Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

I find such agencies supplied in the first place by the scribes of the Roman Church, the organisation of which had replaced as a central civilising influence the power of the lost Roman Empire. The scriptoria of the monasteries rendered the service formerly given by the copyists of the book-shops or of the country houses, while their armaria, or book-chests, had to fill the place of the destroyed or scattered libraries of the Roman cities or the Roman villas. The work of the scribes was now directed not by an Augustus, a Mæcenas, or an Atticus, but by a Cassiodorus, a Benedict, or a Gregory, and the incentive to literary labour was no longer the laurel crown of the circus, the favours of a patron, or the honoraria of the publishers, but the glory of God and the service of the Church. Upon these agencies depended the existence of literature during the seven long centuries between the fall of the Western Empire and the beginning of the work of the universities, and, in fact, for many years after the foundation of the universities of Bologna and of Paris, the book-production of the monasteries continued to be of material importance in connection with the preservation of literature.

In a study of the organisation of the earliest book-trade of Bologna and Paris and of the method under which the text-books for the universities were produced and supplied, I have attempted to indicate the part played by the universities in the history of literary production. In a later chapter I have presented sketches of one or two of the more noteworthy of the manuscript dealers, who carried on, for a couple of centuries prior to the invention of printing, the business of supplying books to the increasing circles of readers outside of the universities.

In 1450 comes the invention of printing, which in revolutionising the methods of distributing intellectual productions, exercised such a complex and far-reaching influence on the thought and on the history of mankind. I have described with some detail the careers of certain of the earlier printer-publishers of Europe, and have been interested in noting how important and distinctive were the services rendered by these publishers to scholarship and to literature.

The concluding chapter sketches the growth of the conception of the idea of property in literature, and the gradual development and extension throughout the States of Europe of the system of privileges which formed the precedent and the foundations for the modern system of the law of literature and of interstate copyright legislation. I have taken pleasure in pointing out that the responsibility for securing this preliminary recognition of property in literary productions and of the property rights of literary producers rested with the printer-publishers, and that the shaping of the beginnings of a copyright system for Europe is due to their efforts. It was they also who bore the chief burden of the contest, which extended over several centuries, for the freedom of the press from the burdensome censorship of Church and State, a censorship which in certain communities appeared likely for a time to throttle literary production altogether. I can but think that the historians of literature and the students of the social and political conditions on which literary production is so largely dependent, have failed to do full justice to men like Aldus, the Estiennes, Froben, Koberger, and Plantin, who fought so sturdily against the pretensions of pope, bishop, or monarch to stand between the printing-press and the people and to decide what should and what should not be printed.

I have thought it worth while, in giving the business history of these old-time publishers, to present the lists of their more characteristic publications,—lists which seem to me to possess pertinence and value as giving an impression of the nature and the range of the literary interests of the time and of the particular community in which the publisher was working, while they are also, of course, indicative of the personal characteristics of the publisher himself. When we find Aldus in Venice devoting his presses almost exclusively to classical literature, and in the classics, so largely to Greek; while in Basel and Nuremberg the early printers are producing the works of the Church Fathers, in Paris the first Estienne (in the face of the fierce opposition of the theologians) is multiplying editions of the Scriptures, and in London, Caxton and his immediate successors, disregarding both the literature of the old world and the writings of the Church, are presenting to the English public a long series of romances and fabliaux,—we may understand that we have to do not with a series of accidental publishing selections, but with the results of a definite purpose and policy on the part of capable and observing men, a policy which gives an indication of the nature and interests of their several communities, while it characterises also the aims and the individual ideals of the publishers themselves. Some of these earlier publishers were willing simply to produce the books for which the people about them were asking, while others, with a higher ambition and a larger feeling of responsibility, proposed themselves to educate a book-reading and a book-buying public, and thus to create the demand for the higher literature which their presses were prepared to supply.

These earlier printer-publishers took upon themselves, in fact, the responsibility which had previously rested with the universities, and, back of the universities, with the monasteries, of selecting the literature that was to be utilised by the community and through which the intellectual life of the generation was to be in large part shaped and directed. They thus took their place in the series of literary agencies by means of which the world’s literature had been selected, preserved, and rendered available for mankind, a chain which included such diverse and widely separated links as the Ptolemies of Alexandria, the princely patrons of Rome, Cassiodorus, S. Benedict and his monasteries, the schools of Charlemagne and Alcuin, the universities of Bologna and Paris, and, finally, the printer-publishers who utilised the great discovery of Gutenberg.

The fact that, during both the manuscript period and the first two centuries of printing, the writings of Cicero were reproduced far more largely than those of any other of the Roman writers, is interesting as indicating a distinct literary preference on the part of successive generations both of producers and of readers. The pre-eminence of Aristotle in the lists of the mediæval issues of the Greek classics has, I judge, a different significance. Aristotle stood for a school of philosophy, the teachings of which had in the main been accepted by the Church, and copies of his writings were required for the use of students. The continued demand for the works of Cicero depended upon no such adventitious aid, and can, therefore, fairly be credited to their perennial value as literature.

My readers will bear in mind that I have not undertaken any such impossible task as a history of literary production, or even a record of all the factors which controlled literary production. I have attempted simply to present a study of certain conditions in the history of the manifolding and distribution of books by which the production and effectiveness of literature was very largely influenced and determined, and under which the conception of such a thing as literary property gradually developed. The recognition of a just requirement or of an existing injustice must, of course, always precede the framing of legislation to meet the requirement or to remedy the injustice, and the conception of literary property and a recognition of the inherent rights (and of the existing wrongs) of literary producers had to be arrived at before copyright legislation could be secured.

I have specified as the limit of the present treatise the close of the seventeenth century, although I have found it convenient in certain chapters to make reference to events of a somewhat later date. It has been my purpose, however, to present a study of the conditions of literary production in Europe prior to copyright law, and the copyright legislation of Europe may be said to begin with the English statute of 1710, known as the Act of Queen Anne.

I trust that in the near future some competent authority may find himself interested in preparing a history of copyright law, and I shall be well pleased if the present volumes may be accepted by the historian of copyright and by the students of the subject as forming a suitable general introduction to such a history.