Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

By the middle of the fifteenth century, there appears to have been a considerable trade in manuscripts in Heidelberg and in places dependent upon Heidelberg. In the library of the University of Erlangen, there exists to-day a considerable collection of manuscripts formerly belonging to the monastery of Heilsbronn, which manuscripts were prepared in Heidelberg between 1450 and 1460. The series includes a long list of classics, indicating a larger classical interest in Heidelberg than was to be noted at the time in either Prague or Vienna.[379]

The University of Cologne, founded a few years later, became the centre of theological scholarship in Germany, and the German manuscripts of the early part of the fifteenth century which have remained in existence and which have to do with theological subjects were very largely produced in Cologne. A number of examples of these have been preserved in the library of Erfurt.

One reason for the smaller importance in Germany of the stationarius was the practice that obtained on the part of the instructors of lecturing or of reading from texts for dictation, the transcripts being made by the students themselves. The authority or permission to read for dictation was made a matter of special university regulation. The regulation provided what works could be so utilised, and the guarantee as to the correctness of the texts to be used could either be given by a member of the faculty of the university itself or was accepted with the certified signature of an instructor of a well known foreign university, such as Paris, Bologna, or Oxford.

By means of this system of dictation, the production of manuscripts was made much less costly than through the work of the stationarii, and the dictation system was probably an important reason why the manuscript-trade in the German university cities never became so important as in Paris or London.

It is contended by the German writers that, notwithstanding the inconsiderable trade in manuscripts, there was a general knowledge of the subject-matter of the literature pursued in the university, no less well founded or extended among the German cities than among those of France or Italy. This familiarity with the university literature is explained by the fact that the students had, through writing at dictation, so largely possessed themselves of the substance of the university lectures.

In the Faculty of Arts at Ingolstadt, it was ordered, in 1420, that there should be not less than one text-book (that is to say, one copy of the text-book) for every three scholars in baccalaureate. This regulation is an indication of the scarcity of text-books.

The fact that the industry in loaning manuscripts to students was not well developed in the German universities delayed somewhat the organisation of the book-trade in the university towns. Nevertheless, Richard de Bury names Germany among the countries where books could be purchased, and Gerhard Groote speaks of purchasing books in Frankfort. This city became, in fact, important in the trade of manuscripts for nearly a century before the beginning of German printing.[380]

Æneas Silvius says in the preface of his Europa, written in 1458, that a librarius teutonicus had written to him shortly before, asking him to prepare a continuation of the book “Augustalis.”[381] This publishing suggestion was made eight years after the perfection of Gutenberg’s printing-press, but probably without any knowledge on the part of the librarius of the new method for the production of books.

In Germany there was, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, outside of the ecclesiastics, very little demand for reading matter. The women had their psalters, which had, as a rule, been written out in the monasteries. As there came to be a wider demand for books of worship, this was provided for, at least in the regions of the lower Rhine, by the scribes among the Brothers of Common Life. The Brothers took care also of the production of a large proportion of the school-books required.

During the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, the Brothers took an active part in the production and distribution of manuscripts. Their work was distinct in various respects from that which was carried on in monastery or in university towns, but particularly in this that their books were, for the most part, produced in the tongue of the common folk, and their service as instructors and booksellers was probably one of the most important influences in helping to educate the lower classes of North Germany to read and to think for themselves. They thus prepared the way for the work of Luther and Melanchthon.