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Humanism and Early Printing
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Martin Davies |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Many European scholars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were devoted to the rediscovery and study of ancient Greek and Roman texts and the interpretation of their ideas and values for the Renaissance world. These and related practices later came to be described as humanism. Martin Davies explains the impact that the invention of movable-type printing, by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz in the 1450s, had on the development of humanism. |
 s it happened, the invention of printing had no connection with humanism of any sort (if we except the fact, incidental and apparently without immediate consequence for Italy, that the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, is our sole witness to the Gutenberg Bible in the making, in late 1454). But the ready adaptation of the humanists, as of all literate classes of Italian society, to the innovation from the north, and the overall preeminence of Italy itself in early printing, are marks of the receptivity which long exposure to an active trade in books had brought. |
The cartolaio (stationer) remained in the centre of the picture even with the arrival of print: he could organize paper stocks, find the large capital sums needed to support the initial investment in men and materials while sales were awaited, supply workers for the hand-finishing of books and above all give access to networks of distribution which were, and are, essential for any successful publishing enterprise. |
Some ten years after Enea Silvio saw the first fruits of Gutenberg's invention (and the technique was at first a closely confined secret), printing arrived in Italy with two German clerics. Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz were part of the diaspora from Gutenberg's city of Mainz consequent upon political upheavals there in 1462. They set up their presses in the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco, some fifty miles east of Rome, where the first books were issued in 1464-5. |
Why they came to Subiaco is not known, but it is reasonable to suspect the involvement of the German churchman and philosopher Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus), who had long been familiar to humanist circles in Italy. By the account of Giovanni Andrea Bussi, who had been his secretary from 1458 until the cardinal's death in 1464, Cusanus had always desired that the new method of multiplying books should be brought from Germany to Rome. |
Cusanus may well have seen in this "sacred art" a means of disseminating more accurate and uniform texts for divine service, a cause we know to have been close to his heart. But of course there was no need to restrict one's output to any particular class of book--all early printers, naturally with individual bias and frequent miscalculation, printed whatever they thought would find a market. |
Sweynheym and Pannartz did not in fact print service books, nor indeed any law or scholastic theology, staples of early production elsewhere. The character of their press was from the outset resolutely humanistic. This was signalled both by the texts they chose to print (classical and patristic, for the most part) and the form in which they printed them. The books appeared at first in a rather rough approximation to humanistic script, subsequently improved to something like the modern roman typeface when the printers moved to Rome in 1467. |
The two Germans also put themselves to the trouble of having two successive founts of Greek type cast in order to give the proper look to Latin books incorporating Greek quotations. Just as Gutenberg had modelled his layout and types on current gothic manuscript models (having no other), so Sweynheym and Pannartz attempted to reproduce the sort of books acceptable to cultivated Italian taste. This naturally also involved the hand-finishing which Italian buyers expected--book and chapter headings written in red, hand-painted initials at major divisions of the text, vine-stem borders on the first page and so on--often carried out in the printer's office. The humanist accent of the production of Sweynheym and Pannartz became more pronounced when they engaged Cusanus's old secretary to be their press editor. Bussi's prefaces, in one of which he speaks of Cusanus's hopes for printing, form one of the most fascinating sets of documents of early printing. |
The impact of print
What had changed and how was the change perceived? We have an almost immediate reaction to the impact of print from the pen of one of the leading humanists of the day. Leon Battista Alberti, papal secretary and in the modern phrase "universal man," tells us in his autobiography that he was in the habit of enquiring of all sorts of scholars, artists and craftsmen about their professional secrets. |
In the preface to another work, De cifris ("On Secret Writing"), written about 1466, he reports a most interesting conversation with another papal courtier which has every appearance of verisimilitude. Sitting in the Vatican gardens, they fell to talking about the remarkable German invention which enabled as few as 3 men to make "by impression of characters" 200 copies of a given book in 100 days. This sort of calculus rapidly became a commonplace in early notices on printing, and we can suppose it is how Sweynheym and Pannartz introduced themselves and their work. |
The vast change of scale inherent in the new technology obviously had very great consequences for the economic operation of the book trade. But Italian scholars were not slow to see the advent of the press in terms of what it could do for their own works and reading matter. A humanist such as Francesco Filelfo, who had spent much of his long life copying out texts by hand, rejoiced in the new availability of books and sought to buy the earliest products of the Roman press. |
From the point of view of the consumer, greatly increased numbers of books meant not only easier access to the texts in demand--many an earlier humanist letter is devoted to finding out just where a text might be had for copying--but also cheaper access. As Bussi proclaimed in his prefaces, learned works were now within the reach of poor students for the first time. He sent out priced lists of the books printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz to correspondents by way of advertising; one of them finished in the hands of the Nuremberg humanist and physician Hartmann Schedel, an indication of the reach of the international book trade. Thanks to his good connections, with the Medici in particular, the Florentine scholar Angelo Poliziano had access to priceless manuscript treasures from the past; but when he wanted a text on which to enter collations, or simply to read, he would buy a printed book--convenient, legible and cheap. |
The imposition of uniformity
Apart from considerations of price, a printed edition had the additional merit (generally speaking) of uniformity throughout all its copies, many hundreds at a time, which encouraged precise and systematic reference in a way not possible with manuscripts. In this way the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro could key his entire series of textual corrections of the Elder Pliny, made in the early 1490s, to the 1472 Venice edition of the Natural History. |
Standardization of reference, and ease of actually finding one's way around a text with printed headlines, chapter sections, foliation and eventually pagination, were important advances for scholarship. None of these devices was unknown to the manuscript world, but in the nature of the case they were sporadic, inconsistent and individual in their application. |
Standardization of the texts themselves was another important consequence of print. Outside very circumscribed situations, such as official textbooks of the major universities, it was impossible for central authorities to control the dissemination of accurate texts in the Middle Ages. Print gave texts fixity, for good or ill. The process of comparing manuscripts of a given work tended to result in a conflation of two or more streams of textual tradition which then became the intellectual property of an individual or small circle. With the appearance of printed books a de facto standard was set up to which scholars and students everywhere could bring correction or commentary. This was not so much by design as the outcome of ordinary human sloth. It was very much easier to reprint an existing edition than to set one up afresh from a manuscript, if only because the high cost of paper made accurate calculation of the length of a book a matter of vital concern to printers. |
The popular classical and patristic texts therefore tended to consolidate, not without exceptions or editorial interventions, into a vulgate text or textus receptus, received, that is, by the community of scholars at large. It was still possible for distinct strands of text to descend in parallel series of editions, but this is not generally the case, or not for very long, for works in which humanists took an interest. It is also true that many an early edition, or editor, proclaims a thorough revision of the text in hand which investigation shows to be at best wishful thinking, at worst imposture. |
This power of the press to impose a measure of uniformity was felt from the beginning to be double-edged. The hasty correction which a hard-pressed editor such as Giovanni Andrea Bussi was obliged to carry out, very often on the first manuscript that came to hand, permitted corrupt texts to be put into wide circulation. Even worse, an already corrupt text could become the vehicle of wilful emendation on the part of the editor. It was precisely this that provoked another papal curialist, Niccolò Perotti, Archbishop of Siponto, to attack Bussi's editing as early as 1471 and to call for centralized overseeing of texts issued at Rome. He says that he had thought the advent of printing was an inestimable boon to mankind until he set eyes on Bussi's 1470 edition of Pliny and realized that men of slight learning were now in a position to publish whatever they liked in hundreds of copies, without any sort of editorial responsibility or control. He proposes as a remedy that the pope should appoint a competent scholar (he thinks of himself) to supervise texts printed at Rome. |
Perotti himself, when Bussi ceased working for Sweynheym and Pannartz to become the papal librarian, got the chance to turn his hand to preparing editions for the same firm in 1473: his own work found no kindlier reception with a number of fellow humanists than Bussi's had with him. His Utopian scheme for control of the press came to nothing, but it did point up a troublesome aspect of the new invention. There were voices raised on the other side. Bussi saw his task as getting the material into print, and then correction of outstanding difficulties could follow as a sort of communal enterprise. Years later, in the Greek Theocritus of 1496, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius took a similar complacent (or resigned) line, to the effect that something is better than nothing, and a text once printed can at least find many correctors where a manuscript can only receive occasional and individual emendation. This, of course, is true in the long run. |
By the time of Aldus many humanists had long been closely associated with the press, as authors, editors and even printers (like Aldus himself, Felice Feliciano at Pojano, Bonaccorso da Pisa and Alessandro Minuziano at Milan). When in the late 1440s Filelfo had wanted to distribute fine copies of his Satires, he had had to organize a number of scribes to write out each manuscript. To have his translation of Xenophon's Cyropaedia attain wide circulation in 1476 he had only to hand a single manuscript--of course, corrected by the author--to the printer. |
The scholars who came to hold university posts as professors of rhetoric--Domizio Calderini at Rome, Giorgio Merula at Venice, Filippo Beroaldo at Bologna and then Paris--seem to have encountered no difficulty in finding publishing outlets for their own writings (Poliziano had regular printers of his works on both sides of the Apennines, at Florence and Bologna) and for the classics upon which they commented. |
There was a steady demand for the staple schoolroom authors of antiquity, though some firms, notably Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome and the first Venetian printers, suffered by over-estimating the rate at which the market could take up their products in this line. Many of these editions, perhaps most, came equipped with authoritative humanist commentary, the format soon falling into a small number of standard designs derived from manuscript models. And even if there was no commentary, there was still apt to be room for letters, poems, author's lives--small humanist adornments which gave employment to authors and pleasure to readers. Nearly 200 editions of Virgil and over 300 editions of Cicero in the fifteenth century alone, in an average print run of perhaps 500 copies, will give an idea of the scale of production and of the opportunities which print opened up. |
Reports of the death of the manuscript in the Renaissance have been greatly exaggerated, as are reports of the death of the book in our own. There are probably as many manuscripts of the second half of the fifteenth century as of the first, and overall the (extant) production of that century outweighs in numbers all previous centuries put together. From the point of view of the humanist scholar, there were always works (if only one's own) which were either not available in print or not obtainable when they were: there are hundreds of manuscripts of the period copied from printed editions, and texts in Greek were very uncommon in print before the end of the century. Necessarily, one still relied on hand-copying. |
This story is an extract from pages 53-58 of "Humanism in script and print in the fifteenth century," by Martin Davies, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright Cambridge University Press, 1996. |
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