Part 1 (1/2)
Printing and the Renaissance.
by John Rothwell Slater.
PRINTING did not make the Renaissance; the Renaissance made printing.
Printing did not begin the publication and dissemination of books. There were libraries of vast extent in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome.
There were universities centuries before Gutenberg where the few instructed the many in the learning treasured up in books, and where both scholars and professional scribes multiplied copies of books both old and new. At the outset of any examination of the influence of printing on the Renaissance it is necessary to remind ourselves that the intellectual life of the ancient and the mediaeval world was built upon the written word. There is a naive view in which ancient literature is conceived as existing chiefly in the autograph ma.n.u.scripts and original doc.u.ments of a few great centers to which all ambitious students must have resort. A very little inquiry into the multiplication of books before printing shows us how erroneous is this view.
We must pa.s.s over entirely the history of publis.h.i.+ng and book-selling in ancient times, a subject too vast for adequate summary in a preliminary survey of this sort. With the fall of Rome and the wholesale destruction that accompanied the barbarian invasions a new chapter begins in the history of the dissemination of literature. This chapter opens with the founding of the scriptorium, or monastic copying system, by Ca.s.siodorus and Saint Benedict early in the sixth century. To these two men, Ca.s.siodorus, the ex-chancellor of the Gothic king Theodoric, and Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, is due the grat.i.tude of the modern world. It was through their foresight in setting the monks at work copying the scriptures and the secular literature of antiquity that we owe the preservation of most of the books that have survived the ruins of the ancient world. At the monastery of Monte Ca.s.sino, founded by Saint Benedict in the year 529, and at that of Viviers, founded by Ca.s.siodorus in 531, the Benedictine rule required of every monk that a fixed portion of each day be spent in the scriptorium. There the more skilled scribes were entrusted with the copying of precious doc.u.ments rescued from the chaos of the preceding century, while monks not yet sufficiently expert for this high duty were instructed by their superiors.
The example thus n.o.bly set was imitated throughout all the centuries that followed, not only in the Benedictine monasteries of Italy, France, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, but in religious houses of all orders. It is to the mediaeval Church, her conservatism in the true sense of the word, her industry, her patience, her disinterested guardians.h.i.+p alike of sacred and of pagan letters, that the world owes most of our knowledge of antiquity. Conceive how great would be our loss if to archaeology alone we could turn for the reconstruction of the civilization, the art, the philosophy, the public and private life of Greece and Rome. If the Church had done no more than this for civilization, it would still have earned some measure of tolerance from its most anti-clerical opponents. It is of course to the Eastern rather than to the Roman Church that we owe the preservation of cla.s.sical Greek literature, copied during the dark ages in Greek monasteries and introduced into Italy after the fall of Constantinople.
A second stage in the multiplication and publication of ma.n.u.script books begins with the founding of the great mediaeval universities of Bologna, Paris, Padua, Oxford, and other centers of higher education. Inasmuch as the study of those days was almost entirely book study, the maintenance of a university library with one or two copies of each book studied was inadequate. There grew up in each university city an organized system of supplying the students with textbooks. The authorized book-dealers of a mediaeval university were called =stationarii=, or stationers, a term apparently derived from the fixed post or station a.s.signed in or near the university buildings to each scribe permitted to supply books to the students and professors. A stationer in England has always meant primarily a book-dealer or publisher, as for example in the term Stationers' Hall, the guild or corporation which until 1842 still exercised in London the functions of a copyright bureau. Incidentally a stationer also dealt in writing materials, whence our ordinary American use of the term. Another name for the university book-dealers was the cla.s.sical Latin word =librarii=, which usually in mediaeval Latin meant not what we call a librarian but a vender of books, like the French =libraire=. These scribes were not allowed at first to sell their ma.n.u.scripts, but rented them to the students at rates fixed by university statutes. A folded sheet of eight pages, sixteen columns of sixty-two lines each, was the unit on which the rental charges were based. Such a sheet at the beginning of the thirteenth century rented for about twenty cents a term; and since an ordinary textbook of philosophy or theology or canon law contained many sheets, these charges const.i.tuted no inconsiderable part of the cost of instruction. The books must be returned before the student left the university; sales were at first surrept.i.tious and illegal, but became common early in the fourteenth century. Reasonable accuracy among the stationers was secured by a system of fines for errors, half of which went to the university, the other half being divided between the supervisor or head proof-reader and the informant who discovered the error.
The original regulation which forbade the stationers to sell books was intended to prevent students of a profiteering turn of mind from buying books for resale to their fellow-students at a higher price, thus cornering the market and holding up the work of an entire cla.s.s. In course of time, however, the book-dealers were permitted not only to sell textbooks, at prices still controlled by official action, but also to buy and sell ma.n.u.scripts of other books, both those produced by local scribes and those imported from other cities and countries.
This broadening of the activities of the university bookstores led naturally to the third and last stage which the publis.h.i.+ng business underwent before the invention of printing. This stage was the establishment in Florence, Paris, and other intellectual centers, of bookshops selling ma.n.u.scripts to the general public rather than to university students. These grew rapidly during the first half of the fifteenth century, receiving a marked impetus from the new interest in Greek studies. Some years before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Italian book-sellers were accustomed to send their buyers to the centers of Byzantine learning in the near East in quest of ma.n.u.scripts to be disposed of at fancy prices to the rich collectors and patrons of literature. There is evidence of similar methods in France and Germany during the earlier decades of the Renaissance.
This preliminary sketch of the book-publis.h.i.+ng business before printing is intended to correct a rather common misapprehension. Ma.n.u.script books were indeed relatively costly, but they were not scarce. Any scholar who had not been through a university not only had access to public libraries of hundreds of volumes, but might also possess, at prices not beyond the reach of a moderate purse, his own five-foot shelf of the cla.s.sics. The more elegant ma.n.u.scripts, written by experts and adorned with rich illuminations and sumptuous bindings, were of course not for the humble student; but working copies, multiplied on a large scale by a roomful of scribes writing simultaneously from dictation, might always be had. Chaucer, writing of the poor clerk of Oxford at the end of the fourteenth century, tells us that
”Him was levere have at his beddes heed Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye, Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye.”
We are not sure that he had the whole twenty books; that was his ambition, his academic dream of wealth; but we are a.s.sured that he spent on books all the money he could borrow from his friends, and that he showed his grat.i.tude by busily praying for the souls of his creditors.
When we consider the enormous number of ma.n.u.script books that must have existed in Europe in the middle ages, we may well wonder why they have become relatively rare in modern times. Several explanations account for this. In the first place, the practice of erasing old ma.n.u.scripts and using the same vellum again for other works was extremely common.
Secondly, vast numbers of ma.n.u.scripts in the monasteries and other libraries of Europe were wantonly or accidentally destroyed by fire, especially in times of war and religious fanaticism. In the third place, the early binders, down through the sixteenth century and even later, used sheets of vellum from old ma.n.u.scripts for the linings and the covers of printed books. Finally, after the invention of printing, as soon as a given work had been adequately and handsomely printed in a standard edition, all but the finest ma.n.u.scripts of that book would naturally be looked upon as of little value, and would be subject to loss and decay if not to deliberate destruction. Owing to these and perhaps other causes it is almost entirely the religious ma.n.u.scripts that have survived, except those preserved in royal libraries and museums from the finer collections of the middle ages.
The invention of printing was not the work of any one man. Not only were printed pages of text with accompanying pictures produced from woodcut blocks in Holland a quarter of a century before Gutenberg began his work at Mainz, but it is pretty well established that movable types were employed by Laurence Koster, of Haarlem, as early as 1430. But Koster, who died about 1440, did not carry his invention beyond the experimental stages, and produced no really fine printing. Moreover, his work had no immediate successor in Holland. Whether it be true, as sometimes alleged, that Gutenberg first learned of the new art from one of Koster's workmen, we have no means of knowing. At any rate, Gutenberg's contemporaries as well as his successors gave to him the credit of the invention. That he was not the first to conceive the idea of multiplying impressions of type-forms by the use of a screw press is evident; but he was the first to develop the invention to a point where it became capable of indefinite extension. He seems to have worked in secret for some years on the problems involved in type-founding and printing before the year 1450, when he set up his shop in Mainz.
The capital for the new business was furnished by a wealthy goldsmith named Johann Fust. Between 1450 and 1455 Gutenberg printed an edition of the Latin Bible, sometimes known as the Mazarin Bible, which is ordinarily regarded as the first printed book. It was a magnificently printed volume, exhibiting at the very foundation of the art a skill in presswork scarcely surpa.s.sed by any of Gutenberg's immediate successors.
He was a great printer, but not a financially successful one. Fust sued his partner in 1455 for repayment of the loans advanced, and upon Gutenberg's failure to meet these obligations Fust foreclosed the mortgage and took over the printing plant. Although Gutenberg started another publis.h.i.+ng house at Mainz, and continued it until his death in 1468, the main development of printing after 1455 was in the original plant as carried on by Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer. They printed in 1457 an edition of the Psalms in which for the first time two-color printing was employed, the large initial letters being printed in red and black. This innovation, designed to imitate the rubricated initials of the ma.n.u.scripts, involved great technical difficulties in the presswork, and was not generally adopted. Most of the early printed books, even down to the end of the fifteenth century, left blanks for the large capitals at the beginnings of the chapters, to be filled in by hand by professional illuminators.
From the establishments of Gutenberg and of Fust and Schoeffer in Mainz knowledge of the new art spread rapidly into many German cities. In 1462 Mainz was captured and sacked by Adolph of Na.s.sau in one of the local wars of the period, and printers from the Mainz shops made their way to other cities throughout the empire. Before 1470 there were printing establishments in almost every German city, and hundreds of works, mostly theological, had been issued from their presses.
In all these early German books, printed of course in Latin, the type used was the black-letter. Gutenberg, in designing his first font, evidently tried to imitate as closely as possible the angular gothic alphabet employed by the scribes in the best ma.n.u.scripts. Not only were the letters identical in form with the engrossing hand of the monks, but the innumerable abbreviated forms used in the Latin ma.n.u.scripts were retained. Thus a stroke over a vowel indicated an omitted =m= or =n=, a =p= with a stroke across it indicated the Latin prefix =per=, a circle above the line stood for the termination =us=, an =r= with a cross meant--=rum=, and so forth. These abbreviations, which make printed books of the earliest period rather hard reading today, were retained not only to save s.p.a.ce but to give the printed page as nearly as possible the appearance of a fine ma.n.u.script. It was not at first the ambition of the printers and type-founders to make their books more legible or less taxing on the eyes than ma.n.u.script; their readers were accustomed to ma.n.u.script and felt no need of such improvements. The mechanical advance in the art of writing brought about by printing was at first regarded as consisting in the greater rapidity and lower cost at which printed books could be produced.
But the new invention was at first looked upon by some famous scholars and patrons of learning as a detriment rather than a help. The great Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim, wrote as late as 1494 in the following terms:
”A work written on parchment could be preserved for a thousand years, while it is probable that no volume printed on paper will last for more than two centuries. Many important works have not been printed, and the copies of these must be prepared by scribes. The scribe who ceases his work because of the invention of the printing-press can be no true lover of books, in that, regarding only the present, he gives no due thought to the intellectual cultivation of his successors. The printer has no care for the beauty and the artistic form of books, while with the scribe this is a labor of love.”
Contrasted with this low estimate of the importance of the new art by some scholars, we note the promptness with which the great churchmen of Italy and of France took measures to import German printers and set up presses of their own. In 1464 the abbot of Subiaco, a monastery near Rome, brought to Italy two German printers, Conrad Schweinheim and Arnold Pannartz, and set them at work printing liturgical books for the use of the monks. Soon afterward, under ecclesiastical patronage, they began to issue, first at Subiaco and then at Rome, a series of Latin cla.s.sics. During five years this first printing establishment in Italy published the complete works of Cicero, Apuleius, Caesar, Virgil, Livy, Strabo, Lucan, Pliny, Suetonius, Quintilian, Ovid, as well as of such fathers of the Latin Church as Augustine, Jerome and Cyprian, and a complete Latin Bible. This printing establishment came to an end in 1472 for lack of adequate capital, but was soon followed by others both in Rome and especially in Venice.
Early Venetian printing forms one of the most distinguished chapters in the whole history of the subject. The most famous of the first generation was Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman who had learned the art in Germany. Between 1470 and his death in 1480 he printed many fine books, and in most of them he employed what is now called roman type. He was not absolutely the first to use the roman alphabet, but his roman fonts were designed and cast with such artistic taste, such a fine sense of proportion and symmetry of form, that the Jenson roman became the model of later printers for many years after his death. Roman type, unlike the black-letter, had two distinct origins. The capitals were derived from the letters used by the ancient Roman architects for inscriptions on public buildings. The small letters were adapted from the rounded vertical style of writing used in many Italian texts, altogether different in form from the angular gothic alphabet used in ecclesiastical ma.n.u.scripts. Jenson's roman letters were clear, sharp and easy to read, and const.i.tuted the greatest single addition to the art of printing since its beginning. Germany clung obstinately to the black-letter in its Latin books, as it has adhered down to very recent times to a similar heavy type for the printing of German text; but the rest of Europe within a few years came over to the clearer and more beautiful roman.
There were many early printers at Venice between Jenson and his greater successor Aldus Manutius, who began business in 1494, but we shall pa.s.s over them all in order to devote more careful attention to the n.o.ble history of the Aldine press. I propose in the remainder of this paper to select five great printers of the Renaissance, and to examine their work both as a whole and as ill.u.s.trated in typical examples. These five are:
ALDUS MANUTIUS, of Venice.