Print, Power and People in 17th-Century France

Available for the first time in English, this is a major work of scholarship, originally published in Geneva in 1969 by a distinguished French historian of the famous Annales school and President of the Institut du Livre. By placing the publishing trade at the center of the study of the intellectual, political, and economic evolution of Europe through examination of the physical evidence, Martin has revolutionized historical narrative. He shows the printed book to be the focus of society's cultural well-being. This is an exhaustive look at the most highly developed book trade of the period, the century from 1598 to 1701 in France. The inquiry is consistently set against the background of international and internal political and religious conflict.