Many current discussions of lists begin with anthropological accounts that set lists as the ur-genre of all texts. The literary theorist Walter Ong suggests that most cuneiform script that has survived is account keeping and that writing was largely invented for that purpose. According to the anthropologist Jack Goody, lists help demarcate the “great divide” between oral and literate cultures. Goody and Ong have argued that lists allow for novel forms of cognition by decontextualizing words from their discursive contexts. By making objects discontinuous, lists allow them to be levered out of their normal settings and to be rearranged, classified, and analyzed. Even Goody and Ong would not deny the existence of some lists in oral cultures, such as catalogs of warriors in epic poetry, but they emphasize that such lists do not separate the objects on the list from their narrative framing and thus are not truly discontinuous. Classic examples of lists, such as Homer’s catalog of ships, would therefore not be lists at all according to this definition.
Decontextualized from nature and narrative, the argument goes, each object on the list can be closely examined and controlled, thus making the history of list making a frequent topic in accounts of state control of information. The pared-down structure of the list stands in for the movement of things through monitored points of access, such as merchants filing through points of entry and exit in an ancient Sumerian walled city, forcing their goods to be paraded before governmental inspection. The historian Arndt Brendecke has compared such Mesopotamian list making to flows of information in the Spanish Empire, and to certain choke points in port towns and bureaucratic offices.
More recent work in anthropology and linguistics has sharply questioned the thesis of the great divide in general, and the link between list making, writing, and a new rationality in particular. Many types of textual lists are not as discontinuous as Goody claimed. Lists can call up tacit knowledge that, to the period reader, filled in the blanks of a seemingly discontinuous list, but which may not be as obvious several centuries later. Many premodern lists, whether oral or written, can be understood to have embedded within them a preorganized, continual hierarchy, whether of society (king lists; genealogies; and military, bureaucratic, and noble ranks), of space (itineraries), of time (chronologies), or of all three combined (entries, parades, and processions).
In fact, it is not at all obvious that these various genres would have been seen as various forms of one entity, the list. Historians have included a vast array of specialized historical terms, many of them now obsolete or nearly so, within studies of lists. In French alone, Gregorio Salinero has noted “almanach, armorial, billet, bulletin, cadastre, catalogue, cens, chronique, chronotaxis, classement, *codex, collection, compilation, dictionnaire, état civil, feuille, *florilège, galerie, index, inventaire, livres, mémoire, minte, obituaire, pragmatiques, propositions, recensement, relation, répertoire encyclopédique, registre, répartitions, rôle, scalae, série, souscriptions, syllabaire, synopsis, table, tableaux, table chronographique, tablettes chronologiques, témoignage, vignette, vies.” Many of the terms that Salinero includes under the rubric of the list, however, were specialized for qualitatively different, incommensurable subject matters. They appeared in specific historical circumstances that do not make them interchangeable.
Many treatments of lists, such as Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, written to accompany an exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris, stress the dizzying cornucopia of visual and textual forms that lists have taken. Such all-encompassing groupings of lists, such as in Eco’s essay, or in Salinero’s list of terms, expand the genre to such an extent that it becomes difficult to trace or analyze. As a result, the scholarly investigation of lists does not proceed further than reiterating that lists are meant to organize but in fact subvert order—with an obligatory reference to Borges’s Chinese *encyclopedia. No tradition of premodern reflexive writing about lists in general exists, and thus it is difficult to assess whether contemporaries would have recognized all the terms Salinero listed as instances of a list.
Approaching the topic from linguistic and conceptual history, however, allows for a sharper view of what has counted as a list. According to this perspective, the list was not to be found everywhere; rather, it was, literally, marginal. The word itself, from the Old English liste, meaning a hem or border, is of remarkably recent vintage. The term came to be applied primarily to a written grouping of people, not objects, at the turn of the seventeenth century, such as the “list of laweless resolutes” Fortinbras compiled in Hamlet. However, its older meaning as the hem of a garment remained primary. In 1598, John Florio defined a list as “a list or selvage of any cloth, a list where tilting or turneaments are used, a role, a checkrol, or catalogue of names, an inventorie.” We might consider his dictionary itself to take the form of a list, but evidently Florio did not. In a later dictionary, Edward Phillips did not include the term in 1671 and 1678; in 1696, he defined it as “A Scrowl of the Names of several persons of the same Quality with whom we have Business, or with whom we have some Relation. A List of the Slain and Wounded in such a Battel. A list of such a ones Creditors. A List of the Prisoners in such a Prison. It is also the Bordering of a Piece of Cloath that limits the Breadth of it.” Over the course of the century, the listing of people had come to replace the hem of a garment as the primary meaning of the term. To Phillips, it meant the names of individuals who belonged to a particular social group.
This nominalist approach, in contrast to Liam Young’s “ontic” or civilizational perspective, restricts the study of lists. The historical question to answer becomes not what the function of lists in human society has been since the emergence of *literacy. Rather we might in a more targeted fashion explore the obscure origins of this term in *early modernity, its specific use in listing people, and the way it eventually replaced and rendered obsolete so many other terms for collected serial information.
The early modern emergence of the list seems to offer some support for another great divide in which lists have figured in historiography, that is, the shift from manuscript to print with the invention of the printing press in the 1450s. Elizabeth Eisenstein, for example, has emphasized the information-finding aids that appeared in tables, registers, and indexes of printed works. However, here too, some series are more internally organized and hierarchical than they might appear to modern readers. The historian Richard Oosterhoff, for instance, notes that certain series in printed textbooks that appear to us as lists are “are not simply lists, but serve as a conceptual map,” complete with an inherent hierarchy.
Given that the early modern list applied primarily to human subjects in various social configurations, rather than the contents of books, I suggest a sociopolitical explanation for the rise of the term, rather than an explanation drawn from the history of the book. The term list also emerged alongside market society, the public sphere, and finally, national taxation, all developments calling for listing many previously unenrolled parts of society. Compared to many other literate societies, postclassical Europe reserved its listing of people for a small fraction at its social edges, that is, the highest echelons included in genealogies and lists of officeholders, or the extreme fringe to be found among wanted felons, heretics, and authors to be censored. The bulk of the population was not listed. Perhaps for reasons of its novelty, representations of society in list form initially appeared a chief way to indicate a distasteful, new social chaos in early modern Europe, replacing a traditional, qualitative order based on natural structure and divine fiat with the fungibility of monetary exchange and disordered feasting and brawling associated with the marketplace.
François Rabelais made lists a key feature of the marketplace aesthetic that Mikhail Bakhtin termed “carnivalesque.” Rabelais made his farcical lists compete with and upend more traditional social registers; Gargantua and Pantagruel were the progeny of fifty-nine giants, outdoing Jean Bouchet’s fifty-seven kings in his Anciennes et modernes genealogies des roys de France (Ancient and modern genealogies of the kings of France, 1528). Numerous satires inspired by the market scenes in the Advertisements of Trajano Boccalini (1556–1613) likewise criticized consumer society as an ungovernable stampede, overwhelmed with long lists of desirable objects. These were lists that did not have the implicit order of the great chain of being and feudal hierarchy underlying them. They, like the “list of laweless resolutes” in Hamlet, are thus qualitatively different from previous genres that tacitly included such orders.
From a means of showcasing disorder, the list became a tool for imposing a new order on this previously unorderable population. State projects for investigating the bulk of the populace have thus been rich in such lists. One edited volume, Le temps des listes (The age of lists), emphasizes two such projects: Spain’s quest to gain complete information of America and the listing and reordering of society in the French Revolution. To these we might add, from late seventeenth-century England, the political arithmetic of William Petty, who used lists for studying and remaking society, and the demographic studies of John Graunt, who analyzed the “bills of mortality,” or annual accounts of births and deaths in London first mandated in 1603. Studies of modern governmentality continue to stress the political technology of the list. Only after the list became a tool for ordering and controlling the disordered populace did lists begin to dominate our notion of ranked and ordered texts, rendering obsolete many older terms.
Vera Keller
See also book sales catalogs; censorship; governance; indexing; inventories; public sphere; registers; scrolls and rolls; surveys and censuses