In 1474, Louis XI. of France, pledged as security for the safe return

of a manuscript containing a treatise by the Arabic physician Rhases,

which he had borrowed from the medical Faculty of the University of

Paris, his silver plate, while a nobleman also stood security for the

King in the transaction. In 1392, the Countess of Blois, wife of the

Baron of Castellane, left in her will, as a bequest to her daughter, a

manuscript on parchment of the _Corpus Juris_. It was made a condition

of the bequest that the daughter should marry a jurist, in order that

this valuable treasure could come into the right hands.

The National Library in Paris contains two manuscripts of the Bible

in Latin and French text, written on parchment, which Firmin Didot

appraised as having cost to produce not less than the equivalent of

82,000 francs. He excludes from this calculation of cost the price

of the parchment, the hire of the scribes, and the cost of the

binding. The principal item of the outlay for the more valuable of

these manuscripts was incurred in the production of the 5,000 designs

illuminated in gold and colour, the cost of preparing which Didot

estimated at over 12,000 francs.

As before pointed out, the exceptional outlay incurred in the

production of these illuminated manuscripts cannot be taken as in any

way a guide for the average market price of manuscripts prepared for

general circulation and sale. The text-books, chap-books, etc., which,

during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were prepared for the

common folk, sold at prices that seem very low when one bears in mind

the large amount of manual labour required for their production. The

school ordinance of the town of Bautzen (in Saxony) of 1418 fixed

the price of an _A B C_ book, containing also a _Paternoster_, at

one groschen; of a _Doctrinal_, a half mark; and of a _Donatus_, ten

groschens.

At this time, however, the market price in the same region for a hen

was one pfennig, for a pound of beef two pfennigs, for a loaf of

bread, containing rations for three men for one day, three pfennigs,

for a pound of cheese one pfennig, for a measure of the best wine one

kreutzer.

From this date on, however, there came to be, with the increase in

the production of manuscript books in the common text, a very steady

decrease in the selling price of such books.

At the end of the fourteenth century the average price in Italy for a

well written copy of the _Corpus Juris_ was 480 marks. In 1451, such a

copy was sold in Florence for 14½ ducats, the equivalent of 90 marks.

In 1400, a manuscript containing writings of Justinian, Sallust, and

Suetonius, written on 115 folio sheets of parchment, was sold in

Florence for 16 ducats, the equivalent of 100 marks. In 1467, a copy of

the comedies of Terence, written on 198 folio sheets (paper, however,

instead of parchment), was bought in Heidelberg for three gulden. By

this date, sixteen years, namely, after the printing of Gutenberg’s

first volume, the competition or the expectation of the competition of

the printing-press, had already begun to affect the market prices of

manuscripts. In 1499, there is record of the sale in Heidelberg for

the price of two gulden, of a manuscript comprising 134 quarto sheets,

containing the _Hecuba_ of Euripides, and the _Idyls_ of Theocritus.

In not a few of the monasteries, even of those which had an old-time

repute for literary activity, the literary efforts came and went in

waves, and sometimes for long periods, extending over a generation or

more, there was an actual decrease in the extent of the attention given

to the production of manuscripts and to the securing of additions to

the library. In other instances the development of the libraries went

on but slowly.

C. Schmidt refers to the record of the library of the Strasburg

Cathedral, which in 1260 possessed a collection of fifty codices that

had been for the most part presented by Bishop Wernher as far back

as 1027. In the year 1372, the catalogue of the library shows that

the number had increased to ninety-one, a gain of only forty-one

manuscripts in a space of more than one century.

The renewed interest that came to the scholars of Italy in the works of

classic writers with the revival of classical studies induced by the

Renaissance caused manuscripts of these works to be searched for, not

only in Italy and in the countries of the East that could most easily

be reached by Italy, but throughout the monasteries of Europe. In 1517,

there is record of instruction being given by Pope Leo X. to a certain

cleric named Heytmer to visit the libraries of the Palatinate and of

the adjoining districts and to search for classical manuscripts for

purchase for the Papal collection. Heytmer was enjoined to make special

inquiry for the missing books of Livy.

Another agent of Leo was fortunate enough to discover in the monastery

of Corvey on the Weser the first five books of Tacitus. Being unable

to induce the monastery to make sale of the manuscript, he succeeded

in some way in appropriating it, and in getting it safely over the

Alps. It was this manuscript that was used for the _editio princeps_

of Tacitus, printed in Rome in 1515. The Pope sent to the library of

the Corvey monastery a copy of this printed edition of the Tacitus as

a restitution for the appropriated manuscript. The manuscript itself,

in 1522, was taken (one does not know how) from Rome to Florence, where

it is to-day chained in the Laurentian Library. I understand that

this Corvey text constituted the only copy of the first five books of

Tacitus which had been found when this author was first put into print.

=The Manuscript Period in England.=--During the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries, in England as in ancient Greece, and as also

in mediæval Italy, Southern France and Germany, the people who were

prepared to interest themselves in literary productions, received

their literature, or at least their poetical literature, very largely

by means of reciters or minstrels. In the prologue to his _Troilus

and Cressida_, Chaucer tells us it was intended to be read _or elles

sung_. George Ellis points out that this must relate to the chanting

recitation of the minstrels. Ellis goes on to say: “A considerable

part of our old poetry is simply addressed to an audience, without any

mention of readers. That our English minstrels at any time united all

the talents of the profession, and were at once poets and reciters and

musicians, is extremely doubtful; but that they excited and directed

the efforts of their contemporary poets to a particular species of

composition, is as evident as that a body of actors must influence the

exertions of theatrical writers. They were, at a time when reading

and writing were rare accomplishments, the principal medium of

communication between authors and the public; and their memory in some

measure supplied the deficiency of manuscripts, and probably preserved

much of our early literature until the invention of printing.”[397]

Says Jusserand: “At a time when books were rare, and when the theatre,

properly so-called, did not exist, poetry and music travelled with the

minstrels and gleemen (_jongleurs_) along the highway, and such guests

were always welcome.”[398]

The connection of minstrelsy with the circulation of literature is

referred to by Charles Knight as follows: “A popular literature was

kept alive and preserved, however imperfectly, before the press came to

make those who had learnt to read self-dependent in their intellectual

gratifications; and what has come down to us of the old minstrelsy,

with all its inaccuracy and occasional feebleness, shows us that the

people of England, four or five centuries ago, had a common fund of

high thought upon which a great literature might in time be reared. The

very existence of a poet like Chaucer is the best proof of the vigour,

and to a certain extent of the cultivation, of the national mind, even

in an age when books were rarities.”[399]

As early as the twelfth century, during such reigns as those of Henry

I. (Beauclerc) and Henry II., there was in England a very considerable

production of literature, under such various headings as chronicles,

satires, sermons, works of science and of medicine, treatises on style,

prose romances, and epics in verse. Jusserand points out that a large

proportion of these compositions were written in Latin.[400] This

would indicate a wider general understanding of Latin than prevailed

three centuries later when Caxton’s printing-press began its work;

for, as will be noted in the chapter on Caxton, the proportion of

Latin books issued by Caxton was very much smaller than was the case

with the contemporary publishers in France and in Germany. Such an

active and varied literary production as that described by Jusserand

would also, of course, imply the existence of a considerable body of

trained scribes in addition to those who were at work in the monastic

_scriptoria_ on the chronicles and books of devotion.

The very large measure of attention given to the production of legends

and romances, and the great popularity of these among almost all

classes of the people, was the distinctive feature of the literature

of England during the three centuries preceding the introduction of

printing. The scenes of many of these romances are laid in classic

times, and their characters bear classic names; but the stories are

hardly constructed on classic lines, and very little attempt is made

to preserve what the dramatic critic in _Nicholas Nickleby_ calls “the

oneness of the drama.” Antiquity is presented in the garb of the Middle

Ages. As Jusserand remarks: “Everything in these poems was really

translated; not only the language of the ancients but their raiment,

their civilisation, their ideas. Venus becomes a princess: the heroes

are knights, and their costumes, pictured in the illuminations, are so

much in the fashion of the day that they serve us to date the poems.”

In addition to these classic romances, in which old-time heroes

masquerade in mediæval garb and speak in mediæval language, there is

a long series of tales which appear to have been of English origin.

English readers and English writers of the time seem to have possessed

a special penchant for story-telling. “Prose tales were written in

astonishing quantities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by pious

authors who under pretext of edifying and amusing their readers at

the same time, began by amusing and frequently forgot to edify.”[401]

The Welshman, Walter Map, became famous at the Court of Henry II. for

his satires and humorous stories. His work was done in Latin. His _De

Nugis Curiatum_ secured the most abiding repute. He might perhaps

be considered as a twelfth-century Martial. That famous body of

stories, the _Gesta Romanorum_, heretofore believed to be the result

of German reshaping of legends originating with the monks of Italy,

is now claimed to have been first compiled in England towards the

end of the thirteenth century.[402] The _Gesta_ was one of the most

widely circulated books in Europe (outside of the accepted devotional

classics) both in the manuscript period, and during the first century

of printing.

The stories of the time are of very varied origin and in many cases

had evidently, in the rewriting, undergone material modifications

or transformations. Whether the language used be Latin, French, or

English, it is evident from the character of the tales that the writers

were addressing themselves not to any limited group of scholars and

clerics, but to what would to-day be described as a popular circle of

readers and of hearers. Thomas Wright points out that even those tales

which are presented in Latin give evidence from local references and

from English quotations of having been written for Englishmen.[403]

The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, chief among the story-tellers

of England, if not of Europe, were written about 1390. After the

long series of translations and adaptations, these tales of Chaucer

mark a distinct epoch in the production of native romance, in which

characters, incidents, and surroundings were alike English, although

there are many evidences of continental influences. The circulation of

the _Tales_ in manuscript form was very extended, and Caxton showed

his usual excellent judgment by including them in the first group of

publications issued from his Westminster Press. This earliest printed

edition was probably published in 1478. A second edition was issued by

Caxton in 1484.

It seems probable, as well from the history of the _Canterbury Tales_

as from that of the long series of romances which had preceded them,

a history giving evidence of a wide-spread influence and repute, that

there must have been, during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth

centuries, a considerable book-production outside of the monastery

_scriptoria_, and that there must also have been a fairly effective

machinery for the sale and distribution of the manuscript texts. The

latter were doubtless supplied in great part by the travelling pedlars,

who sold with their novelties in ribbons and trinkets the latest new

tale, or the latest version of some very old tale.

Books in manuscript were included in the goods sold at certain of

the great fairs, such as that of Stourbridge (near Cambridge), St.

Giles (near Oxford), and St. Bartholomew, in London.[404] After the

introduction of printing, such fairs did considerable business in

the sale not only of the chap-books and almanacs, which were carried

about in the pedlars’ packs, but also of substantial and costly works.

Professor Thorold Rogers explains that the rapid diffusion of books

and pamphlets at a time when newspapers and advertisements were still

unknown, can only be accounted for by the understanding that the

book-dealers made large use of these fairs. He goes on to say that he

finds entries of purchases for the libraries of the Oxford colleges,

with the statement that the books were bought at St. Giles’s Fair.[405]

It will be remembered how two centuries or more after the period

referred to by Thorold Rogers, Michael Johnson, the father of Samuel,

made a practice of going on market days to Uttoxeter, taking there from

his book-shop in Litchfield books to be offered for sale on a stall

in the market-place. The market days had, in 1725, replaced in great

measure the old-time fairs. In the chapter on Germany, I have referred

to the early use made of the Fair at Nordlingen by the dealers in

manuscripts, a practice which was later continued by the printers.

It does not appear that the manuscript-dealers were permitted to

carry on their trade in the chapels or within the enclosures of the

cathedrals, as was so largely done by their contemporaries in Germany

and in France. The extensive multiplication of books by copyists is

less easy to account for. I have not been able thus far to find record

of any considerable production, in London or other commercial centres,

of books in manuscript, and I can only infer such production from the

wide-spread circulation and influence of the books themselves.

The literary activities of England during these centuries of the

manuscript period were by no means limited to the production of

fiction. The long series of contributions to local and national history

made by the monkish chroniclers have been referred to in a previous

chapter. In the twelfth century, Orderic Vital or Vitalis writes his

_Angligenæ Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ_, Henry of Huntingdon, his _Historia

Anglorum_ (from A.C. 55 to A.D. 1154), and William of Malmesbury,

his _Gesta Regum Anglorum_. The _Historia Anglorum_ was printed in

1586, at the expense of Sir Henry Savile. William of Malmesbury was,

like Richard de Bury, noted as a collector of books. His history was

issued between 1112 and 1124. A few years later, in 1139, appears the

great _Historia Regum Britanniæ_, of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey

begins his British history with the earliest times, and, thanks, as he

explains, to certain special discoveries, or to a special revelation,

he is able to write with as much certainty about the reign of King

Arthur as concerning events of his own time. This chronicle must have

been largely multiplied and widely distributed, as an exceptionally

large number of copies have been preserved to the present time, the

British Museum alone possessing no less than thirty-four.

In the thirteenth century the work of the historians is carried on

by such writers as Roger of Wendover, and Matthew Paris, chief among

English chroniclers. In the fourteenth century, the most noteworthy

among a long series of historical writers is Ralph Higden, author

of the _Polychronicon_, or “Universal History,” which remained for

centuries an accepted authority.

In the thirteenth century, Bartholomew or Glanville compiles one of the

oldest of the general cyclopædias. Of this, many manuscripts have been

preserved, eighteen of which are in the National Library in Paris.[406]

John of Gaddesden, court physician under Edward II. (1310-1312), writes

a medical cyclopædia, or compendium of prescriptions, which not only

secures a European reputation at the time, but retains its prestige for

nearly three centuries, and is issued in print in Augsburg, in 1595,

in two quarto volumes. As early as the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189)

an important group of law books had appeared, and the law treatises

of Henry of Bracton, issued early in the thirteenth century, retained

their value sufficiently to appear two centuries later in a printed

edition, abridged from the original text. These few typical writers are

referred to simply as presenting some indication of the variety and of

the extent of the literary activities of England during the centuries

preceding the beginning of printing. The popular interest in the works

of such writers, and the great influence exerted by them upon the

opinions of their own and of succeeding generations, is evidence of a

considerable multiplication of copies and of an extended circulation,

and this evidence is corroborated by the fact that of many of the books

of the period so large a number of copies have been preserved to the

present time through the perils and vicissitudes of the intervening

centuries.

The most noteworthy example of the literary interests of Britain

during the manuscript period is afforded by Richard Aungerville,

better known as Richard de Bury, Bishop Palatine of Durham, whose

famous _Philobiblon_ was given to the world in 1345. In his various

travels, and through his correspondents in England, France, and Italy,

he was able to get together a great collection of books, which were

later bequeathed to the University of Oxford. His eloquent tribute

to his beloved books must, I judge, be taken rather as expressing

the enthusiasm of an exceptionally devoted scholar than as fairly

representing the literary spirit of the time:

“Thanks to books, the dead appear to me as though they still lived....

Everything decays and falls into dust by the force of time: Saturn is

never weary of devouring his children, and the glory of the world would

be buried in oblivion, had not God as a remedy conferred on mortal man

the benefit of books.... Books are the masters that instruct us without

rods or ferules, without reprimands or anger, without the solemnity of

the gown or the expense of lessons. Go to them, you will not find them

asleep: if you err, no scoldings on their part: if you are ignorant, no

mocking laughter.”[407]

In 1344, (the year before his death) Richard writes as follows:

“As it is necessary for a state to provide military arms, and prepare

plentiful stores of provisions for soldiers who are about to fight,

so it is evidently worth the labour of the church militant to fortify

itself against the attacks of pagans and heretics with a multitude of

sound books. But because everything that is serviceable to mortals

suffers the waste of mortality through lapse of time, it is necessary

for volumes corroded by age to be restored by renovated successors,

that perpetuity, repugnant to the nature of the individual, may be

conceded to the species. Hence it is that Ecclesiastes significantly

says, in the 12th chapter. ‘There is no end of making many books.’

For, as the bodies of books suffer continued detriment from a combined

mixture of contraries in their composition, so a remedy is found out

by the prudence of clerks, by which a holy book paying the debt of

nature may obtain an hereditary substitute, and a seed may be raised up

like to the most holy deceased, and that saying of Ecclesiasticus, be

verified, ‘The father is dead and, as it were, not dead, for he hath

left behind him a son like unto himself.’”

One of the earliest authorities concerning book publishing in England

is Bishop Fell, who in his Memoir on the State of Printing in the

University of Oxford, tells us that that university “possessed an

exclusive right of transcribing and multiplying books by means of

writing,” a privilege which implies a species of copyright. The date

referred to is about 1600.

In both Oxford and Cambridge, according to the statutes in force

before the introduction of printing, the _stationarii_ belonged to

the class of _Servientes_, who were appointed by the chancellor

or vice-chancellor of the university. The records of Oxford show

many instances of the pawning of books by the undergraduates and

occasionally by the instructors to the _stationarii_. In one codex,

belonging to Mr. Thomas Paunter, there is an inscription showing that

it was pawned to a _stationarius_ in 1480, for the sum of thirty-eight

shillings.[408] Books which had been so pledged, came frequently

enough, after their forfeiture, into sale. An entry in the accounts

of the library of S. John’s College in Cambridge, dating from 1456,

records a payment made, apparently from the treasury of the college,

for the redemption of an _Avicenna_ from the _stationarius_ to whom

a certain John Marshall had pledged the manuscript. The cost of the

redemption was £1. 6_s._ 4_d._[409]

The Oxford _stationarii_ finally secured privileges as members of

the university, but not before 1458, (as a result apparently of an

arrangement between the university and the city authorities), did this

agreement take the _stationarii_ out of the jurisdiction of the city,

and put them into the same class with the dealers in parchment, the

illuminators, and the scribes, who for many years had been subordinated

to the university. The taxes on the _stationarii_ were fixed by and

collected by the chancellor, and the proportion due to the city

treasury was paid over by him.

The term _stationarius_, which had, as we have seen, been in use for

these university dealers throughout all Europe, secured in Great

Britain a permanent association with the book-trade by its use as an

appellation for the publishers’ and booksellers’ guild, which was

chartered in 1403 as “The Stationers’ Company.” Its headquarters in

London was entitled Stationers’ Hall, and is still so known. The term

in Great Britain, however, was made from a very early date to cover a

larger variety of trade undertakings than that to which it was limited

in the university towns in Italy, France, and Germany. The business of

selling manuscripts on commission, which was, as we have seen, kept

under very close supervision on the part of the university authorities

of Paris and Bologna, appears to have been much less important in

England, and the dealers seem for the most part to have been left free

to make such terms either in buying or selling manuscripts as they saw

fit, and as the necessities of their customers rendered practicable.

As early as the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377), there is record of a

number of _stationarii_ as carrying on business in Oxford. In an Oxford

manuscript dating from this reign, there is an inscription of a certain

Mr. William Reed, of Merton College, who tells us that he purchased

this book from a _stationarius_.[410]

In London, there is record of an active trade in manuscripts being in

existence as early as the middle of the fourteenth century. The trade

in writing materials, such as parchment, paper, and ink, appears not to

have been organised as in Paris, but to have been carried on in large

part by the grocers and mercers. In the housekeeping accounts of King

John of France, covering the period of his imprisonment in England, in

the years 1359 and 1360, occur entries such as the following:

“To Peter, a grocer of Lincoln, for four quaires of paper, two

shillings and four pence.”

“To John Huistasse, grocer, for a main of paper and a skin of

parchment, 10 pence.”

“To Bartholomew Mine, grocer, for three quaires of paper, 27

pennies.”[411]

The manuscript-trade in London concentrated itself in Paternoster Row,

the street which became afterwards the centre of the trade in printed

books.

The earliest English manuscript-dealer whose name is on record is

Richard Lynn, who, in the year 1358, was _stationarius_ in Oxford.[412]

The name of John Browne occurs in several Oxford manuscripts on about

the date of 1400. Nicholas de Frisia, an Oxford _librarius_ of about

1425, was originally an undergraduate. He did energetic work as a book

scribe and, later, appears to have carried on an important business in

manuscripts. His inscription is found first on a manuscript entitled

_Petri Thomæ Quæstiones_, etc., which manuscript has been preserved in

the library of Merton.

There is record, as early as 1359, of a manuscript-dealer in the town

of Lincoln who called himself Johannes _Librarius_, and who sold, in

1360, several books to the French King John. It is a little difficult

to understand how in a quiet country town like Lincoln with no

university connections, there should have been enough business in the

fourteenth century to support a _librarius_.

The earliest name on record in London is that of Thomas Vycey, who was

a _stationarius_ in 1433. A few years later we find on a parchment

manuscript containing the wise sayings of a certain Lombardus, the

inscription of Thomas Masoun, “_librarius of gilde hall_.”

Between the years 1461 and 1475, a certain Piers Bauduyn, dealer in

manuscripts, and also a bookbinder, purchased a number of books for

Edward IV. In the household accounts of Edward appears the following

entry: “Paid to Piers Bauduyn, bookseller, for binding, gilding and

dressing a copy of Titus Livius, 20 shillings; for binding, gilding and

dressing a copy of the Holy Trinity, 16 shillings; for binding, gilding

and dressing a work entitled ‘The Bible’ 16 shillings.”

William Praat, who was a mercer of London, between the years 1470 and

1480 busied himself also with the trade in manuscripts, and purchased,

for William Caxton, various manuscripts from France and from Belgium.

Kirchhoff finds record of manuscript-dealers in Spain as early as the

first decade of the fifteenth century. He prints the name, however, of

but one, a certain Antonius Raymundi, a _librarius_ of Barcelona, whose

inscription, dated 1413, appears in a manuscript of Cassiodorus.

[Illustration]

PART II.

THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.

[Illustration]

PART II.

THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.

CHAPTER I.

THE RENAISSANCE AS THE FORERUNNER OF THE PRINTING-PRESS.

THE fragments of classic literature which had survived the destruction

of the Western Empire, had, as we have seen, owed their preservation

chiefly to the Benedictine monasteries. Upon the monasteries also

rested, for some centuries after the overthrow of the Gothic Kingdom of

Italy, the chief responsibility for maintaining such slender thread of

continuity of intellectual activity, and of interest in literature as

remained. By the beginning of the twelfth century, this responsibility

was shared with, if not entirely transferred to, the older of the great

universities of Europe, such as Bologna and Paris, which from that time

took upon themselves, as has been indicated, the task of directing

and of furthering, in connection with their educational work, the

increasing literary activities of the scholarly world.

With the increase throughout Europe of schools and universities, there

had come a corresponding development in literary interests and in

literary productiveness or reproductiveness. The universities became

publishing centres, and through the multiplication and exchange of

manuscripts, the scholars of Europe began to come into closer relations

with each other, and to constitute a kind of international scholarly

community. The development of such world-wide relations between

scholars was, of course, very much furthered by the fact that Latin

was universally accepted as the language not only of scholarship but

practically of all literature.

In Italy, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, intellectual

interests and literary activities had expanded beyond the scholastic

circles of the universities, and were beginning to influence larger

divisions of society. The year 1300 witnessed the production in

Florence of the _Divine Comedy_ of Dante, and marked an epoch in the

history of Italy and in the literature of the world. During the two

centuries which followed, Florence remained the centre of a keener,

richer, and more varied intellectual life than was known in any other

city in Europe.

With the great intellectual movement known as the Renaissance, I

am concerned, for the purposes of this study, only to indicate the

influence it exerted in preparing Italy and Europe for the utilisation

of the printing-press. The work of the Renaissance included, partly as

a cause, and partly as an effect, the rediscovery for the Europe of the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the literature of classic Greece,

as well as the reinterpretation of the literature of classic Rome.

The influence of the literary awakening and of the newly discovered

masterpieces would of necessity have been restricted to a comparatively

limited scholarly circle, if it had not been for the invention of

Gutenberg and for the scholarly enterprise and devotion of such

followers of Gutenberg as Aldus, Estienne, and Froben. It is, of

course, equally true that if the intellectual world had not been

quickened and inspired by the teachers of the Renaissance, the presses

of Aldus would have worked to little purpose, and their productions

would have found few buyers. Aldus may, in fact, himself be considered

as one of the most characteristic and valuable of the products of the

movement.

The Renaissance has been described by various historians, and analysed

by many commentators. The work which has, however, been accepted as

the most comprehensive account of the movement and the best critical

analysis of its nature and influence, and which presents also a vivid

and artistic series of pictures of Italy and the Italians during

the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, is Symonds’

_Renaissance in Italy_. These volumes are so thoroughly imbued with

the spirit of the period, and the author’s characterisations are so

full and so sympathetic, that it is difficult not to think of Symonds

as having been himself a Florentine, rather than a native of the

“barbarian realm of Britain.”

I take the liberty of quoting the description given by Symonds of the

peculiar conditions under which Italy of the fifteenth century, in

abandoning the hope of securing a place among the nations of the world,

absorbed itself in philosophic, literary, and artistic ideals. Freshly

imbued with Greek thought and Greek inspiration, Italy took upon itself

the rôle played centuries earlier by classic Greece, and, without

political power or national influence, it assumed the leadership of the

intellect and of the imagination of Europe.

“In proportion as Italy lost year by year the hope of becoming a united

nation, in proportion as the military instincts died in her, and the

political instincts were extinguished by despotism, in precisely the

same ratio did she evermore acquire a deeper sense of her intellectual

vocation. What was world-embracing in the spirit of the mediæval Church

passed by transmutation into the humanism of the fifteenth century. As

though aware of the hopelessness of being Italians in the same sense

as the natives of Spain were Spaniards, or the natives of France were

Frenchmen, the giants of the Renaissance did their utmost to efface

their nationality, in order that they might the more effectually

restore the cosmopolitan ideal of the human family. To this end both

artists and scholars, the depositories of the real Italian greatness at

this epoch, laboured; the artists by creating an ideal of beauty with

a message and a meaning for all Europe; the scholars by recovering for

Europe the burghership of Greek and Roman civilisation. In spite of

the invasions and convulsions that ruined Italy between the years 1494

and 1527, the painters and the humanists proceeded with their task as

though the fate of Italy concerned them not, as though the destinies

of the modern world depended on their activity. After Venice had been

desolated by the armies of the League of Cambray, Aldus Manutius

presented the peace-gift of Plato to the foes of his adopted city, and

when the Lutherans broke into Parmegiano’s workshop at Rome, even they

were awed by the tranquil majesty of the Virgin on his easel. Stories

like these remind us that Renaissance Italy met her doom of servitude

and degradation in the spirit of ancient Hellas, repeating as they do

the tales told of Archimedes in his study, and of Paulus Emilius face

to face with the Zeus of Phidias.[413]...

It is impossible to exaggerate the benefit conferred upon Europe by

the Italians at this epoch. The culture of the classics had to be

reappropriated before the movement of the modern mind could begin,

before the nations could start upon a new career of progress; the

chasm between the old and the new world had to be bridged over. This

task of reappropriation the Italians undertook alone, and achieved

at the sacrifice of their literary independence and their political

freedom. The history of the Renaissance literature in Italy is the

history of self-development into the channels of scholarship and

antiquarian research. The language created by Dante as a thing of

power, polished by Petrarch as a thing of beauty, trained by Boccaccio

as the instrument of melodious prose, was abandoned even by the Tuscans

in the fifteenth century for revived Latin and newly discovered Greek.

Patient acquisition took the place of proud inventiveness; laborious

imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The

force of mind which in the fourteenth century had produced a _Divine

Comedy_ and a _Decameron_, in the fifteenth century was expended upon

the interpretation of codices, the settlement of texts, the translation

of Greek books into Latin, the study of antiquities, the composition

of commentaries, encyclopædias, dictionaries, ephemerides. While

we regret this change from creative to acquisitive literature, we

must bear in mind that these scholars, who ought to have been poets,

accomplished nothing less than the civilisation, or, to use their own

phrase, the humanisation, of the modern world. At the critical moment

when the Eastern Empire was being shattered by the Turks, and when

the other European nations were as yet unfit for culture, Italy saved

the Arts and Sciences of Greece and Rome, and interpreted the spirit

of the classics. Devoting herself to what appears the slavish work of

compilation and collection, she transmitted an inestimable treasure

to the human race; and though for a time the beautiful Italian tongue

was superseded by a jargon of dead languages, yet the literature

of the Renaissance yielded in the end the poetry of Ariosto, the

political philosophy of Machiavelli, the histories of Guicciardini and

Varchi. Meanwhile the whole of Europe had received the staple of its

intellectual education.”[414]

Symonds finds in the age of the Renaissance, or in what he calls

the Humanistic movement, four principal periods: first, the age of

inspiration and discovery, which is initiated by Petrarch; second,

the period of arrangement and translation. During this period, the

first great libraries came into existence, the study of Greek began

in the principal universities, and the courts of Cosimo de’ Medici in

Florence, Alfonso in Naples, and Nicholas in Rome, became centres of

literary activity; third, the age of academies. This period succeeded

the introduction of printing into Italy. Scholars and men of letters

are now crystallising or organising themselves into cliques or schools,

under the influence of which a more critical and exact standard of

scholarship is arrived at, while there is a marked development in

literary form and taste. Of the academies which came into existence,

the most important were the Platonic in Florence, that of Pontanus in

Naples, that of Pomponius Lætus in Rome, and that of Aldus Manutius in

Venice. This period covered, it is to be noted, the introduction of

printing into Italy (1464) and its rapid development. In the fourth

period it may be said that scholasticism to some extent took the place

of scholarship. It was the age of the purists, of whom Bembo was both

the type and the dictator. There is a tendency to replace learning

with an exaggerated attention to æsthetics and style. It was about the

Court of Leo X. (1513-1522) that these æsthetic _literati_ were chiefly

gathered. “Erudition, properly so-called,” says Symonds, “was now upon

the point of being transplanted beyond the Alps.”

The names of the scholars and writers who, following Dante, gave fame

to Florence and to Italy, are part of the history of the world’s

literature. It is necessary to refer here only to those whose influence

was most important in widening the range of scholarly interests and

in preparing Italy and Europe for the diffusion of literature, a

preparation which, while emphasising the requirement for some means of

multiplying books cheaply, secured for the printing-press, as soon

as its work began, an assured and sufficient support. The fact that a

period of exceptional intellectual activity and literary productiveness

immediately preceded the invention, or at least the introduction of

printing, must have had an enormous influence in furthering the speedy

development and diffusion of the new art. The press of Aldus Manutius

seems, as before said, like a natural and necessary outgrowth of the

Renaissance.

The typical feature of the revival of learning in Italy was, of course,

the rediscovery of the literature of Greece. In the poetic simile of

Symonds, “Florence borrowed her light from Athens, as the moon shines

with rays reflected from the sun. The revival was the silver age of

that old golden age of Greece.”[415] The comparison of Florence with

Athens has repeatedly been made. The golden ages of the two cities were

separated by nearly two thousand years; but history and human nature

repeat themselves, and historians have found in the Tuscan capital of

the fifteenth century a population which, with its keen intellectual

nature, subtle and delicate wit, and restless political spirit, recalls

closely the Athens of Pericles. The leadership which belonged to Italy

in literature, art, scholarship, and philosophy, was, within Italy,

conceded to Florence.

The first name in the list of Florentine scholars whose influence

was important in this revival is that of Petrarch. He never himself

mastered the Greek language, but he arrived at a realisation of the

importance of Greek thought for the world, and he preached to others

the value of the studies which were beyond his own grasp. It was at

Petrarch’s instance that Boccaccio undertook the translation into Latin

of the _Iliad_. Among Latin authors, Petrarch’s devotion was given

particularly to Cicero and Virgil. The fact that during the first

century of printing more editions of Cicero were produced than of any

other classic author must have been largely due to the emphasis given

by the followers of Petrarch to the beauty of Cicero’s latinity and the

permanent value of his writings.

Petrarch was a devoted collector of manuscripts, and spared neither

labour nor expense to secure for his library codices of texts

recommended as authoritative. Notwithstanding his lack of knowledge

of Greek, he purchased for his collection all the Greek manuscripts

which came within his reach and within his means. Fortunately for

these expensive literary tastes, he appears to have possessed what we

should call a satisfactory independence. Some of his manuscripts went

to Boccaccio, while the rest were, at his death, given to the city of

Florence and found place later in the Medicean Library.

Petrarch laid great stress on the importance, for the higher education

of the people, of efficient public libraries, and his influence with

wealthy nobles served largely to increase the resources of several of

the existing libraries. In his scholarly appreciation of the value

of such collections, he was helping to educate the community to

support the booksellers, while in the collecting of manuscripts he was

unwittingly doing valuable service for the coming printer. He died in

1374, ninety years before the first printing-press began its work in

Italy. A century later his beautiful script served as a model for the

italic or cursive type which was first made by Aldus.

Symonds thinks it very doubtful whether the Italians would have

undertaken the labour of recovering the Greek classics if no Petrarch

had preached the attractiveness of liberal studies, and if no school of

disciples had been formed by him in Florence. Of these disciples, by

far the most distinguished was Boccaccio. His actual work in furthering

the study of Greek was more important than that of the friend to whom

(although there was a difference of but nine years in their ages) he

gave the title of “master.” Boccaccio, taking up the study of Greek

(at Petrarch’s instance) in middle life, secured a sufficient mastery

of the language to be able to render into Latin the _Iliad_ and the

_Odyssey_. This work, completed in 1362, was the first translation

of Homer for modern readers. He had for his instructor and assistant

an Italian named Leontius Pilatus, who had sojourned some years at

Byzantium, but whose knowledge of classic Greek was said to have been

very limited. Boccaccio secured for Pilatus an appointment as Greek

professor in the University of Florence, the first professorship of

Greek instituted in Europe.

The work by which Boccaccio is best known, the _Decameron_ or the _Ten

Nights’ Entertainment_, was published in 1353, a few years before the

completion by Chaucer of the _Canterbury Tales_. It is described as

one of the purest specimens of Italian prose and as an inexhaustible

repository of wit, beauty, and eloquence; and notwithstanding the fact

that the stories are representative of the low standard of moral tone

which characterised Italian society of the fourteenth century, the

book is one which the world will not willingly let die. It is probably

to-day in more continued demand than any book of its century, with the

possible exception of the _Divine Comedy_. The earliest printed edition

was that of Valdarfer, issued in Florence in 1471. This was three years

before the beginning of Caxton’s work as a printer in Bruges. The

_Decameron_ has since been published in innumerable editions and in

every language of Europe.

A far larger contribution to Hellenic studies was given some years

later by Manuel Chrysoloras, a Greek scholar of Byzantium, who,

after visiting Italy as an ambassador from the Court of the Emperor

Palæologus, was, in 1396, induced to accept the Chair of Greek in the

University of Florence. “This engagement,” says Symonds, “secured

the future of Greek erudition in Europe.” Symonds continues: “The

scholars who assembled in the lecture-rooms of Chrysoloras felt that

the Greek texts, whereof he alone supplied the key, contained those

elements of spiritual freedom and intellectual culture without which

the civilisation of the modern world would be impossible. Nor were

they mistaken in what was then a guess rather than a certainty. The

study of Greek implied the birth of criticism, comparison, research.

Systems based on ignorance and superstition were destined to give way

before it. The study of Greek opened philosophical horizons far beyond

the dream world of the churchmen and monks; it stimulated the germs

of science, suggested new astronomical hypotheses, and indirectly led

to the discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense

of the beautiful in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of

Christianity, the language of the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul,

to analysis, and commenced a new era of Biblical inquiry. If it be

true, as a writer no less sober in his philosophy than eloquent in his

language has lately asserted, that except the blind forces of nature,

nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin, we are

justified in regarding the point of contact between the Greek teacher

Chrysoloras and his Florentine pupils as one of the most momentous

crises in the history of civilisation. Indirectly the Italian intellect

had hitherto felt Hellenic influence through Latin literature. It was

now about to receive that influence immediately from actual study of

the masterpieces of the Attic writers. The world was no longer to be

kept in ignorance of those ‘eternal consolations’ of the human race. No

longer could the scribe omit Greek quotations from his Latin text with

the dogged snarl of obtuse self-satisfaction, _Græca sunt, ergo non

legenda_. The motto had rather to be changed into a cry of warning for

ecclesiastical authority upon the verge of dissolution, _Græca sunt,

ergo periculosa_; since the reawakening faith in human reason, the

reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the

liberty, audacity, and passion of the Renaissance, received from Greek

studies their strongest and most vital impulse.”

Symonds might have added that the literary revival, which was so

largely due to these Greek studies, made possible, a century later,

the utilisation of the printing-press, the invention of which would

otherwise have fallen upon comparatively barren ground; while the

printing-press alone made possible the diffusion of the new knowledge,

outside of the small circles of aristocratic scholars, to whole

communities of impecunious students.

Florence had, as we have seen, done more than any other city of Italy,

more than any city of Europe, to prepare Italy and Europe for the

appreciation and utilisation of the art of printing, but the direct

part taken by Florence in the earlier printing undertakings was,

curiously enough, much less important than that of Venice, Rome, or

Milan. By the year 1500, that is, thirty-six years after the beginning

of printing in Italy, there had been printed in Florence 300 works, in

Bologna 298, in Milan 629, in Rome 925, and in Venice 2835.

The list of the scholars and men of letters who, during the century

following the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio, associated themselves

with the brilliant society of Florence, and retained for the city its

distinctive pre-eminence in the intellectual life of Europe, is a long

one, and includes such names as those of Tommaso da Sarzana, Palla

degli Strozzi, Giovanni da Ravenna, Niccolo de’ Niccoli, Filelfo,

Marsuppini, Rossi, Bruni, Guicciardini, Poggio, Galileo, Cellini,

Plethon, and Machiavelli. It was to Strozzi that was due the beginning

of Greek teaching in Florence under Manuel Chrysoloras, while he

also devoted large sums of money to the purchase in Greece and in

Constantinople of valuable manuscripts. He kept in his house skilled

copyists, and was employing these in the work of preparing transcripts

for a great public library, when, unfortunately for Florence, he

incurred the enmity of Cosimo de’ Medici, who procured his banishment.

Strozzi went to Padua, where he continued his Greek studies.

Cosimo, having vanquished his rival in politics, himself continued

the work of collecting manuscripts and of furthering the instruction

given by the Greek scholars. The chief service rendered by Cosimo

to learning and literature was in the organisation of great public

libraries. During his exile (1433-1434), he built in Venice the

Library of S. Giorgio Maggiore, and after his return to Florence, he

completed the hall for the Library of S. Marco. He also formed several

large collections of manuscripts. To the Library of S. Marco and to

the Medicean Library were bequeathed later by Niccolo de’ Niccoli

800 manuscripts, valued at 600 gold florins. Cosimo also provided a

valuable collection of manuscripts for the convent of Fiesole. The

oldest portion of the present Laurentian Library is composed of the

collections from these two convents, together with a portion of the

manuscripts preserved from the Medicean Library.

In 1438, Cosimo instituted the famous Platonic Academy of Florence, the

special purpose of which was the interpretation of Greek philosophy.

The gathering in Florence, in 1438, of the Greeks who came to the

great Council, had a large influence in stimulating the interest of

Florentines in Greek culture. Symonds (possibly somewhat biassed in

favour of his beloved Florentines of the Renaissance) contends that the

Byzantine ecclesiastics who came to the Council, and the long series of

Greek travellers or refugees who found their way from Constantinople

to Italy during the years that followed, included comparatively few

real scholars whose classical learning could be trusted. These men

supplied, says Symonds, “the beggarly elements of grammar, caligraphy,

and bibliographical knowledge,” but it was Ficino and Aldus, Strozzi

and Cosimo de’ Medici who opened the literature of Athens to the

comprehension of the modern world.

The elevation to the papacy, in 1447, of Tommaso Parentucelli, who took

the name of Nicholas V., had the effect of carrying to Rome some of

the Florentine interest in literature and learning. Tommaso, who was

a native of Pisa, had won repute in Bologna for his wide and thorough

scholarship. He became, later, a protégé of Cosimo de’ Medici, who

employed him as a librarian of the Marcian Library. To Nicholas V.

was due the foundation of the Vatican Library, for which he secured a

collection of some five thousand works. Symonds says that during his

pontificate, “Rome became a vast workshop of erudition, a factory of

translations from Greek and Latin.” The compensation paid to these

translators from the funds provided by the Pope, was in many cases

very liberal. In fact, as compared with the returns secured at this

period for original work, the rewards paid to these translators of the

Vatican seem decidedly disproportionate, especially when we remember

that a large portion of their work was of poor quality, deficient

both in exact scholarship and in literary form. To Lorenzo Valla was

paid for his translation of Thucydides, 500 scudi, to Guarino for a

version of Strabo, 1500 scudi, to Perotti for Polybius, 500 ducats.

Manetti had a pension of 600 scudi a month to enable him to pursue

his sacred studies. Poggio’s version of the _Cyropædia_ of Xenophon

and Filelfo’s rendering of the poems of Homer, were, from a literary

point of view, more important productions. Some of the work in his

series of translations was confided by the Pope to the resident Greek

scholars. Trapezuntios undertook the _Metaphysics_ of Aristotle and

the _Republic_ of Plato, and Tifernas the _Ethics_ of Aristotle.

Translations were also prepared of Theophrastus and of Ptolemy.

In addition to these paid translators, the Pope attracted to his Court

from all parts of Italy, and particularly from his old home, Florence,

a number of scholars, of whom Poggio Bracciolini (or Fiorentino) and

Cardinal Bessarion were the most important. Bessarion took an active

part in encouraging Greek scholars to make their homes and to do their

work in Italy. The great development of literary productiveness and

literary interests in Rome during the pontificate of Nicholas, is one

of the noteworthy examples of large results accruing to literature and

to literary workers through intelligently administered patronage. It

seems safe to say that before the introduction of printing, it was only

through the liberality of patrons that any satisfactory compensation

could be secured for literary productions.

During the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, who in 1435 added Sicily to

his dominions, and under the direct incentive of the royal patronage,

a good deal of literary activity was developed in Naples. Alfonso

was described by Vespasiano as being, next to Nicholas V., the most

munificent patron of learning in Italy, and he attracted to his Court

scholars like Manetti, Beccadelli, Valla, and others. The King paid to

Bartolommeo Fazio a stipend of 500 ducats a year while he was engaged

in writing his _Chronicles_, and when the work was completed, he added

a further payment of 1500 florins. In 1459, the year of his death,

Alfonso distributed 20,000 ducats among the men of letters gathered

in Naples. It is certain that in no other city of Europe during that

year were the earnings or rewards of literature so great. It does

not appear, however, that this lavish expenditure had the effect of

securing the production by Neapolitans of any works of continued

importance, or even of bringing into existence in the city any lasting

literary interests. The temperament of the people and the general

environment were doubtless unfavourable as compared with the influences

affecting Florence or Rome. It is probable also that the selection of

the recipients of the royal bounty was made without any trustworthy

principle and very much at haphazard.

A production of Beccadelli’s, perhaps the most brilliant of Alfonso’s

literary protégés, is to be noted as having been proscribed by

the Pope, being one of the earliest Italian publications to be so

distinguished. Eugenius IV. forbade, under penalty of excommunication,

the reading of Beccadelli’s _Hermaphroditus_, which was declared to be

_contra bonos mores_. The book was denounced from many pulpits, and

copies were burned, together with portraits of the poet, on the public

squares of Bologna, Milan, and Ferrara.[416] This opposition of the

Church was the more noteworthy, as the book contained nothing heretical

or subversive of ecclesiastical authority, but was simply ribald and

obscene.

Lorenzo Valla, another of the writers who received special favours

and emoluments at the hands of Alfonso, likewise came under the

ecclesiastical ban. But his writings contained more serious offences

than obscenity or ribaldry. He boldly questioned the authenticity of

Constantine’s _Donation_ (a document which was later shown to be a

forgery), and of other documents and literature held by the Church

to be sacred, and the accuracy of his scholarship and the brilliancy

of his polemical style, gave weight and force to his attacks.

Denunciations came upon Valla’s head from many pulpits, and the matter

was taken up by the Inquisition. But Alfonso told the monks that they

must leave his secretary alone, and the proceedings were abandoned.

When Nicholas V. came to the papacy, undeterred by the charge of

heresies, he appointed Valla to the post of Apostolic writer, and

gave him very liberal emoluments for work on the series of Greek

translations before referred to. Valla never retracted any of his

utterances against the Church, but he appears, after accepting the

Pope’s appointment, to have turned his polemical ardour in other

directions. He engaged in some bitter controversies with Poggio, Fazio,

and other contemporaries, controversies which seem to have aroused and

excited the literary circles of the time, but which turned upon matters

of no lasting importance. It is a cause of surprise to later literary

historians that men like Valla, possessed of real learning and of

unquestioned literary skill, should have been willing to devote their

time and their capacity to the futilities which formed the pretexts for

the greater part of the personal controversies of the time. Professor

Adams says of Valla: “He had all the pride and insolence and hardly

disguised pagan feeling and morals of the typical humanist; but in

spirit and methods of work he was a genuine scholar, and his editions

lie at the foundation of all later editorial work in the case of more

than one classic author, and of the critical study of the New Testament

as well.”[417]

During the two centuries preceding the invention of printing, it was

the case that more books (in the form of manuscripts) were available

for the use of students and readers in Italy than in any other country,

but even in Italy manuscripts were scarce and costly. Even the

collections in the so-called “libraries” of the cathedrals and colleges

were very meagre. These manuscripts were nearly entirely the production

of the cloisters, and as parchment continued to be very dear, many of

the works sent out by the monks were in the form of palimpsests, that

is, were transcribed upon scrolls which contained earlier writing.

The fact that the original writing was in many cases but imperfectly

erased, has caused to be preserved fragments of a number of classics

which might otherwise have disappeared entirely. The service rendered

by the monks in this way may be considered as at least a partial

offset to the injury done by them to the cause of literature in the

destruction of so many ancient writings. This matter has been referred

to more fully in the chapter on Monasteries and Manuscripts.

One of the Italian scholars of the fifteenth century who interested

himself particularly in the collection of manuscripts of the classics

was Poggio Bracciolini. In 1414, while he was, in his official capacity

as Apostolic Secretary, in attendance at the Council of Constance,

he ransacked the libraries of St. Gall and of other monasteries of

Switzerland and Suabia, and secured a complete _Quintilian_, copies

of _Lucretius_, _Frontinus_, _Probus_, _Vitruvius_, nine of Cicero’s

_Orations_, and manuscripts of a number of other valuable texts. Many

of the libraries had been sadly neglected, and the greater part of the

manuscripts were in dirty and tattered condition, but literature owes

much to the monks through whom these literary treasures had been kept

in existence at all.

Poggio is to be noted as a free-thinker who managed to keep in good

relations with the Church. So long as free-thinkers confined their

audacity to such matters as form the topic of Poggio’s _Facetiæ_,

Beccadelli’s _Hermaphroditus_, or La Casa’s _Capitolo del Forno_, the

Roman Curia looked on and smiled approvingly. The most obscene books to

be found in any literature escaped the Papal censure, and a man like

Aretino, notorious for his ribaldry, could aspire with fair prospects

of success to the scarlet of a Cardinal.[418]

While there could be no popular distribution, in the modern sense of

the term, for necessarily costly books in manuscript, in a community of

which only a small proportion had any knowledge of reading and writing,

it is evident from the chronicles of the time that there was an active

and prompt exchange of literary novelties between the court circles

and the literary groups of the different cities, and also between the

Faculties of the universities. A controversy between two scholars or

men of letters (and there were, as said, many such controversies, some

of them exceedingly bitter) appears to have excited a larger measure

of interest and attention in cultivated circles throughout the country

than could probably be secured to-day for any purely literary or

scholastic issues. There must, therefore, have been in existence and

in circulation a very considerable mass of literature in manuscript

form, and we know from various sources that Florence particularly

was the centre of an important trade in manuscripts. I have not thus

far, however, been able to find any instances of the writers of this

period receiving any compensation from the publishers, booksellers, or

copyists, or any share in such profits as might be derived from the

sale of the manuscript copies of their writings. It seems probable that

the authors gave to the copyists the privilege (which it was in any

case really impracticable to withhold) of manifolding and distributing

such copies of the books as might be called for by the general public,

while the cost of the complimentary copies (often a considerable

number) given to the large circle of friends, seems as a rule to have

been borne by the author.

As the author had to take his compensation in the shape of fame (except

in the cases of receipts from patrons), the wider the circulation

secured for copies of his productions (provided only they were not

plagiarised), the larger his fund of--satisfaction. For substantial

compensation he could look only to the patron. Fortunately for the

impecunious writers of the day, it became fashionable for not a few of

the princes and nobles of Italy to play the rôle of Mæcenas, and by

many of these the support and encouragement given to literature was

magnificent, if not always judicious.

During the reigns of the last Visconti and of the first Sforza, or

from about 1440 to 1474, literature became fashionable at the Court

of Milan. Filippo Maria Visconti is described as a superstitious and

repulsive tyrant, and he could hardly by his own personality have

attracted to Lombardy men of intellectual tastes. Visconti appears,

however, to have considered that his Court would be incomplete

without scholars, and to have been willing to pay liberally for their

attendance. Piero Candido Decembrio was one of the most industrious of

the writers who were supported by Visconti. According to his epitaph,

he was responsible for no less than 127 books. Symonds speaks of his

memoir of Visconti as a vivid and vigorous study of a tyrant. Gasparino

da Barzizza was the Court letter-writer and rhetorician, and, as the

official orator, filled an important place in what was considered the

intellectual life of the city.

By far the most noteworthy, however, of the scholars who were attracted

to Milan by the Ducal bounty was Francesco Filelfo. He could hardly

be said to belong to Lombardy, as he was born in Ancona and educated

at Padua, and had passed a number of years in Venice, Constantinople,

Florence, Siena, and Bologna. The longest sojourn of his life, however,

was made in Milan, where he arrived in 1440, and where he enjoyed for

some years liberal emoluments from the Court.

Filelfo was evidently a man with great powers of acquisition and with

exceptional versatility. He brought back with him from Constantinople

(where he had remained for some years) a Greek bride from a noble

family, an extensive collection of Greek manuscripts, and a working

knowledge of the Greek language; and at a time when Greek ideas and

Greek literature were attracting the enthusiastic attention not

merely of the scholars but of the courtiers and men of fashion, these

possessions of Filelfo were exceptionally serviceable, and enabled

him to push his fortunes effectively. He seems to have possessed a

self-confidence at least equal to his learning. He speaks of himself

as having surpassed Virgil because he was an orator, and Cicero

because he was a poet. Symonds says, however, that, notwithstanding his

arrogance, he is entitled to the rank of the most universal scholar

of his age, and his self-assertion doubtless aided not a little in

securing prompt recognition for his learning. Venice paid him, in 1427,

a stipend of 500 sequins for a series of lectures on Eloquence. A year

later he accepted the post of lecturer in Bologna on Moral Philosophy

and Eloquence, with a stipend of 450 sequins. Shortly afterwards,

flattering offers tempted him to Florence, where he lectured on the

Greek and Latin classics and on Dante, with a stipend first of 250

sequins, and later of 450 sequins. He found time while there for the

preparation of translations of the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle, and of a

number of other Greek works.

Filelfo’s arrogance and bad temper, and his fondness for invective

and satire, soon brought him into trouble with the literary circle of

Florence, and finally with the Medici, and he was compelled to withdraw

to Siena, where he remained four years with a stipend of 350 florins.

From there, after a brief visit to Bologna, he removed to Milan, where

his emoluments were much larger than any heretofore received, and

where, in the absence of any other scholars of equal attainments or

assumptions, he had the satisfaction of being the accepted literary

leader of the capital. In addition to his professional salary,

he received large sums and presents for addresses, orations, and

commemorative poems, which he was always ready to prepare. Such a

combination of rhetoric and literature was peculiarly characteristic of

the Italy of the time, and may be said to constitute a distinct phase

in the history of compensation for intellectual productions. Filelfo

published, in two ponderous volumes, his Satires, Odes, and other

fugitive pieces, under the title of _Convivia Mediolanensia_.

Notwithstanding the considerable sums which Filelfo earned through

his lectures and through his various rhetorical productions, he seems

always to have been in need of money. His tastes were expensive, while

his three wives had borne him no less than twenty-four children. In

his later years he gained the reputation of being very greedy of gold

and of making impudent demands which bore very much the character of

blackmail. Gregorio Lollio, writing (in 1452) to the Cardinal of Pavia,

describes Filelfo in the following words: “He is calumnious, envious,

vain, and so greedy of gold that he metes out praise or blame according

to the gifts he gets, both despicable as proceeding from a tainted

source.”[419]

From Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, he received a liberal stipend.

Pope Nicholas V., after reading some of his Satires (which Symonds

characterises as “infamous”) presented him with 500 ducats. Travelling

from Rome to Naples, Filelfo received more presents from Alfonso, who

dubbed him a knight. Continuing his journey, he secured honours and

rewards in Ferrara from Duke Borso, in Mantua from Marchese Gonzaga,

and in Rimini from Gismondo Malatesta. After the death of Sforza, he

accepted, in 1475, from Pope Sixtus IV., a professional Chair in Rome,

with a salary of 600 florins. He soon, however, quarrelled with the

Pope, and withdrew to Florence, where Lorenzo de’ Medici provided a

post for him as Professor of Greek Literature.

Filelfo died in Florence in his eighty-third year. He had probably

received larger emoluments for his work as an instructor, as a

rhetorician, and as a man of letters, than any man of his generation,

but he died without any means, and was buried by the charity of

the Florentines. His career, in its activities, vicissitudes,

controversies, successes, and bitternesses, was very typical of the

lives of the Italian scholars of the period.

At the time of Filelfo’s death, while in many other cities the

influence of the Renaissance was bringing together collections of books

and circles of scholars, and literary productiveness was increasing

throughout Italy, Florence still remained the capital of learning and

of refined culture. Lorenzo de’ Medici had, in 1469, succeeded to

Pietro, and of all the Medici it was Lorenzo whose influence was the

most important in furthering the intellectual and artistic movements

of the time. Symonds speaks of him as “a man of marvellous variety and

range of mental power, in whom ... the versatility of the Renaissance

found its fullest incarnation.”

Lorenzo attracted to his villa the greatest scholars and most brilliant

men of the time, a circle which included Poliziano, Landino, Ficino,

Pico della Mirandola, Alberti, Pulci, and Michael Angelo. The interests

of this circle, as of all similar Italian circles of the time, were

largely absorbed in the philosophy and literature of Greece, and

special attention was devoted to the teachings of Plato. Plato’s

writings were translated into Latin by Ficino, and the translation

was printed in 1482, at the cost of Filippo Valvio. Ficino was too

poor himself to undertake the publication of his works, and this was

the case with not a few of the distinguished authors of the age. The

presentation of books to the public required at this time what might be

called the endowment of literature, an endowment which was supplied by

the liberality of wealthy patrons possessed of literary appreciation

or public-spirited ambition, or of both. As Symonds expresses it,

“Great literary undertakings involved in that century the substantial

assistance of wealthy men, whose liberality was rewarded by a notice

in the colophon or in the title-page.” The formal dedication was an

invention of a somewhat later date.

The Ficino edition of _Plotinus_, printed at the expense of Lorenzo

de’ Medici, and published a few weeks after his death, bears the

inscription, _Magnifici sumptu Laurentii patriæ servatoris_. The

edition of _Homer_ of Lorenzo Alopa, issued in 1488, was printed at the

expense of either Bernardo Nerli or Giovanni Acciajuoli. These examples

of printed publications belong, however, to a later chapter. Ficino

followed up his translation of Plato’s work with a _Life of Plato_, and

an essay on the _Platonic Doctrine of Immortality_.

In 1484, appeared in the Florentine circle the beautiful and brilliant

Pico della Mirandola, a man who through his exceptional gifts, his

varied learning, and the charm of his personality, exercised a very

wide influence over his generation, and who may possibly be accepted

as at once the type and the flower of the Renaissance. Pico studied

at Bologna, and later at Paris. He printed, in 1489, in defence of

his philosophical theories, certain theses which were condemned as

heretical by Innocent VIII. In 1493, the ban of heterodoxy was renewed

by a brief of Alexander VI. Pico’s enquiring mind and scholarly ardour

covered a wide range of research, including the philosophy of the

Platonists, the mysteries of the Cabbala, and the system and theories

of Aquinas, Scotus, Albertus Magnus, and Averrhoes, and he proposed to

devote his learning and his life to the task of reconciling classical

traditions with the Christian creeds. Didot quotes the following

characteristic sentence from a letter written by Pico, February 11,

1491, to Aldus Manutius: “_Philosophia veritatem quærit, theologia

invenit, religio possidet_.” (Philosophy seeks truth, theology

discovers it, religion possesses it.)

Pico died at the age of thirty-one, before the book had been written in

which he proposed to demonstrate these positions. He was able, however,

to render a great service to Italy and to Europe in securing for his

friend Aldus the aid required for the establishment of the Aldine Press

in Venice. The details of the relations of the two men are given in the

chapter on Aldus.

Other noteworthy members of the literary circle which surrounded

Lorenzo de’ Medici, were Christoforo Landino, Leo Battista Alberti, and

Angelo Poliziano. Landino edited _Horace_ and _Virgil_ and translated

Pliny’s _Natural History_, and in 1481 published an edition of _Dante_,

and Battista Alberti, (whose comedy of _Philodoxius_, which passed for

an antique, was published by the Aldi, in 1588, as the work of Lepidus

Comicus), wrote three treatises on painting, and several volumes on

architecture. Alberti was more distinguished as an artist, architect,

and musician, than as an author. It was characteristic, however, of the

men of this group to be universal in their genius.

Symonds speaks of Poliziano as emphatically the representative of

the highest achievements of the age in scholarship, and as the first

Italian to combine perfect mastery over Latin and a correct sense of

Greek, with splendid genius for his native literature. His published

works included annotated editions of _Ovid_, _Suetonius_, _Statius_,

_Pliny_, and _Quintilian_, translations of _Epictetus_, _Galen_,

and _Hippocrates_, a series of _Miscellanea_, and most important of

all, the edition, printed from the famous Amalfi manuscript, of the

_Pandects_ of Justinian.

Among the smaller cities in which the Humanistic movement influenced

literature and furthered the development of learning, may be mentioned

Carpi, afterwards the home of Musurus and Aldus; Mirandola, the

birthplace of the brilliant Pico; Pesaro, where Alessandro and

Constanzo Sforza brought together a library rivalling that of the

Medici; Rimini, where Sigismondo Malatesta gathered about his fortress

a circle of scholars; and Urbino, where the good Duke Frederick brought

together one of the finest collections of manuscripts which Europe

had known, a collection valued at over 30,000 ducats. Vespasiano, who

served for some time as librarian, says that for fourteen years the

Duke kept from thirty to forty copyists employed in transcribing Greek

and Latin Manuscripts. The work of these copyists went on for some

years after the introduction of printing into Italy, for Frederick, in

common with not a few other of the scholarly nobles who were collectors

of manuscripts, distrusted and looked down upon the new art, and had no

interest in books which were merely mechanical reproductions.

Vespasiano da Bisticci, whose aid Frederick had secured in the

preparation of his library, was noted as an author, as a scribe, and as

a bookseller. Symonds speaks of the “rare merit” of the biographical

work in Vespasiano’s _Lives of Illustrious Men_, the memoirs of which

Symonds utilised largely in the preparation of his _Renaissance_.

Vespasiano’s literary work must have been done “in the intervals of

business,” for his business undertakings were important. He was the

largest dealer in manuscripts of his time. His purchasing agents and

correspondents were armed with instructions to secure authenticated

codices wherever these were obtainable, and the monasteries not only

of Italy but of Switzerland, South Germany, Hungary, Transylvania, and

the East were carefully searched for possible literary treasures. He

employed a large force of skilled copyists in the production of copies

of famous works, which copies were distributed through correspondents

and customers in the different scholarly centres of Europe. Possessing

himself a wide and exact scholarship, he gave his personal attention

to the selection of his texts, the training of his copyists and the

supervision of their work, so that a manuscript coming from Vespasiano

carried with it the prestige of accuracy and completeness.

Vespasiano’s scholarly knowledge and his special experience in

palæography were utilised by such clients as Nicholas V., Cosimo de’

Medici, Frederick of Urbino, and other lovers of literature, in the

formation of and development of their libraries. Vespasiano united,

therefore, the functions of a scholarly editor and commentator, a

collector, a book-manufacturer, a publisher and a bookseller, a

series of responsibilities which called for a wide range of learning,

accomplishments, and executive ability. It is evident from his career

and from the testimony of his friends and clients (terms in this case

practically identical) that he was devoted to literature for its own

sake. He accepted the rewards secured by his skill and enterprise,

and promptly expended these in fresh efforts for the development

and extension of liberal scholarship. Vespasiano may be called the

last, as he was probably the greatest of the book-dealers of the

manuscript period. Born in 1421 and living until 1498, he witnessed

the introduction of printing into Italy, and may easily have had

opportunities of handling the earlier productions of the Venetian

printing-press. Vespasiano was a fitting successor of Atticus and a

worthy precursor of Aldus, whose work in the distribution of scholarly

literature was, in fact, a direct continuation of his own.

As before mentioned, the trade in the production of manuscript copies

went on for a number of years after the introduction of printing. The

noblemen and wealthy scholars who had inherited, or who had themselves

brought together, collections of famous works in manuscript, were for

some time, not unnaturally, unwilling to believe that ordinary people

could, by means of the new invention, with a comparatively trifling

expenditure secure perfect and beautiful copies of the same works.

Before the death of Vespasiano, in 1498, however, the work of the

printing-press had come to be understood and cordially appreciated by

book-buyers and students of all classes, and the trade of the copyists

and of the manuscript-dealers had, excepting for newly discovered

texts, practically come to an end. The career of Vespasiano belongs

strictly to the chapter on the publishers of manuscripts, of whom he

was the most important. The man himself, however, through his character

and services, belongs essentially to the movement of the Renaissance,

of which movement he was at once a product and a leader.

During the reigns of Pope Innocent VIII., 1484-1492, and of Alexander

VI. (Borgia), 1492-1503, little or nothing was done in Rome to

further the development of literature. To the latter was in fact

due the initiating of the system of the subjection of the press to

ecclesiastical censorship, a system which for centuries to come was to

exercise the most baneful influence over literature and intellectual

activities and to interfere enormously with the establishment of any

assured foundation for property in literature. Some account of the long

contests carried on by the publishers of Venice against this claim for

ecclesiastical control of the productions of their presses, is given in

a later chapter.

Venice stood almost alone among the cities of Italy in resisting the

censorship of the Church, and even in Venice, the Church in the end

succeeded in the more important of its contentions. In Spain, the

ecclesiastical control was hardly questioned. In France, it was, after

a century of contest, practically merged in the censorship exercised

by the Crown, a control which was in itself fully as much as the

publishing trade could bear and continue to exist. In Austria and South

Germany, after the crushing out of the various reformation movements,

the Church and State worked in practical accord in keeping a close

supervision of the printing-presses. In North Germany, on the other

hand, ecclesiastical censorship never became important. The evils

produced by it were, however, serious and long enduring throughout a

large portion of the territory of Europe, and the papal Borgia, though

by no means a considerable personage, is responsible for bringing

into existence an evil which assumed enormous proportions in the

intellectual history of Europe.

Towards the close of the fifteenth century begins in Italy the age of

academies, associations of scholars and littérateurs for the furthering

of scholarly pursuits and of literary undertakings. One of the earlier

of these Academies was instituted in Rome, in 1468, by Julius Pomponius

Lætus (a pupil of Valla), for the special purpose of promoting the

study of Latin literature and Latin antiquities. Comedies of Plautus

and of other Latin dramatists were revived, and the attempt was made to

make Latin, at least for the scholarly circle, again a living language.

The Academy was suspected by Pope Paul II. to have some political

purpose, and it was for a time suppressed, but resumed its activities

some years later under the papacy of Alexander VI.

The Academy of Naples was instituted in 1470, under the leadership of

Beccadelli and Juvianus Pontanus, and with a membership comprising a

number of the brilliant scholars whom Alphonso the Magnanimous had

attracted to his Court. This society also devoted itself particularly

to the revival of an interest in Latin literature, and not a few of the

members became better known under the Latinised names there adopted by

them than by their Italian cognomens. Pomponius had written little and

hoped to be remembered through his pupils. Pontanus on the other hand,

wrote on many subjects, using for the purpose Latin, of which he was

a master. Symonds says that he chiefly deserves to be remembered for

his ethical treatises, but he seems himself to have attached special

importance to his amatory elegiacs and to a series of astronomical

hexameters entitled _Urania_.

In Florence, the Platonic Academy continued to flourish under the

auspices of the Rucellai family. It was suppressed in 1522, at the

time of the conspiracy against Giulio de’ Medici, but again revived

in 1540. In 1572, was organised in Florence the famous academy called

_Della Crusca_, which secured for itself a European reputation. In

Bologna, in 1504, the society of the _Viridario_ was instituted,

with the purpose of studying printed texts and of furthering the art

of printing. Bologna had a considerable number of other literary

societies, for the study of jurisprudence, chivalry, and other

subjects. Throughout Italy at this period academies multiplied, but the

greater number exercised no continued influence.

It is probable, however, that they all proved of service in preparing

the way for the printed literature which the Italian presses were,

after 1490, beginning to distribute, and that in widening the range of

popular interest in scholarship and in books generally, they did not

a little to render possible the work of Aldus and other early Italian

publishers. The academy founded by Aldus in Venice, for the prosecution

of Greek studies, will be referred to in the chapter on Aldus.

“The fifteenth century rediscovered antiquity; the sixteenth was

absorbed in slowly deciphering it. In the fifteenth century ‘educated

Europe’ is but a synonym for Italy. What literature there was north

of the Alps was in great part derived from, or was largely dependent

upon, the Italian movement. The fact that the movement originated

in the Latin peninsula, was decisive of the character of the first

age of classical learning (1400-1550). It was a revival of Latin as

opposed to Greek literature. It is now well understood that the fall

of Constantinople, though an influential incident of the movement,

ranks for little among the causes of the Renaissance. What was revived

in Italy in the fifteenth century was the interest of the Schools

of the early Empire--of the second and third century.... But in one

decisive feature, the literary sentiment of the fifteenth century was a

reproduction of that of the Empire. It was rhetorical, not scientific.

Latin literature as a whole is rhetorical.... The divorce of the

literature of knowledge and the literature of form which characterised

the epoch of decay under the early empire, characterised equally

the epoch of revival in the Italy of the Popes.... The knowledge and

wisdom buried in the Greek writers presented a striking contrast to the

barren sophistic which formed the curriculum of the Latin schools. It

became the task of the scholars of the second period of the classical

revival to disinter this knowledge.... Philology had meant composition

and verbal emendation; it now meant the apprehension of the ideas

and usages of the ancient world. Scholars had exerted themselves to

write, they now bent all their effort to know.... There came now into

existence what has ever since been known as ‘learning,’ in the special

sense of the term. The first period of humanism in which the words of

the ancient authors had been studied, was thus the preparatory school

for the humanism of the second period, in which the matter was the

object of attention.

As Italy had been the home of classical taste in the first period,

France became the home of classical learning in the second. Single

names can be mentioned, such as Victorius or Sigonius in Italy,

Mursius or Vulcanius in the Low Countries, who were distinguished

representatives of ‘learning,’ but in Bulæus, Turnebus, Lambrinus,

Scaliger, Casaubon, and Saumaise, France produced a constellation of

humanists whose fame justly eclipsed that of all their contemporaries.

If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the humanist

movement, which she had so brilliantly inaugurated, the answer is that

the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of ecclesiastical

ideas. Learning is the result of research, and research must be free

and cannot coexist with the claim of the Catholic clergy to be superior

to enquiry. The French school, it will be observed, is wholly in fact

or in intention Protestant. As soon as it was decided (as it was before

1600) that France was to be a Catholic country, and the University of

Paris a Catholic university, learning was extinguished in France.

France saw without regret and without repentance the expatriation

of her unrivalled scholars. With Scaliger and Saumaise, the seat of

learning was transferred from France to Holland. The third period of

classical learning thus coincides with the Dutch school. From 1593, the

date of Scaliger’s removal to Leyden, the supremacy in the republic of

learning was possessed by the Dutch. In the course of the eighteenth

century, the Dutch school was gradually supplanted by the North German,

which from that time forward has taken, and still possesses, the lead

in philological science.”[420]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER II.

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING AND THE WORK OF THE FIRST PRINTERS OF HOLLAND

AND GERMANY.

1440-1528.

“FOUR men, Gutenberg, Columbus, Luther, and Copernicus, stand at

the dividing line of the Middle Ages, and serve as boundary stones

marking the entrance of mankind into a higher and finer epoch of its

development.”[421]

It would be difficult to say which one of the four has made the

largest contribution to this development or has done the most to

lift up the spirit of mankind and to open for men the doors to the

new realms that were in readiness. The Genoese seaman and discoverer

opens new realms to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe from

the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast space of

Western oceans, and in adding to the material realms controlled by

civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its thought and

fancy. The Reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the bonds which had

chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in securing for them again

their rights as individual Christians, conquers for them a spiritual

realm and brings them into renewed relations with their Creator. The

great astronomer shatters, through his discoveries, the fixed and petty

conceptions of the universe which had ruled the minds of mankind, and

in bringing to them fresh light on the nature and extent of created

things, widens at the same time their whole understanding of themselves

and of duty. The citizen of Mayence may claim to have unchained

intelligence and given to it wings. He utilised lead no longer as a

death-bringing ball, but in the form of life-quickening letters which

were to bring before thousands of minds the teachings of the world’s

thinkers. Each one of the four had his part in bringing to the world

light, knowledge, and development.

At the time when the art of printing finally took shape in the mind

of Gutenberg, the direction of literary and intellectual interests

of Germany rested, as we have seen, largely with Italy. The fact,

however, that the new art had its birthplace, not in Florence, which

was at that time the centre of the literary activities of Europe, but

in Mayence, heretofore a town which had hardly been connected at all

with literature, and the further fact that the printing-presses were

carrying on their work in Germany for nearly fifteen years before

two printers, themselves Germans, set up the first press in Italy,

exercised, of necessity, an important influence in inciting literary

activities throughout Germany and in the relations borne by Germany to

the scholarship of the world.

The details of the life and early work of Gutenberg are at best

but fragmentary, and have been a subject of much discussion. It is

not necessary, for the purpose of this treatise, to give detailed

consideration to the long series of controversies as to the respective

claims of Gutenberg of Mayence, of Koster of Haarlem, or of other

competitors, as to the measure of credit to be assigned to each in

the original discovery or of the practical development of the the

printing-press. It seems in any case evident that whatever minds

elsewhere were at that time puzzling over the same problem, it was the

good fortune of Gutenberg to make the first practical application of

the printing-press to the production of impressions from movable type,

while it was certainly from Mayence that the art spread throughout the

cities, first of Germany, and later of Italy and France.

It is to be borne in mind (and I speak here for the non-technical

reader) that, as indicated in the above reference, the distinction and

important part of the invention of Gutenberg was, not the production of

a press for the multiplication of impressions, but the use of movable

type and the preparation of the form from which the impressions were

struck off. The art of printing from blocks, since classified as

xylographic printing, had been practised in certain quarters of Europe

for fifty years or more before the time of Gutenberg, and if Europe had

had communication with China, xylography might have been introduced

four or five centuries earlier.

With the block-books, the essential thing was the illustrations, and

what text or letterpress accompanied these was usually limited to a

few explanatory or descriptive words engraved on the block, above,

beneath or around the picture. Occasionally, however, as in the _Ars

Moriendi_, there were entire pages of text engraved, like the designs,

on the solid block. The earlier engraving was done on hard wood, but,

later, copper was also employed. It is probable that the block-books

originated in the Netherlands, and it is certain that in such towns

as Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, the art was developed more rapidly

than elsewhere, so that during the first half of the fifteenth century,

the production of wood engravings and of books made up of engravings

(printed only on one side, and accompanied by a few words of text),

began to form an important article of trade. The subjects of these

designs were for the most part Biblical, or at least religious. One

of the earlier of the block-book publications and probably the most

characteristic specimen of the class, is the volume known as the

_Biblia Pauperum_. This was a close imitation of a manuscript book

that had for five or six centuries been popular as a work of religious

instruction. It had been composed about 850, by S. Ausgarius, a monk

of Corbie, who afterwards became Bishop of Hamburg. The _scriptorium_

established by him at Corbie was said to have been the means of

preserving from destruction a number of classics, including the

_Annals_ of Tacitus.[422] The use, five centuries later, as one of the

first productions of the printing-press, of the monk’s own composition,

may be considered as a fitting acknowledgement of the service thus

rendered by him to the world’s literature. Examples of manuscript

copies of the _Biblia Pauperum_ are in existence in the _Bibliothèque

Nationale_ in Paris, in Munich, in the British Museum, and elsewhere,

and there is no difficulty in comparing these with the printed copies

produced in the Netherlands, which are also represented in these

collections.

It is probable that Laurence Koster of Haarlem, whose name is, later,

associated with printing from movable type, was himself an engraver of

block-books. Humphreys is, in fact, inclined to believe that the first

block-book edition of the _Biblia Pauperum_ was actually Koster’s work,

basing this opinion on the similarity of the compositions and of their

arrangement to those of the _Speculum Humanæ Salvationis_, which was

the first work printed from movable type, and the production of which

is now generally credited to Koster.[423] The _Biblia Pauperum_ was

printed from blocks in Germany as late as 1475, but before that date an

edition had been printed from movable type by Pfister in Bamberg.

As has been pointed out by many of the writers on the subject, the

so-called invention of printing was not so much the result of an

individual inspiration, as the almost inevitable consequence of a long

series of experiments and of partial processes which had been conducted

in various places where the community was interesting itself in the

multiplication of literature.

If, as is probably the case, the first book printed from movable type

is to be credited to Koster, it remains none the less the case that

Gutenberg’s process must have been worked out for itself, and that the

German possessed, what the Hollander appears to have lacked, not merely

the persistence and the practical understanding required to produce

a single book, but the power to overcome obstacles and to instruct

others, and was thus able to establish the new art on a lasting

foundation.

The claims of the Hollanders under which Koster is to be regarded as

the first printer, or at least (bearing in mind the Chinese precedents

in the tenth century) the first European printer, from movable type,

claims which Humphreys accepts as well founded, are in substance as

follows: Laurence Koster was born, somewhere in Holland, about 1370,

and died in Haarlem about 1440. He is believed to have made his first

experiments with movable wooden types about 1426, and to have worked

with metal types about ten years later. The principal of the earlier

authorities concerning Koster’s career is a certain Hadrian Junius, who

completed, in 1569, a history of Holland, which was published in 1588.

He speaks of Koster as being a man of an honourable family, in which

the office of Sacristan (custos, Coster or Koster) was hereditary,

and he describes in detail the development of the invention of type,

from the cutting of pieces of beech-bark into the form of letters, to

the final production of the metal fonts. Junius goes on to relate the

method under which Koster’s first book (from type), _Speculum Humanæ

Salvationis_, was printed, in 1430. This book, the origin of which is

not known, had for many years been popular among the Benedictines,

and few of their monasteries were without a copy. As a result of

this popularity, many examples of the manuscript copies have been

preserved, some of which are in the Arundel collection in the British

Museum. Zani says that the _Speculum_ was compiled for the assistance

of poor preachers, and in support of this view he quotes certain lines,

which may serve also as an example of Latinity and of the general style:

_Predictum prohemium hujus libri de contentis compilavi

Et propter pauperes predicatores hoc opponere curavi._[424]

Koster appears to have produced, about 1428, an edition of a portion

of the _Speculum_ in which the entire pages (presenting on the upper

half two designs, and on the lower two columns of text) are printed

from solid wooden blocks. Humphreys gives examples of these pages. The

cutting of the text, all the letters of which had, of course, to be cut

in reverse, is a wonderful piece of work. About 1430, was completed the

first issue printed from movable types. The arrangement of the pages

is the same, the upper half is occupied with two designs (printed in

brown ink, from wooden blocks), and the lower half is given to the

text, printed in black ink, from the metal type. The first typographic

edition contains a number of xylographic pages. In the type-pages, the

block-illustration was printed first, and the sheet was then imposed

again for the printing of the text. Both the designs and the text were

modelled to follow very closely the character of the manuscripts of

the period. The volume is undoubtedly the earliest European example of

printing from type, and the evidence that it was the work of Koster,

and that it was produced not later than 1430, or about twenty years

earlier than the Bible of Gutenberg, is, I understand, now accepted by

the best authorities as practically conclusive. Three editions of the

book were printed by Koster before his death in 1440, the third being

printed in Dutch (instead of Latin), and being entirely typographic.

This is the edition seen and described (128 years later) by Junius.

After specifying the method employed by Koster (according to his own

views concerning movable type), Junius goes on to say, “It was by this

method that he produced impressions of engraved plates, to which he

added ‘separate’ letters. I have seen a book of this kind, the first

rude effort of his invention, printed by him on one side only; this

book was entitled the _Mirror of Our Salvation_.” While this evidence

of Junius comes first into record one hundred and twenty-eight years

after the time assigned to the printing of Koster’s first book, it is

the conclusion of Humphreys, Blades, and other historians that, in

consideration of the circumstances under which Junius wrote, and the

nature of the information which was evidently at that time available

for him, his testimony may safely be accepted as conclusive. Junius

goes on to say that Koster, having perfected his system, and finding

a rapidly increasing demand for his printed books, was unable to

manage the work with the aid of the members of his own family. He

took foreign workmen into his employ, which eventually led to the

abstraction of his secret and caused the credit of his invention to

be given to others.[425] Junius gives further details concerning the

channels through which he secured the record of the work of Koster. He

refers to a certain Nicholas Galius who had been his first preceptor,

and who remembered having heard the facts connected with Koster’s

discovery from a certain Cornelius when the latter was over eighty

years of age. Cornelius testified that he had himself been a binder

in the establishment of Koster, and the Dutch historian, Meerman, has

discovered in the records of the church of Haarlem a memorandum dated

1474, which is evidence that there was at that date a binder in the

town called Cornelius.[426]

In claiming for Holland the prestige of inventing the several

distinctive processes connected with the printing of books, Humphreys

sums up as follows: It is beyond dispute that the Dutch were the first

to produce block-books, and thus were virtually the first printers

of books. It is also a matter of record that it was the printers of

Holland who first devised the art of stereotyping, a process which

was applied by John Miller of Amsterdam towards the close of the

seventeenth century. There is, therefore, apart from the details

above specified and from the evidence of tradition, a strong natural

presumption in favour of the development in Holland of the intervening

step of substituting movable types for carved pages of letters.

Humphreys points out that there are other references to the production

in the Netherlands of books from movable metal types, before the date

at which Gutenberg’s first volume was completed in Mayence. In a

record of accounts of Jean Robert, Abbé of Cambrai, the manuscript of

which has been preserved in the archives of the city of Lille, appears

the entry: “Item, for a printed (_getté en molle_) _Doctrinal_ that

I sent for to Bruges by Macquart, who is a writer at Valenciennes,

in the month of January, 1445, for Jacquet, twenty sous, Tournois.

Little Alexander had one the same, that the church paid for.” It is

stated later in the record that one of these books proved to be so

“full of faults” that it had to be replaced by a written copy.[427]

The purport of the term _getté en molle_ (which might possibly have

been written _jetté_ or _guetté_) was first elucidated by M. Besuard,

who pointed out that it evidently stood for “cast in a mould,” the

reference being to the metallic types, which were so cast. In the

letters of naturalisation accorded, in 1474, to the first printers with

movable types established in Paris, the term used is _escritoire en

molle_, or writing by means of moulds or moulded letters. Humphreys is

inclined to give credit to the theory, which is presented by many of

the advocates of Koster, that the first suggestion of the new art was

brought to Gutenberg in Strasburg by a workman who had been employed

by Koster in Haarlem, but he admits that this theory is supported by

practically nothing that can be called evidence, and depends for its

authority simply upon the sequence of events, and upon the surmises

and probabilities suggested by Junius. It remains the case that after

the death of Koster, which occurred either in 1440 or in 1439, the

production of books from type came to an end in Holland, and that for

instruction in the new art Europe was indebted not to Haarlem but to

Mayence. We may accept as conclusive the evidence which gives to Koster

the credit of producing the first book printed (outside of China) from

movable type, without lessening the value of the service rendered by

Gutenberg. The shores of our Western Continent were undoubtedly visited

by Eric and his Northmen, but it was Columbus who gave to Europe the

New World.

The production of printed books, which changed the whole condition of

literary production and of literary ownership, is to be traced directly

to the operations of Gutenberg and Fust. Kapp mentions that if it were

not for the records of certain court processes of Strasburg and of

Mayence, we should have hardly any trustworthy references whatsoever to

the work or the relations of Gutenberg prior to 1450.

By means of these court records, however, it has proved possible to

secure some data concerning various undertakings in which Gutenberg was

engaged before he devoted himself to his printing-office. He belonged

to a noble family of Mayence, the family name of which was originally

Gensfleisch, a name Latinised by some writers of the time as Ansicarus.

For more than a century, the Gensfleische stood at the head of the

nobility of the city in the long series of contests carried on with

the guilds and citizens.

Until the sacking of the city, after the outbreak of October,

1462, Mayence was the most important of the free cities and of the

commercial centres of the middle Rhine district, and was an important

competitor for the general trade of central Europe with Strasburg on

the upper river and with Cologne in the region below. The citizens

felt themselves strong enough, with the beginning of the fifteenth

century, to make a sturdy fight against the old-time control claimed by

the nobility, and as early as 1420, they had overcome the patricians

in a contest which turned upon the reception of the newly chosen

Elector, Conrad III. As one result of this struggle, a number of the

Gensfleische found themselves among the exiles.

Gutenberg’s father, whose name was Frilo, had held the office of Tax

Receiver or General Accountant in the city, and was among those who

were banished in 1420. Gutenberg himself was born either in 1397

or 1398. He appears to have passed a portion of his youth at the

little village of Eltville, and from there went to Strasburg. In the

year 1433, an entry in the tax record of Mayence speaks of Henne

Gensfleisch, called Gutenberg, who was an uncle of the printer. About

the year 1440, Gutenberg was engaged in Strasburg in the manufacture

of looking-glasses, and is already referred to as a man of scientific

attainments and learned in inventions.

One of the court records above referred to gives the details of a suit

brought by the brothers Dritzehn against Gutenberg, in connection with

this first manufacturing business. Another Dritzehn, a brother or a

cousin of the above, had as early as 1437 applied to Gutenberg to

be instructed (in consideration of the payment of an honorarium) in

a “certain art” (_in etlicher kunst_). Shortly thereafter Gutenberg

entered into an arrangement with a certain Hans Riffe of Lichtenau,

and instructed him in the trade of manufacturing mirrors, Riffe making

an investment in the business and sharing the profits.

Dritzehn made in all, three contracts with Gutenberg; under the first,

he was instructed in the art of stone-polishing, and took some interest

in this branch of Gutenberg’s business; under the second, he interested

himself in the manufacturing of mirrors; while the third contract

refers to certain arts and undertakings (_kunste und afentur_) in which

Dritzehn also received instruction, and to the carrying on of which he

also contributed an investment.

It is the opinion of some of the students on the subject that the

researches of Gutenberg, which resulted in 1450 in the production of a

working printing-press, had begun at least ten years back, and that, in

connection with these researches, he had been obliged to borrow money

or to accept investments from Dritzehn and from other associates. The

vague terms used in referring to the undertakings which were associated

with or which followed the mirror manufacturing business (“a certain

art”) indicate that these associates had been cautioned to give no

information as to the precise nature of the work in which Gutenberg

was experimenting. Humphreys is of opinion that the term “manufacture

of looking-glasses” was used partly as a blind and partly as a joke,

and that Gutenberg was actually engaged in the production (with

the aid of one of Koster’s assistants) of copies of the _Speculum_

(Mirror). Against this view is the fact that Gutenberg did not print

the _Speculum_ at all. If Gutenberg were already working over the

printing-press invention at the time of his association with Dritzehn

and with Riffe, there may be some justice in the claim of Strasburg to

be the birthplace of the printing-press. The completed press, however,

was not produced until Gutenberg had returned to the old home city of

the family--Mayence.

After the close of the suit brought by Dritzehn against Gutenberg,

that is to say, after 1440, there are no further references to

Gutenberg’s undertakings in Strasburg. It is not even known whether

or not he continued business operations there, but it appears that he

was dwelling there as late as 1444. In 1448, he is recorded as again a

citizen of Mayence, and it was in Mayence that, in 1450, the completed

invention became known to the world.

Gutenberg’s name stands on no title-page and is connected with no

colophon. The fact, however, that the full responsibility for the

invention belongs to him is borne witness to by his contemporaries,

Peter Schöffer, Ulrich Zell, the Abbot Trithemius, Jacob Wimpheling,

and others. In a chronicle of the archbishop of Mayence, continued to

the year 1555 and compiled by Count Wilhelm von Zimmern, it is recorded

that the noble art of book-printing was discovered in Mayence by a

worthy citizen named Gutenberg, who devoted to the invention all his

time and resources until he had brought it to a successful completion.

In 1470, a letter was written by the scholar, Wilhelm Fichet, of Paris,

to the historian, Robert Gaguin, which letter was later printed on

the last sheet of a volume published in Paris and in Basel, entitled:

_Gasparini Pergamensis Orthographiæ Liber_. This letter contains an

enthusiastic description of the new art of book-printing discovered in

Germany by Gutenberg. The writer says: “There has been discovered in

Germany a wonderful new method for the production of books, and those

who have mastered this method are taking their invention from Mayence

out into the world somewhat as the old Grecian warriors took their

weapons from the belly of the Trojan horse. The light of this wonderful

discovery will spread from Germany to all parts of the earth. I have

been told by three foreigners--Kranz, Freiburger, and Gering--that

Gutenberg has succeeded in producing books by means of metal letters in

place of using the handiwork of the scribes.”

Fichet goes on to speak of Gutenberg as “bringing more blessings

upon the world than were given by the goddess Ceres, for Ceres could

bestow only material food, while through Gutenberg the productions of

the thinkers could be brought within the reach of all people.” This

letter was written only two years after the death of Gutenberg, and

as it came from Basel, one of the first cities to which the new art

had been carried from Mayence, it constitutes very good contemporary

evidence as to the immediate credit that was given to Gutenberg for the

invention.[428]

The historical date now given for the completion of the invention is

August 22, 1450. On this date Gutenberg entered into a contract with

Johann Fust, a wealthy citizen and goldsmith of Mayence, under which

contract Fust loaned to Gutenberg, with interest at 6 per cent. (a

low rate for that period), the sum of 800 gulden in gold. This sum

Gutenberg agreed to utilise in developing his invention, while the

material of the workshop to be instituted was pledged to Fust as

security for the repayment of the loan. The sum proved insufficient

for establishing the necessary plant, and two years later Fust added a

further sum of 800 gulden.

Gutenberg pledged himself, as afterwards stated in the lawsuit which

arose between Fust and himself, to use this money for the printing of

books,--“_das werk der bücher_.” At the time Gutenberg secured this

loan, it seemed evident that, in experimenting with and in developing

his invention, he had exhausted his own entire resources.

Gutenberg could, of course, lay no claim to being in any literal sense

of the term the first printer. Printing in one form or another had been

carried on in Germany and elsewhere for a number of years, and printing

from movable blocks had, in fact, been done in China 400 years or more

before the beginning of Gutenberg’s work. As early as the twelfth

century, says Kapp, there are numerous references to cloth printers,

stampers of letters, and printers of maps. The oldest wood-cut known to

have been produced in Europe, is a representation of S. Christopher,

and bears date 1423. At about this time, and probably, in fact, some

years earlier, was begun in Holland, as previously stated, the work

of printing from wooden blocks, the designs being principally devoted

to holy subjects. In connection with such designs, there had been

printing also from letterings cut out of solid wooden blocks, and these

letterings had even in some cases been cut upon blocks sufficient to

occupy an entire page.

The practical contribution made by Gutenberg, which developed from the

easy processes of stamping designs and brief lines of lettering, a

method by means of which whole books could be produced, was first, in

the use of movable metal type, produced by casting, and second, in an

improvement made in the mechanism of the hand presses by which larger

sheets could be worked.

The first work produced with this movable metal type was a Latin

version of the Bible. The description of this volume is first given in

a chronicle of Cologne, dating from the year 1499, the statements in

which rest upon the authority of Ulrich Zell, who was the first printer

in Cologne.

Concerning the further operations of Gutenberg, we are mainly dependent

upon the references in the records of the suit brought by Fust, in

1445, for the repayment of his loan, and upon a document of 1468

in which a certain Dr. Humery entered into an undertaking with the

Archbishop of Mayence that the printing-office plant left by the

deceased Johann Gutenberg shall not be permitted to be taken out of

the city of Mayence. This later reference had to do with a second

printing-press established by Gutenberg with the aid of the said Humery.

In the suit brought by Fust, Gutenberg contended that the second

payment of 800 gulden agreed upon had never been given to him in full.

He stated further that Fust had agreed to advance 300 gulden per year

for use in the purchase of materials, paper, parchment, type-metal, and

ink. The matter of the later accountings between Fust and Gutenberg is

evidently a complicated one and need not be considered here in detail.

Gutenberg’s inability to repay the first and more important loan for

the payment of which his first printing-press had been mortgaged,

caused the ownership of this office to come into the control of Fust.

Fortunately, by the time his first venture had thus been closed, as

far at least as he was concerned, he had been able to give sufficient

evidence of the importance and of the commercial value of the

undertaking to be in a position to interest others in his schemes.

His second printing-press was in like manner pledged to the associate

who provided the capital,--Dr. Humery,--and the business of this

office appears to have been continued without break until the time

of Gutenberg’s death in 1468. With these new resources at hand,

Gutenberg was able to cast some new fonts of type, and to make various

improvements in his working methods.

The first issues of the new press, the organisation of which appears to

have been completed about 1457, were volumes containing the writings

of Mätthaus de Cracovia and Thomas Aquinas. The third book was the

famous first edition of the _Catholicon_, a grammatical compilation

of the Dominican monk Balbus from Genoa. The _Catholicon_ was a folio

containing no less than 373 rather closely printed sheets. In the

meantime, Fust had associated with him Schöffer or Schoiffher, who had

been an assistant of Gutenberg, and the two were continuing work in the

original printing-office.

The sacking of Mayence, in 1462, by Adolph of Nassau, put an end, for

the time, to all business in the city, including the work of the new

printing-presses. Gutenberg betook himself to the neighbouring town of

Eltville, which, as early as 1420, had given shelter to his parents,

and there he carried on his printing for a time under the protection of

Archbishop Adolph.

Kapp points out that the printing art had its development, not in a

university centre, but in a commercial town, and was from the outset

carried on, not by scholars, but by workers of the people, and that

this fact doubtless had an important influence in bringing the whole

business of the production of books and the distribution of literature

into closer relations with the mass of the German people than was the

case in France.

In France, as will be noted later, the first printers were directly

associated with the university, succeeding immediately to the official

university scribes, and the production of books through the presses

continued to be under direct control of the university, as had been the

case from the beginning with the production of books in manuscript.

The fact that the control of the first French presses rested with the

university Faculty, undoubtedly exercised an important influence on

the choice of the books to be printed, and the first issues of the

French presses were, therefore, in the main restricted to editions of

the classics or to works of jurisprudence and medicine belonging to

the official lists of the university texts. The earlier issues of the

German press, on the other hand, were books belonging in no way to the

university _curriculum_, but were addressed directly to the interests

of the people at large.

While the modifications introduced by Gutenberg into the methods of

printing, under which the old engraved blocks were replaced by movable

leaden type, seem slight in themselves, they constituted nevertheless a

new art. The actual changes were but inconsiderable, but the practical

result was a revolution in the possibilities of the press.

Gutenberg’s work as a printer was, from a commercial point of view,

never successful. During the eighteen years which elapsed between the

time of his invention and the date of his death, he seems to have been

always under the pressure of debt and money difficulties. He had in

fact no time to make money. He had given up, in his devotion to his

invention, previous business undertakings which were remunerative,

and he had absorbed in the development of the printing-press all the

resources that he could control. His interest, however, was evidently

that of perfecting an art rather than of creating a business; and

in spite of his various difficulties and his several lawsuits with

his associates, it is in evidence as part of the testimony in these

very suits, that he was recognised by all as a man of knowledge and

character, and as a born leader, whose integrity of purpose and whose

nobility of aim were acknowledged by all with whom he had to do.

With all his misfortunes, he seems never for a moment to have lost

confidence in the value to the world of his idea, and to this idea,

with no thought of personal gain or advantage, he was willing to devote

his means and his life.

The difference between the production each year of a few hundred

copies of religious or classical works by the laborious toil of the

monks or the university scribes, works which could at best benefit

only the limited circle of readers who were within reach either of the

monasteries or of the universities, and a world-wide distribution, as

well of the great books of the earlier times which belonged to the

world’s literature as of the current thoughts of the contemporary

generation, was a difference, not of degree, but of kind. It was a

revolution in the history of human thought and in the influence of

thought upon humanity.

If the invention of printing had not taken shape in the brain of

Gutenberg, it would doubtless have come to the world through some

other worker, and, in fact, with no very great delay, for other men

were already busying themselves with the same great need and were on

the track of the same means of supplying the need. As the history

stands, however, the credit for the revolution must be given to the

mirror-maker of Mayence. Other sailors would certainly have found

their way to the Western Continent if the opportunity or the attempt

of Columbus had failed, but it is to Columbus that history gives the

laurel crown.

Gutenberg, and the printers who followed him, naturally selected as the

first models for their newly founded type the script letters with which

they were familiar in the best manuscripts. The first font of type

manufactured by Gutenberg, which was used in his earliest publication,

_The Folio Bible_, was known as the “missal type,” having been copied

from the script adopted by the monks for the books of worship. This

style of type was followed for a long time for Bibles and for religious

works generally. One of the earlier objections against printed books

was that they were so much less beautiful in their appearance than the

work of the best scribes, and it was the finest script that remained

as the ideal to be attained by the type-founders and the clear black

impression of the best oak-gall writing ink that was to be imitated by

the impressions from the presses.

The scholarly lovers of fine books in Germany regarded the new art at

the outset with no little disapproval and criticism. The collectors

who had brought together, with much labour and expenditure, stores

of valuable manuscripts dreaded lest, through the multiplication of

comparatively inexpensive copies of their texts, the value of their

collections should be taken away. When the messengers of Cardinal

Bessarion were shown by the Greek Laskaris (later the author of the

first Greek grammar that came into print), a specimen of one of the

earlier printed books, they spoke sneeringly of this so-called

discovery which had been made by a barbarian from a German city.[429]

The great manuscript-dealer, Vespasiano, writing in 1482 concerning

the magnificent ducal library in Urbino, the volumes in which had

been largely either collected or purchased by himself or under his

own direction, says: “In this library all the volumes are of perfect

beauty, all written, by skilled scribes, on parchment and many of

them adorned with exquisite miniatures. The collection contains no

single printed book. The Duke (Frederick) would be ashamed to have a

printed book in his library.”[430] By collectors like Frederick and

manuscript-dealers like Vespasiano, the new art was considered to be

merely a mechanical method of producing inartistic volumes, with which

none but uncultivated people could be satisfied.

For a number of years, therefore, after the work of the first presses,

there were still produced beautiful specimens of manuscripts, more

particularly of Italian and French books of worship, and for this class

of manuscripts the work of the hand illuminators and miniature painters

continued to be utilised. In Germany there are various examples of

books which had been printed, being again produced in written copy, as

for instance, the _Chronicon Urspergense_, of Hroswitha.[431] It was

also the case that for the production of large choir-books the work of

the scribes continued to be useful.

Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote to Gerlach, Abbot of Deutz, a

letter which was printed in 1494 in Mayence, under the title, _De Laude

Scriptorum Manualium_. In this he says:

“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 required 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 labour of love.”[432]

Notwithstanding such criticism on the part of a few scholarly

churchmen, the influence of Rome and of the Church generally, during

the earlier work of the printers, was very largely favourable and had

not a little to do with the support given to the work which might

easily otherwise have been given up for lack of adequate business

return. The Church of Rome felt itself at this time sufficiently secure

in its control of the minds of men to be prepared to utilise to full

advantage all methods for distributing its doctrinal literature, and

to have no dread as to these same means being used for the scattering

of heretical teachings. The popes of the time, largely influenced by

the spirit of the Renaissance, gave a cordial welcome to the revival

of scholarly interests and to the printing-press as an important

means for furthering the general education and the intellectual

development of the community. Their interest was by no means limited

to the distribution of doctrinal works, but in these earlier years of

publishing they welcomed, and to a considerable extent co-operated in,

the production of editions, for general circulation, of the works of

the pagan classics.

Hegel says, in his _Philosophy of History_, that the renewed interest

in the studying of the writings of the ancients found an important

support in the service of the printing-press. He goes on to point out

that the Church felt no anxiety concerning this renewed interest in

pagan literature, and evidently did not imagine that this literature

was introducing into the minds of men a new element of suggestion and

of inquiry.

It may be considered as one of the fortunate circumstances attending

the introduction of the art of printing that the popes of the time were

largely men of liberal education and of intellectual tastes, while one

or two, such as Nicholas V., Julius II., and Leo X., had a very keen

personal interest in literature and were collectors of books.

The fact that Leo X. was a luxury-loving, free-thinking prince rather

than a devoted Christian leader or teacher, may very probably have been

in the end a service for the enlightenment and development of his own

generation and of the generations that were to come. An earnest and

narrow-minded head of the Church could, during the first years of the

sixteenth century, have retarded not a little the development of the

work of producing books for the community at large.

It was a number of years before the dread of the use of the

printing-press for the spread of heretical doctrines and of a

consequent undermining of the authority of the Church assumed such

proportions in the minds of the popes in Rome and with the bishops

elsewhere, as to cause the influence of the Church to be placed against

the interests of the world of literature. As a result of this early

acceptance by the Church of the printing-press as a useful ally and

servant, the first Italian presses were supported by bishops and

cardinals in the work of producing classics for scholarly readers,

while at the other extremity of the Church organisation, and at a

distance of a thousand miles or more from Rome, the Brothers of

Common Life were using the presses in their Brotherhood homes for the

distribution of cheap books among the people.

Berthold von Henneberg, Elector of Mayence, speaks of “The Divine Art

of Printing.”[433] The Carthusian monk, Werner Rolewinck, writes, in

his _Outline History of the World_ (_Fasciculus Temporum_): “The art

of printing which has been discovered in Mayence is the art of arts,

the science of sciences, by means of which it will be possible to place

in the hands of all men treasures of literature and of knowledge which

have heretofore been out of their reach.”

Joh. Rauchler, the first Rector of the Tübingen High School (later the

University of Tübingen), rejoices that through the new art so many

authors can now be brought within the reach of students in Latin,

Greek, and Hebrew, authors who are witnesses for the Christian faith,

and the service of whose writings to the Church and to the world is so

great, that he can but consider “this art as a gift directly from God

himself.”[434] Felix Fabri, Prior of the Dominican monastery in Ulm,

says, in his _Historia Suevorum_, issued in the year 1459, that “no art

that the world has known can be considered so worthy, so useful, so

much to be esteemed, indeed, so divine as that which has now, through

the Grace of God, been discovered in Mayence.”

The first printing work done by the Brothers of Common Life dates

from 1468. They appear to have promptly utilised their scribes as

compositors and their illuminators as designers for the new form in

which their books were produced. Many of the Benedictine monasteries

which had for so many centuries led the way in the preservation and

the multiplication of literature at once associated presses with their

monasteries and had their monks trained in the art of setting type and

of printing sheets.

Among the monastery printing-presses were those of the Carthusian

monastery in Strasburg, the monastery of S. Ulrich and Afra, in

Augsburg, and the Benedictine monasteries in Nuremberg and Rostock.

As a rule, in places where the work of scribes had been active, the

printing-press found a ready acceptance. It was not long, however,

before so great a development in the methods of the printing business

was brought about that it became difficult for the monasteries to carry

on the work effectively, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the

production of books in monasteries had practically ceased.

The favourable relations between the Church and the printers were

checked by the Humanistic movement, which, a generation or more

before the Reformation, began to bring into question the authority

of the Church and the infallibility of papacy. The influence of the

Humanistic teachers was so largely furthered by the co-operation

of the printers that the jealousy and dread of the ecclesiastical

authorities were promptly aroused, and they began to utter fulminations

against the wicked and ignorant men who were using the art of printing

for misleading the community and for the circulation of error.

The ecclesiastics, who had at first favoured the widest possible

circulation of the Scriptures, now contended that much of the heretical

teaching was due to the misunderstanding of the Scriptures on the part

of readers who were acting without the guidance of their spiritual

advisers.

The authorities of the Church now began to take the ground that the

reading of the Scriptures by individuals was not to be permitted,

and that the Bible was to be given to the community only through

the interpretation of the Church. At the same time, the authority

of the Church was exerted to repress, or at least to restrict, the

operations of the printing-press, and to bring printers and publishers

under a close ecclesiastical supervision and censorship. It was

now, however, too late to stand between the printing-press and the

people. Large portions of the community had become accustomed to a

wide circulation of books and to the selection without restriction of

such reading-matter as might be placed within their reach, and this

privilege they were no longer willing to forego.

It was nevertheless true that in certain countries, particularly in

Italy and in France, the censorship of the Church was strong enough

seriously to hamper and interfere with publishing undertakings and to

check the natural development of literary production. Even in Italy,

however, the critical spirit was found to be too strong to be entirely

crushed out, and from Venice, the most important of the Italian

publishing centres, it proved possible to secure for the productions of

the printing-press a circulation that was practically independent of

the censorship of Rome.

The Humanistic movement was, on other grounds, of immediate service for

the printers and publishers, in that it brought about an active demand

for the works of classical writers, a demand which it required the

fullest resources of the earlier printers to supply.

If the invention of Gutenberg had taken shape during the period when

there happened to be no such active intellectual literary interests,

the first printers might easily have found it difficult to secure

business for their presses and the development of the business of book

production would have been seriously hampered. The long series of

controversies which were brought into being by the Reformation, and

the large mass of controversial literature which was the result of

the Reformation, constituted, a generation later, another favourable

influence in securing an assured foundation for the business of the

printers. If it be the case that the work of the leaders of the

Reformation could hardly have been carried on without the aid of the

printing-press, it is also true that at a time when the business of the

early printers was in a very critical and unremunerative condition,

the impetus given to the production of literature, and the increased

eagerness on the part of the common people for literature, formed an

essential factor in making an assured foundation for the business of

the printers and the publishers.

In 1462, on the 28th of October, Archbishop Adolph of Nassau captured

the city of Mayence and gave it over to his soldiers for plunder. The

typesetters and printers, with all other artisans whose work depended

upon the commerce of the city, were driven to flight, and it appeared

for the moment as if the newly instituted printing business had been

crushed out. The result of the scattering of the printers, however, was

the introduction of the new art into a number of other centres where

the influences were favourable for its development.

The typesetters of Mayence, driven from their printing-offices by the

heavy hand of the Church, journeyed throughout the world, carrying

their new knowledge and training and they were able to give to many

communities the means of education and enlightenment through which the

great revolt against the Church was finally instituted. The work of

the printers, checked for the time in Mayence, took shape promptly in

Strasburg, and from there was taken down the Rhine to Cologne, and in

a few years was also in active operation in Basel, Augsburg, Ulm, and

Nuremberg. In 1464, as elsewhere described, German printers carried

their invention into Italy and erected the first Italian printing-press

in Subiaco. And in 1470, also through Germans, the work of the printers

began in Paris.

The shrewd and enterprising merchant Fust, by means of whose capital

Gutenberg had been able to begin his business operations, would

hardly have pressed his suit against his associate, if he had not had

confidence in the value of the invention. As soon as, through the

decision of 1455, he came into possession of the presses, he at once

put these again into operation. He found a practical superintendent

or co-worker in Peter Schöffer. Schöffer was a German by birth, but

had carried on work in Paris as a scribe or writer of higher class

manuscripts, as illuminator, and as a manuscript-dealer. Returning to

Mayence in 1454, he had entered the employ of Gutenberg as type-setter

and proof-reader. Later, having married the daughter of Fust, he was

taken into partnership by his father-in-law, and was able to make a

satisfactory organisation and a wide development for the business of

the printing-office. The first publication issued by Fust & Schöffer

was a psalter printed (in Latin) on parchment, with the great missal

type.

The second work, undertaken, not at the risk of the printers, but at

the cost of two of the Mayence monasteries, was an edition of a great

choir-book. This psalter, or rather _psalterium_, is the first printed

work in which the name of the printer is given and the date of the

publication. It apparently proved possible to secure for this book even

with the very inadequate distributing machinery that was available, a

remunerative sale, as it was printed again in 1490, in 1502, in 1515,

and in 1516.

Among the earlier publications of Fust & Schöffer are the _Rationale

Divinorum Officiorum_ of the Dominican monk Durandus, which was issued

in 1459, the _Codex Constitutionum_ of Pope Clement, issued in 1460,

and the _Bull_ of Emperor Frederic III. against Diether von Isenburg,

printed in 1461. The most beautiful and most important production of

their press was, however, the great Latin Bible issued in 1462, in two

folio volumes, and which is known as the “48 line Bible.”

The work of the printing-office was, as previously stated, stopped by

the sacking of the city, and the two partners appear to have migrated

for the time to Frankfort. In 1464, they were again in Mayence, and

in that year they published the sixth book of the _Decretals_ of Pope

Boniface VIII., and the _De Officiis_ of Cicero. The latter was the

first of the German editions of the classics, and remained a favourite

book with the German printers, being repeatedly reprinted.

In 1453, Fust made a journey to Paris in order to find sale there

for his big Bible. This was four years before the first Paris

printing-press began its work, and it was in connection with this

big Bible that the gossip arose of Fust being able, through compact

with the Devil, to produce an indefinite number of copies of a book.

It could not be understood how in any other way these copies could

be offered so cheaply. The University of Paris was at that date the

most important in Europe, and the influence of the University upon the

cultivation of the city and its close relations with the old book-trade

in manuscripts, had made Paris the most important European centre for

literary production and the place where scholars were in the habit

of looking for their material. It was in Paris, if anywhere, that it

should prove possible to find sale for the Latin Bible, and Fust’s

efforts appear to have met with a prompt success. The first Bible

bearing a date was completed in 1462, and is known as the Mayence

Bible. At the time it was in readiness (in October) nothing could be

done in getting it into the market, as Mayence was being besieged by

Adolph of Nassau. In 1466, Fust is again in Paris with copies of the

second edition of his _De Officiis_, and with other of his publications.

There is still preserved in the city library of Geneva a copy of this

edition of Cicero, which contains the record that it was bought by

Louis de la Vernada, in Paris, in July, 1466, from Fust.[435]

Fust & Schöffer may claim to have been the first printers who

acted also as publishers and booksellers. Notwithstanding the many

difficulties with which they had had to contend, they were able to

offer their books at prices which, to the old dealers in manuscripts,

seemed astounding and which gave some pretext for the charge of magic.

Madden says that a copy of the “48 line Bible” printed on parchment,

could be bought in Paris, in 1470, for 2000 francs, and that the cost

of the same text a few years earlier in manuscript form would have been

five times as great. Bishop John of Aleria, writing in 1467 to Pope

Paul II., says that it is now possible to purchase in Rome for 20

gulden, gold, works which a few years earlier would have cost not less

than 100 gulden, and that other books now selling as low as 4 gulden

would previously have cost not less than 20 gulden. The first results

of the printing-press appear, therefore, to have been a reduction of

about four fifths in the price of work of a scholarly character.

Fust is entitled to the description, not only of the second printer

and of the first publisher, but of the first pirate in printed

books. In 1465, Mentel printed in Strasburg under the title of _De

Arte Prædicatoria_, the fourth book of S. Augustine’s _De Doctrina

Christiana_. The editor states that he had, for the purpose of this

edition, collected manuscript texts in the libraries of Heidelberg,

Speyer, Worms, and Strasburg, and that he had induced Joh. Mentel,

a “master of the art of printing,” to put the volume into a form

available for the general use of clerics.

Fust reprinted this volume in 1466, following the text with precision,

and simply replacing Mentel’s name with his own. This is the first

instance of literary appropriation of which there is any record, after

the beginning of printing.[436]

After the death of Fust, which occurred early in 1467, Schöffer

continued the business with Fust’s sons, and established branches in

Paris and in Angers. His name appears for the first time alone on the

title-page of the _Thomas Aquinas_, published in a folio of 516 pages

in March, 1467. He prints it in full as Petrus Schoiffher de Gernsheim.

In a receipt for 15 gold crowns, paid by the College of Autun for

a copy of this, Schoiffher styles himself _Impressor Librorum_. He

appears to have made sale in Paris not only of his own publications,

but of the books issued by other German printers.

In a copy of the work of Johannus Scotus, printed by Koberger in 1474,

now contained in the library of the Paris Arsenal, appears the entry,

“I, Peter Schöffer, printer from Mayence, acknowledge that I have

received from the worthy Magistrate, Johannus Henrici, of Pisa, three

_scuta_ as the price of this book.”[437] Schöffer seems to have acted

in some measure also as purchasing agent for the University of Paris,

through an associate, Guimier, who was a licensed member of the Paris

guild. The Paris branch of the business was given up a few years later,

and Schöffer devoted his energies to extending his trade in Germany. In

1479, his name appears in the list of the citizens of Frankfort, and

the removal to Frankfort of his publishing headquarters constituted

the first step towards the selection of that city as the centre of

the publishing and bookselling trade of Germany, a position that it

retained for more than a century. Schöffer continued, however, to do

the work of his printing in Mayence.

Some light is thrown upon the extent of the publishing undertakings

carried on at the time by Schöffer with his associate Hancquis, by the

record of a suit brought by the two partners in 1480 against a certain

Bernhard Inkus, of Frankfort. They charged Inkus with having begun

the publication of a considerable series of books, the property right

in which (_Eigentumsrecht_) vested in themselves and in Conrad Henki

(who was a son of Fust). It does not appear from the record of this

trial on what grounds Schöffer and his associates claimed the right to

control these books, or whether the unauthorised issues of which they

complained had been printed by the defendant Inkus or were simply being

offered for sale by him on behalf of other printers.

The case appears to have been referred or possibly appealed to a court

in Basel, and by this court was issued some preliminary injunction

against the continued sale of the books complained of. The record

giving the final decision of the case is, however, missing. The lack

of full details of the suit is the more to be regretted as it appears

to have been the first case after the invention of printing involving,

if not copyright ownership, at least a certain control by contract.

In the same year we find the Magistracy of the City of Frankfort

applying to the Magistracy of the City of Lübeck for the protection

of Schöffer against some illegitimate infringement of Schöffer’s

business rights on the part of the Lübeck citizen Hans Bitz. Here also

is there no record as to the result of the application. The firm also

had dealings with Ulm, as appears from a claim made, in 1481, for the

collection of the moneys due from certain citizens in Ulm--Harscher,

Ruwinger, and Ofener, for books delivered. They sent to Ulm, with

a protection certificate given by Elector Diether of Mayence, a

representative who was empowered to collect the money. There was at

the outset some delay in connection with an alleged informality in his

authorisation, but the Magistracy of Ulm sent back word that as soon as

the requisite authorisation was secured, the collection of the money

would be enforced in due course.

These cases are evidence of a certain organisation of machinery for

the distribution of books and for the management of a publishing

business, within a comparatively brief period after the beginning of

the work of the printing-presses, and they indicate also that the

second firm which entered into the business of printing had succeeded

in establishing such business on fairly assured foundations, and in

carrying on successfully large undertakings. It is to be noted further

that Fust & Schöffer, and other of the earlier German printers, did

their work without the assistance of any patronage, and without even

the advantage of a university connection. The early printers of Italy

would have found it impracticable to carry on their operations without

the assistance of certain wealthy and enterprising noblemen who were

prepared to interest themselves in the new art either from curiosity

or from philanthropy, and as late even as 1495, that is to say nearly

half a century after the beginning of printing, the organisation of

the business of Aldus was dependent upon the favour and services of

certain of his noble friends. In Paris the first printers were helped,

and in part supported, by the money of patrons or of the Crown, and

by the co-operation and influence of the University. In England also

the influence of Oxford was of material importance in securing for the

first printers some assured foundation and support, while the work

of Caxton and his immediate successors in London was also largely

furthered by, if not actually dependent upon, the work or help of noble

and wealthy friends.

In Germany, however, the printing work began, as we have seen, through

the enterprise and ingenuity of a citizen manufacturer who was

supported by the middle class of the community, and who made his first

connections directly with the townspeople. The help of the universities

appears to have been of comparatively smaller importance. It probably

counted for more in Cologne than in any other of the university cities

in which the earlier printers did their work.

In the course of the thirty-six years of his independent business

activity, that is from the death of Fust in 1466 to the time of his

own death, Schöffer printed in all fifty-nine works which bear date

and which have been identified as his. His firm took rank for this

period as by far the most important printing and publishing concern in

existence.

With hardly an exception, the books issued from his press were folios.

They were printed with fifty to sixty lines on the page, and contained

an average of about 300 pages or 150 sheets.

Among the works included in the list are the _Constitutiones_

of Clement V., the _Institutions_ of Justinian, the _Expositio

Sententiarum_ of Thomas Aquinas, the _Epistolæ_ of S. Jerome, the

sixth book of the _Decretals_ of Boniface VIII., the _Decretals_ of

Gregory IX., the _Codex_ of Justinian, and the _Expositio Psalterii_

of Joh. Torquemada. The last named volume had already been printed in

Subiaco and again in Rome under the direct supervision of the author,

who was supplying the funds for carrying on the first printing-office

established in Italy.

After Schöffer’s death in 1502, his son printed an edition of the

_Mercurius Trimegistus_.

I do not find record of the arrangement entered into by Schöffer for

the editing of the texts of the works printed by him. The collection

of manuscripts for use as “copy” for printers, and the collection of

different manuscripts in order to secure the most complete and accurate

texts, must have called for a considerable measure of scholarly and of

general literary knowledge.