PRINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE [Illustration] PRINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE: A PAPER READ BEFORE THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUBOF ROCHESTER NEW YORK BY JOHN ROTHWELL SLATER. [Illustration] NEW YORK William Edwin Rudge 1921 PRINTING AND THE RENAISSANCE: A PAPER READ BEFORE THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB OF ROCHESTER N. Y. PRINTING did not make the Renaissance; the Renaissance made printing. Printing did not begin the publication and dissemination of books. Therewere libraries of vast extent in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome. There were universities centuries before Gutenberg where the fewinstructed the many in the learning treasured up in books, and whereboth scholars and professional scribes multiplied copies of books bothold and new. At the outset of any examination of the influence ofprinting on the Renaissance it is necessary to remind ourselves that theintellectual life of the ancient and the mediaeval world was built uponthe written word. There is a naive view in which ancient literature isconceived as existing chiefly in the autograph manuscripts and originaldocuments of a few great centers to which all ambitious students musthave resort. A very little inquiry into the multiplication of booksbefore printing shows us how erroneous is this view. We must pass over entirely the history of publishing and book-selling inancient times, a subject too vast for adequate summary in a preliminarysurvey of this sort. With the fall of Rome and the wholesale destructionthat accompanied the barbarian invasions a new chapter begins in thehistory of the dissemination of literature. This chapter opens with thefounding of the scriptorium, or monastic copying system, by Cassiodorusand Saint Benedict early in the sixth century. To these two men, Cassiodorus, the ex-chancellor of the Gothic king Theodoric, andBenedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, is due the gratitude ofthe modern world. It was through their foresight in setting the monks atwork copying the scriptures and the secular literature of antiquity thatwe owe the preservation of most of the books that have survived theruins of the ancient world. At the monastery of Monte Cassino, foundedby Saint Benedict in the year 529, and at that of Viviers, founded byCassiodorus in 531, the Benedictine rule required of every monk that afixed portion of each day be spent in the scriptorium. There the moreskilled scribes were entrusted with the copying of precious documentsrescued from the chaos of the preceding century, while monks not yetsufficiently expert for this high duty were instructed by theirsuperiors. The example thus nobly set was imitated throughout all the centuriesthat followed, not only in the Benedictine monasteries of Italy, France, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, but in religious houses ofall orders. It is to the mediaeval Church, her conservatism in the truesense of the word, her industry, her patience, her disinterestedguardianship alike of sacred and of pagan letters, that the world owesmost of our knowledge of antiquity. Conceive how great would be our lossif to archaeology alone we could turn for the reconstruction of thecivilization, the art, the philosophy, the public and private life ofGreece and Rome. If the Church had done no more than this forcivilization, it would still have earned some measure of tolerance fromits most anti-clerical opponents. It is of course to the Eastern ratherthan to the Roman Church that we owe the preservation of classical Greekliterature, copied during the dark ages in Greek monasteries andintroduced into Italy after the fall of Constantinople. A second stage in the multiplication and publication of manuscript booksbegins with the founding of the great mediaeval universities of Bologna, Paris, Padua, Oxford, and other centers of higher education. Inasmuch asthe study of those days was almost entirely book study, the maintenanceof a university library with one or two copies of each book studied wasinadequate. There grew up in each university city an organized system ofsupplying the students with textbooks. The authorized book-dealers of amediaeval university were called =stationarii=, or stationers, a termapparently derived from the fixed post or station assigned in or nearthe university buildings to each scribe permitted to supply books to thestudents and professors. A stationer in England has always meantprimarily a book-dealer or publisher, as for example in the termStationers' Hall, the guild or corporation which until 1842 stillexercised in London the functions of a copyright bureau. Incidentally astationer also dealt in writing materials, whence our ordinary Americanuse of the term. Another name for the university book-dealers was theclassical Latin word =librarii=, which usually in mediaeval Latin meantnot what we call a librarian but a vender of books, like the French=libraire=. These scribes were not allowed at first to sell theirmanuscripts, but rented them to the students at rates fixed byuniversity statutes. A folded sheet of eight pages, sixteen columns ofsixty-two lines each, was the unit on which the rental charges werebased. Such a sheet at the beginning of the thirteenth century rentedfor about twenty cents a term; and since an ordinary textbook ofphilosophy or theology or canon law contained many sheets, these chargesconstituted no inconsiderable part of the cost of instruction. The booksmust be returned before the student left the university; sales were atfirst surreptitious and illegal, but became common early in thefourteenth century. Reasonable accuracy among the stationers was securedby a system of fines for errors, half of which went to the university, the other half being divided between the supervisor or head proof-readerand the informant who discovered the error. The original regulation which forbade the stationers to sell books wasintended to prevent students of a profiteering turn of mind from buyingbooks for resale to their fellow-students at a higher price, thuscornering the market and holding up the work of an entire class. Incourse of time, however, the book-dealers were permitted not only tosell textbooks, at prices still controlled by official action, but alsoto buy and sell manuscripts of other books, both those produced by localscribes and those imported from other cities and countries. This broadening of the activities of the university bookstores lednaturally to the third and last stage which the publishing businessunderwent before the invention of printing. This stage was theestablishment in Florence, Paris, and other intellectual centers, ofbookshops selling manuscripts to the general public rather than touniversity students. These grew rapidly during the first half of thefifteenth century, receiving a marked impetus from the new interest inGreek studies. Some years before the fall of Constantinople in 1453Italian book-sellers were accustomed to send their buyers to the centersof Byzantine learning in the near East in quest of manuscripts to bedisposed of at fancy prices to the rich collectors and patrons ofliterature. There is evidence of similar methods in France and Germanyduring the earlier decades of the Renaissance. This preliminary sketch of the book-publishing business before printingis intended to correct a rather common misapprehension. Manuscript bookswere indeed relatively costly, but they were not scarce. Any scholar whohad not been through a university not only had access to publiclibraries of hundreds of volumes, but might also possess, at prices notbeyond the reach of a moderate purse, his own five-foot shelf of theclassics. The more elegant manuscripts, written by experts and adornedwith rich illuminations and sumptuous bindings, were of course not forthe humble student; but working copies, multiplied on a large scale by aroomful of scribes writing simultaneously from dictation, might alwaysbe had. Chaucer, writing of the poor clerk of Oxford at the end of thefourteenth century, tells us that "Him was levere have at his beddes heed Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye, Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrye. " We are not sure that he had the whole twenty books; that was hisambition, his academic dream of wealth; but we are assured that hespent on books all the money he could borrow from his friends, and thathe showed his gratitude by busily praying for the souls of hiscreditors. When we consider the enormous number of manuscript books that must haveexisted in Europe in the middle ages, we may well wonder why they havebecome relatively rare in modern times. Several explanations account forthis. In the first place, the practice of erasing old manuscripts andusing the same vellum again for other works was extremely common. Secondly, vast numbers of manuscripts in the monasteries and otherlibraries of Europe were wantonly or accidentally destroyed by fire, especially in times of war and religious fanaticism. In the third place, the early binders, down through the sixteenth century and even later, used sheets of vellum from old manuscripts for the linings and thecovers of printed books. Finally, after the invention of printing, assoon as a given work had been adequately and handsomely printed in astandard edition, all but the finest manuscripts of that book wouldnaturally be looked upon as of little value, and would be subject toloss and decay if not to deliberate destruction. Owing to these andperhaps other causes it is almost entirely the religious manuscriptsthat have survived, except those preserved in royal libraries andmuseums from the finer collections of the middle ages. The invention of printing was not the work of any one man. Not only wereprinted pages of text with accompanying pictures produced from woodcutblocks in Holland a quarter of a century before Gutenberg began his workat Mainz, but it is pretty well established that movable types wereemployed by Laurence Koster, of Haarlem, as early as 1430. But Koster, who died about 1440, did not carry his invention beyond the experimentalstages, and produced no really fine printing. Moreover, his work had noimmediate successor in Holland. Whether it be true, as sometimesalleged, that Gutenberg first learned of the new art from one ofKoster's workmen, we have no means of knowing. At any rate, Gutenberg'scontemporaries as well as his successors gave to him the credit of theinvention. That he was not the first to conceive the idea of multiplyingimpressions of type-forms by the use of a screw press is evident; but hewas the first to develop the invention to a point where it becamecapable of indefinite extension. He seems to have worked in secret forsome years on the problems involved in type-founding and printing beforethe year 1450, when he set up his shop in Mainz. The capital for the new business was furnished by a wealthy goldsmithnamed Johann Fust. Between 1450 and 1455 Gutenberg printed an edition ofthe Latin Bible, sometimes known as the Mazarin Bible, which isordinarily regarded as the first printed book. It was a magnificentlyprinted volume, exhibiting at the very foundation of the art a skill inpresswork scarcely surpassed by any of Gutenberg's immediate successors. He was a great printer, but not a financially successful one. Fust suedhis partner in 1455 for repayment of the loans advanced, and uponGutenberg's failure to meet these obligations Fust foreclosed themortgage and took over the printing plant. Although Gutenberg startedanother publishing house at Mainz, and continued it until his death in1468, the main development of printing after 1455 was in the originalplant as carried on by Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer. Theyprinted in 1457 an edition of the Psalms in which for the first timetwo-color printing was employed, the large initial letters being printedin red and black. This innovation, designed to imitate the rubricatedinitials of the manuscripts, involved great technical difficulties inthe presswork, and was not generally adopted. Most of the early printedbooks, even down to the end of the fifteenth century, left blanks forthe large capitals at the beginnings of the chapters, to be filled in byhand by professional illuminators. From the establishments of Gutenberg and of Fust and Schoeffer in Mainzknowledge of the new art spread rapidly into many German cities. In 1462Mainz was captured and sacked by Adolph of Nassau in one of the localwars of the period, and printers from the Mainz shops made their way toother cities throughout the empire. Before 1470 there were printingestablishments in almost every German city, and hundreds of works, mostly theological, had been issued from their presses. In all these early German books, printed of course in Latin, the typeused was the black-letter. Gutenberg, in designing his first font, evidently tried to imitate as closely as possible the angular gothicalphabet employed by the scribes in the best manuscripts. Not only werethe letters identical in form with the engrossing hand of the monks, butthe innumerable abbreviated forms used in the Latin manuscripts wereretained. Thus a stroke over a vowel indicated an omitted =m= or =n=, a=p= with a stroke across it indicated the Latin prefix =per=, a circleabove the line stood for the termination =us=, an =r= with a crossmeant--=rum=, and so forth. These abbreviations, which make printedbooks of the earliest period rather hard reading today, were retainednot only to save space but to give the printed page as nearly aspossible the appearance of a fine manuscript. It was not at first theambition of the printers and type-founders to make their books morelegible or less taxing on the eyes than manuscript; their readers wereaccustomed to manuscript and felt no need of such improvements. Themechanical advance in the art of writing brought about by printing wasat first regarded as consisting in the greater rapidity and lower costat which printed books could be produced. But the new invention was at first looked upon by some famous scholarsand patrons of learning as a detriment rather than a help. The greatTrithemius, abbot of Sponheim, wrote as late as 1494 in the followingterms: "A work written on parchment could be preserved for a thousand years, while it is probable that no volume printed on paper will last for more than two centuries. Many important works have not been printed, and the copies of these must be prepared by scribes. The scribe who ceases his work because of the invention of the printing-press can be no true lover of books, in that, regarding only the present, he gives no due thought to the intellectual cultivation of his successors. The printer has no care for the beauty and the artistic form of books, while with the scribe this is a labor of love. " Contrasted with this low estimate of the importance of the new art bysome scholars, we note the promptness with which the great churchmen ofItaly and of France took measures to import German printers and set uppresses of their own. In 1464 the abbot of Subiaco, a monastery nearRome, brought to Italy two German printers, Conrad Schweinheim andArnold Pannartz, and set them at work printing liturgical books for theuse of the monks. Soon afterward, under ecclesiastical patronage, theybegan to issue, first at Subiaco and then at Rome, a series of Latinclassics. During five years this first printing establishment in Italypublished the complete works of Cicero, Apuleius, Caesar, Virgil, Livy, Strabo, Lucan, Pliny, Suetonius, Quintilian, Ovid, as well as of suchfathers of the Latin Church as Augustine, Jerome and Cyprian, and acomplete Latin Bible. This printing establishment came to an end in 1472for lack of adequate capital, but was soon followed by others both inRome and especially in Venice. Early Venetian printing forms one of the most distinguished chapters inthe whole history of the subject. The most famous of the firstgeneration was Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman who had learned the art inGermany. Between 1470 and his death in 1480 he printed many fine books, and in most of them he employed what is now called roman type. He wasnot absolutely the first to use the roman alphabet, but his roman fontswere designed and cast with such artistic taste, such a fine sense ofproportion and symmetry of form, that the Jenson roman became the modelof later printers for many years after his death. Roman type, unlike theblack-letter, had two distinct origins. The capitals were derived fromthe letters used by the ancient Roman architects for inscriptions onpublic buildings. The small letters were adapted from the roundedvertical style of writing used in many Italian texts, altogetherdifferent in form from the angular gothic alphabet used inecclesiastical manuscripts. Jenson's roman letters were clear, sharp andeasy to read, and constituted the greatest single addition to the art ofprinting since its beginning. Germany clung obstinately to theblack-letter in its Latin books, as it has adhered down to very recenttimes to a similar heavy type for the printing of German text; but therest of Europe within a few years came over to the clearer and morebeautiful roman. There were many early printers at Venice between Jenson and his greatersuccessor Aldus Manutius, who began business in 1494, but we shall passover them all in order to devote more careful attention to the noblehistory of the Aldine press. I propose in the remainder of this paper toselect five great printers of the Renaissance, and to examine their workboth as a whole and as illustrated in typical examples. These five are: ALDUS MANUTIUS, of Venice. ROBERT ESTIENNE, of Paris, commonly known by the name of =Stephanus=. JOHANN FROBEN, of Basel. ANTON KOBERGER, of Nuremberg. WILLIAM CAXTON, of London. Each stands for a different aspect of the art of printing, both in themechanical features of book-making and also in the selection of works tobe published and the editorial methods employed in making them ready forthe press. Taken together, the books issued from their presses at theend of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century form asort of composite picture of the Renaissance. [Illustration] First of all, in our consideration and in order of greatness, stands thename of Aldus Manutius. The books of the Aldine press, all with thewell-known sign of the anchor and dolphin, are familiar to most studentsof the classics. Aldus was born in 1450, the very year of Gutenberg'sinvention. For the first forty years of his life he was a scholar, devoting himself to the Latin classics and to the mastery of the newlyrevived Greek language and literature. His intimate association withPico della Mirandola and other Italian scholars, as well as with manyof the learned Greeks who then frequented Italian courts and cities, ledhim to conceive the great plan upon which his later career was based. This was nothing less than to issue practically the whole body ofclassic literature, Greek as well as Latin, in editions distinguishedfrom all that had preceded in two important respects. First, they wereto be not reprints of received uncritical texts but new revisions madeby competent scholars based upon a comparison of all the best availablemanuscripts. Secondly, they were to be printed not in ponderous andcostly folios but in small octavos of convenient size, small but cleartype, and low price. This was not primarily a commercial venture likethe cheap texts of the classics issued in the nineteenth century byTeubner and other German publishers, but resembled rather in its broadhumanistic spirit such a recent enterprise as the Loeb ClassicalLibrary. The purpose in each case was to revive and encourage thereading of the classics not alone by schoolboys but by men of all agesand all professions. But there is this important difference, that Mr. Loeb is a retired millionaire who employs scholars to do all the workand merely foots the bill, while Aldus was a poor man dependent uponsuch capital as he could borrow from his patrons, and had at the sametime to perform for himself a large part of the editorial labors on hisbooks. Mr. Loeb commands the latest and most complete resources of themodern art of printing; Aldus helped to make that art. Mr. Loeb'seditors may employ when they choose the style of type known as italic;Aldus invented it. Mr. Loeb's publishers have at their command all theadvertising and selling machinery of a great modern business concern, and yet they do not, and probably can not, make the classics pay forthemselves, but must meet the deficits out of an endowment. Aldus had toorganize his own selling system, his advertising had to be largely byprivate correspondence with scholars and book-sellers throughout Europelaboriously composed with his own hand; yet it was imperative that thebusiness become as soon as possible self-supporting, or at least thatlosses in one quarter should be recouped by profits in another. It was in his edition of Virgil, 1501, that Aldus first employed the newcursive or sloping letter which later came to be known in Englishprinting as italic type. According to tradition he copied it closelyfrom the handwriting of the Italian poet Petrarch. The type was verycompact, covering many more words on a page than the roman of that day, and was used as a body type, not as in our day for isolated words andphrases set apart for emphasis or other distinction from the rest of thetext. Aldus also, though not the first to cast Greek type, gave hisGreek fonts an elegance which was soon imitated, like the italic, byother printers. By the introduction of small types which were at thesame time legible, and by adopting for his classical texts a smallformat suitable for pocket-size books, Aldus invented the modern smallbook. No longer was it necessary for a scholar to rest a heavy folio ona table in order to read; he might carry with him on a journey half adozen of these beautiful little books in no more space than a singlevolume of the older printers. Furthermore, his prices were low. Thepocket editions or small octavos sold for about two lire, or forty centsin the money of that day, the purchasing power of which in modern moneyis estimated at not above two dollars. This popularizing of literature and of classical learning did not meetwith universal favor amongst his countrymen. We read of one Italian whowarned Aldus that if he kept on spreading Italian scholarship beyond theAlps at nominal prices the outer barbarians would no longer come toItaly to study Greek, but would stay at home and read their Aldineeditions without adding a penny to the income of Italian cities. Such afear was not unfounded, for the poorer scholars of Germany and theNetherlands did actually find that they could stay at home and get for afew francs the ripest results of Italian and Greek scholarship. Thisgave Aldus no concern; if he could render international services tolearning, if he could help to set up among the humbler scholars of otherlands such a fine rivalry of competitive coöperation as already existedamong such leaders as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, he should be wellcontent to live laborious days and to die poor. Both these he did; buthe gathered around him such a company of friends and collaborators asfew men have enjoyed; he must have breathed with a rare exhilaration, born of honest and richly productive toil, the very air of Athens in herglory; and he must have realized sometimes amid the dust and heat of theprinting shop that it was given to him at much cost of life and grindingtoil to stand upon the threshold of the golden age alike of typographyand of the revival of learning. In 1514, the year before his death, Aldus wrote to a friend a letter of which I borrow a translation fromGeorge Haven Putnam's Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages. This is the picture Aldus drew of his daily routine: "I am hampered in my work by a thousand interruptions. Nearly every hour comes a letter from some scholar, and if I undertook to reply to them all, I should be obliged to devote day and night to scribbling. Then through the day come calls from all kinds of visitors. Some desire merely to give a word of greeting, others want to know what there is new, while the greater number come to my office because they happen to have nothing else to do. 'Let us look in upon Aldus, ' they say to each other. Then they loaf in and sit and chatter to no purpose. Even these people with no business are not so bad as those who have a poem to offer or something in prose (usually very prosy indeed) which they wish to see printed with the name of Aldus. These interruptions are now becoming too serious for me, and I must take steps to lessen them. Many letters I simply leave unanswered, while to others I send very brief replies; and as I do this not from pride or from discourtesy, but simply in order to be able to go on with my task of printing good books, it must not be taken hardly. As a warning to the heedless visitors who use up my office hours to no purpose, I have now put up a big notice on the door of my office to the following effect: Whoever thou art, thou art earnestly requested by Aldus to state thy business briefly and to take thy departure promptly. In this way thou mayest be of service even as was Hercules to the weary Atlas. For this is a place of work for all who enter. " What a picture that letter gives us of the half humorous, half patheticspirit in which the great publisher endured the daily grind. Twentyyears of it wore him out, but his dolphin-and-anchor trade-mark stillafter four centuries preaches patience and hope to all who undertakegreat burdens for the enlightenment of mankind. The Aldine press did not confine its efforts to the ancient classics, but printed editions of Dante and Petrarch and other Italian poets, andproduced the first editions of some of the most important works ofErasmus. But all of its publications belonged in general to the movementknown as humanism, the field of ancient and contemporary poetry, drama, philosophy, history, and art. Aldus left to others, especially to thegreat ecclesiastical printers of Venice and of Rome, the printing of thescriptures, the works of the church fathers, and the innumerable volumesof theological controversy with which the age abounded. In France, onthe other hand, the great publishing house of the Estiennes, orStephani, to whom we next direct our attention, divided its effortsbetween the secular and sacred literature. Inasmuch as the history ofthe Stephanus establishment is typical of the influence of printing uponthe Renaissance, and of the Renaissance upon printing, which is thesubject of this paper, we may well examine some aspects of its career. Printing had been introduced into France in 1469 by the ecclesiastics ofthe Sorbonne. Like that abbot of Subiaco who set up the first press inItaly five years before, these professors of scholastic philosophy andtheology at Paris did not realize that the new art had in it thepossibilities of anti-clerical and heretical use. For the firstgeneration the French printers enjoyed a considerable freedom fromcensorship and burdensome restrictions. They published, like theVenetians, both the Greek and Latin classics and the works ofcontemporary writers. Both Louis XII. And Francis I. Gave theirpatronage and encouragement to various eminent scholar-printers whoflourished between the establishment of the first publishing-houses inParis and the beginning of the sixteenth century. I pass over all theseto select as the typical French printers of the Renaissance the familyfounded by Henri Estienne the elder. His first book, a Latin translationof Aristotle's Ethica, appeared in 1504. From that date for nearly ahundred years the house of Stephanus and his descendants led thepublishing business in France. Both in the artistic advancement of theart of printing and in the intellectual advancement of French thought bytheir selection of the works to be issued they earned a right to theenduring gratitude of mankind. Henri Estienne, the founder of the house, who died in 1520, hadpublished during these sixteen years at least one hundred separateworks. Although they were mostly Latin, many of them revealed Estienne'sknowledge of and devotion to the new Greek studies, and this tendency onhis part was at once suspected as heretical by the orthodox doctors ofthe Sorbonne. The favor of King Francis was not at all times sufficientto protect him from persecution, and an increasing severity ofcensorship arose, the full force of which began to be evident in thetime of his son Robert. After Henri's death his business was for a time carried on by hiswidow's second husband, Simon Colines, a scholar and humanist ofbrilliant attainments. Both while at the head of the house of Stephanusand later when he had withdrawn from that in favor of Robert Estiennehis stepson and set up a separate publishing business, Colines addedmuch to the prestige of French printing. He caused Greek fonts to becast, not inferior to those of the Venetian printers, and began topublish the Greek classics in beautiful editions. It was Colines, ratherthan either the elder or the younger Estienne, who elevated the artisticside of French printing by engaging the services of such famoustypographical experts as Geofroy Tory, and adding to his booksillustrations of the highest excellence, as well as decorative initialsand borders. Indeed it may be said that after the death of Aldussupremacy in the fine art of book-making gradually passed from Venice toParis. [Illustration] The greatest of the Estiennes was Robert, son of Henri Estienne andstepson of Colines, who was in control of the house from 1524 to hisdeath in 1559. The very first book he published was an edition of theLatin Testament. Although following in the main the Vulgate or officialBible of the Roman Church, he introduced certain corrections based onhis knowledge of the Greek text. This marked the beginning of a longcontroversy between Estienne and the orthodox divines of the Sorbonne, which lasted almost throughout his life. In following years he publishedmany editions of the Latin scriptures, each time with additionalcorrections, and eventually with his own notes and comments, in somecases attacking the received doctrines of the Church. A Hebrew OldTestament, in 1546, was followed in 1550 by the Greek New Testament. Thenext year he published a new edition of the Testament in which for thefirst time it was divided into verses, a precedent followed in Bibleprinting ever since. It was not merely the fact of his printing thescriptures at all that angered the heresy-hunters, but much moreEstienne's notes and comments, in which, like Luther in Germany andTyndale in England, he sided with the views of the Reformers. What distinguishes Robert Estienne from the ordinary Protestant scholarsand publishers of his time is the fact that he was not only a Reformerbut a humanist of broad and tolerant culture. In all the illustriousgroup of that age there is scarcely another like him in this union ofreligious zeal and of scholarly culture. Luther and Calvin and Tyndalehad the one; Erasmus is the most eminent example of the other, with suchgreat publishers as Aldus and Froben his worthy supporters. But RobertEstienne, alongside of his controversial works and Biblical texts, labored at such great enterprises as his monumental edition of Terence, in which he corrected by the soundest methods of textual criticism noless than six thousand errors in the received text, and especially hismagnificent lexicons of the Latin and Greek languages, which set thestandard for all other lexicographers for generations to come. The middle of the sixteenth century in France is thus marked by acurious blend of those two distinct movements in human history which wecall the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the blend is nowhere morepicturesque than in the life of Robert Estienne. At one moment we findhim attacking the abuses of the church, at another we find himconsulting with Claude Garamond upon the design of a new Greek type, orreading the final proofs of an edition of Horace or Catullus or Juvenal, or discussing with some wealthy and noble book-collector like the famousGrolier the latest styles in elegant bindings and gold-stampeddecoration. For beauty and for truth he had an equal passion. All thatromance of the imagination which touches with a golden glamour therecovered treasures of pagan antiquity he loved as intensely as if itwere not alien and hostile, as the many thought, to that glow ofspiritual piety, that zeal of martyrdom, that white, consuming splendorwhich for the mystical imagination surrounds the holy cross. Humanism atits best is ordinarily thought to be embodied in the many-sided figureof Erasmus, with his sanity, his balance, his power to see both sides, that of Luther and of the Church, his delicate satire, his saving humor, his avoidance of the zealot's extremes. Perhaps a not less strikingfigure is that of this much less known French printer, striving in themidst of petty cares and unlovely sectarian strife to maintain thestoical serenity of a Marcus Aurelius side by side with the spiritualexaltation of a Saint Paul. There are two types of great men equallyworthy of admiration: those of unmixed and lifelong devotion to a singleaim springing from a single source, such as Aldus Manutius, and those inwhom that balance of diverse and almost contradictory elements ofcharacter which commonly leads to weakness makes instead for strengthand for richness, for duty and delight. Such was Robert Estienne. [Illustration] [Illustration: FROBEN] The third printer whom I have selected as typical of the Renaissance isJohann Froben, of Basel. His chief distinction is that he was theclosest friend and associate of Erasmus, the principal publisher ofErasmus's works, and the representative in the book trade of theErasmian attitude toward the Reformation. Although he did print theGreek Testament, years before Estienne published his edition in Paris, he accompanied it with no distinctively Protestant comments. Although atone time he issued some of the earlier works of Luther, he desistedwhen it became evident that Erasmus opposed any open schism in theChurch. It was Froben who gave to the world those three famous works ofErasmus, the Encomium Moriae or Praise of Folly, the Adagia or Proverbs, and the Colloquia or Conversations, which did quite as much as thewritings of Luther to arouse independent thinking within the Church, andto bring to an end the last vestiges of the middle ages in church andstate. And in this relation of Froben to Erasmus there was not the merecommercial attitude of a shrewd publisher toward a successful authorwhose works became highly lucrative, but the support by one enlightenedscholar who happened to be in a profitable business of another whohappened to be out of it. The earlier life of Erasmus exhibits a ratherdepressing illustration of the humiliations to which professionalscholars were exposed in trying to get a living from the pensions andbenefactions of the idle rich. Literary patronage, as it existed fromthe days of Horace and Maecenas down to the death-blow which Dr. Johnsongave it in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, has never helped theindependence or the self-respect of scholars and poets. It was Froben'speculiar good fortune to be able to employ, on a business basis with aregular salary, the greatest scholar of the age as one of his editorsand literary advisers, and at the same time enable him to preserve hisindependence of thought and of action. Aldus and the French publishershad gathered about them professional scholars and experts for theexecution of specific tasks at the market price, supplemented often bygenerous private hospitality. That was good; but far better was Froben'srelation with his friend, his intellectual master, and his profitableclient Erasmus. In an age when no copyright laws existed for theauthor's benefit the works of Erasmus were shamelessly pirated ineditions, published in Germany and France, from which the authorreceived not a penny. Yet Froben went right on paying to Erasmus notonly the fixed annual salary as a member of his consulting staff butalso a generous share of the profits upon his books. In a greedy, unscrupulous, and rapacious age this wise and just, not to say generous, policy stands out as prophetic of a better time. As a printer Froben was distinguished by the singular beauty of hisroman type, the perfection of his presswork, and the artistic decorationof his books. In this last respect he was much indebted to the genius ofHans Holbein, whom he discovered as a young wood-engraver seeking workas Basel. With that keen eye for unrecognized genius which marked hiscareer he employed Holbein to design borders and initials for his books. Later, with an equally sagacious and generous spirit, perceiving thatthe young artist was too great a man to spend his days in a printingoffice, he procured for him through Sir Thomas More an introduction tothe court of Henry VIII, where he won fame and fortune as a portraitpainter. I narrate the incident because it illustrates a very attractiveand amiable aspect of some of these men of the Renaissance, anuncalculating and generous desire to help gifted men to find their trueplace in the world where they might do their largest work. This, in anage when competition and jealous rivalry in public and in private lifewas as common as it is now, may give pause to the cynic and joy to thelover of human kindness. ANTON KOBERGER (=No printer's mark known=) We are in a different world when we turn to the fourth of our fiverepresentative printers, Anton Koberger, of Nuremberg. During the fortyyears of his career as a publisher, between 1473 and 1513, he issued 236separate works, most of them in several volumes, and of the whole lotnone show any taint of reforming zeal. Koberger was a loyal Catholic, and his published books were largely theological and all strictlyorthodox in nature. He is distinguished in two respects from the otherGerman printers of his time, the time between the death of Gutenberg andthe rise of Martin Luther. In the first place his work showed greattypographical excellence, with many fonts of handsome Gothic type and alavish use of woodcut illustrations. In the second place, his publishingbusiness was far better organized, far more extensive in its selling anddistributing machinery, than that of any other printer in Europe. Welearn that he had agents not only in every German city, but in the veryheadquarters of his greatest competitors at Paris, Venice, and Rome, andin such more distant places as Vienna, Buda-Pesth, and Warsaw. Thetwenty-four presses in his own Nuremberg establishment were notsufficient for his enormous business, and he let out printing jobs oncontract or commission to printers at Strasburg, Basel, and elsewhere. The true German spirit of discipline appears in a contemporary accountof his printing plant at Nuremberg. He had more than a hundred workmenthere, including not only compositors, pressmen, and proof-readers, butbinders, engravers, and illuminators. All these were fed by theiremployer in a common dining-hall apart from the works, and we are toldthat they marched between the two buildings three times a day withmilitary precision. Koberger employed for a time the services of Albrecht Dürer, the famousengraver, not only for the illustration of books but also for expertoversight of the typographical form. Typography in its golden age wasrightly regarded not as a mere mechanical trade but as an art of design, a design in black upon white, in which the just proportion of columnsand margins and titles and initials was quite as important as theillustrations. Perhaps Koberger found Dürer too independent or tooexpensive for his taste, for we find him in his later illustrated worksemploying engravers more prolific than expert. Such were MichaelWolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, who drew and engraved the twothousand illustrations in the famous Nuremberg Chronicle published byKoberger in 1493. This remarkable work was compiled by Doctor HartmanSchedel, of Nuremberg. It is a history of the world from the creationdown to 1493, with a supplement containing a full illustrated account ofthe end of the world, the Millennium, and the last judgment. This is byno means all. There is combined with this outline of history, not lessambitious though perhaps not more eccentric than H. G. Wells's latestbook, a gazetteer of the world in general and of Europe in particular, aportrait gallery of all distinguished men from Adam and Methuselah downto the reigning emperor, kings, and pope of 1493, with many intimatestudies of the devil, and a large variety of rather substantial andTeutonic angels. Every city in Europe is shown in a front elevation inwhich the perspective reminds one of Japanese art, and the castle-towersand bridges and river-boats all bear a strong family resemblance. Thebook is full of curious material, quite apart from the quaintillustrations. In the midst of grave affairs of state we run across aplague of locusts, an eclipse of the sun, or a pair of lovers who diedfor love. Scandalous anecdotes of kings and priests jostle the fiercestdenunciations of heretics and reformers. A page is devoted to theheresies of Wyclif and Huss. Anti-Semitism runs rampant through itspages. Various detailed accounts are given of the torture and murder ofChristian boys by Jews, followed by the capture and burning alive of theconspirators. Superstition and intolerance stand side by side with anaive mystical piety and engaging stories of the saints and martyrs. Ofall the vast transformation in human thought that was then taking formin Italy, of all the forward-looking signs of the times, there is littletrace. From 1493 to the last dim ages of the expiring world, thedownfall of Antichrist and the setting up of the final kingdom of heavenupon earth, seemed but a little way to Hartman Schedel, when he wrotewith much complacence the colophon to this strange volume. He left threeblank leaves between 1493 and the Day of Judgment whereon the readermight record what remained of human history. It is indeed rather thelast voice of the middle ages than the first voice of the Renaissancethat speaks to us out of these clear, black, handsome pages that werepulled damp from the press four hundred and twenty-eight years ago onthe fourth of last June. At first reading one is moved to mirth, then towonder, then perhaps to disgust, but last of all to the hauntingmelancholy of Omar the tent-maker when he sings "When you and I behind the veil are past, Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last. " As to worthy Hartman Schedel, God rest his soul, one wonders whether hehas yet learned that Columbus discovered America. He had not yet heardof it when he finished his book, though Columbus had returned to Spainthree months before. O most lame and impotent conclusion! But thefifteenth century, though it had an infinite childlike curiosity, had nonose for news. Nuremberg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomedup beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's picture of Noahbuilding the ark while Columbus was fitting out the Santa Maria for asecond voyage. Such is mankind, blind and deaf to the greatest things. We know not the great hour when it strikes. We are indeed mostenthralled by the echoing chimes of the romantic past when the futuresounds its faint far-off reveille upon our unheeding ears. The multitudeunderstands noon and night; only the wise man understands the morning. [Illustration] And now finally, what of William Caxton? The father of English printinghad been for many years an English merchant residing in Bruges when hisincreasing attention to literature led him to acquire the new art ofprinting. He had already translated from the French the Histories ofTroy, and was preparing to undertake other editorial labors when hebecame associated with Colard Mansion, a Bruges printer. From Mansion helearned the art and presumably purchased his first press and type. Sixbooks bearing Caxton's imprint were published at Bruges between 1474 and1476, though it is possible that the actual printing was done by Mansionrather than by Caxton himself. In 1476 Caxton set up the first printingshop in England, in a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Between that date and his death in 1491 he printed ninety-three separateworks, some of these in several editions. His industry and scholarlyzeal as a publisher somewhat exceeded his technical skill as a printer. Caxton's books, which are now much rarer than those of many continentalprinters of the same period, are not so finely and beautifully done asthe best of theirs. But the peculiar interest of his work lies in thestriking variety of the works he chose for publication, theconscientious zeal with which he conceived and performed his task, andthe quiet humor of his prefaces and notes. Let me illustrate brieflythese three points. First, his variety. We have observed that Aldus andFroben published chiefly the Latin and Greek classics, Koberger theLatin scriptures and theological works, and Stephanus a combination ofclassics and theology. Caxton published few of the classics and verylittle theology. His books consist largely of the works of the earlyEnglish poets, Chaucer, Gower, and others, of mediaeval romances derivedfrom English, French, and Italian sources, and of chronicles andhistories. The two most famous works that came from his press were thefirst printed editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Malory's Morted'Arthur. His own English translation of the Golden Legend, a mediaevalLatin collection of lives of the saints, is scarcely less in importance. Among many other titles the following may serve to show how unusual andunconventional were his selections: The History of Reynard the Fox. The History of Godfrey of Boloyne, or the Conquest of Jerusalem. The Fables of Aesop. The Book of Good Maners. The Faytes of Armes and of Chyvalrye. The Governayle of Helthe. The Arte and Crafte to Know Well to Dye. This is indeed humanism, but humanism in a different sense from that ofAldus and Erasmus. Human life from the cradle to the grave, human lifein war and peace, human life in its gayer and its graver lights andshadows, human life as embodied equally in famous writers and inanonymous popular legends, was Caxton's field. He accounted nothinghuman alien to his mind or to his great enterprise. Again, Caxton was conscientious. He set great store by accuracy, notonly typographical accuracy in matters of detail, but also the generalaccuracy of the texts or sources from which his own translations and hiseditions of other works were made. For example, in the second edition ofthe Canterbury Tales he explains how the first edition was printed fromthe best manuscript that he could find in 1478, but how after theappearance of that there came to him a scholar who complained of manyerrors, and spoke of another and more authentic manuscript in hisfather's possession. Caxton at once agreed to get out a new edition"whereas before by ignorance I erred in hurting and defaming his book indivers places, in setting in some things that he never said nor made andleaving out many things that are made which are requisite to be set in. "A great many other examples of such disinterested carefulness are to befound in the history of those busy fifteen years at Westminster. In viewof the fact that he was not only editor, printer, and publisher, butalso translated twenty-three books totaling more than forty-five hundredprinted pages, this scholarly desire for accuracy deserves the highestpraise. Unlike Aldus and Froben, who were likewise editors as well aspublishers, he was not surrounded by a capable corps of expert scholars, but worked almost alone. His faithful foreman, Wynkyn de Worde, doubtless took over gradually a large share of the purely mechanicalside of the business, but Caxton remained till the end of his life theactive head as well as the brains of the concern. As for his humor, it comes out even in his very selections of books tobe printed, but chiefly in little touches all through his prefaces. Forexample, in his preface to the Morte d'Arthur he answers with a certainwhimsical gravity the allegations of those who maintain that there wasno such person as King Arthur, and that "all such books as been made ofhim be but feigned and fables. " He recounts with assumed sincerity theevidence of the chronicles, the existence of Arthur's seal in red wax atWestminster Abbey, of Sir Gawain's skull at Dover Castle, of the RoundTable itself at Winchester, and so on. But he goes on to say, in his ownquaint way, which there is not space to quote at large, that in his ownopinion the stories are worth while for the intrinsic interest and themoral values in them, whether they are literally true or not. He closesthus: "Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee. And for to pass the time this book shall be pleasant to read in, but for to give faith and belief that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty. " This wise, sane, gentle apostle of literature in England wrought well inhis day, and is justly honored alike by scholars and by printers, whoregard him, in England and America, as the father of their craft. Indeedto this day in the printing trade a shop organization is sometimescalled a chapel, because according to ancient tradition Caxton's workmenheld their meetings in one of the chapels adjoining the abbey ofWestminster. * * * * * This survey of printing in its relations to the Renaissance is now notfinished but concluded. I have shown that the invention and improvementof printing was not the cause but rather the effect of the revival oflearning, while on the other hand the wide dissemination of literaturemade possible by typography of course accelerated enormously the processof popular enlightenment. I have selected five typical printers of thatage: Aldus, with his Homer. Stephanus, with his Greek Testament. Froben, with his Plato. Koberger, with his Nuremberg Chronicle. Caxton, with his Morte d'Arthur. Here we find represented in the Aldus Homer the revival of Greeklearning, in the Stephanus Testament the application of this to the freecriticism of the scriptures, in the Froben Plato the substitution ofPlatonic idealism for the scholastic philosophy based on Aristotle, inthe Nuremberg book the epitome of mediaeval superstition, credulity, andcuriosity on the verge of the new era, and in Morte d'Arthur the fondreturn of the modern mind, facing an unknown future, upon the naive andbeautiful legends of Arthurian romance. An age full of contradictionsand strange delusions, but an age of great vitality, great eagerness, great industry, patience, foresight, imagination. And in such an age itwas the good fortune of these wise craftsmen who handled so deftly theirpaper and type to be the instruments of more evangels than angels eversang, more revolutions than gunpowder ever achieved, more victories thanever won the applause of men or the approval of heaven. In the beginningthe creative word was =Fiat lux=--let there be light. In the newcreation of the human mind it was =Imprimatur=--let it be printed. Ifprinting had never been invented, it is easy to conceive that theenormous learning and intellectual power of a few men in each generationmight have gone on increasing so that the world might to-day possessmost of the knowledge that we now enjoy; but it is certain that themasses could never have been enlightened, and that therefore the gulfbetween the wise few and the ignorant many would have exceeded anythingknown to the ancient world, and inconceivably dangerous in its appallingsocial menace. Whoever first printed a page of type is responsible formany crimes committed in the name of literature during the past fourcenturies; but one great book in a generation or a century, like a grainof radium in a ton of pitchblende, is worth all it has cost; for likethe radium it is infinitely powerful to the wise man, deadly to thefool, and its strange, invisible virtue so far as we know may lastforever. [Illustration] DESIGNED BY BRUCE ROGERS AND PRINTED FROM MONOTYPE CASLON TYPE BYWILLIAM EDWIN RUDGE AT MOUNT VERNON NEW YORK IN DECEMBER 1921. OF THIS EDITION ONE HUNDRED COPIES ARE ON FRENCH HAND-MADE PAPER ANDFIVE HUNDRED ON ANTIQUE WOVE PAPER. * * * * * Transcriber's Note: This text uses both today and to-day.