Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

While the university assumed the strictest kind of control and supervision over the work of the book-dealers, it conceded, as an offset, to the association of these dealers a very substantial monopoly of the trade of making and selling books. It was prohibited, under severe penalties, for a person not a libraire juré to do business in a book-shop or at any fixed stand; that is to say, he could not sell as a stationnaire, but had to carry on his trade as a pedlar or chap-man, from a pack or a cart. The value of the manuscript that such pedlar was permitted to offer for sale was restricted to ten sous, the equivalent of half a franc. At the price at which manuscripts were held during the fourteenth century, this limitation restricted the trade of the peripatetic vendors to single sheets, or broadsides, containing usually a Pater, an Ave, or a Credo, or a brief calendar or astrological table. Successive edicts were issued from reign to reign, renewing the prohibition upon the selling of books, whether in French or Latin (excepting only of such maximum value), by any drapers, grocers, pedlars, or dealers of any kind.[297]

In all the official references of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the book-dealers, the ground is taken that they formed a class apart from mechanics or from traders in ordinary merchandise. They were considered to be engaged in an intellectual pursuit, and were treated as members of a profession upon whose service the work of the university and that of the Church were largely dependent. Thus in 1649 the Recueil makes use of these words:

Les Marchands-Libraires, Imprimeurs et Relieurs seront toujours censés du corps de nostre bien aymée fille aisnée l’Université; du tout séparés des arts méchaniques, et autres Corps de Mestiers ou marchandises; et come tels, conservés en la jouissance de tous les droicts; priviléges, franchises, libertez, préséances et prérogatives attribuées à ladite université et à eux par les Royes nos prédécesseux et par nous.[298]

It was, therefore, not permitted to the libraire to bring discredit upon his profession by also engaging in any “sordid pursuits” (viles occupations), and in so doing he rendered himself liable to being deposed from his high post (declaré déchu de son noble office). He could, however, unite with his work as libraire that of a notary, or that of a royal counsellor or practitioner in the higher court (avocat du roi au Parlement).

Notwithstanding the personal prestige and the substantial advantages which were thus enjoyed by the book-dealers of the university, there were from time to time instances of protest, amounting occasionally to insubordination, on the part of the libraires, who, as their business aims and possibilities developed, became restive under the long series of trammels and restrictions, and particularly in connection with those imposed by the ecclesiastical division of the university authorities. The dread, however, of losing any portion of their privileges, and particularly the risk of any impairment of their monopoly of the book-trade of the university and of Paris, operated always as a sufficient consideration to prevent the insubordination from going to extremes. Throughout the entire period of the Middle Ages the control of the university continued, therefore, practically absolute over the book-trade of Paris, the influence of the Church and the (more or less spasmodic) authority of the Crown being exercised by means of the university machinery.

This state of affairs continued for some period of years after the introduction of printing. The university still insisted upon its responsibility for the correctness and the completeness of the texts issued from the Paris press, although it gave up of necessity the routine of examining individual copies of the printed editions. On the other hand, the censorship control on the part of the theological Faculty over the moral character and orthodoxy of the works printed was insisted upon more strenuously than ever as the Church began to recognise the enormous importance of the influence upon public opinion of the widely distributed printed volumes. The effect of this ecclesiastical control upon the business of printing books is set forth with some detail in the chapter on the early printers of Paris. It is sufficient to say here that the contention on the part of the university to control, as a portion of the work of higher education, the business of the makers and sellers of books, while sharply attacked and materially undermined after the middle of the seventeenth century, was not formally abandoned until the beginning of the eighteenth. At this time the Crown took over to itself all authority to regulate the press, an authority which disappeared only with the revolution of 1789.

For six centuries the book-trade of Paris and of France, whether it consisted in the production of manuscripts for the exclusive use of members of the university, or of printed books for the enlightenment of the general public, had been obliged to do its work under the hampering and burdensome regulations and restrictions of a varying series of authorities. The rectors of the university, the theologians of the Sorbonne, the lawyers of the Parliament of Paris, the chancellors of the Crown, the kings themselves, had all taken a hand, sometimes in turn, not infrequently in conflict with each other, in the task of “regulating” the trade in books. The burden of the restrictions was, in pretence at least, offset by various privileges and exemptions, but they remained burdens notwithstanding. It may well be a cause of surprise that in the face of such a long series of hampering difficulties, difficulties more serious than those with which any publishers in the world, outside of Rome, had to contend, the manuscript publishers and the later printer-publishers of Paris should have been able to do so much to make Paris a literary and a publishing centre. As has been already indicated, it was certainly the case that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Paris shared with Florence the position of being the centre of the manuscript trade of Europe. It was also the case, as will be set forth in a later chapter, that the first printer-publishers of Paris did most noteworthy work in furthering the development of scholarly publishing and the production of scholarly books. It required, however, the revolution of 1789 to establish the principle that the business of producing and distributing books could secure its legitimate development only when freed from censorship restrictions and regulations, and that it was a business the control of which belonged properly not to the university, the Courts of Parliament, or the Crown, but to the people themselves.

Considering the scarcity and the costliness of books in the Middle Ages, it is somewhat surprising that the work of instruction rested so directly upon books, that is, depended upon the mastery of a text. Thurot says: “It is the distinctive character of instruction in the Middle Ages that the science was not taught directly and in itself, but by the explanation of books which derived their authority solely from their writers.”[299] Roger Bacon formulates it: “When one knows the text, one knows all that concerns the science which is the object of the text.”[300] Instead of taking a course of logic or of ethics, says Compayré, the phrase was reading a book on logic or ethics, legere or audire librum. This close adherence to the text secured, of course, an assured demand in the university towns first for the hired pecias and later for the purchased manuscripts.

The foundation of the College of the Sorbonne dates from 1257. It was organised by Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to Louis IX. The college was at once affiliated with the University of Paris, of which it became the theological Faculty, and in the general direction of which it exercised at times a controlling influence. The college is connected with my subject on the ground of its assumption of the theological censorship of the Paris book-trade and of its frequent attempts to exercise a general censorship over all the productions of the Paris printing-press.

As we shall note later in the history of the Paris book-trade, various complications arose between the publishers and booksellers possessing a university license (the libraires jurés) and certain unlicensed dealers who undertook to come into competition with them. The locality occupied by these unlicensed booksellers was on the Island of the Cité, immediately by the precincts of Notre Dame. In fact it was the case with the book-trade generally north of the Alps that its business was very largely carried on in the portals of a church if not under the immediate shadow of the cathedral.