Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

CHAPTER II.

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING AND THE WORK OF THE FIRST PRINTERS OF HOLLAND AND GERMANY.

1440-1528.

“ FOUR men, Gutenberg, Columbus, Luther, and Copernicus, stand at the dividing line of the Middle Ages, and serve as boundary stones marking the entrance of mankind into a higher and finer epoch of its development.”[421]

It would be difficult to say which one of the four has made the largest contribution to this development or has done the most to lift up the spirit of mankind and to open for men the doors to the new realms that were in readiness. The Genoese seaman and discoverer opens new realms to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe from the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast space of Western oceans, and in adding to the material realms controlled by civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its thought and fancy. The Reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the bonds which had chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in securing for them again their rights as individual Christians, conquers for them a spiritual realm and brings them into renewed relations with their Creator. The great astronomer shatters, through his discoveries, the fixed and petty conceptions of the universe which had ruled the minds of mankind, and in bringing to them fresh light on the nature and extent of created things, widens at the same time their whole understanding of themselves and of duty. The citizen of Mayence may claim to have unchained intelligence and given to it wings. He utilised lead no longer as a death-bringing ball, but in the form of life-quickening letters which were to bring before thousands of minds the teachings of the world’s thinkers. Each one of the four had his part in bringing to the world light, knowledge, and development.

At the time when the art of printing finally took shape in the mind of Gutenberg, the direction of literary and intellectual interests of Germany rested, as we have seen, largely with Italy. The fact, however, that the new art had its birthplace, not in Florence, which was at that time the centre of the literary activities of Europe, but in Mayence, heretofore a town which had hardly been connected at all with literature, and the further fact that the printing-presses were carrying on their work in Germany for nearly fifteen years before two printers, themselves Germans, set up the first press in Italy, exercised, of necessity, an important influence in inciting literary activities throughout Germany and in the relations borne by Germany to the scholarship of the world.

The details of the life and early work of Gutenberg are at best but fragmentary, and have been a subject of much discussion. It is not necessary, for the purpose of this treatise, to give detailed consideration to the long series of controversies as to the respective claims of Gutenberg of Mayence, of Koster of Haarlem, or of other competitors, as to the measure of credit to be assigned to each in the original discovery or of the practical development of the the printing-press. It seems in any case evident that whatever minds elsewhere were at that time puzzling over the same problem, it was the good fortune of Gutenberg to make the first practical application of the printing-press to the production of impressions from movable type, while it was certainly from Mayence that the art spread throughout the cities, first of Germany, and later of Italy and France.

It is to be borne in mind (and I speak here for the non-technical reader) that, as indicated in the above reference, the distinction and important part of the invention of Gutenberg was, not the production of a press for the multiplication of impressions, but the use of movable type and the preparation of the form from which the impressions were struck off. The art of printing from blocks, since classified as xylographic printing, had been practised in certain quarters of Europe for fifty years or more before the time of Gutenberg, and if Europe had had communication with China, xylography might have been introduced four or five centuries earlier.

With the block-books, the essential thing was the illustrations, and what text or letterpress accompanied these was usually limited to a few explanatory or descriptive words engraved on the block, above, beneath or around the picture. Occasionally, however, as in the Ars Moriendi, there were entire pages of text engraved, like the designs, on the solid block. The earlier engraving was done on hard wood, but, later, copper was also employed. It is probable that the block-books originated in the Netherlands, and it is certain that in such towns as Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, the art was developed more rapidly than elsewhere, so that during the first half of the fifteenth century, the production of wood engravings and of books made up of engravings (printed only on one side, and accompanied by a few words of text), began to form an important article of trade. The subjects of these designs were for the most part Biblical, or at least religious. One of the earlier of the block-book publications and probably the most characteristic specimen of the class, is the volume known as the Biblia Pauperum. This was a close imitation of a manuscript book that had for five or six centuries been popular as a work of religious instruction. It had been composed about 850, by S. Ausgarius, a monk of Corbie, who afterwards became Bishop of Hamburg. The scriptorium established by him at Corbie was said to have been the means of preserving from destruction a number of classics, including the Annals of Tacitus.[422] The use, five centuries later, as one of the first productions of the printing-press, of the monk’s own composition, may be considered as a fitting acknowledgement of the service thus rendered by him to the world’s literature. Examples of manuscript copies of the Biblia Pauperum are in existence in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, in Munich, in the British Museum, and elsewhere, and there is no difficulty in comparing these with the printed copies produced in the Netherlands, which are also represented in these collections.