BOOKS FERNANDO CERVANTES


PERILS OF THE PRINTED WORD


The Book in the Renaissance Andrew Pettegree


YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 421PP, £30 Tablet Bookshop price £27


01420 592974 I


n 1989, builders renovating a house in Delft found six very old books hidden under the floor- boards. They were all Protestant


works that had been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books and concealed at some point towards the beginning of the anti-Spanish Dutch revolt in the late 1560s. The extra - ordinary story of their survival is only matched by the realisation that just two of them were previously known: no copy of the other four has been traced in any library in the world. This incident brings into sharp focus the


woefully incomplete data upon which histor - ians rely in their efforts to reconstruct the history of what was perhaps the most impor- tant revolution in the history of literacy. Even publications that we can be fairly confident about are liable to be unsettled by disconcert- ing discoveries. Take the well-known celebratory pamphlets that seemed to mark practically every stage of the progress of the Hapsburg-Valois wars and which are widely thought to have been produced in Paris and Antwerp. While working at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix, Andrew Pettegree came across a volume containing 33 short, cheap and rather badly produced pamphlets, all about the wars, which had been printed in Rouen between 1538 and 1544. This was local work for locals: vigorous, informative, passionate and, until now, entirely unknown. A sane sense of deep inadequacy in the face


THE TABLET BOOKSHOP £1.75 (4 books or more: add £5)


Postage and Packing for books up to 1kg* UK


EUROPE £2.00 per book


REST OF THE WORLD £2.50 per book *P&P for oversized books will be charged at cost


We accept Visa, MasterCard and Switch Cheques payable to Redemptorist Publications


Call:


Email: Post:


01420 592 974 Fax: 01420 888 05 tabletbookshop@rpbooks.co.uk


The Tablet Bookshop, Alphonsus House Chawton, Hampshire GU34 3HQ


Redemptorist Publications will endeavour to sell you the book at the price advertised. However, occasionally on publication the published price is altered,in which case we will notify you prior to debiting your card.


30 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010


Leonhart Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium, Basel, 1542. Glasgow University Library


of such a staggering mass of unknown material permeates this splendid book. Pettegree convincingly challenges the widespread per- ception that the invention of moveable-type print was a progressive and modernising episode, that helped to rescue the learning of the ancients from obscurity and to catapult the West into a mindset that has ever since been turning darkness into light. The picture that emerges is much more complex and hap- hazard. Adaptation, restructuring and deep anxieties abounded. Grubby little books and pamphlets – most of which are now lost, with the tiny proportion that survives scattered around thousands of different libraries – actu- ally underpinned the financial needs of this highly volatile industry. The most successful books were invariably


the butt of humanist ridicule. The Benedictine Filippo de Strata, for instance, urged the Doge of Venice in the 1470s to ban printing from the Republic in order to stop it wrecking the cause of letters. The attitude was so wide- spread that Pettegree wonders whether it might explain why print failed to get a foothold in proud Florence. After all, the new craft had high standards to compete with. Forty years after the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible, Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, was still ordering hand-copied books from Italy. The clear separation of manuscripts and printed books, to which we have become accustomed, was in fact quite slow to develop. Indeed, manuscripts were frequently copied from printed books to meet the higher stan- dards of the late fifteenth century. As Pettegree explains, the subsequent development of library science, with its requirement that


manuscripts and printed books be stored sep- arately, meant that a crucial piece of evidence about fifteenth-century collection organisation was “carefully, lovingly destroyed”. None of this deters Pettegree from telling an engrossing and sure-footed story of the early development of a trade whose unfor- giving cruelty led to countless lost fortunes. It is easy to forget that Gutenberg himself died in poverty and failure. Even 60 years after the publication of his Bible, printers were still mostly catering for a rich, conser- vative and restricted readership. Things only began to change after the prolonged crisis brought about by the long wars in late- fifteenth-century Venice and the consequent shift of gravity northwards, towards Paris, Lyon, Basel and Antwerp. It was in these thriving cities, where daring businessmen could appropriate the Venetian advances while developing structures of organisation that made printing less susceptible to failure, that the book at last broke free of its roots in the manuscript world. Pettegree uses a huge range of sources to tell the story, most notably the rich and enthralling correspondence between Johann Amerbach of Basel and Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, a partnership that facilitated the first printed edition of Patristic writings. Pettegree is in his element when discussing the fresh challenges brought about by the crisis of the German Reformation. Wittenberg was a most unpropitious place for successful printing to develop –we only need to remem- ber that Luther’s 1516 edition of Tauler’s sermons was a dismal failure. The rise of the Reformation Flugschrift, however, soon turned Wittenberg into an astounding success: this can still be observed in all its original freshness in Lucas Cranach’s title-page designs, which exude such shameless confi - d ence. Ironically, the success of the Flugschrift made printers aware of the profitability of cheap books, and this gave rise to the prolif- eration of the works of entertainment and news so abhorred by Luther. Thereafter, Augsburg quickly emerged as an important printing centre of vernacular works, among which news pamphlets, mostly about Italy and the Ottoman world, were especially favoured, due to the city’s location. There is much, much more: prodigies and


natural phenomena; chivalry; the domesti- cation of recreational music; magic and astrology; science and technology; the lure of the New World; prophecy and propaganda. These and many other themes are all given their due with a wealth of colourful detail depicted by a confident, judicious and learned eye. Seldom have the origins of the early mod- ern printing revolution, that unique but complex episode whose effects are still evolv- ing, been explored with such refreshing good sense and authority.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48