Febvre & Martin 1958

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. 1958. London: Verso, repr. 1984.

• NB that the first chapter is about the introduction of paper into Europe

Overall

Febvre and Martin offer, as their alternative title suggests, an account of "the book in the service of history," emphasizing that the printing press was not itself revolutionary but that social change that was already occurring (as, say, the development of national vernacular languages [323]) was consolidated by the production and distribution of texts via the printing press. Their method is mainly based on accounts of print runs as indicating, as they are at pains to emphasize, the market- and profit-driven book trade. Interestingly they describe how, while printing helped facilitate the Renaissance in classical learning and the Reformation, that it also abandoned certain sorts of medieval knowledge in selecting works to be printed, thus "the introduction of printing was in this respect a stage on the road to our present society of mass consumption and standardization" (260).

Preface

• 9 These new books were to cause profound changes not only in the habits of thought but also in the working conditions of secular and religious scholars, the great readers of the time. The changes (we won't say revolution) soon broke the bounds of this original audience and made considerable impact on the world outside
  • alt title: "the book in the service of history"
• 10 ...We hope to establish how and why the printed book was something more than a triumph of technical ingenuity, but was also one of the most potent agents at the disposal of western civilisation in bringing together the scattered ideas of representative thinkers.
• 12 [by way of demarcating the end of their study] Between 1803 and 1814 Koenig built three types of machine which were the prototypes of the modern printing plant: the power-driven platen press, the stop-cylinder press and the two-revolution press. As early as 1791 an Englishman, Nicolson, had worked out the pricniple of the cylinder steam press with self-inking rollers. INventions like these of course greatly accelerated the output of books and prepared the ground for the newspaper, the most recent newcomer yet to the world of print.
  • which was already invented so it was a change in production and distribution models

Ch 8 The Book as a Force for Change

I: From Ms to Printed Book

• 248 Assuming an average print run to be no greater than 500, then about 20 million books were printed before 1500, an impressive [249] total even by 20th-century standards, and even more so when we remember that the Europe of that day was far less populous than now.
  • what was the result of this change?
• 249 One fact must not be lost sight of: the printer and the bookseller worked above all and from the beginning for profit.
• ...the majority, or very nearly, of books were religious and among them of course were many edition so fhte Scriptures. What subject [250] was more likely in the eyes of printers to sell at a time when most readers were clerics?
• another important category of pre-1500 texts: classics of philosophy and theology, which were mainly printed in university cities
  • e.g., Aristotle mostly printed in Venice, Augsburg, Cologne, Leipzig; Lombard's Sententiae in Basel
• 251 and books printed for the use of priests
• 252 The reading public was extended by the sheer numbers of books which reached wider and wider audiences with increasing ease. Printing also made for a more exact knowledge of the Latin language and of the authors of classical antiquity.
  • printing just preceded the diffusion of Italian humanism throughout Europe
• 253 The crucial role of printing in relation to humanist studies up to the last years of the 15th century was not so much to give a wide circulation to those texts which had recently been rediscovered...as to make generally known, by multiplying the number of copies that were available, those texts which had been most commonly used in the middle ages as an introduction to classical literature.
  • printing not as recuperative (yet) but mainly distributive (what's a better word for that?)
  • continuity with middle ages contra the "re-birth" model of the Renaissance: e.g., the continued popularity of Boethius, who "represented a perfect blend of classical and medieval thought" (254)
• 259 So printing does not seem to have played much part in developing scientific theory at the start, though it seems to have helped draw public attention to scientific matters. [evidenced by] ...a new outlook which was already apparent in the numerous technical advances made in as many fields in the first half of the 15th century.
• 260 since printers were concerned with making a profit primarily (and thus with selecting the most profitable medieval texts to be printed), "the introduction of printing was in this respect a stage on the road to our present society of mass consumption and standardization."
  • printing killing certain books and genres even as it advanced others

II: Humanism and the Book

• Method: interpreting numbers of editions and types of books being reprinted frequently
• 262 ...by the C16 the printed book had been produced in sufficient quantities to make it accessible to anyone who could read. It played a central role in the diffusion of knowledge of classical literature at the beginning of the century and later in the propagation of Reformation doctrines; it helped to fix the vernacular languages and encouraged the development of national literatures.
• 266 slow introduction of Greek into printed books -- the interplay between public demand and technical development of Greek type - "this brief account enables us to see how knowledge of the Greek language could spread and how little by little there could develop a market for the Greek classics [and grammars/dictionaries that Aldus printed] in the original language."
• 268 details development of printing in Hebrew by Jews for Jews starting in Italy and pre-1492 Spain
• 276 Alongside the scholastic tradition there thus grew up another separate intellectual tradition based upon the classics. At the same time the printing press encouraged the development of an extensive 'scientific' literature written in the vernacular and intended for the mass market. The bulk of this was made up of summaries, medical remedies, prognostications, and astrological tables.
• 277 perhaps early printing rendereed its most valuable services to what we might call the descriptive sciences - the natural sciences and anatomy - and that mainly by virtue of its ancillary technique of illustration.
• 278 Although printing certainly helped scholars in some fields, on the whole it could not be said to have hastened the acceptance of new ideas or knowledge. In fact, by popularizing long cherished beliefs, strengthening traditional prejudices and giving authority to seductive fallacies, it could even be said to have represented an obstacle to the acceptance of many new views.
  • example: attitudes toward geographical discoveries outside Europe in C16: "So it is not until after 1560 that the existence of the new worlds was recognized outside of a small circle and regarded as of interest.... This goes to show how slow public opinion was in the C16 to take in and assimilate new information with its existing outlook on the world. Moreover one can have doubts as to the extent to which this outlook had, even by the end of the century, changed in its essentials."
• 283-5: genre popularities (in ascending order): geography, law, history, legendary histories/national epics and imaginative literature
  • popularity of Boccaccio, the Roman de la Rose
• 286 At the same time [mid C16] there developed throughout Europe a number of literary forms which were more or less closely related to the fictional novel or story. This relationship [between these proto-novels and Boccaccio, Apuleius's Golden Ass, Heliodorus's Aethiopica] accounts for much of their popular appeal and undoubtedly contributed to the success of More's Utopia and of Rabelais' work. But the two countries in which, in the C16, fictional works were most often written were without doubt Spain and Italy.
• 287 ...traditional tales of knights and stories like Petit Jean de Santré, written to beguile the leisure hours of Burgundian nobles, joined the Shepherds' Calendars in the chapmen's packs. Here we see at work a process of evolution still apparent in our own day by which a masterpiece originally addressed to an elite audience is revised by later generations for a wider and wider public. Those who go to the cinema, read the comic-strips in the newspapers or watch television enter through these new intermediaries into contact with Victor Hugo, Stendhal, de Maupassant, and such classic writeres - or at least with what purports to be their work.

III: The Book and the Reformation

• 288 For the first time in history there developed a propaganda campaign conducted through the medium of the press.
• We must, of course, be careful not to ascribe to the book or even to the preacher too important a role in the birth and development of the Reformation. It would be wrong to regard propaganda and propagandists as the main cause of such developments.
• 289 before Luther the printing press was "facilitating and encouraging the renewal of scriptuural studies [and] it was also turning out thousands of handbills, posters and broadsheets intended for the general public."
• 295 When We consider that the translation of the Bible was only part of Luther's work, and that in addition he wrote sermons, polemics...and catechisms wghich, cheaper and easier to understand, were produced in even greater numbers, then we can see that we have here for the first time a truly mass readership and a popular literature within everybody's reach.
• 304 To sell forbidden books, to violate the prohibitions of the Sorbonne, of the Parlement, of even the King himself, this in fact became a purely commercial necessity for many booksellers [during and after the Reformation].
  • emphasizing the European, transnational character of the book trade in the C16, and how this too facilitated the Reformation in spite of increasing national regulation

IV: Printing and Language

• 319 just as print favoured the growth of the Reformation, so it helped mould our modern European languages.
• 320 Publishers in their search for the largest possible market naturally tended to encourage the growing use of the vernacular for new purposes. Morevoer the press gave the book a permanent and unchanging text. Books 'now escaped the tendency peculiar to scribes, partly conscious and partly unconscious, to modernize the text they were copying as they went along' (A. Meillet). When they took over from the scribes printers began to eliminate the whims of spelling and the phrases of dialect which would have made their books less readily understood by a wide public.
  • though the "started" is the important part
  • they put this nicely on 327: "Spelling long remained subject to the whims of foremen and compositors: authors might complain but they could not prevent it. Little by little however standards were fixed, not so much by a priori principles invented by innovating theoretician as by the slow changing of habits."
• 322 impact of Luther's works on standardizing German
• 331 Latin no doubt also owed its survival to its precision and clarity. In the face of modern languages which were constantly developing it had the advantage of possessing a fixed vocabulary whose meaning was easy to determine by reference to well-known and authoritative texts. It must have partly been for this reason that it continued to be the language of diplomacy, science and philosophy in the C17. Its use in medicine became steadily rarer, but it went on being the language of mathematics and astronomy.
• 332 So, by encouraging publication in the national languages for economic reasons, the book trade was in the end fostering the development of those languages, and bringing about the decline of Latin. This was to be a fateful development. It marked, it is true, the origin of a culture belonging to the masses, but its consequences, once set in motion were incalculable. The unified Latin culture of Europe was finally dissolved by the rise of the vernacular languages which was consolidated by the printing press.
• 323 In England the effect of the Reformation was to encourage the publication of translations of Scripture and of religious works, and their language was to be as influential on the development of English as Luther's in Germany. First Tyndale, then Coverdale translated the Scriptures, and their pioneer work was followed by succeeding versions culminating in one of the supreme achievements [324] of English prose, the Authorized Version [King James] of 1611.