Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

During the reigns of Pope Innocent VIII., 1484-1492, and of Alexander VI. (Borgia), 1492-1503, little or nothing was done in Rome to further the development of literature. To the latter was in fact due the initiating of the system of the subjection of the press to ecclesiastical censorship, a system which for centuries to come was to exercise the most baneful influence over literature and intellectual activities and to interfere enormously with the establishment of any assured foundation for property in literature. Some account of the long contests carried on by the publishers of Venice against this claim for ecclesiastical control of the productions of their presses, is given in a later chapter.

Venice stood almost alone among the cities of Italy in resisting the censorship of the Church, and even in Venice, the Church in the end succeeded in the more important of its contentions. In Spain, the ecclesiastical control was hardly questioned. In France, it was, after a century of contest, practically merged in the censorship exercised by the Crown, a control which was in itself fully as much as the publishing trade could bear and continue to exist. In Austria and South Germany, after the crushing out of the various reformation movements, the Church and State worked in practical accord in keeping a close supervision of the printing-presses. In North Germany, on the other hand, ecclesiastical censorship never became important. The evils produced by it were, however, serious and long enduring throughout a large portion of the territory of Europe, and the papal Borgia, though by no means a considerable personage, is responsible for bringing into existence an evil which assumed enormous proportions in the intellectual history of Europe.

Towards the close of the fifteenth century begins in Italy the age of academies, associations of scholars and littérateurs for the furthering of scholarly pursuits and of literary undertakings. One of the earlier of these Academies was instituted in Rome, in 1468, by Julius Pomponius Lætus (a pupil of Valla), for the special purpose of promoting the study of Latin literature and Latin antiquities. Comedies of Plautus and of other Latin dramatists were revived, and the attempt was made to make Latin, at least for the scholarly circle, again a living language. The Academy was suspected by Pope Paul II. to have some political purpose, and it was for a time suppressed, but resumed its activities some years later under the papacy of Alexander VI.

The Academy of Naples was instituted in 1470, under the leadership of Beccadelli and Juvianus Pontanus, and with a membership comprising a number of the brilliant scholars whom Alphonso the Magnanimous had attracted to his Court. This society also devoted itself particularly to the revival of an interest in Latin literature, and not a few of the members became better known under the Latinised names there adopted by them than by their Italian cognomens. Pomponius had written little and hoped to be remembered through his pupils. Pontanus on the other hand, wrote on many subjects, using for the purpose Latin, of which he was a master. Symonds says that he chiefly deserves to be remembered for his ethical treatises, but he seems himself to have attached special importance to his amatory elegiacs and to a series of astronomical hexameters entitled Urania.

In Florence, the Platonic Academy continued to flourish under the auspices of the Rucellai family. It was suppressed in 1522, at the time of the conspiracy against Giulio de’ Medici, but again revived in 1540. In 1572, was organised in Florence the famous academy called Della Crusca, which secured for itself a European reputation. In Bologna, in 1504, the society of the Viridario was instituted, with the purpose of studying printed texts and of furthering the art of printing. Bologna had a considerable number of other literary societies, for the study of jurisprudence, chivalry, and other subjects. Throughout Italy at this period academies multiplied, but the greater number exercised no continued influence.

It is probable, however, that they all proved of service in preparing the way for the printed literature which the Italian presses were, after 1490, beginning to distribute, and that in widening the range of popular interest in scholarship and in books generally, they did not a little to render possible the work of Aldus and other early Italian publishers. The academy founded by Aldus in Venice, for the prosecution of Greek studies, will be referred to in the chapter on Aldus.

“The fifteenth century rediscovered antiquity; the sixteenth was absorbed in slowly deciphering it. In the fifteenth century ‘educated Europe’ is but a synonym for Italy. What literature there was north of the Alps was in great part derived from, or was largely dependent upon, the Italian movement. The fact that the movement originated in the Latin peninsula, was decisive of the character of the first age of classical learning (1400-1550). It was a revival of Latin as opposed to Greek literature. It is now well understood that the fall of Constantinople, though an influential incident of the movement, ranks for little among the causes of the Renaissance. What was revived in Italy in the fifteenth century was the interest of the Schools of the early Empire—of the second and third century.... But in one decisive feature, the literary sentiment of the fifteenth century was a reproduction of that of the Empire. It was rhetorical, not scientific. Latin literature as a whole is rhetorical.... The divorce of the literature of knowledge and the literature of form which characterised the epoch of decay under the early empire, characterised equally the epoch of revival in the Italy of the Popes.... The knowledge and wisdom buried in the Greek writers presented a striking contrast to the barren sophistic which formed the curriculum of the Latin schools. It became the task of the scholars of the second period of the classical revival to disinter this knowledge.... Philology had meant composition and verbal emendation; it now meant the apprehension of the ideas and usages of the ancient world. Scholars had exerted themselves to write, they now bent all their effort to know.... There came now into existence what has ever since been known as ‘learning,’ in the special sense of the term. The first period of humanism in which the words of the ancient authors had been studied, was thus the preparatory school for the humanism of the second period, in which the matter was the object of attention.

As Italy had been the home of classical taste in the first period, France became the home of classical learning in the second. Single names can be mentioned, such as Victorius or Sigonius in Italy, Mursius or Vulcanius in the Low Countries, who were distinguished representatives of ‘learning,’ but in Bulæus, Turnebus, Lambrinus, Scaliger, Casaubon, and Saumaise, France produced a constellation of humanists whose fame justly eclipsed that of all their contemporaries.

If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the humanist movement, which she had so brilliantly inaugurated, the answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of ecclesiastical ideas. Learning is the result of research, and research must be free and cannot coexist with the claim of the Catholic clergy to be superior to enquiry. The French school, it will be observed, is wholly in fact or in intention Protestant. As soon as it was decided (as it was before 1600) that France was to be a Catholic country, and the University of Paris a Catholic university, learning was extinguished in France. France saw without regret and without repentance the expatriation of her unrivalled scholars. With Scaliger and Saumaise, the seat of learning was transferred from France to Holland. The third period of classical learning thus coincides with the Dutch school. From 1593, the date of Scaliger’s removal to Leyden, the supremacy in the republic of learning was possessed by the Dutch. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Dutch school was gradually supplanted by the North German, which from that time forward has taken, and still possesses, the lead in philological science.”[420]