Conclusion: CODA, OR BOOKS ACROSS BORDERS

In his L’origine de l’imprimerie de Paris, published in Paris in 1694, André Chevillier, a librarian at the Sorbonne, recalls how an Orientalist colleague told him that “an Armenian had shown him in Paris a book he had brought from Persia that he claimed those of his nation had printed in their language.”¹ The author’s reluctance to believe that Armenians in seventeenth-century Iran could have published a book in their own language is a telltale reflection of a popular perception in early modern Europe regarding the craft of printing. Scholars of print culture, from Chevillier in the seventeenth century down