Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

The work of the manuscript-dealers in Florence was carried on not only for the citizens and sojourners in the city itself, but for the benefit of other Italian cities in which there was no adequate machinery for the manifolding of manuscripts. Bartholomæus Facius, writing from Naples in 1448, speaks of the serious inadequacy of the scribes in that city. There were but few men engaged in the business, and these were poorly educated and badly equipped.[340] Facius was, therefore, asking a correspondent in Florence to have certain work done for him which could not be completed in Naples. Poggio writes from Rome about the same date to Niccolo in Florence to somewhat similar effect. He speaks with envy of the larger literary facilities possessed by his Florentine friends.[341]

Next to Florence, the most important centre for the manuscript trade of North Italy was Milan. As early as the middle of the fourteenth century, there is record of no less than forty professional scribes being at work in the city. Such literary work as was required by Genoa and other Italian towns within reach of the Lombardy capital came to Milan. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the population of the city was about 200,000, there had been in the city but two registered copyists. More important, however, than that of either Florence or Milan, was the manuscript trade of Venice, the position of which city gave it exceptional advantages as well for the collection of codices from the East as for securing the services of skilled scribes from Athens or from Constantinople. One of the more noteworthy of the Venetian importers of manuscripts was Johannes Galeotti, a Genoese by birth, who made various journeys to Constantinople, and whose special trade is referred to in an inscription on a manuscript dating from 1450 and containing the speeches of Demosthenes.[342]

Reference has already been made to Aurispa, who appears to have been the most important manuscript-dealer of his time, not only in Venice, but possibly in the world. Aurispa sent various agents to Greece and to the farther East to collect manuscripts and kept scribes busied in his work-shop in Venice in preparing authentic copies of these texts. One of his travellers was Plantinerus, who was sent to the Peloponnesus in 1415, and who succeeded in securing there some valuable codices.[343] Plantinerus found, in executing his commissions, that he had to come into competition with a traveller sent out by Cosimo de’ Medici on a similar errand.

Venice possessed an advantage over the other Italian cities, not only in the collection of texts, and in its facilities for manifolding these, but in its position for securing wide sales for the same in the cities outside of Italy, with which it was, in connection with its active commerce, in regular relations. The lines of the Oxford printers, Theo. Rood and Thomas Hunt, printed in their edition of the Letters of Phalaris, give an indication of the relations of the English university in the early part of the fifteenth century with the literary marts of Southern Europe.

Celatos, Veneti, nobis transmittere libros

Cedite, nos aliis vendimus, O Veneti—[344]

(If you Venetians will send over to us the books which have been hidden (i. e. difficult or rare books, or possibly books unearthed from far off Eastern regions) we will find sale for the same.)

There is evidence in fact of a very active book-trade between Venice and England for many years before the introduction into Italy of the printing-press. The work of Aldus and of those who were associated with him in carrying on printing and publishing undertakings in Venice naturally very largely extended these relations with the English scholars, but the channels for the same had already been opened. The manuscript-dealers in Venice fixed their place of business in the most frequented parts of the city—the Bridge of the Rialto, and the Plaza of S. Mark.

The trade of the Italian dealers in manuscripts was not brought to an immediate close by the introduction of printing. The older scholars still preferred the manuscript form for their books, and found it difficult to divest themselves of the impression that the less costly printed volumes were suited only for the requirements of the vulgar herd. There are even, as Kirchhoff points out,[345] instances of scribes preparing their manuscripts from printed “copy,” and there are examples of these manuscript copies of printed books being made with such literalness as to include the imprint of the printer.

The work of Aldus (continued with scholarly enterprise later by such men as Froben of Basel and Estienne of Paris) in the printing of Greek texts, although begun as early as 1495, and although exercising a very wide influence upon the distribution of Greek literature, was insufficient to supply the eager demand of the scholars, while not many other printers were, in the early years of the exercise of the art, prepared to incur the very considerable risk and expense required for the production of Greek fonts of type. The risk was, of course, by no means limited to the cost of the type; the printers of the earlier Greek books had themselves but slight familiarity with the literature of Greece, and they were obliged in many cases to confide the selection and the editing of their texts to editors to whom this literature was very largely still a novelty. The printers hardly knew what books to select and they had no adequate data upon which to base business calculations as to the extent of the demand that could be looked for for any particular book. The feeling that they were working in the dark was, therefore, a very natural one.

It was on this ground that, while printing-presses were, during the century after 1450, multiplying rapidly through Europe, the printing of Greek books continued to be for a large portion of the period an exceptional class of undertakings, and work was still found for scribes who could be trusted to make accurate transcripts of Greek codices.