God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne Review

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God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne ReviewI approached God's Plagiarist with the expectation of some naughty the sort of schoolboy pleasure of learning what the teachers are really up to during lunchtime. I came away deeply disappointed. Bloch's Migne is a black and white stick figure (actually, just black) on a barely pencil-sketched background. Yes, Migne was avaricious; yes, Migne was self-promoting; yes, Migne played fast with copyrights. The flat and repetitive narrative never gets beyond this superficial chapter of faults. There must be more to know about Migne and the supporting cast, people, for example, like Cardinal Pitra. We learn nothing really about the ecclesiastical background of 19th France although it was a very interesting time to be a Catholic. Bloch seems actually to know little (or to care little)about the Catholic matrix of his story and his hasty dismissal of Migne's spiritual life hints at some biases. In the end I am puzzled why Bloch took the time to write the book at all. What was his motive? The expose in itself is so obvious as hardly to warrant 152 pages. Was it time for a tenure review? Yes, Migne was a plagiarizing, self-promoting, avaricious, workaholic little cleric. But the hundreds of volumes of his Patrologia series can still be found in any decent library in the western world and no one who has ever studied early Christianity can do without them. Those last two facts, which say something about enduring value, are true of Migne; they will not be true of Bloch's shallow and mean spirited little book.
God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne OverviewGod's Plagiarist is an entertaining account of the abbe Jacques-Paul Migne, one of the great entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century. A priest in Orleans from 1824 to 1833, Migne then moved to Paris, where, in the space of a decade, he built one of the most extensive publishing ventures of all time.How did he do it?Migne harnessed a deep well of personal energy and a will of iron to the latest innovations in print technology, advertising, and merchandising. His assembly-line production and innovative marketing of the massive editions of the Church Fathers placed him at the forefront of France's new commerce. Characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers" of the century, this priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable of business practices in the service of his devotion to Catholicism.Part detective novel, part morality tale, Bloch's narrative not only will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French intellectual history but will appeal also to general readers interested in the history of publishing or just a good historical yarn."An unforgettable, Daumier-like portrait, sharp and satirical, of this enterprising, austere and somewhat crazed merchandiser of sacred learning. . . . Bloch deserves great credit for the wit and style of his effort to explore the Pedantic Park of nineteenth-century learning, that island of monsters which scholars have found, as yet, no escape."—Anthony Grafton, New Republic"Bloch is an exhilarating guide to the methods which made Migne the Napoleon of the Prospectus, a publicist of genius, Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum rolled into one."—David Coward, Times Literary Supplement"Mercifully, Bloch's sense of humour has none of that condescending mock-bewilderment commonly applied to the foreign or ancient. . . . It enables Bloch to promote Migne as a forerunner of the department store and to place him on a continuum running from St. Paul to the Tupperware party: the quality of the merchandise is increasingly irrelevant, still more the nature of its contents."—Graham Robb, London Review of Books

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