Act of Faith (20 page)

‘Pah!’ The
signora
flung her head back and laughed. ‘If they try to stop me printing it, there will be an outcry such as the Pope has never heard.’

‘But how do you know?’

‘Because I will start it.’ She smiled. ‘Nobody can shout more loudly than a Venetian widow.’

I grinned at her.

‘Believe me, Isabella,’ she said. ‘This is just the beginning.’

The characters in
Act of Faith
are imaginary, but the early life of Master de Aquila is loosely based on the experiences of a generation of people such as Menasseh Ben Israel, one of the first great Jewish printers in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. His family, like that of his contemporary Joseph Athias and others, fell afoul of the Inquisition and fled to the relative safety of Amsterdam, where they printed masterpieces such as their Hebrew Bibles. (In 1634, Menasseh attended the Frankfurt Book Fair — still one of the world’s largest book trade fairs today.)

Real historical figures mentioned in the book include the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, poet John Milton, philosopher René Descartes, theologian Martin Luther, and the classical philosophers and authors Homer, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero and Pliny.

The arrest of Professor Hawkins is based on real events in Cambridge in 1644, although I’ve condensed several events into one. All ‘monuments of superstition and idolatry’ in the college chapels and parish churches were destroyed by William ‘Smasher’ Dowsing, and a commission was appointed to enforce Parliament’s Covenant and root out all ‘idle, ill-affected, and Scandalous Clergy, of the University’.

The Member of Parliament for Cambridge was Oliver Cromwell, who became a general in the Parliamentary army. King
Charles I was charged with high treason and executed in 1649. In 1653, Cromwell was made Lord Protector of England.

William Ward, whose execution Isabella attended, was a Catholic priest who refused to give up his faith in Protestant England. He was executed at Tyburn in 1641.

Contarini is an illustrious name shared by many Venetians over the centuries — indeed, it is the name of one of the great houses of Venice and of many Doges. I’m sure its history contains any number of feisty widows, but this particular Signora Contarini is invented.

Actually, there were several women amongst the first few generations of printers and publishers, such as ‘the Widowe Orwin’ in London, Helizabeth de Rusconibus in Venice, Iolande Bonhomme in France, and Anne Lichfield, who, after the death of her husband, became the official printer for the University of Oxford.

Some of the books mentioned in
Act of Faith
are real; some are not. Isabella tells us she learned Italian from reading Dante, the first popular author to write in his own Tuscan language rather than Latin. (The first printed edition of his
Commedia
appeared in 1472.) She also reads
Utopia
, Thomas More’s political satire (edited by Erasmus and published in Latin in 1518). She and her father are experts on Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, who lived between 484 and 425 BCE. The first Latin translation of his original Greek
Histories
was available by 1450, but the entire book wasn’t translated into English until 1709.

John Wilkins, whose ‘silly little treatise’ Professor Hawkins reads, was a clergyman and academic whose works included
The Discovery of a World in the Moone
(1638), which popularised the new science of astronomy and the ideas of people such as
Galileo — then on trial for saying that the planets revolve around the sun, not the earth.

Printing exploded into the western world after Johannes Gutenberg printed his Bible in 1455 in Mainz near Frankfurt, using a press with movable metal type or letters to produce multiple copies of pages. By the end of the century, there were printers in hundreds of cities in Europe, producing millions of copies of books and pamphlets — and this amazing new technology helped spread protests against the Catholic Church.

To minimise the damage and dissent, the Church revived the Inquisition and started banning books. The auto de fé ceremony, or ‘act of faith’, began in the thirteenth century. Over the next five hundred years, thousands of people in Spain and Portugal were tried and punished, particularly people suspected of being Muslim or Jewish and women accused of witchcraft. Even one of Spain’s most revered artists, Goya, was hauled before the Inquisition as late as the 1820s for painting scenes of an auto de fé tribunal. He was forced to flee the country.

The first edition of the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books was published in 1557 and updated regularly after that. Over the years it has included thousands of titles, many written by some of the most admired authors and thinkers in history, including Galileo, Erasmus and any number of Nobel prizewinners. The list of banned books included encyclopaedias and dictionaries and even the Bible in languages other than Greek, Latin or Hebrew. It was specifically forbidden for non-Christian printers to publish Bibles. The Index was finally abandoned in 1966, but to this day books get banned all over the world for being too provocative, too radical or for simply telling the truth.

Like Master de Aquila, I have too many books for my own good, and it seems to me now that the ideas in them have woven together in my mind over many years to become this book. I can’t list them all here, but if you’d like to read more about Isabella’s world, you could start with anything at all about Venice by John Julius Norwich or Jan Morris, or on London by Peter Ackroyd. Geraldine Brooks’s novel
People of the Book
traces a precious Hebrew manuscript through European history.

Terrific books for younger readers include Cynthia Harnett’s novel about early English printing,
The Load of Unicorn
, and James Barbary’s
Puritan and Cavalier: English Civil War
(my editions are both crumpled Puffins, from 1966 and 1977 respectively). One of the few books I had of my very own when I was ten or so was
The Children of the New Forest
by Frederick Marryat (1847), set during the English Civil War.

For those who’d like to dig a little deeper into the past, the details of Isabella’s journeys across Europe were informed by the marvellous travel narrative
Coryat’s Crudities
(1611), John Evelyn’s diaries on his time in Venice (1646), and the much later journals and letters of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley published as
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour
(1817).

Autos de fé were documented in contemporary paintings such as that of Francisco Ricci (now in the Prado in Madrid), and I read witnesses’ accounts of the ceremony and Inquisitorial tribunal hearings in
The Spanish Inquisition
by Joseph Pérez (2004),
A History of the Inquisition of Spain
by Henry Charles Lea (1906–7) and the 1828 Goodrich collection of
The Records of the Spanish Inquisition
.

I often consulted references such as
Jewish Literacy
by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (2001) and John Carter’s classic
ABC for Book Collectors
(mine is the seventh edition). Details of daily life and particularly information about trade and the European economies were gleaned from books such as Simon Schama’s
The Embarrassment of Riches
(1987), Liza Picard’s
Restoration London
(1997), Lisa Jardine’s
Worldly Goods
(1996), Brian Pullan’s
The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice
,
1550–1670
(1998) and
Trading Places
by Maartje van Gelder (2009).

You can delve into the novel’s broader themes via the philosophers and poets mentioned throughout, or through recent histories of thought like A. C. Grayling’s
Towards the Light
(2007).

The history of the book and printing is, naturally, well-documented, and I made use of
A Companion to the History of the Book
, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (2007), and
The Oxford Companion to the Book
, edited by Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (2010), amongst others. For technical details I referred to
The British Library Guide to Printing: History and Techniques
by Michael Twyman (1998) and
Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use
by Daniel Updike (2001). I also spent many hours drooling over sumptuous cartography books such as Peter Whitfield’s
Mapping the World
(1998) and
The Map Book
, edited by Peter Barber (2005).

I work at the State Library of Victoria, where, although my job has little to do with rare books, I can wander into the gallery during my lunch break to gaze at William Caxton’s
Myrrour of the Worlde
(1490) or
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(1499), or examine digitised versions online, pop into the reference section to consult the
Encyclopaedia Judaica
(1972), or spend my evenings in the Reading Rooms poring over books on every topic from clothing
and food of the seventeenth century to medieval Islamic astronomy to the political impact of the Counter-Reformation.

My colleagues at the library found for me — as they do for thousands of other researchers every year — precious, wonderful things: early Dutch printed maps and books that made my hair stand on end; title pages and printers’ marks that made everything in this book seem, momentarily, real. Amongst the treasures were precious Dutch maps of the known world and universe created by Claes Jansz Visscher (1652) and Willem Blaeu (1635); and religious books for the English market printed in Amsterdam: Cotton’s
Concordance
(1635) and Beze’s Bible (1640) ‘with most profitable Annotations upon all the hard places, and other things of great importance’.

Fragments of Isabella’s world still exist. You can visit the Ghetto in Venice — it isn’t walled and guarded any more — and San Marco remains the most wondrous of buildings in one of the most glorious cities in the world. You can walk along the canals in Amsterdam, or wander through the medieval lanes and fresh-mown lawns of Cambridge.

During my research for
Act of Faith
I’ve hunted through online archives and collections all over the world: the British Museum and British Library, King’s College London, Amsterdam’s Zuiderzee Museum and Rijksmuseum, the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Vermeer Centrum in Delft and many, many more. British History Online provides access to the proceedings of the House of Lords and the Commons, including ordinances about the purge of Cambridge and the conduct of the Civil Wars. I found works by early women printers on the websites of the Library of the University of Illinois and Princeton University Library, while the Library of the University of Amsterdam is home to a remarkable
collection of rare maps and books, including many printed by Menasseh Ben Israel and his sons.

Countless hours vanished while I zoomed in on paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt and others, studying details of interiors, hairstyles, clothing, food and tableware; pored over seventeenth-century maps and paintings of Venice, Seville, London, Cambridge, Genoa and Amsterdam; ploughed through diaries and travel journals, proceedings of Parliament, academic journals and contemporary accounts of events; looked up lace collars and daggers and fonts and belt buckles and recipes. All without leaving my desk.

Thanks to generations of authors, librarians, publishers, collectors, curators, scholars, printers and readers, many pictures and documents, books and maps from the seventeenth century survived to the twenty-first century, and are now being published all over again in digital form.

Isabella would like that.

Kelly Gardiner
Melbourne, 2011

My work on
Act of Faith
was made a great deal easier by the Australia Council, which generously provided me with an Emerging Writers’ Grant at the beginning of the project.

My thanks to the lovely Lisa Berryman, my editors Kate Burnitt and Nicola O’Shea, and everyone at HarperCollins.

The illustrations on the pages of this book are printers’ devices and page elements from books printed in Amsterdam and Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are from the marvellous Sticht Collection of rare printed material in the State Library of Victoria. Jan McDonald, Keith Maguire and Sally Stewart from the Library found me wonderful and rare printed treasures from the collection.

Susannah Walker provided advice on the draft and supported me in every way imaginable.