Scholarship, Commerce, Religion

Ian Maclean

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068728
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

A decade ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Roderick Conway Morris claimed that "almost everything that was going to happen in book publishing—from pocket books, instant books and pirated books, to the concept of author's copyright, company mergers, and remainders—occurred during the early days of printing." Ian Maclean's colorful survey of the flourishing learned book trade of the late Renaissance brings this assertion to life.The story he tells covers most of Europe, with Frankfurt and its Fair as the hub of intellectual exchanges among scholars and of commercial dealings among publishers. The three major religious confessions jostled for position there, and this rivalry affected nearly all aspects of learning. Few scholars were exempt from religious or financial pressures. Maclean's chosen example is the literary agent and representative of international Calvinism, Melchior Goldast von Haiminsfeld, whose activities included opportunistic involvement in the political disputes of the day. Maclean surveys the predicament of underfunded authors, the activities of greedy publishing entrepreneurs, the fitful interventions of regimes of censorship and licensing, and the struggles faced by sellers and buyers to achieve their ends in an increasingly overheated market.The story ends with an account of the dramatic decline of the scholarly book trade in the 1620s, and the connivance of humanist scholars in the values of the commercial world through which they aspired to international recognition. Their fate invites comparison with today's writers of learned books, as they too come to terms with new technologies and changing academic environments.

CHAPTER ONE

Setting the Scene

It may seem somewhat foolhardy to set out to chart on a European scale the impact of commercial practices on the learned book market over more than half a century of economic instability and religious turmoil. There are more focussed ways the subject might be approached, by restricting it to a shorter period of time, a given country, a single discipline or publisher. Indeed, there are many excellent monographs of this kind in existence, to which the lecture series on which this study is based owed a great deal. It is in no small measure because of them that I have felt able to undertake this broader survey, in which I hope to draw together the threads of many years of interest in the learned book and its markets, and offer a general understanding of its operation from which the particularity of any one case can be measured.1 The Latin book trade is much more a feature of the continental than of the English book world in the late Renaissance, and has attracted more attention in European historical writing than in Anglo-American scholarship, which can sometimes give the impression that England was in the forefront of various developments in publishing: I do not believe this to be the case in the period I have chosen.2

The material I shall be dealing with is not easily susceptible of neat quantification or statistical analysis, although some general impressions can be formed about the size of the market and its modes of operation.3 A sense of the learned book market can be more easily conveyed through case-studies, of which Chapter 2 is a sustained example. I have published elsewhere a collection of fourteen such studies, and shall be drawing, on occasion, on the fruits of this research.4 The already published cases, and the ones I shall add here, will necessarily be drawn from the ranks of both the famous and the obscure, across the whole range of scholarly disciplines, in all the major continental publishing centres. I shall do my best not to turn this into a bewildering procession of names, book titles, and places.

It might be argued that to single out Latin books in a publisher’s list is to ignore the whole field of publishing (including books in the vernacular) which sustained his commercial enterprise. The argument has some merit, in that it points to the common practice of diversifying output; in some of the cases I shall consider (notably Sigmund Feyerabend, Giovanni Battista Ciotti, and Johann Theobald Schönwetter), it is clearly true. But there are many publishers—Johannes Oporinus, Johannes Froben, Nicolaus Episcopius, Heinrich Petri and his heirs in Basel, the Wechel presses, Nicolas Bassée, Zacharias Palthen and his heirs in Frankfurt and Hanau, Jacob Stoer, Eustache Vignon and the Crespin presses in Geneva, Jerôme Drouart in Paris, Christophe Plantin and his heirs in Antwerp, to name but a few—who specialised in scholarly publication of various kinds, and whose enterprises are best understood in that context. In most cases, not all of their output took the form of learned monographs or editions; it included what now would be classed as textbooks.5 Whether the latter subsidised the former will be one of the questions I shall ask in the course of this study.

There is one other preliminary remark I should like to make about the period on which I have chosen to concentrate and its relationship to earlier printing and publishing. In a review in the Times Literary Supplement which appeared a decade ago, Roderick Conway Morris claimed that “almost everything that was going to happen in book publishing—from pocket books, instant books and pirated books, to the concept of author’s copyright, company mergers, and remainders—occurred during the early days of printing, the subsequent centuries offering but variations upon a theme.”6 This seems to me to be broadly true; that does not mean, however, that the relationship between scholarship, commerce, and their politico-economic context did not evolve. The claim has prompted me here to offer two initial contexts for the study which follows: the early years of the age of print, and the religious developments which culminated in a confessionalised Europe.

The Market before the Age of Confessions (1480–1560)

The argument for continuity from the scribal age to that of print has been strongly made by Rosamund McKitterick, who asserts that “contrary to the assumption that there was a total revolution in the dissemination of ideas as a consequence of the advent of printing, it needs to be stressed that the printers were able to exploit well-established modes for the dissemination of ideas, habits of book ownership, markets and patterns of distribution in the book trade.”7 In my view, this claim underestimates the radical change in the dissemination of ideas through the move from the commissioning of single manuscripts from an exemplar to the simultaneous production of multiple copies for which purchasers had to be found. It is certainly true that scribal culture was not extinguished by printing, but continued to play a part in the transmission of knowledge. By operating through commission (as a sort of “printing on demand”), it could easily be regulated by the universities where the largest scriptoria were situated, some of which forbade the selling of books to foreigners.8 This may help explain the small initial uptake of the new technology in universities.9 But if there was speculative production of manuscripts in the same way as there was speculative production of printed books, it must have been confined to very few scriptoria.10 Printing brought benefits such as more secure dissemination of knowledge and the possibility of unlimited export to purchasers beyond the local or regional levels. The commercial application of the new technology changed the sequence text–scribe–reader to one which led from author or editor to printer and purchaser. It thus gave a new role to the person promoting copy, and created a market of unknown size, making all printing ventures acts of speculation. This provoked in turn a series of commercial crises in the book market, arising from false assumptions about uptake or market saturation, which in turn led to the development of syndicates to facilitate risk-sharing.11 The resulting instability did not settle down until the 1520s. The impact of the new means of the transmission of knowledge generated a growing sense of the dangers of printing, not least in the Roman Church, which realised that it could lead to small or isolated minorities communicating doctrines and opinions to a broad public, contrary to the interests of the church or ruling elites.12 Whence the guarded reception of printing in bulls of 1487 and 1501, and at the Lateran Council of 1513, and the institution and development of regimes of censorship by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities.13

The towns which by 1500 became major centres of the learned book trade shared a number of features, but, surprisingly, the presence of a local university was not one of these. The cities of Basel, Paris, Leipzig, and Cologne each harboured a university, but the following very active centres of printing did not: Lyon, Venice, Nuremberg, Strasbourg until 1556, Frankfurt, and Antwerp after 1564.14 Nor was the existence of a fair a common factor, although most of these places entertained foreign merchants; but it is clear that cities with fairs at which books were offered as merchandise did eventually see the establishment and expansion of a resident printing trade with an international dimension. If one takes the gross figures of titles published for Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg as indicative of local activity, the following comparison emerges:

1530–1535: Frankfurt 117; Leipzig 269; Strasbourg 355

1580–1585: Frankfurt 316; Leipzig 171; Strasbourg 98

1611–1615: Frankfurt 1390; Leipzig 1294; Strasbourg 289

Even though this is a very crude measurement, it indicates the rise of Frankfurt and its rivalry with Leipzig, and the relative decline of Strasbourg, which none the less remains a very important centre of printing for the international market.15

Nearly all early printing centres had easy access to paper mills, a vibrant intellectual life, a reservoir of artisanal talent, a supply of credit, a capacity to deal with money exchange and credit notes, and a sophisticated market organization, needed for efficient distribution (by 1500, a book could be obtained within a few months almost anywhere in Europe).16 All these centres sat on trade routes, and operated internationally: the Alantsee brothers, for example, were Viennese publishers who used the printers and markets of Basel, Strasbourg, and Hagenau, and even extended their activity as far as Venice, which was by far the most productive centre of printing in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.17 Even where scholarly books were not produced in great numbers, such as at Augsburg, a town with extensive trading connections could become an important centre of distribution.18 The European trade routes placed some countries at the periphery: these included England and Iberia, even though Lisbon and Barcelona were very important trade centres for different products.19

Printing could have become a trade secret regulated by a guild; that is what John of Speyer aspired to when he obtained a privilege giving him the sole right to exercise the new technology in Venice in 1469. But his attempt at securing a monopoly did not succeed, and printing became an “ars liberalis” both in Italy and elsewhere. So early printers and publishers inserted themselves into the existing guild structures of the various cities in which the new technology implanted itself. Initially, very few new specialised guilds or confraternities were established, and as Erasmus sarcastically pointed out, there was no clear apprenticeship structure: it was easier to become a printer than a baker.20 The dominance of the towns I have mentioned went hand in hand with the dominance of countries. According to Andrew Pettegree’s calculations, over 90 percent of the production of scholarly books of the sixteenth century can be attributed to France (19 percent), Italy (27 percent), Germany (40 percent), Switzerland (5.3 percent), and the Netherlands (7.7 percent). England, Iberia, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe constitute a periphery; only Spain among this latter group produced a significant number of learned books for the local market, but they failed to achieve much in the way of an international sale.21

Publishing was a trade that embodied the new conception of mercantilism. It brought together a number of separate proto-industrial processes (paper-making, printing, binding) and was characterised by “putting out”—that is, the separation of artisans into independent contributors to the completed end product.22 Two models of marketing the product emerged: the Hansa model and the branch system, which I shall investigate in detail in Chapter 6 (pages 175–176). Profit in this world did not necessarily mean surplus profit or mercantile expansion. While it was possible to become rich and to accumulate goods, it is also true that many publishers harboured no more than the ambition to stay in business and to survive crises caused by the many external dangers (war, plague, economic downturns) and internal ones (saturated markets, unredeemed credit, problems of cash flow, persistent debt). To talk, therefore, in terms of supply-side economics, with its emphasis on increasing incentive to produce, or sophisticated business strategies involving capital formation, or even business plans which provide clear guidance as to priorities and economic choices, seems anachronistic. Equally, diversification as a way of spreading risk, or calculation of investment by discounting back to the present the future expected profits of the undertaking, are concepts which do not capture very well the nature of the enterprise, although a crude, unquantified awareness of both factors can be seen at work in the activities of publishers. But they did see the need to identify and attract purchasers for their speculatively produced multiple copies, and this led to changes in the presentation of scholarly and other works, such as modes of distribution, and the institution of the title page, which acted as an advertisement for the contents of a book. These and other factors constitute a “field” of early modern scholarly publication—a field in the Bourdieusian sense (see below, pages 240–241)—that had a logic or rationality which was the outcome of the set of forces and pressures which shaped the activities of those who took part in the field: authors, publishers, booksellers, purchasers.

Two new elements had a massive influence on early printing: humanism and reformation. Much had been achieved by the first generations of humanists in the fifteenth centuries in recovering the world and literature of antiquity, and spreading the knowledge of new languages, notably Greek. Their activities in Italy were much aided by the presence of collections of important manuscripts of classical texts.23 Printing was to be of inestimable value to their efforts. Scholars such as Erasmus praised the new technology as an “almost divine” invention, exposing the ignorance of the scholastic world and offering the possibility of the dissemination of accurate texts to a nascent republic of letters.24 Such scholars went further than just supplying copy: they suggested books for publication, wrote prefaces to them, added celebratory verses about the new learning written by and to their colleagues and friends, and engaged in proof-reading and editorial work on a vast scale. Of all these activities, the most important was perhaps the role of corrector, who was part of the team working in the printing shop, and whose presence guaranteed the scholarly integrity of the text.

Religious reformers went further than this, and saw the new technology as a providential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Conventions of Transcription
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Setting the Scene
• 2. In Medias Res: A Literary Agent in Frankfurt, 1606–1615
• 3. Authors, Fields, and Genres
• 4. Labor, Impensa, Emolumentum: The Publisher of Learned Books
• 5. Controlling the Market: Temporal and Ecclesiastical Authorities
• 6. Sellers and Purchasers: Markets, Distribution, and Collection-Building
• 7. The Rise and Fall of the Learned Book Market, 1560–1630
• 8. Postscript: Then and Now
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index