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08873_Field_TCGG T638.txt
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1996-04-10
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Hutton cites Aretino on page xiv of his study: “Let others worry
themselves about style and so cease to be themselves. Without
a master, without a model, without a guide, without artifice I
go to work and earn my living, my well-being and my fame.
What do I need more? With a goose-quill and a few sheets of
paper I mock myself of the universe.”
We shall return to his “without a model, without a guide,”
for it was literally true. The press was an instrument without
precedent. It had no writers and no reading public of its own,
and had for a long time to make do with the kind of writer and
public created by manuscript conditions. As Febvre and Martin
explain in L’Apparition du livre, the press had to rely on
medieval manuscripts almost entirely for the first two
centuries. As for the role of author, it did not exist, so the
writer tried on various masks of preacher and clown for the first