Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

Luther’s complaints, referred to further on, were principally directed, as it must be remembered, not against the loss of profits to himself, but to the injury to the community and the grievance to the writers in having books circulated in an unrevised and incorrect text.

CHAPTER III.

THE PRINTER-PUBLISHERS OF ITALY, 1464-1600.

THE reproduction and distribution of the works of classical writers to such an extent as not only to influence the scholarly thought of the time, but to widen enormously the circles of society reached and affected by intellectual influences, became possible only through the new art of printing which had been brought across the Alps by German workmen; while the prompt utilisation of printing for the service of scholarship called for the devoted labour of printers who were themselves scholars and who were prepared to subordinate and even to sacrifice, in the cause of a literary ideal, their immediate business advantage. It was to the high scholarly ideals and courageous and unselfish labours of Aldus Manutius and his immediate successors no less than to the imagination, ingenuity, and persistency of Gutenberg and Fust, that the Europe of 1495 was indebted for the great gift of the poetry and the philosophy of Greece. Mayence and Venice joined hands to place at the service of the scholarly world the literary heritage of Athens.

The close of the fifteenth century witnessed a great expansion in more than one direction of European thought. In the West, Columbus had opened up a new world, and his discovery, while giving manifold incentives to the men of action, must also have served as a powerful stimulus to the imagination of the thinkers of the time, in its suggestions concerning the possibilities of the future. In the East, the printers of Venice were making use of scholars from Constantinople to rediscover for Europe the vast realm of Greek thought, and to bring Homer, Plato, and Aristotle to the knowledge of the students of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. Perhaps in no other epoch of the world’s history has there been so great an expansion of the possibilities of thought and of action, so suggestive a widening of range of the imagination, as in the decade succeeding 1492.

The introduction into Italy of the art of printing was due to Juan Turrecremata, who was Abbot of the monastery of Subiaco, and who later became Cardinal. He was a native of Valladolid in Spain, and his family name was Torquemada, of which name Turrecremata is the Latinised form. The Cardinal has been confused by Frommann[447] with the Torquemada who was Inquisitor-General of the Inquisition during the period of its most pitiless activity. The latter probably belonged to the same family, but his Christian name was Tomas, and he was not born till 1420, thirty years later than the Cardinal. Juan Torquemada had, however, been one of the confessors of Queen Isabella, and was said to have made to her the first suggestion of the necessity of establishing the Inquisition, in order to check the rising spirit of heresy. He did not realise what a Trojan horse, full of heretical possibilities, he was introducing into Italy in bringing in the Germans and their printing-press.

The monastery of Subiaco was some sixty miles from Rome. Among its monks were, in 1464, a number of Germans, some of whom had, before leaving Germany, seen or heard enough of the work done by the printers in Mayence or Frankfort to be able to give to the Abbot an idea of its character. The Abbot was keenly interested in the possibilities presented by the new art, and with the aid of these German monks he arranged to bring to Subiaco two printers, Conrad Schweinheim, of Mayence, and Arnold Pannartz, of Prague, who were instructed to organise a printing-office in the monastery. They began their operations early in 1464, their first work being given to the printing in sheet form of the manuals of worship or liturgies used in the monastery.

In 1465, they published the first volume printed in Italy, an edition of a Latin syntax for boys, edited by Lactantius. This was followed in the latter part of the same year by an edition of Cicero’s De Oratore, and in 1467, by the De Civitate of Augustine.

It was only the enthusiasm of the Abbot that rendered it possible, even for a short period, to overcome the many obstacles in the way of carrying on a printing-office in an out of the way village like Subiaco. But the difficulties soon became too great, and in 1467, the two German printers found their way, under the invitation of the brothers Massimi, to Rome, where they set up their presses in the Massimi palace. There they carried on operations for five years, during which time they produced a stately series of editions of the Latin classics, including the works of Cicero, Apuleius, Gellius, Cæsar, Virgil, Livy, Strabo, Lucan, Pliny, Suetonius, Quintilian, Ovid, together with editions of certain of the Church Fathers, such as Augustine, Jerome, and Cyprian. They also published a Latin Bible, and the Bible commentaries of Nicholas de Lyra, in five volumes.