I am a rare-book collector, and I feel
delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one
page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina
Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long.
They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal
addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and
pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the
virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our
contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions
are one-page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book,
thank some national or international endowment for a generous
grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the
love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children,
and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We
understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals
revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent
underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten
in a hurry....
But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines
saying "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank
my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by
Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller
Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction.
It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric.