Recent Contributions to Retrospective Greek Bibliography
In his recent study of publishing in eighteenth-century Russia, Gary Marker has called attention to the importance of publication and distribution of the printed word as one measure of the reception of Western thought into Eastern Europe. For historians of the Balkans, no less than for Russian specialists, a crucial aid in this type of study has been the publication of systematic retrospective national bibliographies. Nowhere in the Balkans has this concern for retrospective bibliographical control been so closely linked with historical scholarship as in Greece. Even before the monumental publication of Émile L. J. Legrand's multivolume Bibliographic hellénique, modern Greek historical and philological study was closely linked to bibliographical coverage of Greek imprints during the Turcocratia. Since World War II, this concern for retrospective national bibliography has been closely identified with the study of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment and Greek literature from the fall of Byzantium to the modern period.