Poets, patrons, and printers : crisis of authority in late medieval France /

In a time when heated issues of copyright and ownership of creative rights spill over into daily discourse, the appearance of this careful new study is opportune. Brown (Univ. of California at Santa Barbara) shows how the advent of printing brought about a new conception of authorship in late medieval Europe. She posits that poets in the 1500s--e.g., Jean Le Maire, Jean Bouchet, Jean Molinet, and Pierre Gringore--became more aware of their legal standing and asserted greater control over the printing and distribution of their work--thus displacing literary patrons from their role as sponsors. Brown provides a historical framework for a better understanding of this crisis of literary identity and authority, a turning point intensified by the transition to print capitalism. Integrating the 45 black-and-white illustrations that enhance the book, and detailed summaries of relevant legal cases, she elucidates convincingly how the appearance of printed books in the late medieval period initiated permanent changes in relationships among poets, patrons, and printers. In the wake of scholarship by Ong, Foucault, and Eisenstein, Brown's study takes her earlier work a step further (especially the chapter she contributed to Printing the Written Word, ed. by Sandra Hindman, 1991). Recommended for upper-division undergraduate, research, and large public libraries. R. Cormier; Central Piedmont Community College