Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

The business cares of these first years of his printing business were not allowed to prevent him from going on with his personal studies. In 1502, he published, in a handsome quarto volume, a comprehensive grammar under the title of Rudimenta Grammatices Linguæ Latinæ, etc. cum Introductione ad Hebraicam Linguam, to the preparation of which he had devoted years of arduous labour. Piratical editions were promptly issued in Florence, Lyons, and Paris. He also wrote the Grammaticæ Institutiones Græcæ (a labour of some years), which was not published until 1515, after the death of the author.

It will be noted that nearly all the undertakings to which he gave, both as editor and as publisher, his earliest attention, were the necessary first steps in the great scheme of the reproduction of the complete series of the Greek classics. Before editors or proof-readers could go on with the work of preparing the Greek texts for the press, dictionaries and grammars had to be created. Laskaris, whose Grammar initiated the series, was a refugee from the East, and at the time of the publication of his work, was an instructor in Messina. No record has been preserved of the arrangement made with him by his Venetian publisher, a deficiency that is the more to be regretted as his Grammar was probably the very first work by a living author, printed in Italy. Gaza was a native of Greece, and was for a time associated with the Aldine Press as a Greek editor.

In 1500, Aldus married the daughter of the printer Andrea Torresano of Asola, previously referred to as the successor of the Frenchman Jenson and the purchaser of Jenson’s matrices. In 1507, the two printing concerns were united, and the savings of Torresano were utilised to strengthen the resources of Aldus, which had become impaired, probably through his too great optimism and publishing enterprise.

During the disastrous years of 1509-1511, in which Venice was harassed by the wars resulting from the League of Cambray, the business came to a stand-still, partly because the channels of distribution for the books were practically blocked, but partly also on account of the exhaustion of the available funds. Friends again brought to the publisher the aid to which, on the ground of his public-spirited undertakings, he was so well entitled, and he was enabled, after the peace of 1511, to proceed with the completion of his Greek classics. Before his death in 1515, Aldus had issued in this series the works of Aristotle, Plato, Homer, Pindar, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Lysias, Æschines, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, and others, in addition to a companion series of the works of the chief Latin writers. The list of publications included in all some 100 different works, comprised (in their several editions) in about 250 volumes. Considering the special difficulties of the times and the exceptional character of the original and creative labour that was required to secure the texts, to prepare them for the press, to print them correctly, and to bring them to the attention of possible buyers, this list of undertakings is, in my judgment, by far the greatest and the most honourable in the whole history of publishing.

It was a disadvantage for carrying on scholarly publishing undertakings in Venice, that the city possessed no university, a disadvantage that was only partly offset by the proximity of Padua, which early in the fifteenth century had come under Venetian rule. A university would of course have been of service to a publisher like Aldus, not only in supplying a home market for his books, but in placing at his disposal scholarly assistants whose services could be utilised in editing the texts and in supervising their type-setting. The correspondence of members of a university with the scholars of other centres of learning, could be made valuable also in securing information as to available manuscripts and concerning scholarly undertakings generally. In the absence of a university circle, Aldus was obliged to depend upon his personal efforts to bring him into relations, through correspondence, with men of learning throughout Europe, and to gather about the Aldine Press a group of scholarly associates and collaborators.

The chief corrector or proof-reader for Greek work of the Press was John Gregoropoulos, of Candia. Some editorial service was rendered by Theodore Gaza, of Athens, who took part, for instance, in the work on the set of Aristotle. The most important, however, of the Greek associates of Aldus was Marcus Musurus, of Crete, whose name appears as the editor of the Aristophanes, Athenæus, Plato, and a number of other of the Greek authors in the Aldine series, and also of the important collection of Epistolæ Græcarum.

Musurus was an early friend of Pico, and later of his nephew, Alberto Pio, and it was at Carpi that he had first met Aldus, with whom he ever afterwards maintained a close intimacy. In 1502, probably at the instance of Aldus, Musurus was called by the Venetian Senate to occupy the Chair of belles-lettres at Padua, and he appears to have given his lectures not only in the University, but also in Venice. Aldus writes: “Scholars hasten to Venice, the Athens of our day, to listen to the teachings of Musurus, the greatest scholar of the age.”

In 1503, the Senate charged Musurus with the task of exercising a censorship over all Greek books printed in Venice, with reference particularly to the suppression of anything inimical to the Roman Church. This seems to have been the earliest attempt in Italy to supervise the work of the printing-press. It is natural enough that the ecclesiastics should have dreaded the influence of the introduction of the doctrines of the Greek Church, while it is certainly probable that many of the refugees from Constantinople brought with them no very cordial feeling towards Rome. The belief was very general that if the Papacy had not felt a greater enmity against the Greek Church than against the Turk, the Catholic states of Europe would have saved Constantinople. The sacking of Constantinople by the Christian armies of the Fourth Crusade was still remembered by the Christians of the East as a crime of the Western Church. There were, therefore, reasons enough why the authorities of Rome should think it necessary to keep a close watch over the new literature coming in from the East, and should do what was practicable to exclude all doctrinal writings, and the censorship instituted in 1502 was the beginning of a long series of rigorous enactments which proved, however, much less practicable to carry out in Venice than elsewhere in Italy.

Other literary advisers and associates of Aldus were Hieronymus Alexander (later Cardinal), Pietro Bembo, Scipio Carteromachus, Demetrius Doucas, Johann Reuchlin, and, above all, Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose learning rivalled that of Musurus, and who, outside of Italy, was far more widely known than the Greek scholar.

It was in the year 1500 that the scheme took shape in the mind of Aldus of an academy which should take the place in Venice that in Florence was occupied by the academy instituted by the Medici. The special aim of the Aldine Academy, to which Aldus gave the name Ne-accademia Nostra, was the furthering of the interest in, and knowledge of, the literature of classic Greece. Aldus himself was the first president of the Academy, and while the majority of the members were residents either of Venice or of Padua, the original list included scholars of Rome, of Bologna, and of Lucca, Greeks of Candia, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and others from distant places.