of the royal privilege system, see Elizabeth Armstrong, Before Copyright: The French Book-­Privilege System, 1498–1526 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 26.  Ibid., 1. 27. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 328. 28. Catach, L’Orthographe française à l’époque de la Renaissance, 164 n. 11. Catach’s hypothesis as to the identity of the printer of Deffence has recently been supported by compelling new edvidence from Magali Vène regarding the woodblock initials in the text. See Magali Vène, “L’imprimeur de La Deffence et de L’Olive de 1549 et le mystère des lettrines ‘C E,’ ” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 69, no. 3 (2007): 645–658.



Notes to Pages 276–287

339

29.  François Titelmans, Compendium naturalis philosophiae . . . (Paris: François Girault for François Estienne, 1547), np, title page verso. 30.  “Réserve des livres rares,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/ dpt_rlr.html. 31.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 372–373. 32.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 20. 33.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 358–359. 34.  Ibid., 352–353. 35.  Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 23. 36.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 412–413. 37.  Ibid., 336–337. 38. Cécile Alduy, “Lyric Economies: Manufacturing Values in French Petrarchan Collections (1549–60),” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 726. 39.  Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 9. 40. Hampton, Literature and Nation, 153. 41.  Ibid., 153–154. 42.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 342–343. 43.  Jacques Peletier du Mans, L’art poëtique de Jacques Peletier du Mans, departi an deux livres (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1555), 63. 44. Peletier, Art poëtique, 64. 45.  Modern technology, as Elissa Marder has suggested, reveals the technological “maternal function” that haunts every apparently natural birth, an originary technicity of the “mother” and the “mother tongue.” See Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 46.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 328–329. 47. Ibid. 48. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 17. 49.  Grafting as a technique for cultivating fruit trees and other plants also underwent a revival during the Renaissance, appearing in numerous farming manuals and almanacs in the sixteenth century. 50.  Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 355. 51.  Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault, L’Agriculture et maison rustique (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1572), 333 52.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 338–339. 53. Peletier, Art poëtique, 63. 54. Knight, Of Books and Botany, 9. 55.  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 17. 56.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 370–371. 57.  Ibid., 372–373. 58.  The authors of L’Agriculture et maison rustique inform their readers that through the “artifice of grafting . . . not only is one species changed and transformed into another” (l’artifice d’enter . . . non seulement une espece est changee & transmuee en une autre), but it also enables France to receive “foreign trees” (arbres estrangers) in its own soil. Estienne and Liébault, L’Agriculture et maison rustique, 330.

340

Notes to Pages 287–294

59. Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer, 23. 60.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 370–373. 61. Ibid., 328–329. 62. Ibid. 63.  Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy Interview” (1961), www.nextnature.net/2009/12/ the-­playboy-­interview-­marshall-­mcluhan/. 64.  Du Bellay, Deffence, 404–405. 65.  Ibid., 412–413. 66.  “I’aime beaucoup mieux que tu le lises imprimé correctement que dépraué par vne infinité d’exemplaires ou qui pis est corrompu miserablement par vn tas d’imprimeurs non moins ignorans que temeraires et impudens.” (I prefer that you read it correctly printed rather than perverted in an infinite number of copies or, what is worse, miserably corrupted by a bunch of printers who are no less ignorant than they are reckless and impertinent.) Joachim Du Bellay, Divers jeux rustiques. 67.  Du Bellay, Deffence, np (F7r). 68. Although chesne is an attested spelling of chaine in the fifteenth century (distinguished from “oak” by context and feminine gender), this spelling is rare by the mid-­sixteenth century. 69.  The spelling was indeed changed to chaine as early as Frédéric Morel’s revised edition of 1569, Les oeuvres françoises de Joachim Du Bellay rev. et de nouveau augm. de plusieurs poésies non encore auparavant imprimées (Paris: Frédéric Morel, 1569).

Epilogue Epigraph: Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 47. 1.  Derrida, “Culture et écriture” (my translation). 2. Derrida, Dissemination, 9. “Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-­effacement. Upon reaching the end of the pre-­(which presents and precedes, or rather forestalls, the presentative production, and, in order to put before the reader’s eyes what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak, predict, and predicate), the route which has been covered must cancel itself out.” 3. Peletier, Dialogue/ de l’ortografe/ e Prononciation Françoęse/, 94–95. 4.  Ibid., 95. 5.  In his critique of the Deffence, Barthélemy Aneau will suggest that such rhetoric is already unnecessary in 1549: “There is no defense without prior accusation. . . . Who is accusing, or, Who has accused the French language? No one, certainly.” (Il n’est point defense, sans accusation precedente. . . . Qui accuse, ou, Qui a accusée la langue Françoise? Nul, certes.)

Index

Académie française: 149, 152, 183, 217, 273, 333n24, 338n24 Accents: 146–163, 230–231, 243, 264, 303n9, 325n58; acute accent: 93, 146, 148–150, 154, 156–157, 292, 324n50; as lacking in French: 146–148; as phonographic technologies: 124, 137–138, 154, 161, 179; cedilla: 92–93, 147, 149–151, 154, 160–163, 292, 303n64, 303n65, 325n65; circumflex: 146, 148–150, 152–160, 182–185, 185, 325n56; in grammars: 149, 154–156; in Greek: 110; in Latin: 147– 148, 157; in modern French: 146, 152–153; introduction in French: 2, 10, 31, 92–93, 124, 137–138, 143, 146–163, 214; relation to introduction of Roman typefaces: 166; relation to royal cultural politics: 151, 160–163; role of printers in introducing: 150–152, 158–160, 244; treatises on: 132, 150, 158– 160, 191, 194–195, 231, 292 Agüera y Arcas, Blaise: 309n118, 312n69 Alberti, Leon-Battista: 70, 93, 129 Alciato, Andrea: 102, 105, 112 Alighieri, Dante: 3–4, 17, 30, 129, 187, 191, 202, 204, 224 Alphabet: 31, 90, 106, 125, 127, 141, 154, 166, 207–212, 216–217; A as first letter of: 123, 208–212; accents as supplements to: 147– 150; alphabetization: 194, 207; as figure of knowledge: 207–210; fashioning of letters: 94; French: 147, 160, 163, 175; graphic system of: 85, 137, 285; Greek: 163; history of: 92, 169, 171; Latin: 148–149, 154, 160, 164; learning of: 45; letters of: 15, 20, 26, 30, 39–40, 43–47, 49, 56, 59, 66–67, 73, 76–77, 79–82, 85, 87, 92, 94–97, 106–109, 112, 114– 115, 116, 117–120, 123–124, 126, 128–130, 134, 137–144, 146, 148–149, 152–154, 156,

159–161, 163–169, 173, 175–178, 181–183, 185, 191, 193, 197, 199–203, 207–212, 213, 215– 216, 218, 225, 227–228, 233, 235, 238–240, 244, 247, 256, 258–260, 266, 268, 270, 272, 274, 278, 283, 287–290, 292, 294, 305n65, 312n70, 316n117; linear or sequential character of: 29, 115, 200; mythological origin of: 287; order of: 110, 129, 200, 207, 216– 217; pronunciation of: 125; relation to the human body: 30, 211; relation to grammar: 39, 199–202; relation to movable type printing: 26, 30, 66, 84, 207, 316n117; specificity of: 27; technology of: 127; use in algebra: 176; varieties of: 130, 163 Anatomy: 37, 40–41, 46, 52–53, 56–58, 125, 134, 154, 156, 262, 264 Anderson, Benedict: 1, 30, 35, 109–110, 121, 231, 281, 334n31 Aneau, Barthélémy: 101, 340n5 Apuleius: 16 Arche-printing: 25–27, 31–34, 37, 90 Aristotle: 10, 17, 40, 50–54, 56–58, 84, 118, 121, 138, 270, 310n23 Armstrong, Elizabeth: 274, 338n25 Artifice, artificiality: 3–6, 9, 13, 18–19, 35, 37–43, 46–47, 51, 53–58, 63, 70–71, 75, 77–78, 115, 127–128, 130–134, 137, 139, 187, 190, 204, 206, 217–218, 221, 225, 234, 237, 268–270, 272, 282, 284, 286–287, 339n58 Artillery: 12–13, 54, 282, 287 Augereau, Antoine: 150, 158–159, 168 Auroux, Sylvain: 4, 192–193, 202, 219–220, 222, 328n28, 331n100 Bacon, Francis: 131 Baddeley, Susan: 169, 325n58 Bade, Josse: 82–85, 165–166

342 Index Baggioni, Daniel: 219 Baïf, Antoine de: 192 Balibar, Renée: 116, 320n73 Barton, John: 191 Bembo, Pietro: 17 Benjamin, Walter: 1, 33, 106, 133–134, 279, 284 Bennington, Geoffrey: 36, 40, 100, 301n14, 307n92 Bernard, Auguste: 318n12 Bèze, Théodore de: 169–170, 292–293 Binet, Étienne: 85–86 Boeckeler, Erika: 30, 318n10 Bolter, Jay David: 75 Bovelles, Charles de: 34, 110, 115, 122, 167, 200–202, 204, 214, 330n54 Brun, Auguste: 334n41, 335n54 Brunelleschi, Filippo: 62 Bruni, Leonardo: 16 Brunot, Ferdinand: 30, 34–36, 92, 230, 306n67 Budé, Guillaume: 14, 34, 83, 101, 129, 204, 319b40, 326n83 Capella, Martianus: 125, 202 Carvajal, Juan: 73 Castellesi, Adriano: 16, 164 Catach, Nina: 150, 276, 318n12, 338n28 Catherine de Medici: 224 Caucie, Antoine: 192 Cave, Terence: 32 Caxton, William: 73–74 Cerquiglini, Bernard: 34, 153, 325n57, 327n111 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: 16, 113, 128, 157, 164, 281, 284, 286–287, 303n11, 315n115 Citolini, Alessandro: 171–18 Charles V of France: 60, 118–119, 121 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: 161 Charles VII of France: 248, 326n74 Charles VIII of France: 248, 334n29 Charles IX of France: 253–254 Charles IX of France: 224 Charles Le Téméraire: 60, 311n56 Chauvet, Paul: 254, 334n27 Chenoweth, Katie: 334n41 Chrétien de Troyes: 129, 133 Cohen, Paul: 334n41 Colines, Simone de: 93, 147, 153, 161, 167 Colophon: 48–49, 62–69, 71–81, 85, 273, 312n66 Compositor: 44, 80, 82, 84, 122–123, 132, 157, 170, 185, 266, 290

Conley, Tom: 32, 92, 94, 165, 319n50, 325n65, 344 Copyist. See Scribe Cordier, Mathuin: 148, 157 Cormack, Bradin: 130 Correction: 35, 69, 80, 122–123, 175, 196, 237, 276, 290 Corrector: 75, 93, 122–123, 170, 175 Corrozet, Gilles: 101 Courouau, Jean-François: 6, 334n41 Crantz, Martin: 68 Crystal, David: 262 Cyaneus, Louis: 150, 325n64 Davis, Natalie Zemon: 252–255, 334n27 Defaux, Gérard: 305n66 Derrida, Jacques: 1–3, 5–10, 21–34, 39–42, 48–51, 57–58, 79, 87–88, 90, 98–100, 106, 109–110, 113, 136–137, 141, 144–145, 169, 174, 179, 181, 186, 188–190, 192, 217, 230, 234–235, 247, 249, 261, 264–265, 270, 274, 284, 301n2, 301n14, 304n30, 304n38, 305n66, 308n115, 311n57, 312n66, 324n39; arche-writing: 6, 24–25, 36, 39, 141, 264; différance: 99, 140, 145, 308n115; iterability: 42–43, 45–47, 50–51, 90, 97, 102, 115–116, 127, 136, 139, 166, 188, 274, 308n115; logocentrism: 4, 23–24, 26, 29–30, 32, 50, 89, 120, 137–138, 152, 166, 294, 305n66; Of Grammatology: 5, 23–24, 26–30, 32–33, 39–41, 79, 106, 136–137, 141, 144, 179, 212, 301n2, 304n2; phonocentrism: 4, 9, 24–30, 32–33, 35, 50, 89–90, 138, 141, 143, 145, 148, 152, 169, 174, 177, 258, 294; relation to printing: 22–23; reception in early modern scholarship: 32; spectrality: 2, 7, 9, 31, 65, 88, 110, 112, 114, 120, 144–145, 151–152, 156, 218, 230, 312n6; supplementarity: 5, 9, 26, 33, 37, 41–43, 47, 53–54, 56–57, 62–64, 70–71, 98, 109, 138, 143, 145, 147, 149, 154, 162, 177– 178, 181–182, 233–234, 265, 269–270, 272, 284, 290, 294, 301n2, 304n32, 327n104; survival: 5, 10–11, 13–14, 18, 21, 67, 98, 100, 234, 261, 264–265, 312n66; system of hearing-oneself-speak: 27–28, 30, 89, 140–141, 179, 249; trace: 10, 23, 25, 10–31, 33–34, 36, 65, 77, 82, 144, 153, 174, 238, 264, 304n32, 305n43, 312n66; writing (écriture): 23–25, 33–34, 39–40, 43, 106 Des Autels, Guillaume: 168, 182, 192, 256–258 Des Périers, Bonaventure: 197, 236

Index 343 Descartes, René: 34, 131 Dictionary. See French language Diomedes: 19–20, 39, 111, 201 Dolet, Étienne: 2, 14, 98, 132, 150, 160, 192, 194–196, 212, 214, 224–225, 231 Donatus: 19–20, 39, 79, 97, 111, 198, 201, 316n121 Du Bellay, Joachim: 10, 13–14, 18–20, 92, 98, 101, 120, 147, 192, 195, 214, 233, 236–237, 261–294 Dubois, Jacques (Sylvius): 34, 154–158, 179, 181, 185, 192, 200, 204–205, 214, 220–221, 224, 264 Dubois, Pierre: 116 Du Pré, Galliot: 150, 165, 244, 334n36 Edison, Thomas: 75, 136, 144 Eisenstein, Elizabeth: 21, 130, 207, 303n24, 315n106, 322n108 Erasmus, Desiderius: 82, 103–104, 129, 147– 148, 164, 198, 204–207, 281, 319n40, 324n48, 326n83, 330n73 Estienne, Charles: 56 Estienne, Henri I: 93, 147, 157, 166, 214, 331n86 Estienne, Henri II: 34, 147, 192, 214, 221, 209n121 Estienne, Robert: 2, 14, 65, 148, 150–151, 155, 157–159, 163, 192, 200, 204, 212, 214–217, 220–225, 231, 240, 277, 292, 312n67, 315n112, 318n12 Fabri, Pierre: 121 Fantoni da Fivizzano, Carolina: 72–73 Febvre, Lucien: 35, 70, 213, 306n67, 313n73, 315n109 Fichet, Guillaume: 68–69, 79, 163–164 Ficino, Marcello: 213 Fleming, Juliet: 32 Francois (proper noun): 111, 112, 115, 120 François I of France: 14, 54, 92–93, 101, 106, 112–115, 119, 121, 150, 165, 170, 196, 197, 213– 216, 227, 229–258, 260, 268, 274, 294, 318n12, 321n97, 325n65, 326n83, 333n15, 334n26 French language: as “mother tongue”: 108– 109, 112, 114–121, 186–189, 216, 230–232, 242–254, 294; as proto-national language: 1, 9, 33, 88, 109–115, 127, 138, 149, 214, 227, 229–252, 281–282, 288, 334n41; cultivation of: 13, 15–16, 19, 97–98, 107–114, 125, 129,

132–133, 146–147, 174, 212–214, 233–234, 283–284; first books printed in: 121; first dictionaries of: 2, 4, 6, 9, 15, 31, 65, 92, 128, 157, 163, 191–195, 204, 205, 216–217, 222– 223, 231, 264, 277, 292; grammars of: 2, 4, 6, 9–10, 31, 128, 135, 139, 149, 154–158, 179, 181, 187, 191–192, 212, 214–228, 230, 255–260, 264; historiography of: 32–35; introduction of the apostrophe in: 92–93, 124, 126, 150, 152, 154, 156, 160, 168, 244; introduction of quotation marks in: 103, 130; laws pertaining to: 112, 229–252, 255–260; Middle French: 35, 119; reduction into art: 132, 135, 175, 196, 218, 225, 264; typefaces used for printing: 130, 151–152, 157–158, 161–168, 172, 244, 292. See also Vernacular language Freud, Sigmund: 90, 311n57 Friburger, Michael: 68 Fust, Johann: 76–81 Galen: 51–54, 57–58, 205 Gallic Hercules: 89, 100–106, 111–114, 120, 122, 133, 135, 138, 190, 197, 212, 224, 232, 236, 260, 288, 290–291 Garamond, Claude: 157, 213, 266, 292 Gellius, Aulus: 129 Genet, Jean: 48–49 Gering, Ulrich: 68 German language: 137, 142, 176, 202, 254, 292 Gitelman, Lisa: 65, 317n135 Goldberg, Jonathan: 32, 59, 311n48 Gourmont, Gilles de: 93 Grafting: 4, 11, 107, 162, 223, 232–233, 247, 251–252, 265–266, 269, 272–273, 280–281, 283–286, 288, 290, 339n49, 339n58 Grafton, Anthony: 123 Grammar: 1, 3, 5, 9–10, 15–16, 19–20, 31, 39, 79, 92–93, 97, 106, 110, 116, 121, 123, 125, 127–128, 132–133, 135, 139–40, 147, 149, 154– 158, 164, 179, 181, 187, 191–206, 212–228, 230, 234, 248, 251, 255–260, 264, 278, 283, 292, 328n23 Grammatization: 4, 10, 19–20, 79–80, 92, 192–194, 199, 203–205, 207, 218, 220, 222, 225, 232, 328n28 Greek language: 3–4, 12–21, 30, 69, 101–103, 108, 110, 113, 115, 118, 120, 127, 130, 132, 135, 138–139, 142–144, 146–148, 150–151, 153– 154, 156, 163, 167, 169, 171, 174, 185, 194–195, 198–199, 202, 204–208, 210, 223–225, 228, 233, 246, 259, 262–265, 276–280, 282–285

344 Index Greene, Thomas: 16 Grenier,, Jean: 192 Grusin, Richard: 75 Gryphius, Sébastien: 150 Gutenberg, Johannes: 6, 25, 39, 44, 51, 63, 66, 69, 70, 73, 76–77, 79–80, 82, 85, 177, 268, 278, 285, 309n118, 312n69, 316n122; Bible (42–line Biblia Latina): 39, 66, 73, 76, 79, 248, 278

Kantorowicz, Ernst: 236 Keller, Marcus: 265, 337n14 Kemp, William: 165, 326n77 Kempelen, Wolfgang von: 73 Kenny, Neil: 13 Kibbee, Dougals: 328n26, 335n48 Kittler, Friedrich: 35, 73, 81, 168–169, 211–212, 320n75 Kritzman, Lawrence: 32

Hampton, Timothy: 265 Hauser, Henri: 253–255, 334n27 Hebrew language: 3–4, 13, 19, 113, 115–116, 130, 142, 146, 163, 169, 198, 204, 216, 228, 263, 318 Heidegger, Martin: 21–22, 26, 49–52, 68, 90, 106, 127–128, 152, 273, 310n15 Henri II of France: 224 Henri III of France: 101 Heynlin, Johann: 68–69, 163–164 Homer: 129, 284, 286–87 Horace: 138, 174, 233, 277 How-to books: 94, 121, 128–135 Human: 2, 4, 7, 9–10, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26–28, 30–31, 37–40, 50–58, 66, 70–80, 84–85, 92–94, 96, 111, 114–116, 120, 123, 125, 127, 131–132, 134, 149, 166, 171, 182, 192–194, 203–214, 262, 264, 269–270, 272, 283, 288, 317n134, 324n48, 330n69 Humanism: 2, 10, 12–20, 30, 34–35, 67–68, 75, 82, 92–93, 98, 101, 112, 120–121, 129, 131– 132, 147–148, 151, 154, 156–157, 163–167, 198–200, 204–206, 212–214, 233–234, 250, 277, 281, 303n21, 325n71, 330n69 Husserl, Edmund: 193

La Primaudaye, Pierre de: 186–187 L’Angelier, Arnoul: 150, 274, 276, 288, 334n36 Latin language: 1, 3, 4, 6, 13–21, 30, 34, 69, 103, 108–109, 111, 115–116, 118–121, 126, 129, 130, 132, 134–135, 138–140, 142–151, 153–157, 163–167, 171–172, 174, 182, 186–187, 191, 194–195, 198–200, 202–208, 210, 216, 222– 225, 228, 231, 233, 235, 237, 242–250, 252, 259, 262, 263–265, 276–277, 279–282, 284– 285, 287, 293–294 Lefèvre, Raoul: 73–74 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques: 167 Le Roy, Guillaume: 121 Le Roy, Louis: 131, 199, 283 Leroi-Gourhan, André: 31, 52, 58, 85, 174, 193– 194, 314n98, 317n134 Letters. See Alphabet Liu, Lydia: 169 Lodge, R. Anthony: 245 Lucian of Samosata: 101–104, 113, 129, 181, 260

Imprimeur du roy. See Royal Printer Italian language: 4, 16–18, 137, 142, 287, 322n108 Ivins, William: 43, 92, 145–146 Jacobus de Fivizzano: 48, 71–72, 314n95, 314n96 Janot, Denis: 150, 240, 244, 318n12, 334n36 Johann of Speyer: 72–73 John of Westphalia: 49, 79, 85 John VII of Constantinople: 127 Johns, Adrian: 36, 303n24, 313n73 Jones, John: 137 Joubert, Laurent: 142, 144, 177, 292 Juste, François: 150, 152

Mainz Psalter: 76–81 Mallard, Olivier: 150, 240, 318n12 Manuscript: 12, 21–22, 27, 34, 48–51, 50–51, 59–86 Manutius, Aldus: 75, 146–147, 151, 266 Marchesi, Simone: 4 Marder, Elissa: 5, 116–118, 339n45 Marguerite de Navarre: 151, 158, 168, 326n83 Marot, Clément: 93, 119, 151, 158, 162, 168, 325n64, 333n24 Martin, Henri-Jean: 35, 70, 213, 306n67, 313n73, 315n109 Martin, Jean: 169 Masse, René: 133 Mazzio, Carla: 130, 307n96 McLuhan, Marshall: 57, 70–71, 146, 274, 287, 314n93, 316n120 Meigret, Louis: 14, 139–143, 153–154, 168, 172, 175, 177, 179–182, 192, 218, 220–221, 224– 225, 249, 255–260, 323n13, 327n108

Index 345 Melehy, Hassan: 32, 338n21 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène: 110, 230, 332n6, 334n41 Miélot, Jean: 51, 60–63, 82–85 Miller, J. Hillis: 308n115 Montemagno, Buonaccorso da: 60 Morel, Frédéric: 288, 340n69 Moss, Ann: 16 Mother tongue. See French language Movable type. See Printing Nationalism: 7, 9, 33, 138, 145, 153, 188, 190, 259–260, 272–273, 281–282, 288, 319n49 National language. See French language Nature, naturalness: 2–5, 8–9, 17–18, 20–22, 25, 37–42, 46–47, 51–53, 55–57, 60, 64, 75, 77, 79, 85–86, 98, 106, 110, 115–116, 120–123, 125, 127–128, 131, 134–135, 137, 139, 141, 147, 162, 187–191, 202, 204, 206, 211–212, 233– 234, 236–237, 245, 258, 260, 263, 266–270, 273–274, 282–286, 288, 292, 305n44, 330n69, 337n14, 339n45 Needham, Paul: 309n118, 312n69 Nicot, Jean: 131, 324n50 Nietzsche, Friedrich: 58–59, 113, 247, 261–262 Nogent, Guibert de: 116 O’Brien, John: 32 Occitan language: 161 Ong, Walter: 22, 26–27, 146, 223, 274, 304n27, 319n48, 331n93 Oresme, Nicole: 17, 118–119 Orthography: 1–2, 6, 10, 35, 68–69, 80, 92, 110, 123, 126, 128, 132, 137–144, 147–148, 150, 152–160, 164, 169–185, 191–192, 194, 213, 221, 225, 227, 231, 243, 256–260, 264, 276, 282, 292, 314n84, 323n11, 325n58, 326n93; debates regarding: 139, 153–154, 169–170, 256–260, 292; phonetic reforms: 2, 31, 128, 137–145, 154–158, 169–183, 191, 225–228, 255–260, 282, 292 Ovid: 129, 233, 308n99 Palsgrave, John: 135, 149, 218–221, 322n119, 328n26 Paré, Ambroise: 37–47, 51–56, 58–59, 120–121, 127, 134, 186, 307n93 Parikka, Jussi: 8 Pasquier, Estienne: 122–123 Pedagogy: 108, 112–114, 125–126, 128, 133, 148–149, 157, 177, 186–228, 261, 328n25

Peletier du Mans, Jacques: 14, 98, 120, 136, 138–139, 141, 143–144, 148, 152–154, 169– 172, 174–184, 190–192, 225, 228, 233–234, 249, 256, 264, 282–283, 285, 292, 293 Périon, Joachim: 34 Petrarch: 129, 164 Peyrefitte, Alain: 333n24 Phantom limb: 37, 65, 120 Philippe Le Bon: 60 Philology: 14, 16–20, 92, 98, 108, 264 Phonetic writing: 27–30, 35, 136–137, 144–145, 149, 154, 169, 174, 207, 255–260, 306n76, 325n93; spelling reforms (see Orthography) Phonography: 10, 28–31, 75, 136–145, 148–150, 153–154, 158, 161, 163, 166–168, 172–175, 177–182, 228, 232, 264, 292, 294 Pilot, Jean: 192 Pitman, Isaac: 137 Pléiade group: 120, 256 Pliny the Elder: 16, 72, 266, 268–270, 284, 337n17 Poe, Edgar Allen: 76 Pollard, Alfred: 78, 311n58, 316n116 Printing technology: 1, 6–7, 14, 25–26, 30, 49, 60, 63, 66, 69, 76–77, 79–80, 82, 84, 127– 128, 131–133, 135, 148, 193, 196, 203, 212–213, 216, 243, 266–268, 279, 285, 288; and the mechanization of knowledge: 131–132; as “artificial” writing: 70, 77–78; as “modern” technology: 21–22, 67, 282–283; as orthographic technology: 68–69, 123, 128, 171, 173–174, 292; as technology or restoration, revival, or reanimation: 9, 13–15, 54, 72, 99, 142–143, 148, 151, 164, 166, 177, 233–235, 278, 283; as technology of survival: 5, 13–14, 67–69, 97, 265, 279, 284, 286; as teletechnology: 89–90, 95, 109; assembly-line technology: 107, 274, 286, 319; Chinese invention of: 25; correctness of: 68–69, 85–86, 122–123, 128, 130–131, 196, 212, 216, 220, 237–239, 276, 290, 320n83, 340n66; first Paris press: 68; historiography of: 24–25, 31–36; incunable period: 65–86, 121; laws regulating: 238–241; print capitalism: 30, 84, 109, 181, 231, 254; printers: 65, 71–86, 128, 130; print shop: 82–85, 107, 122–123, 127, 132, 134–135; print workers: 82–85, 107, 132, 232, 252–255; production of national space and community: 1, 88, 94, 107, 109–114, 127, 149, 165, 193, 197, 207, 217, 227, 288; relative ease of: 73–74, 85–86;

346 Index Printing technology (continued) speed and efficiency of: 67, 69–70, 74, 78, 80, 85, 90; initial spread of: 66, 70, 85–86; techniques and practices of: 66, 75, 78, 80–85, 107, 122–123, 127, 266–268, 312n70; early terminology for: 44, 66, 71–72, 77; Western invention of movable type: 23, 25, 63–66; workers strike (tric): 239, 241, 252–255 Priscian: 19–20, 39, 97, 111, 140, 198, 201–202 Privilege. See Royal Privilege Pronunciation: 30, 92, 108, 110, 125–126, 131, 138–150, 153–154, 157, 161–162, 164, 169, 171– 172, 174–175, 177–178, 182–183, 186–187, 194–195, 199–203, 205, 207, 219, 228–230, 256–260, 330n54, 328n26 Prosthesis: 51–86, 89–90, 94, 101–102, 112, 114 Quintilian: 16, 93, 97, 129 Rabelais, François: 13, 101, 124, 152, 172, 200 Ramée, Pierre de la (Ramus): 177, 191–193, 197, 218, 223–228, 292, 307n93, 328n23, 331n105 Rebuffe, Pierre: 246–247 Regosin, Richard: 32 Reiss, Timothy: 93 Rickard, Peter: 12 Ronell, Avital: 5, 90, 106 Ronsard, Pierre de: 101, 278, 319n33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 39, 41, 177, 301n2 Royal Printer (imprimeur du roy): 92–93, 150, 161, 192, 213–214, 216, 240, 318n12 Royal Privilege: 92, 129, 161, 196, 244, 274–275, 322n119, 338n25 Sainte-Marthe, Charles de: 196 Saussure, Ferdinand de: 39, 141, 145 Sauvage, Denis: 169 Sawday, Jonathan: 338n23 Schoeffer, Peter: 49, 76–81, 315n115, 316n128, 326n74 Scribe: 6, 51, 60–67, 69, 71, 74–82, 84 Seneca: 16 Silvius, Aeneas: 73 Skalnik, James Veazie: 223 Sorbonne (University of Paris): 14, 68, 158, 168, 240, 277 Spelling. See Orthography Stallybrass, Peter: 81

Stiegler, Bernard: 7, 52, 57, 79, 98–99, 192–193, 270, 284, 310n40, 314n84, 326n93 Tacitus: 16 Technē: 5, 7, 10, 19–20, 23–24, 27, 37–41, 52–53, 57, 90, 98, 102, 135, 147, 162, 199, 201, 204, 206–207, 214, 223–224, 243, 265, 268–270, 272–273, 282, 287, 338n23. See also Technics and Technology Technics: 2–3, 6–9, 19–20, 24, 51–52, 57, 62, 75, 87–88, 97–100, 116, 124, 127, 192–193, 270, 284, 317n134. See also Technē and Technology Technology: 6, 10, 12–14, 19, 21–22, 30, 38–39, 47–53, 57–59, 64, 67–69, 71–73, 79, 98–100, 106, 112, 120, 127–135, 138, 140, 161, 164, 173–174, 190–193, 204, 217–218, 231–232, 238, 243–245, 247, 269–270, 273, 282–288, 313n73, 314n92, 316n120, 339n45. See also Technē, Technics, Teletechnology, and Printing technology Telephone: 5, 49, 88–90, 120, 149, 257, 260 Teleprinting: 88–91, 113, 128–129, 135 Teletechnology: 8, 31, 87–90, 94–115, 120, 123, 132–134, 138, 140, 148, 151, 166, 232 Thévenin, Paule: 48 Title page: 63, 74, 83–84, 162, 175, 216, 266– 268, 273–275, 278–279, 286 Tory, Geoffroy: 2, 14–15, 18–20, 22, 30, 35, 87, 89, 92–98, 100–135, 150–151, 157, 192, 197, 199–202, 208–212, 229, 240, 246, 257, 264, 291, 318n10, 318n12, 321n97 Trithemius, Johannes: 66–67 Trudeau, Danielle: 334n41 Typesetter. See Compositor Typewriter: 21, 48–50, 58–59, 72–73, 88–89, 304n26, 325n56 Typography: 1–2, 5, 10, 15–16, 21–22, 25, 27, 40, 42–46, 49–51, 66, 68, 77, 79–81, 89, 92–98, 106–107, 110, 123–125, 127–128, 130, 138, 143, 147–148, 151–152, 154–168, 172–173, 175, 179, 181, 193, 199, 201, 203, 207–216, 225, 230, 243–244, 251–252, 266–270, 276, 292, 330n73 Urbino, Duke of: 66 Valla, Lorenzo: 16, 198 Vascosan, Michel de: 169 Vergil, Polydore: 66–67, 85–86, 285 Vérin, Hélène: 131, 322n105

Index 347 Vernacular language: 1–20, 24–25, 27, 30–31, 35, 47, 53, 69, 88–90, 92–95, 97–98, 103, 106–130, 132–135, 137–144; advocacy for: 92, 95, 97–98, 114–115, 166, 196, 233; association with the maternal body or nursing: 4–5, 126–127, 191, 260; choice to write in: 108, 111–113, 115, 118, 120–121, 134; ­g rammatization of: 199–205; imagined community of: 106, 109–114; politics of: 93, 106–114, 123–124; readership in print: 129, 133–135; “rise” of: 8–10, 27, 30, 35, 279; share of print market: 121, 281; ­sixteenth-century “revolution” of: 1–2, 4–5, 8–10, 20, 98, 231, 265, 279, 283; survival of: 5, 98, 18–19, 114; translation into: 17, 60, 103–104, 118–119, 121, 132, 138, 167–168, 199, 233, 235, 277. See also French language Vervliet, Hendrik: 268 Vidoue, Pierre: 165, 326n76

Villers-Cotterêts, Ordinance of: 10, 31, 34, 127, 213, 216, 219, 227, 229–252, 254, 258, 333n24, 334n31, 334n41 Villey, Pierre: 273 Virgil: 223, 284, 286–287 Vitruvius: 120, 166 Voice: 2, 9–10, 26–31, 38, 45, 72, 82, 87–90, 98–99, 103, 106, 111–114, 136–145, 147–149, 151, 153–154, 167–168, 171, 174, 177–181, 183, 204–205, 256, 258–260, 263, 265, 291, 323n30, 326n93 Wechel, André: 181 Wechel, Chrétien: 179–181 Williams, Raymond: 81 Wills, David: 7–9, 40, 53, 56–57, 307n93 Woodblock printing. See Woodcut Woodcut: 43–45, 53, 56, 58, 66, 84–85, 93, 100, 103, 122, 130, 132, 133, 135, 146–147, 163, 172, 208, 210, 270, 285, 322n108, 338n28

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Acknowledgments

For this book, some ten years in the making, I am indebted to far more friends, colleagues, and institutions than I could hope to thank here. Like every book in relation to its author, it is both my own and not my own, and I can never fully repay the debt or adequately express my gratitude for the support from others that has enabled it to bear my name. This book is, first of all, a product of the books inside it, and I would like to recognize especially the following libraries, archives, and collections for providing me with access to the materials they house: the Rare Books and Special Collections Department at Princeton University; the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Beinecke Library at Yale University; and the Douglas H. Gordon Collection of French Books at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. In its earliest stages, this project was nurtured by my teachers and friends at Brown University, above all Virginia Krause—the most careful reader and an inspiration in every way. I also owe much to the mentoring of Réda Bensmaïa, Lewis Seifert, and the entire faculty of the Department of French Studies, and to the steadfast friendship of Amy Vegari, Teresa Villa-­Ignacio, Kelley Kreitz, Ghenwa Hayek, and Ariane Helou, along with so many others. At the University of Chicago, where this project began to take on its current shape, I am indebted to the incomparable collegiality, intellectual stimulation, and friendship I found in the Society of Fellows, on the Media Aesthetics team, and throughout the university, with a special nod to Andrew Dilts, Neil Verma, and Tim Michael. I am profoundly grateful for the warmth and support shown to me by my colleagues at Washington and Lee University during my two years there, especially Domnica Radulescu, John Lambeth, Françoise Fregnac-­Clave, Mohamed Kamara, Matthew Bailey, Jeff Barnett, Ellen Mayock, Antonio Reyes, and Sarah Horowitz. At Princeton University, where this book was written and completed over the past several years, I owe a great debt to the unflagging generosity, inspiration, and support of my colleagues in the Department of

350 Acknowledgments

French and Italian—Tom Trezise, David Bellos, André Benhaïm, Göran Blix, Pietro Frassica, Simone Marchesi, Gaetana Marrone-­Puglia, Florent Masse, Nick Nesbitt, Effie Rentzou, Christine Sagnier, Volker Schröder, and Christy Wampole—as well as to countless colleagues, students, and friends across the university, including Gavin Arnall, Alexander Baron-­R aiffe, Jean Bauer, Eduardo Cadava, Sarah Chihaya, Chad Córdova, Jeff Dolven, Daniel Hoffman-­ Schwartz, Matt Karp, John Logan, Barbara Nagel, Eileen Reeves, Gabriel Swift, and Chloé Vettier. Beyond institutional contexts, this book owes much to my fellow seiziémistes and early modernist colleagues and friends who have provided so much feedback and excellent models of scholarship over the past decade; a young scholar could not hope for a more welcoming and supportive community. Thanks especially to Matt Ancell, Hall Bjørnstad, Elizabeth Black, Tom Conley, Dorothea Heitsch, Elisabeth Hodges, George Hoffmann, Bob Hudson, Lawrence Kritzman, David LaGuardia, Ellen McClure, Hassan Melehy, Marian Rothstein, Phillip Usher, Cathy Yandell, Zahi Zalloua, and, once again, Virginia Krause. My very special thanks go to Jessica Keating, who has been a constant comrade and unwavering friend over the past decade. To the other community of scholars that has nurtured and supported this project—those who work on, and in the wake of, Jacques Derrida—I owe more than I can say, especially to the group that gathers annually at IMEC to translate Derrida’s seminars, who welcomed me when I arrived from out of nowhere some nine years ago: Geoffrey Bennington, Peggy Kamuf, Michael Naas, Pascale-­Anne Brault, Elizabeth Rottenberg, David Wills, Ellen Burt, and Kir Kuiken. This book and I also owe a deeply felt debt to Elissa Marder, who was an inspiration even before I knew her and who has been an invaluable source of advice, encouragement, and friendship since we met. I would like to thank Jerry Singerman, my editor, who first took an interest in this project and who has so deftly seen it through the process of becoming a book. I also owe a keen debt to the two anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript for the University of Pennsylvania Press, and whose rigorous and thoughtful feedback played no small role in guiding me toward its final shape. A warm thanks to my father, mother, and sister—Steve, Denise, and Carly— for their unswerving love and absolute confidence in me, and in the possibility of this book, even when things got bumpy. Thanks most of all to Rodrigo Therezo, who pushed me when I needed to be pushed and helped me understand what this book could be, who kept the schedule and did the dishes, and who loved me and wouldn’t let me settle. This project was a long time coming, but it wouldn’t be a book without you.