The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method. By Joseph A. Dane. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 242; 6 illustrations. $60.


Books that purport to debunk scholarly myths constitute a well-established genre for intervening in academic discourse, and Joseph Dane has made a career of it: his last two books took on, respectively, the critical mythology of irony, and the myth of a "textualized " Chaucer who could be freed from the vagaries of bibliographic history. His third major book claims as its target "the myth of print culture, " which he describes as "an undefined but universal form of culture " (p. 10) that modern scholars of book history simply assume to exist without rooting their arguments in the material evidence of individual books. He insists that the book resources to which historians often refer "do little more than reproduce the banalities of book history and classical histories that could be written almost without regard to detailed study of individual books " (p. 56). If there are heroes in Dane's study, they are individual books, which, in their idiosyncratic detail, refuse to conform to the scholarly narratives created to explain them. The other hero is Dane himself in his guise as the skeptic who bucks the consensus. He describes this mode rather bluntly late in the book: "when all the authorities agree, they are far more apt to be suffering under the same delusion " (p. 181). Some of us prefer to use, if not cherish, our delusions, so Dane's polemical style will not endear him equally to all readers, a risk all myth-debunkers run. However, in over two decades of impeccable scholarship, Dane has certainly earned the attention of his primary audience in bibliography and has begun to develop the argument that his secondary audience of literary scholars (particularly medievalists) ought to attend more closely to bibliographic study.

Ashby Kinch
University of Montana