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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Major transformations in society are always accompanied by parallel transformations in systems of social communication what we call the media. In this book, historian Frédéric Barbier provides an important new economic, political and social analysis of the first great 'media revolution' in the West: Gutenberg�s invention of the printing press in the mid fifteenth century. In great detail and with a wealth of historical evidence, Barbier charts the developments in manuscript culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and shows how the steadily increasing need for written documents initiated the processes of change which culminated with Gutenberg. The fifteenth century is presented as the 'age of start-ups' when investment and research into technologies that were new at the time, including the printing press, flourished.
Tracing the developments through the sixteenth century, Barbier analyses the principal features of this first media revolution: the growth of technology, the organization of the modern literary sector, the development of surveillance and censorship and the invention of the process of 'mediatization'. He offers a rich variety of examples from cities all over Europe, as well as looking at the evolution of print media in China and Korea.
This insightful re-interpretation of the Gutenberg revolution also looks beyond the specific historical context to draw connections between the advent of print in the Rhine Valley (�paper valley�) and our own modern digital revolution. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern history, of literature and the media, and will appeal to anyone interested in what remains one of the greatest cultural revolutions of all time.
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Foreword
Notes
Abbreviations
The Media and Change
Other Media Revolutions
The Carolingian Reformation
Industrial Revolution and Economy of the Sign
Notes
Part I: Gutenberg before Gutenberg
1: The Preconditions for a New Economy of the Media
The Key Space of Modernity: The Town
The Market in Education
The Emergence of the Political
Notes
2: The Economy of the Book
Manuscript Production
Change: The Contents
Change: The Objects and Practices
Notes
3: The Birth of the Market
The Market and its Regulation
The Religious Paradigm, or the Emergence of the Masses
Writing: Work and the Professions
Notes
Part II: The Age of Start-ups
4: The Development and Logics of Innovation
Paper and Papermaking
Xylography
Punches, Forms and Moulds
Notes
5: Gutenberg and the Invention of Printing
Historical Portrait of a City
Strasbourg
The Return to Mainz
Notes
6: Innovation
Techniques: Process Innovation
Practices
The Society of the Workshops
The Invention of the Graphosphere
Notes
Part III: The First Media Revolution
7: Printing Conquers the World
The Spread of the Innovation
Ranking the Cities
Conjunctures and Specializations: The Market and Innovation
Notes
8: The Nature of Text
The Book System
The Meaning of the Text
The ‘Book-Machine’
Notes
9: The Media Explosion
A New Paradigm: Production and Reproduction
The Reformation and Printing
Regulation: Imposing Order on Books
Printing and Governments
Notes
Conclusion
Chronologies
Semiology and Virtuality
Product and Market
Gutenberg's Europe
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Table 1.1 Large towns in the Middle Ages
Table 1.2 Urban population and rate of urbanization in Europe, 1300–1500
Table 2.1 Production of manuscripts in Germany, eighth–fifteenth centuries
Table 3.1 Book artisans in London in the fifteenth century
Table 7.1 Printed production (number of titles) in Mainz and Speyer in the fifteenth century
Table 7.2 The main printing towns in Europe (until 1470)
Table 7.3 The twenty largest towns in Europe for printed production, 1495–1499
Table 7.4 Evolution of printed production by major regions (number of titles)
Table 7.5 Editions of Books of Hours (number of titles)
Table 7.6 Production of incunabula (number of editions)
Table 7.7 Production of incunabula: number of editions before 1481
Table 7.8 Production of incunabula (number of editions), 1481–1500
Table 7.9 Number of translations printed in the fifteenth century (number of titles)
List of Illustrations
Figure 4.1 The aesthetic of the ‘letters with secants’ was extremely successful, and they were used not only in calligraphy but also in the decorative elements of some remarkable buildings. Cistercian abbey of Alcobaça, Portugal.
Figure 5.1 Strasbourg (in Latin,
Argentina
), a Free Imperial City and true capital of the valley of the middle Rhine, received Gutenberg when he was forced to leave Mainz; it is very likely, therefore, that it was here that printing was definitively perfected. This view of the city, taken from the
Chronicle of Nuremberg
of Hartmann Schedel (Nuremberg, Anton Koberger, 1493), is remarkable for the modernity of its page layout: note the printed foliation and running head, also the spire of the Cathedral as if shooting up from the illustration in the inside margin of the text. Municipal Library of Valenciennes.
Figure 5.2 The first printers mainly financed themselves by ‘jobbing printing’, for which the model was provided by letters of indulgences. These were pre-printed formularies, sometimes run off by the thousand, which only needed the handwritten addition of the name of the beneficiary. The letter shown is an indulgence of the Bishop of Tournai dated 1500. The relatively commonplace nature of these minor items explains their poor survival rate. Municipal Library of Valenciennes.
Figure 5.3 The ‘first great European book’ is the
42-line Bible
, which emerged from the presses of Gutenberg in Mainz in 1455. The impression is in two columns, abbreviated characters are relatively numerous and the decoration of the ornamented letters was still done manually. The copy shown here is from the ancient and very rich library of the Benedictines of St Bertin, near Saint-Omer. Library of Saint-Omer.
Figure 6.1 The first typographic workshop known directly is that of Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, successors to Gutenberg in Mainz: explicit printed in red in the Latin
City of God
, published by Peter Schoeffer in 1473, with a note of the date (
anno LXXIII
) and a xylographed typographic mark (the two shields hanging from a branch). Municipal Library of Valenciennes.
Figure 6.2 The first book printed outside Germany, the
De Oratore
of Cicero, was produced by Sweynheym and Pannartz in Subiaco in 1465. The impression is in Roman characters and the page layout illustrates the humanist doctrine of ‘the text alone’, without additions or commentary. It is a book intended for instruction, as shown by the wide margins reserved for the reader's handwritten notes. National Széchényi Library, Budapest.
Figure 6.3 The aesthetic of the
Boethius
printed in Lyon by Jean de Vingle for Etienne Gaynard in 1499 was the very opposite of the example shown in figure 6.2: note the Gothic characters, but above all the combination, on the same page, of the text itself (in larger letters and in the centre of the page) and the commentaries of St Augustine and of Josse Bade in the form of marginal gloss. The volume has been rubricated by hand. Municipal Library of Valenciennes.
Figure 7.1 The
Histories
of Herodotus, in the Latin translation of Laurent Valla, published in 1494 in Venice by Johannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis, of Forlivio. The page layout is that of the Italian Renaissance, with a magnificent border on a black background. Beginning the volume is a xylographed illustration: a servant crowns the author as he writes (note the depiction of the
studiolo
). National Széchényi Library, Budapest.
Figure 7.2 The production of small and beautifully illustrated Books of Hours was a speciality of Parisian printers and booksellers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Shown here are the
Hours for the Use of Rome
, printed by Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre in 1498. The central engraving (the
Adoration of the Shepherds
) still has an architectural frame of Gothic inspiration (note the French captions), the margins are decorated by combinations of small woodblocks, sometimes with a phylactery (the Delphic Sybil in the lower right-hand corner), the impression was done on vellum and the painted decoration is manuscript. Municipal Library of Valenciennes.
Figure 7.3 A very rare example of a printed incunabulum in glagolitic, this missal was printed in red and black at Zengg (Croatia) in 1494. The canon Blacć Baromicć oversaw the printing, for which the special fonts had been ordered from Venice. National Széchényi Library, Budapest.
Figure 7.4 The
Letters
(
Epistolae
) of Marsilius Ficinus, printed in Venice in 1495, is a model example of the Italian Renaissance, with a first page within a spectacular archaizing engraved border. The work is dedicated to Giuliano de Medici. Municipal Library of Tours.
Figure 7.5
The Ship of Fools
, written by the Strasbourg physician Sebastian Brant, was one of the first success stories of the book trade: first published in German (
das Narrenschiff
) in Basel, it was next translated into Latin (
Stultifera navis
) and French, then into other vernacular languages. It consisted of a collection of short moral pieces describing the human condition, each illustrated by a xylograph. The series begins with the celebrated ‘Bibliomaniac’, the fool who collected books that he never did anything but dust: ‘I open the dance of fools/Because all around me/I accumulate the books/That I do not understand/And that I never read’. The proliferation of books thanks to printing posed in new terms the question of the justification of reading, hence also the question of censorship.
Figure 8.1
The Chronicle of Nuremberg
begins with an index (
Tabula
) of the subjects addressed in the book, here arranged in alphabetical order: note the elegant page layout, in two columns, with a painted initial for each letter (the initial A has not been added) and letters of larger size for the sub-classifications (A, Ad, Af, Ag, etc.). The references are to the different leaves. At the beginning of the index, a few lines of text describe its use. With printing, the book became a machine with an apparatus that facilitated its use: the
Chronicle
shows how human memory was now externalized, the index enabling readers to find the passage they wanted quickly. Municipal Library of Valenciennes.
Figure 9.1
The Placards against the Mass
, in 1534, constituted one of the very first examples of the process of mediatization. The publicity given to the text led Francis I to take drastic action, to the extent of briefly prohibiting printing anywhere in the kingdom. Museum of Printing, Lyon.
Figure 9.2 With the Zurich physician Conrad Gesner, we enter the virtual world: the printed book, even more the collection of books (the library), constituted an immensely powerful means of knowing and mastering the real world. Gesner, author of the first universal bibliography (
Bibliotheca bibliographica universalis
), also embarked on an inventory of the physical world with his
Historia animalium
(Zurich, 1551). Municipal Library of Valenciennes.
List of Maps
Map 7.1 The spread of printing in Europe, 1452–1470
Map 7.2 The twenty main centres of printing between 1495 and 1499 (by number of titles, not including placards and anopisthographic leaflets)
Map 7.3 Towns with at least one printing workshop between 1452 and 1501
Map 7.4 Workshops active in 1500
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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CHAPTER 1
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Dedication
to Henri-Jean Martin
Copyright page
First published in French as L'Europe de Gutenberg. Le livre et l'invention de la modernité occidentale (XIIIe-XVIe siècle), (c) Éditions Belin, 2006
This English edition (c) Polity Press, 2017
Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d'un programme d'aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien de la Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux États Unis, service de l'ambassade de France aux EU. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux États Unis, a department of the French Embassy in the United States.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7257-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7258-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barbier, Frederic, author.
Title: Gutenberg's Europe : the book and the invention of Western modernity / Frederic Barbier.
Other titles: Europe de Gutenberg. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016013294 (print) | LCCN 2016041373 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745672571 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745672588 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509509928 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509509935 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Printing–History–Origin and antecedents. | Books–History. | Gutenberg, Johann, 1397?-1468. | Europe–Civilization. | BISAC: HISTORY / Social History.
Classification: LCC Z126 .B36513 2016 (print) | LCC Z126 (ebook) | DDC 686.1092–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013294
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Foreword
I hope in this book, by a discussion of the very first media revolution, that of Gutenberg in the mid fifteenth century, to offer some insights into the media revolution of the early twenty-first century. It is an essay, not an in-depth study or a scholarly work on the invention of printing – a subject on which a formidable bibliography already exists. It will ask how Western civilizations passed from one communication system (oral and manuscript) to another (printing); how this technological innovation developed and what were its consequences; and how the change in the dominant media influenced not only social structure as a whole, but a number of abstract categories and ways of thought. As a revolution of equal if not greater significance takes place before our eyes, it is important to be able to identify how the changes that accompanied phenomena of the same order came about in the past.
I have chosen not to encumber my book with a bibliography other than that provided by the notes, which refer only to material I have directly and regularly drawn on for this work. A supplementary and much more extensive bibliography on the history of the book may be found on the website of the Centre de recherche en histoire du livre,1 which includes a complementary iconography specially prepared for this volume. Some of my notes refer to other relevant websites, in particular those of an iconographical nature.
I would like to thank all the colleagues and friends with whom I have discussed the themes developed in this book; and in particular to record my gratitude to the librarians and archivists whose books and records I have consulted over the years, sometimes importunately, in France and in other European countries: Mmes et MM. Jesus Alturo (Barcelona), Pierre Aquilon (Tours), Michella Bussotti (Peking), Max Engammare (Geneva), Sabine Juratic (Paris), Jean-Dominique Mellot (Paris), Matthias Middell (Leipzig), István Monok (Budapest), Philippe Nieto (Paris), Dominique Varry (Lyon) and Jean Vezin (Paris). I am grateful also to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine for making it possible for me to carry out my research and bring my project to fruition.2 Lastly, I warmly thank the members of my seminar on the ‘History and civilization of the book’ at the École pratique des hautes études,3 where a number of the arguments developed below were first presented for discussion.
Notes
1.
<http://www.enssib.fr>, then follow the book marks.
2.
<http://www.ihmc.ens.fr/>.
3.
<http://www.ephe.sorbonne.fr/enseignements/4livre.htm>.
Abbreviations
The Media and Change
I show neither sense nor reason, I am foolish indeed to take pride in a multitude of books. I am always wishing for and dreaming of new books, the substance of which I cannot grasp and of which I comprehend nothing…my house is decked out with books, I am content to see them often open without understanding anything inside them…
Sebastian Brant (1498)
Other Media Revolutions
As telecommunications and computing have spread into every aspect of life, the twenty-first century has experienced a spectacular ‘media revolution’. For the historian, however, it is not the first. Other periods have also been marked by far-reaching changes in their systems of social communication. The two crucial periods with regard to written communication were the fifteenth century, with the invention of printing (typography with movable characters), and the nineteenth century, with the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the book and the periodical press, and the invention of the mass book trade.1 In both cases, the system of communication was totally transformed and contemporaries felt they were living in a time of radical change, giving access to a higher level in the scale of civilizations. The humanists of the sixteenth century looked with such disdain on the medieval tradition of thought that the concept of the Middle Ages, with all its negative connotations, seems today to have been their ‘invention’. At the end of the eighteenth century, Condorcet in his turn would present the progress and diffusion of the Enlightenment through the printed word as taking the human race to a new stage in its history, that of triumphant rationality, hence universal happiness. Such utopian discourse is not unique to the revolutions of the past – it has been revived in our own day, from the Rapport Nora-Minc commissioned by President Giscard d'Estaing in 1978 (translated into English as The Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France, MIT Press, 1980) to the theoreticians of the media revolution: the technical progress of today, we are told, creates the potential for a much-expanded and universally shared knowledge, together with new ways of operating, characterized by the instantaneous circulation and processing of information.
I will begin by looking at other media revolutions in Western civilization. What we call the ‘Gutenbergian revolution’, in the mid fifteenth century, transformed the operating conditions of the societies it first affected, some of which rapidly experienced a phenomenon of mass mediatization. I will then examine the nature of the change. The invention of Gutenberg was essentially technological, and the very word ‘revolution’ that is generally used of it today implicitly emphasizes its novelty and its suddenness. Printing brought one period, the Gothic/medieval period, to an end and initiated another, which would be called the Renaissance, characterized both by its close relationship to classical antiquity and by its modernity; indeed it was in the fifteenth century that the word ‘modernity’ emerged in French. Gutenberg's invention had huge consequences for the evolution of Western societies, but it could only happen as a result of a number of earlier phenomena and changes. For the innovation to have practical applications, and for it to spread effectively, it had to be viable not only at the technological level but also at the economic level; it had to respond to a demand, and the conditions of production and distribution had to be such as to make its use possible.
It is this transition from one state to another that I shall discuss, in its three main phases: a slow rise, accelerating to a peak; the apogee of the invention; and the successive developments of its effects and of its appropriation by large numbers of people. These developments can only be perceived and understood in the medium term, with the passage of two or even three generations after Gutenberg, but their consequences were certainly more profound – and more modern – than might have been expected. In other words, there was a period of change preceding Gutenberg, of ‘Gutenberg before Gutenberg’; but there was also a period of post-Gutenberg repercussions, when all the possibilities of the invention were not yet exploited or its consequences appreciated. The invention itself was the turning point, but I will discuss it in the context of a much longer timescale, which first made this transformation possible then allowed its full potential to be exploited – opening the way to other changes.
My main argument concerns the structuring role of the media. Modernity gave texts a new status and radically changed their content, in ways that were particularly visible in the scientific sphere; however, these phenomena can only be understood through the change in the dominant media. The operating conditions of printing, including the practices linked to it, framed and oriented at every level the production of discourse and the models which underlay this very production.
The Carolingian Reformation
As regards writing and books, the change in Western Europe originated at the end of the first millennium, when the demographic and economic trends began first to fluctuate and then to go into reverse. Until the Carolingian period, the relationship with Latin antiquity had remained fairly direct: some of the monuments had survived, the artists followed Graeco-Latin models, the copyists reproduced such manuscripts as reached them, and the handwriting adopted in the great Carolingian scriptoria was directly inspired by Latin handwriting.2 Whether concerted or not, the political project of Charlemagne and his entourage at Aix-la-Chapelle – to restore the Western Empire in the form of a Christian Empire governed by the emperor and the bishop of Rome – has to be understood from this perspective. Its failure marked the start of another period, less closely linked to the ancient models, but oriented towards the construction of a wholly original civilization – that of the Middle Ages proper. It was the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire that paved the way for change and, paradoxically, invention.
The project for Carolingian Reform supposed conditions that did not exist. It needed an effective concept of the state (res publica) and also the material means to ensure the independence of the sovereign and the integration of the territories he controlled. But the kingdom was still seen as a private possession, which the sovereign bequeathed to his successors, between whom it would be divided after his death. The Carolingian Empire disintegrated in the ninth century, to be replaced by the great entities of Western Francia, Lotharingia and Eastern Francia. In the West, in the absence of adequate mechanisms enabling integration, real power was divided between a multitude of local and regional officials who sought autonomy, with the result that the political, economic and cultural spheres fragmented. The break-up was aggravated by the Saracen, Hungarian and above all Norman raids, first signalled in 799; pirates devastated Frisia and then the Channel coasts, sailed up the rivers (sack of Chartres in 857, of Cologne in 881, siege of Paris in 885, etc.) and settled in Normandy (911), from which they conquered England (1066). It was not the distant and too often impotent sovereign but the local powers, the count and the bishop, who were able to organize and coordinate an effective defence against the plunderers. This led, eventually, to the rise of feudalism and the pre-eminence accorded to ties between persons, between the suzerain and his vassal and his sub-vassals. The sacred dimension of his status notwithstanding, the sovereign was in practice no more than the person who sat at the apex of the feudal pyramid.
From the fifth century to the end of the tenth century, the book remained, in the West, effectively confined to the ecclesiastical world, so much so that the word clerk, clericus, initially meaning a man of the Church, took on the meaning of literate and educated. It was the Church which, in the fifth century, when the cadres of state and administrative officials crumbled, took over from the Roman Empire and assured the preservation and transmission of ancient culture. In Gaul, the aristocracy of the Late Empire and the very Early Middle Ages was an aristocracy of Christians of ancient high culture; we need think only of Sidonius Apollinaris, or of Fortunatus, one of Martin's successors in the bishopric of Tours. Scriptoria and libraries were established in the monasteries and in some cathedral schools. The texts were in Latin and their content was primarily religious: the Bible translated into Latin by St Jerome at the end of the fourth century (the Vulgate), the writings of the Fathers of the Church, the lives of saints and martyrs and other liturgical works; to which should be added the texts transmitted from classical antiquity and those of pre-Carolingian and Carolingian authors.
A development of crucial importance followed from the linguistic diversity acquired in the ninth century: classical Latin was no longer either understood or used beyond a very narrow group of educated men, though it remained, in more or less degraded forms, the language of the Church, the administration and written culture. Most people now used the vernacular, Romance languages in the formerly Romanized territories, or Germanic languages where the invaders were in the majority. The vernacular remained essentially oral to the end of the first millennium; in the West, the written material known to us from the ninth century is reduced to very rare and fortuitous texts. Innovation came from the frontier zones: the Oaths of Strasbourg were drawn up in 842 in that key city of the ancient limes. The Canticle of St Eulalia and the Song of Ludwig (Ludwigslied), copied around 870 at the end of a Latin manuscript, came from another frontier, that of Flanders and Hainault.3 In England, the king of Wessex, Alfred the Great (died 899), had the Latin classics translated into the vernacular. In Greater Moravia, Cyril and Methodius created an alphabet adapted to the language of the Slav peoples they evangelized (ninth century); they translated the Bible into Slav and used this language for the liturgy. We shall on several occasions return to the paradoxical role played in the process of innovation by frontier zones or by outlying geographical regions which one might expect, a priori, to be less favoured.
From its beginnings in the second half of the eighth century, the work of the Carolingian scriptoria, after that of St Martin of Tours, marked an important stage in the revival of classical Latin: in the perfecting of the new script, the ‘Carolingian miniscule’;4 in the creation of models of book and page layout; and in copying, strictly speaking. The aim was the reform of the Church, with a view to producing a clergy of high quality and strengthening the structure of imperial power. The central role devolved on the small group that surrounded the emperor in Aix-la-Chapelle: Leidrade, born around 743–5 in Bavaria, was a clerk in Freising (a bishopric created in 739), where he followed the rise of the library and scriptorium under the influence of Bishop Arbeo (764–84); he was summoned to Aix in 782, to join the palace school which included Alcuin, Theodulf and St Benoît of Aniane. The latter, sent as archbishop to Lyon in 796 to impose reform on the diocese, created the school of singers and the school of readers, developed an active scriptorium, reorganized the chapters of the various churches and restored the Abbey of l'Île Barbe. Alcuin (died 804), abbot of St Martin of Tours in 796, also reorganized the school and the scriptorium, making this the most important intellectual centre5 in the empire. Once again we find the frontiers as crucial zones. Leidrade was a Bavarian, Alcuin came from England (York) and Theodulf from Visigothic Spain. The latter, abbot of Fleury-sur-Loire and bishop of Orléans, reorganized the monastic school, while the scriptorium enriched the library. Great intellectual figures followed one another at Fleury in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, including Odo, Gerbert, the schoolmaster Abbo and Abbot Gauzlin, future archbishop of Bourges. Other centres existed alongside the monasteries, in particular in certain cathedral schools. The powerful oppidum of Laon was also the site of a school inspired by the presence of scholars from the British Isles, in the wake of John Scotus Eriugena (until 870). Its library was particularly remarkable for its Greek manuscripts. Much later, at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Laon was once again made famous, by the teaching of Anselm of Laon, the master of William of Champeaux and enemy of the young Abelard.
Industrial Revolution and Economy of the Sign
Though population estimates for the Middle Ages remain speculative, it is possible to highlight the main elements in a dynamism that was increasingly visible after the year 1000. The demographic situation was fundamental, though linked to economic development, and it is in this context that the trajectory specific to writing and the book has to be discussed. With the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, everything changed, and Western Europe began once again to expand: the continent had some 40,000,000 inhabitants around 1100, but nearer 75,000,000 in 1300. France had perhaps 6,000,000 inhabitants in the eleventh century; according to the État des paroisses et des feux (State of parishes and hearths), instituted on royal orders in 1328, the number had risen to between 16 and 17,000,000, making it the most populous kingdom in Europe. In England, the population grew from 1.3,000,000 in 1087 to 3,500,000 at the end of the fifteenth century. And when Raoul Glaber spoke of the ‘white mantle of churches’ covering Western Europe in the eleventh century, he bore witness to the increasing number and size of the human communities.
The wonderful twelfth century and the apogee of the thirteenth century were followed, however, by more troubled times. A demographic plateau, from the 1340s (sometimes earlier, by 1270 in Castile), was followed by a dramatic decline that reduced the population to fewer than 50,000,000 inhabitants by 1400. Natural catastrophes (the Black Death was responsible for the deaths of at least 30 per cent of the European population between 1347 and 1350, perhaps even 50 per cent in the most exposed towns, such as certain Mediterranean ports6) added their toll to that of interminable wars, in particular the Hundred Years War (globally, from Crécy, in 1346, to Castillon, in 1453). Revolts, famines, massacres and underlying insecurity only intensified the crisis. It was not until the fifteenth century that some recovery was visible, and it was only at the end of that century that the population again reached the levels of the 1300s (over 80,000,000 inhabitants). Although this was still an age of underpopulation, and although recurrent crises persisted, aggravated by periodic revisitations of plague, the dynamic was once again more favourable.
Demographic growth, though fragile (as the crisis of the fourteenth century revealed), was made possible by advances in agriculture, transport and trade. Globally, the primary sector was dominant, but the rural world was experiencing profound change. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this took the form of assarting and the adoption of new techniques in agriculture and in certain processing operations: in particular watermills, then windmills, used for grain, textiles and forges, and eventually also for the manufacture of paper. In England, Domesday Book (1085–7) records more than 5,600 mills.
Invented to grind grain, which remained its main use, [the mill] was very quickly used for other tasks: crushing bark for tanners, nuts and olives, ore and newly woven cloth that had to be fulled to give it strength…7
The reception of these innovations drove a growth that fed on itself: this was ‘the first European industrial revolution’ (Fernand Braudel), a horse and milling revolution, which happened between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and which made it possible for more people to be fed.8 The increase in production and the increase in population went hand in hand.
As well as these transformations in the rural world, another sector, and one crucial for my subject, was experiencing radical change: the increasing density of population resulted in a process of geographical interconnection and integration, while also encouraging trade and circulation. Although the barter of goods and services remained the norm at the local and even regional level, things were very different higher up. Decisive innovations in shipbuilding followed one after the other in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: improved sails, the invention of the sternpost rudder and the perfecting of the compass. New maritime routes were opened up and the tonnage of ships was greatly increased – hulks and galleys had a carrying capacity of 300 tonnes, the carrack up to 1,000. This meant that ports had to be adapted, and heavier investment was needed to allow trading operations on a larger scale, which led in turn to the development of improved financial techniques. Political development and the gradual invention of the modern state also depended on greatly increased financial resources.
Writing was central to the most important of these developments. Administrative practice saw the invention in Italy of accounting procedures (double-entry book-keeping at the end of the thirteenth century) and sophisticated instruments of exchange (bill of exchange, credit systems). Modern accounting was based on the definition of very precise calculation procedures and the keeping of series of accounts, and then of specialized books of account. This was also a period of growth in the monetary economy and of the rise of banks, which made it possible to mobilize larger capital sums and put them to use. As the rediscovery of Aristotelian thinking underpinned the growth of a new theory of representation and the sign, economic and financial operations, even political activity, seemed increasingly to belong to an economy of the written sign and of its techniques of manipulation. The invention of Gutenberg happened in a world in the process of rapid modernization, but it provided this very process with the means for a radically new development.
Notes
1.
Trois révolutions
,
passim
; CNAM,
passim
; DEL,
passim
; Elizabeth Eisenstein,
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, 1983);
Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the 15th Century
, ed. Kristian Jensen (London, 2003).
2.
Robert Marichal, ‘L'écriture latine et la civilisation occidentale du Ier au XVIe siècle’, reprinted in
Histoire et art de l'écriture
(Paris, 2005), pp. 650–700.
3.
La Cantilène de sainte Eulalie
(Valenciennes, 1990); at: <http://www-01.valenciennes.fr/bib/decouverte/histoire/cantilène/transcription.htm>.
4.
The genealogy of the scripts is explained by Denis Muzerelle in the article ‘Gothique’ in DEL, 2.
5.
Jacques Le Goff,
Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age
, 1st edn (Paris, 1957; reissued 1985), trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan as
Intellectuals in the Middle Ages
(Oxford, 1993);
Alain de Libéra,
Penser au Moyen Age
, new edn (Paris, 1996).
6.
See the map in Jean Delumeau,
La Civilisation de la Renaissance
, new edn (Paris, 1984), p. 71.
7.
Marie-Thérèse Lorcin,
Société et cadre de vie en France, Angleterre et Bourgogne (1050–1250)
(Paris, 1985), p. 31.
8.
Fernand Braudel,
Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle
, 3 vols (Paris, 1979), vol. 3, p. 470; trans. Siân Reynolds as
The Perspective of the World
(London, 1984), pp. 15–16.
Part IGutenberg before Gutenberg
1The Preconditions for a New Economy of the Media
Though [King Charles V] understood Latin well and there was never any need for it to be expounded to him, he was so farseeing, out of love for his successors, that he wanted to provide for them in times to come instruction and knowledge leading to all the virtues. For this purpose he had all the most notable books translated from Latin into French by the accepted masters and experts in all the sciences and arts…
Christine de Pisan
The Key Space of Modernity: The Town
Growth and tipping point
The modernity of the Middle Ages was based on the town. Though the growth of urbanization and of the innovation it encouraged assumed a major transformation in the countryside, it was also the main factor for change in the sphere of writing. The change was first socio-political: in the town, social structures, occupations and modes of representation were all renewed. The society of the early Middle Ages and the Carolingian period had been a rural society, but, beginning in the eleventh century, there was a step change; urban centres developed, which in their turn promoted innovation in every sphere, including that of the symbolic systems – and of writing. In the words of Fernand Braudel:
prompted by demographic expansion – never before had towns sprung up so thickly within such easy reach of one another. A clear distinction of functions, a ‘division of labour’ between town and countryside, sometimes brutally felt, became the norm. The towns took over industrial activity, became the motors of accumulation and growth, and re-invented money.1
Table 1.1 Large towns in the Middle Ages
The geographical distribution of towns shifted westwards, whereas only the great Mediterranean civilizations, Byzantium and the Arabo-Muslim world, had previously been represented. Of the earliest European metropolises (more than 50,000 inhabitants), all, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, had still belonged to the Byzantine or Islamic worlds (Baghdad, Cairo, Constantinople), but the balance gradually shifted, first in favour of the Italian peninsula, then of other regions. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the list includes four Italian towns (Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence), later to be joined by Naples. Around 1350, and in spite of the Black Death, it was the turn of North-western Europe, with Paris (80,000 inhabitants) and Ghent (60,000 inhabitants). The end of the fifteenth century was marked by the disappearance of independent Burgundy (and the decline of Ghent), but also by the increasing importance of the Iberian Peninsula: Valencia and Lisbon joined the list.
Table 1.2 Urban population and rate of urbanization in Europe, 1300–1500
Dates
Urban population
Rate of urbanization (%)
1300
7750 million
10.3
1400
7560 million
13.6
1500
8390 million
11.2
Source: Paul Bairoch, Jean Batou and Pierre Chèvre, La Population des villes européennes, 800–1850: banque des données et analyse sommaire des résultats 800–1850: The Population of European Cities: Data Bank and Short Summary of Results 800–1850 (Geneva, 1988, p. 225).
The shift was even more marked at the level of large towns (between 20,000 and 50,000 inhabitants). The pre-eminence of Italy, though still real, was lessened to the benefit of other areas, in particular, around 1500, the Iberian Peninsula – with Granada (the last Muslim capital in Europe, which passed into Christian hands in 1492), Seville, Toledo and Barcelona – and the Low Countries and North-western Europe (with Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels, Ghent, Lille, Cologne and London). Other towns had already almost reached this size, including Medina Del Campo, Valladolid and Zaragoza. In short, between the end of the twelfth century and the end of the fifteenth, the dynamic of urbanization shifted, initially to the advantage of Italy alone, then of Western Europe, by contrast with Byzantium and Islam.2 For innovation, this was a decisive factor.
Models of urban success
Let us set aside the political dimension, and the distinction between communes, bonnes villes, ‘residence towns’ (Residenzstadt), etc. The distinguishing feature of urban society was the specialization of the crafts, by contrast with a rural economy characterized by the self-sufficiency of the community. The town, an agglomeration of persons dependent on external sources for their food supply (Werner Sombart), was the natural site for the invention of other models of consumption, hence of life.
Max Weber proposed, speaking very generally, three successful urban models, often found in combination. The first was the town of crafts, for example Chartres, economic capital of Beauce and town of markets. Large numbers of artisans congregated in the suburbs which grew up outside its walls in the eleventh century. Innovation was concentrated on the watercourses, where leather and wool were processed, before activities later diversified. The wealth of the town was given spectacular expression in the construction of the cathedral of Notre Dame, as also in the size of its chapter (seventy-two members!), whose prebends were among the richest in France. As might be expected, these very favourable conditions had consequences for the sphere of writing, whether in the case of the bishop, the chapter or the many religious houses or of the small schools and the prestigious cathedral school itself.3
The second model, which accounted for the most spectacular success stories, was that of the trading town, in particular the town of long-distance trade. This was the case in Italy, at a time when Westerners, Italians in the vanguard, established permanent settlements in Byzantium and the great centres of the eastern Mediterranean, whose trade they dominated. In the north, the Hanseatic networks were controlled by Bruges and Lübeck, though London should not be forgotten. In the fourteenth century, Bruges was the transit centre for wool and the entrepôt for the Hanseatic towns. This period of prosperity continued under the dukes of Burgundy (from 1384), when the presence or proximity of the court encouraged the growth of intellectual and artistic activities. As well as the men of the book (copyists and calligraphers, miniaturists, booksellers and then printers), there were artists, in particular painters, most notably Van Eyck (died 1441) and Memling (died 1494).4 In the interior, it was the fair towns which were the chief hubs for the exchange, regulation and redistribution of merchandise and values, from the fairs of Champagne to the great Italian, French (Lyon), Spanish (Medina Del Campo) and German (Frankfurt on main) fairs. The lift-off of towns such as Leipzig in the fifteenth century was similarly related to their role as trading hubs, in this case connecting the Germanic and Slav worlds.
The third model was that of the princely town, home both to a more or less rich and spectacular court and to administrative services controlling a territory. In central France, in and around the Loire Valley, towns such as Nantes, Angers and even Bourges fall into this category. Let us look more carefully at this model: for the historian, understanding comes from the dialectic between different levels of analysis, from large units to the local level, the latter serving both as illustration and as opportunity for detailed scrutiny. The history of Bourges confirms the general trend, while also illustrating the transition from one model of success to another. In the Roman period, the powerful Gaulish city became capital of the province of Aquitania prima. As the Roman Empire disintegrated, a wall protected it from external attacks. Many buildings testify to the role of Bourges as a religious capital, assisted by the residence of the primate of Aquitaine. The urban renaissance of the tenth century saw the creation of parishes (St Bonnet) and ‘bourgs’ along the roads leading to the gates, which were home to a growing population which practised new crafts. The Benedictine abbey of Chezal-Benoît, founded in 1093, was a cultural centre and its rich library was completely reorganized in 1488 by Abbot Peter du Mas; it later passed in part to the Maurists.5
From the crafts to trade: a bourgeoisie of business and commerce gradually developed in Bourges, active first in wool (sheep farming in the Champagne berrichone), weaving, dyeing and trade (at the fairs). The supremacy of the town was based on its dominance over the surrounding countryside and on the creation of specialized trading networks. Its growth was further promoted by political factors: in 1100, Bourges became part of the royal domain; its walls were extended at the end of the twelfth century; above all, the rebuilding of the cathedral of St Stephen began in 1195. The chapter owned a very rich library, housed in a specially furnished room above the sacristy (1417).6 The number of churches grew and new religious houses were founded. The apogee was reached with the ‘residence city’, when Jean de France, the king's brother, received the duchy of Berry as an apanage and made Bourges his capital (1360). He built a palace there, with a Sainte-Chapelle consecrated in 1405. The ducal administration expanded and the duke himself was a Maecenas and a collector, who assembled a sumptuous library.
In the fifteenth century, the wealth of the great bourgeoisie, its links with the court and royal administration and its role as patron of the arts are illustrated by the career of Jacques Coeur (Bourges, 1395/1400–Chios, 1456), but also by the dynasty of Lallemant. The Lallemant seem to have been immigrants arriving from across the Rhine in the thirteenth century. Originally dealers in fabrics and woollen cloth, they obtained important financial offices (general receivers in Normandy and Languedoc) and were later mayors of Bourges. They were involved in transporting works of art from Italy to Amboise (1495) and in various other schemes promoted by the kings in the region; they amassed a collection of illuminated manuscripts and were in contact with Clément Marot (who composed their epitaph) and the printer-bookseller Geoffroy Tory. Their hôtel, decorated with Italianate themes, was one of the most sumptuous in the town in the early sixteenth century. The explicit of a manuscript of the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, completed in 1489, throws light on the relationships between the families of patrons and the copyists (in this case Nicolas Gomel) or illuminators:
Cy fine le XXe et derrenier livre des anciennetez des juifs…lequel livre a fait escrire noble homme Jehan Lalemant, receveur général de Normandie…par son humble et obéissant serviteur Nicolas Gomel.7
(Here ends the XXe and last book of the antiquities of the Jews…which book the noble Jehan Lalemant, receiver general of Normandy had written…by his humble and obedient servant Nicolas Gomel.)
The university, founded by Louis XI in 1463, crowned the edifice and remained one of the most important in France in the Renaissance period. Nevertheless, the town succumbed to a certain lethargy as a result, amongst other things, of a fire in 1487, the decline of the fairs (in favour of Lyon), the difficulties caused by the periodic disturbances, the departure of the court and the end of the ducal dynasty of Berry. Other examples could equally well have been chosen: in Bourges, as in Poitiers and other towns, the initial period of expansion was dominated by factors of a general nature, mainly demographic and economic, while the second was more ‘political’.
The power of the written word8
The principal development visible from the eleventh century in the world of writing was a general opening up. Writing had until then largely been an affair of the Church, and above all of the monasteries established in the countryside; now it began to permeate the whole of society: first the urban world, then, though to a lesser degree, the worlds of the castles and of even the big villages. This was made possible by the emergence of educational institutions, political rationalization and the growth of trade and an urban bourgeoisie. The town may have been the favoured site of innovation but it, in its turn, depended on the rise of a civilization of writing for the establishment and development of its power: written documents, titles of ownership, accounts, lists and finally books all first appeared in towns. The urban archives were the site of a ‘bourgeois memory’, largely in the vernacular, which was constructed in opposition to the ‘noble memory’ constituted by the cartularies preserved in castles and religious houses. It was also in towns, therefore, that technicians of writing and of written rationality first appeared, that is, notaries and other lawyers, administrators, great merchants, teachers and their students. The fixing of written law accompanied this process. The technicians of writing were gradually incorporated into the urban craft structure, as in Nimes in 1272, in the case of the lawyers and the physicians.
A town like Valenciennes, one of the most important and wealthiest towns in the Scheldt, had an organized archive by 1240. It was in regular correspondence both with neighbouring towns (Sainte-Amand, Le Quesnoy, Tournai and Cambrai) and with towns further away (Ghent and Bruges, Ypres, Ath, Nivelles, Brussels and Arras among others).9 It was by its use of the charters of 1114 and 1302 – written documents – that it systematically extended its control over a surrounding countryside that included some 300 small towns and villages; it imposed its own interpretation of village charters, pushed for the customs to be put into writing and, in effect, created a structure prefiguring an Italian contado such as that of Florence.10 In this latter town, the company of the Scarsella, founded by seventeen merchants in 1357, was in weekly correspondence with Genoa and Avignon; the letters took a fortnight to reach their destination. Further north, the Hanseatic counters maintained a network of correspondents covering the whole of their commercial zone, from London to Novgorod. Together with the specialization of functions, the principal tool of urban supremacy was the practice and the recording of writing. The chief and decisive advantage of the towns lay in their mastery of the spheres of rationality and of the techniques of communication and administration, and in the accumulation (including that of wealth) that this made possible.
Iconography confirms this means of conquest by the ‘writing town’ of the surrounding countryside. Brueghel pictures the Census at Bethlehem in a village in Flanders, in winter. There is not a trace of writing to be seen except in connection with the officials sent out from the ‘residence’ and installed in the village inn, where, armed with their registers, they conduct a census of the inhabitants and, we may assume, collect taxes.11 Pieter Brueghel the Younger's The Village Lawyer illustrates a similar theme, but much later (1620): here, the lawyer has apparently come to the inn, where, almost buried under a mass of all sorts of papers, he sees his clients, while the peasants appear before him, some carrying a fowl by way of payment. There is an almanach (calendar) pinned to the wall, perhaps as a symbol of the system of measuring time linked to writing and to the labour of writing; we see the transition from the ‘natural’ time of the seasons and religious festivals to the time of the administrator (taxes!) and the financier (calculation of rents and rates of interest), an interpretation confirmed by the hourglass on the table – lawyers were paid according to the time spent on a case. Every detail is significant; they reveal the gulf between rural society and a modernity that combined mastery of the written word, the transition to a different perception of time and the invention of a different type of work. It was the categories linked to writing that more and more obviously assured the domination of the town and its administrators and merchants over the rural world.12 It was in the town that the new type of work, intellectual work, was invented; whether it was proper for this work to be paid would be debated for centuries to come, even in the nineteenth century.
Though writing spread, it remained an affair of technicians and a minority. In towns, and even more in the rural world, ‘publicity’ was still ensured by proclamation, and the crier was a common feature of daily life. His job was both to ‘publish’ the decisions of the authorities and to represent them by spreading their word, hence a degree of ceremony and the use of a uniform or at least distinctive signs such as coats of arms. In the Retable of St Bertin, a man reads a charter written on parchment, whose red seal attests to the status of the issuing authority, before a crowd assembled outside the town (1459).13 As late as 1515, the archduke of Austria wrote from Bruges to the magistrate of Valenciennes to inform him of the peace concluded with France and to instruct him to publicize it en lieu où l'on est accoustumé faire criz et publicacions.14 Nevertheless, this was already the age of the ‘empires of paper’ (Marshall McLuhan), power systems in which the fluidity of the software (the paper and, above all, the sign) compounded a power and a wealth that it enhanced. The growth of urbanization was accompanied and reinforced by the growth of an artificial environment, one of signs and the spread of the written, and then printed, word; to which it should be added that we have today entered a new phase of abstraction through the sign, that of the generalization of the virtual.
Acculturation through the town
In a largely rural and feudal society, the towns were themselves frontiers where different worlds met. They were points of contact and exchange, not only of merchandise but also of texts, people, experiences, ideas and representations, ways of life, techniques and even aesthetic forms. Innovation was first a product of new social and political systems. The word ‘bourgeois/burgess’ described, in the etymological sense, the inhabitant of a ‘bourg’ (a small market town), then, by extension, someone who engaged in activities that lay outside the traditional tripartite society. The burgess – or townsman – did not live directly from the land, nor was he an ecclesiastic or a knight. He was part of a different system than that of orders and feudalism. Towns were a place of horizontal solidarities between individuals engaged in the same activity, in contrast to the vertical solidarities characterizing feudalism and its pyramidal system. Though initially subject to one or more lay or ecclesiastical lords, towns, as their power and prosperity increased in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were gradually recognized as original and more or less autonomous entities – the communes.
