A Companion to the History of the Book (38 page)

Among writers of French, an extraordinary phenomenon is Christine de Pisan (c.1364–c.1430), who composed, wrote, and published her own books by winning the support of the French royal family, including the millionaire bibliophile, John, duke of Berry. Much of her work was written in praise of women; her last publication was a poem defending Joan of Arc. Christine may have been taught to write like a professional scribe by her father, who was an official in the royal chancery. She was an adroit self-publicist, who had herself depicted writing at her desk and presenting her book to the queen in the intimacy of her bed chamber. As Christine succeeded as a writer – in every sense of that word – why could not other lay women of her class do likewise? Making books was a business well suited to medieval ladies, as it could be done in the home in the comfortable living-room in which traditional skills like embroidery were done. In addition to German nuns, a few female lay scribes and illuminators are known who assisted their husbands. Christine is unique in the scale of her ambitions – she intended her books to circulate throughout the world — and in the superb quality of the manuscripts she produced. Making books was no longer the province of monks and friars in their harsh cells, but of ladies like Christine in their luxurious houses.

Learning to Read

The reading primer listed among the Beauchamp books is significant. Chaucer in the Prioress’s Tale describes a boy aged seven sitting in school at his primer, learning his little book. This is the first recorded use of the word “primer” in English. One such “little book” from around Chaucer’s time is now in the Plimpton collection at Columbia University. Its eight folios form an unbound booklet measuring 12 cm by 8 cm. Like all primers, it begins with the alphabet – because that was the first thing to learn – and there then follow the three basic texts of late medieval Christianity: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Creed. These prayers are all in English. The remaining pages list other sections of the catechism to learn by heart: the seven deadly sins, the cardinal virtues, and so on. The assumption of the primer is that the principal purpose in learning to read is to learn to pray and to make a confession of faith correctly.

The primer must once have been the commonest of all manuscript books, though now it is among the rarest. Usually the only ones that have been preserved are expensively illuminated collector’s pieces, like the primer of the Emperor Maximilian (b. 1459) and that of Princess Claude of France (b. 1499). Claude’s primer shows her learning to read through the intercession of St. Anne. According to the popular cult which started in the late thirteenth century, St. Anne taught her daughter, the Virgin Mary, to read. In wall paintings, stained glass, sculpture, and book miniatures, particularly in England, St. Anne is depicted instructing the Virgin as a girl from a Book of Hours. Similarly, the Virgin in her turn is shown instructing the child Jesus from her prayer-book. This is why the primer is called “Jesus’s book”
(Liber Jesus),
for example in the primer of Massimiliano Sforza in 1493.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, the Virgin Mary at the moment of the Annunciation is almost invariably shown kneeling in an oratory with a Book of Hours open on her lectern. In her prayerful reading, she becomes a model for the person using the Book of Hours in which she is depicted. In one fifteenth-century image of the Annunciation the lady owner of the book is interposed between the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin, as if the angel were introducing her to the Virgin. Some artists depict additional books in Mary’s oratory among commonplace household objects. In Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation (painted in 1486) in the National Gallery in London, four books sit casually on a shelf: one supports a candlestick, two are under a decanter next to some crockery, and another leans alongside it.

Before 1100, book production had been primarily ecclesiastical and monastic. By 1400, it was mainly commercial, whether it was aimed at the schools and the professions (including the clergy) or at wealthy lay people in town and country. Illuminated manuscripts continued to be produced but their patrons now were kings, dukes, and knights. “Sir Geoffrey Luttrell had me made,” the Luttrell Psalter declares (Camille 1998: 49). By 1400, lay women were perhaps as likely as lay men to be the owners of books, particularly Books of Hours and vernacular literature. The clergy had made illuminated books so covetable that lay people wanted them too. This is a sufficient explanation for the luxury book market. Among ordinary books, the simplest – and probably the most common – was the reading primer. In the centuries between 1100 and 1500 books of many sorts, religious and secular, made their way from churches to palaces, town houses, and manor houses, where they were domesticated – as it were – by the lady of the house. In bed chambers and private oratories, books had begun to furnish a room a century or more before the invention of printing.

Did the existence of more books mean that more people were literate? Unfortunately, there is no statistical information that allows generalizations to be made in terms of numerical proportions or percentages, either for rates of literacy among the medieval population or for annual book production. (In ecclesiastical documents individuals are occasionally described as
literatus,
but this concerns their competence in Latin rather than their literacy in a modern sense.) Rough estimates can be made, however, of the number of books and documents that still exist; these suggest that the materials for literacy increased century by century between 1100 and 1500. Even so, this increase may indicate only that more has been preserved from later centuries — especially from the fifteenth century — than from earlier times. This demonstrates an increase in libraries and archives, rather than in literacy and book production. Nevertheless, the growth of books in vernacular languages and of prayer-books for lay household use, like the Luttrell Psalter, suggest that domestic and familial literacy was indeed increasing among the well-to-do. Could Sir Geoffrey Luttrell and his family read his Psalter, which is all in Latin? Are the magnificent pictures in this and other illuminated manuscripts so prominent and elaborate because the owners of these books made more sense of them than of the text?

Describing the prayer-book of Lady Margaret Beaufort (the great benefactor of Cambridge University who died in 1487), Bishop John Fisher praised her for having “a little perceiving” of the Latin text: by using the rubrics and headings (Fisher explained) she could find her place for the service of the day without assistance (Clanchy 2004: 109—10). It was a commonplace of medieval schoolroom practice that
legere
(meaning “reading” in the sense of pronouncing the text correctly) preceded
intellegere
(meaning “understanding” the text through grammar and vocabulary). Children might learn “reading” at home from their parents using a primer, but they could only achieve “understanding” in a grammar school — and these schools were restricted to boys. Because women got no schooling in grammar (which meant Latin), they missed out on learning to write as well, since writing was taught by copying out the alphabet and Latin vocabulary. Even though signatures (instead of seals) were increasingly being required from women as well as men to authenticate legal documents, the numbers of women who could write in 1500 may have been as low as 1 percent of the population.

Inability to write contrasts with the large numbers who might have been able to read, at least in the restricted medieval sense of
legere.
Derek Brewer estimates that in England “probably more than half the population could read, though not necessarily also write, by 1500” (quoted in Clanchy 1993: 13). This estimate depends on the number who might have been instructed — in the home rather than at school — in the basics of the reading primer. Certainly by 1500, and probably as early as 1200, writing had become familiar to the whole medieval population: as noted above, “everyone knew someone who could read” (Orme 2001: 240). Book-learning had been integrated into the life of the male clerical elite of monks and priests by the beginning of our period in 1100. The achievement of the years 1100 to 1500 was to extend book-learning from monasteries and churches into the domestic sphere of the family. The reading primer, which reinforced the link between religion and learning as strongly as the clergy did, had the potential to make everyone a literate and a book-owner. Shortly after 1500, booksellers’ catalogues were selling primers, described as “abc”s, for a penny each. These were printed booklets, but their form was the same as it had been for centuries.

References and Further Reading

Alexander, J. G. (1992)
Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Beach, A. I. (2004)
Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-century Bavaria.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Binski, P. and Panayotova, S. (eds.) (2005)
The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West.
Turnhout: Brepols.

Camille, M. (1998)
Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England.
London: Reaktion.

Carruthers, M. (1990)
The Book of Memory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clanchy, M. T. (1983) “Looking Back from the Invention of Printing.” In D. P. Resnick (ed.),
Literacy in Historical Perspective,
pp. 7–22. Washington: Library of Congress.

— (1993)
From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307,
2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

— (2004) “Images of Ladies with Prayer-books: What Do They Signify?” In R. N. Swanson (ed.),
The Church and the Book,
pp. 106–22. Wood-bridge: Boydell.

Coates, A. (1999)
English Medieval Books: The Reading Abbey Collections from Foundation to Dispersal.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crick, J. and Walsham, A. (eds.) (2003)
The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Derolez, A. (2003)
The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Donovan, C. (1991)
The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-century Oxford.
London: British Library.

Gehl, P. F. (1993)
A Moral Art: Grammar, Society and Culture in Trecento Florence.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Gibson, M., with Heslop, T A. and Pfaff, R. W (1992)
The Eadwine Psalter.
Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Griffiths, J. and Pearsall, D. (eds.) (1989)
Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

de Hamel, C. (1994) A
History of Illuminated Manuscripts,
2nd edn. London: Phaidon.

— (2001)
The Book: A History of the Bible.
London: Phaidon.

Harthan, J. (1977)
Books of Hours and their Owners.
London: Thames and Hudson.

Hoccleve, T. (1981)
Selections from Hoccleve,
ed. M. C. Seymour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kelly, S. and Thompson, J. J. (eds.) (2005)
Imagining the Book
[in the Middle Ages]. Turnhout: Brepols.

Kristjánsson, J. (1993)
Icelandic Manuscripts,
trans. J. Cosser. Reykjavik: Icelandic Literary Society.

Lewis, S. (1987)
The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Oliver, J. (1996) “Worship of the Word.” In L. Smith and J. H. M. Taylor (eds.),
Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence,
pp. 106–22. London: British Library.

Orme, N. (2001)
Medieval Children.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Petrucci, A. (1995)
Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy,
trans. C. M. Radding. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Robinson, P. R. (1997) “A Twelfth-century
Scriptrix
from Nunnaminster.” In P. R. Robinson and R. Zim (eds.),
The Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers; Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes,
pp. 73–93. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Rouse, M. A. and Rouse, R. H. (1991)
Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts.
Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

Shailor, B. A. (1988)
The Medieval Book.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Smith, Lesley J. (2003)
Masters of the Sacred Page.
Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

15

The Gutenberg Revolutions

Lotte Hellinga

The invention of printing with movable type, which took place in Mainz in the middle of the fifteenth century, is one of the few instances where we can pinpoint a dramatic acceleration in the slow evolutionary process of the history of script. The introduction of the new technique is often regarded as a revolution in the dissemination of knowledge and in communication, but it was by no means a revolution in the sense of a movement intended to overthrow the old order. By the middle of the fifteenth century, readership and ownership of books by men and women were no longer a privilege of the very few (see chapter 14). Book ownership had sufficiently grown to foster a departure from long-established scribal methods of book production and welcome a new technique that allowed books to be manufactured at a rate that caused amazement and delight. “All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true,” wrote Cardinal Juan de Carvajal early in 1455 in a letter to the future pope Pius II, after he had seen sheets of the by then almost completed Latin Bible, which apparently had been put on display by the inventor and printer, Johann Gutenberg, at a political summit meeting of diplomats and prelates held at Frankfurt. The letter, although short, is revealing; it expresses admiration for the clarity of the graphic forms (“your grace would be able to read it without your spectacles”), it gives an estimate of the number of copies printed (between 158 and 180), and reports that they are difficult to obtain for demand is high: buyers were lining up even before the work was finished (Davies 1996). Finally, the circumstances under which the cardinal had seen sheets of the book allow us to guess that Gutenberg was well aware that active marketing strategies were required in order to get a return on his very large investment, perhaps even to raise cash in order to finish the work and repay his loans.

The novelty of print was celebrated in many colophons of early books, in convoluted Latin verse with difficult to interpret circumscriptions of the technique, but also famously by Caxton in plain English: “this said book … is not wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben to thende that every man may have them attones” (in the first book he printed, the
Recuyell of the Histories of Troy,
1473). When the novelty had worn off, but not the appreciation of what the invention meant for Western civilization, centenaries were celebrated at various dates, according to the convenience and beliefs of the organizers. The most recent was in the year 2000.

Without a rising demand for texts produced in highly legible, well-manageable codex form, Johann Gutenberg might not have persisted in developing his ingenious invention, or promising trials might have met with indifference. From what we learn about Gutenberg’s biography from legal documents, the long process of experiment and development had indeed been turbulent, beset with financial problems, political uncertainty and violence, and conflict between individuals (Bechtel 1992; Davies 1996; Kapr 1996). The modern era of mechanical book production was heralded by notions of the need for venture capital and of property rights to an invention.

The Technique: (1) Manufacturing Movable Type

Gutenberg’s invention took full advantage of the degree of abstraction in representing language forms that was offered by the alphabet and by the Western forms of script that were current in the fifteenth century. From sparse relics of Gutenberg’s early experiments, and from his great Latin Bible itself, it is possible to detect that the development of the technique took place in phases, and recent research based on modern imaging technology even suggests that Gutenberg’s technique was indeed a precursor to the definitive process (Agüera y Arcas 2003). We may now surmise that the method of manufacture of type with steel punches and matrices, which became the standard for more than four centuries of typography, was introduced a few years later by Nicolas Jenson, who from early days on was praised as a co-inventor. Jenson’s contribution was apparently based on the early part of his career at the Mint in Paris, where striking medals with elaborate lettering would have given him specialized expertise. Jenson became one of the most influential type-designers of all ages – as well as an excellent printer – when he worked in the 1470s in Venice, but this may have been preceded by an interlude in Mainz, where he probably made a type, first used in 1459, which, unlike Gutenberg’s types, was able to withstand many years of intensive use (Hellinga 2003).

In spite of the existence of archival documents and a very considerable amount of printing surviving from the earliest decades, much of the detail and circumstances of the invention remains open to interpretation, and even has a long tradition of acrimonious dispute. We can, however, be confident about the technique once it had become stable. For each character, a punch was cut in steel, the hardest available metal. The steel punch was used to stamp the character in a copper matrix of fixed dimensions. The matrix was carefully adjusted to fit exactly into a mold, a hinged form which, when closed, was filled with hot, liquid metal with a low melting point, an alloy of lead, tin, and traces of other metals (commonly antimony). The mold would determine exactly the dimensions of the resulting character: of its surface at the top with the character-image (or body, in typographical terms) and its height to paper (Gaskell 1972: 11–39). The number of characters to be cast would vary; most languages need, for example, many “e”s and “n”s, but very few “z”s. Cast characters were kept in type-cases, the capitals in the “upper case,” the minuscles in the “lower case,” and each character had a separate box in the case (Gaskell 1972: 35–7). With a complete fount, that is a set of cast characters, uniform in size but representing every element of the alphabet and in the quantities required for each letter, compositors could build up tightly fitting, solid pages of text. These were combined into forms from which the sheets of paper, subsequently to be folded, were printed. After the necessary number of copies had been printed on the press – on paper or, less frequently, on vellum – the pages of type could be taken off, washed, and disassembled. The individual characters would then be distributed over the type-cases, to be used again.

For printing in Latin, “international” styles were soon established, first a rotunda style developed in Venice, which became familiar to the whole world of learning, and later roman types, based on humanist script, which were pioneered by Nicolas Jenson. For liturgy, a “Gothic” fractura style remained appropriate, which had also been the style chosen by Gutenberg for his Latin Bible. In vernacular printing the style of types echoed the styles of script that had become associated with vernacular texts in manuscript, and varied between languages: the
schwabacher
from South Germany for German, the
bastarda
for French, the script of the Brethren of the Common Life in the Low Countries. English printing was influenced by several of these models, while printers attempted to “anglicize” them by introducing some traditionally English forms (BMC xi: 335–45).

The Technique: (2) The Printing Press

The printing press itself was subject to development. At first, it was a fairly simple adaptation of the press that had been known since antiquity for producing wine and oil. In this contraption, a flat platen was built under which a device could be pushed that held a sheet of paper. The platen would then be driven down by a screw powered by a lever. This press was capable of printing one folio leaf (on half of a sheet of paper or vellum) corresponding to the size of the platen. In the early 1470s, an improvement was introduced (probably first in Rome), a movable carriage which enabled the printer to place a whole sheet on the press and print it in two pulls with two successive moves of the carriage. This new procedure spread from Italy to other countries, and by the middle of the 1480s it had become generally available. This improvement, which speeded up the process of printing, had a profound effect on the production of texts (Hellinga 1997; illustrations of presses with moving carriages in Gaskell 1972: 119–23).

To understand this, we have to take a closer look at the printing process. Printed books were produced as codices, the form in which already for over a millennium established texts had been transmitted. To make a codex, sheets of paper or vellum are folded together to form quires, which are sewn together to form volumes, which can then be protected by a binding of various degrees of solidity. The production of codices, whether manuscript or printed, requires advance planning of their structure, which means that this form of reproduction is suitable only for texts with a predetermined beginning and end. For books printed in the hand-press period, the “format” of the book was determined by the number of times the full sheet was folded, while its dimensions would be determined by the size of the full sheet. The larger the number of pages that must be combined within the sheet to produce a small book, the more intricate the pattern of combination of pages (Gaskell 1972: 88–105). The practice of writing on full sheets before folding them was known to some scribes of manuscript codices, but with the introduction of the printing press, the sheet had to be the standard unit of production. Pages, once set in type, had therefore to be combined in a chase as forms corresponding to the size of the platen – a process known as “imposition.” Initially, the typeset form would have the size of a half-sheet, later of a full sheet.

Since printers normally worked with a fairly limited supply of type, they needed to set pages in the combination required to complete the printing of a sheet, which (except for middle sheets in the quire) would not be in the order in which the text was to be read. A forecast of the contents of each page was therefore made on the manuscript used by the printer (usually by a line-count), a process which is called “casting off.” The division of text in this way rapidly became an established routine. Compositors were adept at making the text they were setting fit the thus allotted space, by using variations in spelling, abbreviation, and contraction, or even by introducing variations in the text. There is evidence of the practice of casting off from the early 1470s (and it may have been practiced before) but it is much more difficult to provide a date for its discontinuation. It may well have varied between printing houses, and their investment in type. We can be certain that, for example, in England by the end of the seventeenth century the practice had become unknown (Hellinga 1999: 82), whereas it had been used for the printing of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623, at a time when it was probably the normal procedure in all but the largest printing houses. It is important to realize that, until the discontinuation of the practice, texts were split up into building blocks to be assembled during production. Books were perceived by their makers as structures in which intellectual content had no more than a secondary part.

The main invention, the principle of composing pages of movable type, had been quickly accomplished to an astonishing degree of perfection. Nevertheless, further development was possible. Within a short time, pages in metal type were combined with woodcut illustrations, later to be followed by metal engravings. Hebrew and Greek, with their vowel points and accents, and music posed problems of vertical as well as horizontal composition which were solved only gradually: Hebrew in the early 1480s, Greek by the Venetian typographers of the 1490s. The first composition of mathematical figures in metal in the first edition of Euclid’s
Elementa,
published in 1482 in Venice by the highly inventive printer Erhard Ratdolt, was exuberantly celebrated by him in a preface, which he even printed in gold in several copies.

Early in the sixteenth century a reaction against the growing uniformity in the appearance of printed books, especially books in Latin, can be observed. Printed books had penetrated new markets. It had become much more common for individuals to own books, and, paradoxically, printed books had become impersonal objects. At this time we find exceptional manuscripts of great splendor, works of art such as could never be produced mechanically. As part of the same reaction against uniformity, typefounders began to design typographical styles that were also works of art in their own right, commissioned for a particular person or to be used for a particular purpose. In the balance between the very general, so easily accepted by the eye that it becomes “invisible,” and the very particular, the typeface that deliberately intrudes into the awareness of the reader, is comprised the whole long history of typography.

The Printing House

Compared with manuscript production, even within a scriptorial organization, the preparation, investment, organization, and technical skills required to produce books in print were very much greater. Even a modest early printing house employed a variety of personnel: compositors, press-crews, one or more correctors, an overseer or master printer. Type design, punch-cutting, and type-founding were specialized skills of the very few and would only exceptionally be found in a printing house such as, for example, Aldus Manutius in Venice. In every printing house, space was required for presses, for the storage of paper and perhaps vellum, and for the finished product. Above all, every printer had to foster trade connections to ensure that books were dispatched and sold in time to yield sufficient return on investment for the business to continue.

The relatively large investment in paper, equipment, and the complicated procedures encouraged careful control over texts before they were committed to print and during production. Printing houses initiated procedures for editing, text preparation, and proofreading right from the beginning of printing, checked the sequencing and imposition of pages (which were particularly vulnerable to error), and sometimes contracted learned or specialist correctors to oversee the accuracy of texts according to the standards of their time. The quality of the publications and the ensuing fame of a printing house stand in direct relation to the level of care in such procedures. Some printing houses which specialized in learned texts, for example Aldus Manutius in Venice and Johann Froben in Basel, employed famous scholars. Erasmus, who worked with these two printers, is the leading example, but there were many other correctors whose names we do not know: ecclesiastics ensured the accuracy of liturgical printing and of biblical and patristic texts. In a different area that required strict accuracy, lawyers of the Inns of Court in London are known to have corrected texts for the specialist printer of this material, Richard Pynson (Baker 1999: 430). Other, less ambitious printers did not employ scholarly correctors at all. Conversely, authors, who generally had no control once their work was in the hands of printers, with or without their foreknowledge, complained bitterly about printing-house negligence and ignorance. When early in the sixteenth century legal protection began to appear in the form of “privileges” issued by a local authority, it was the printer who was protected against competitors reprinting the text within a stated period of time, not the author (Armstrong 1990: 1–13).