Over the last four decades, historians, political theorists and literary scholars have substantially, if gradually, shifted attention away from histories of ideas understood as a sequence of great texts by great men and literary histories concerned principally with the life and works of noted authors of drama, poetry and fiction. Scholars of political thought today – historians and theorists alike – are more likely to speak of political languages or ideologies, discourses or traditions, contingently situated in time and place. The energies of literary studies, too, have been similarly extended to the political or ideological dimensions of literary works, often informed by one or another variant of ‘new historicism’, inflected by various forms of critical theory, or indebted to sundry perspectives in the philosophy of language.

In this chapter I want to raise the question of the relation between these various developments and recent perspectives on the history and historiography of the printed book. If, as many now argue, the history of ‘political thought’ is a matter of distinctive languages or discourses, the material vehicles of such thought remain the various forms and genres of print culture. To note this is to suggest that, despite the often exemplary work that has been done in shifting the object of historiographical inquiry away from ‘unit-ideas’ or ‘the work itself’ as a self-sufficient whole, this focus on the emergence and persistence of such languages tends to a level of ideological generality removed from the welter of polemical struggles at the ‘ground level’, so to speak, between writers and readers at particular moments of intense political engagement.