preface to gutenberg ok

8/14/2019 Preface to Gutenberg OK

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PREFACE TO GUTENBERGA social history of medieval books

By Lester K. LittleLester K. Little is professor of history at Smith. His article is a revised version of the firstin a series of three lectures in medieval studies presented on campus last October. Theother two were delivered by Thomas Kelly of the music department and Vincent Pollina ofthe French department. These lecturers, along with several of their colleagues, haverecently drawn up a plan for a new, interdisciplinary major in medieval studies.

Well before 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg perfected the technique of printing withmovable metal type, many of the essential traits of books as we know them today haddeveloped. Indeed the entire millennium traditionally called the Middle Ages is rich in thelore of books. In order to retain some sense of that great span of time without sacrificingdepth altogether, I propose to take three soundings, all at critical points of transition: fromscroll to book, from book to treasure, and from treasure to tool.Two famous archeological finds of the 1940s will help introduce the first of these

soundings: the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Coptic Library. In 1947 a Bedouinboy discovered several tall jars made of clay in caves close by the western shore of the DeadSea. These jars were found to contain rolls of leather with Hebrew writing. The longest ofthese measured twentyfour feet and consisted of several pieces, each about a foot high,stitched together to form a continuous scroll; this, the longest one, had fifty-four columns ofwriting. The text was identified as the Book of Isaiah and the date of the handwriting wasestablished as from about 100 B.C. Other scrolls in the same find contained dramaticallynew material, especially about the Jewish sect of the Essenes. Apparently the scrolls hadbeen taken from the Essene community of Qumran and placed in those cases for safekeepingduring the Roman-Jewish War of 68-70 A.D.At Nag Hammadi, three hundred miles south of Cairo, a similarly accidental discovery

turned up jars containing not scrolls but books. These contained works composed byChristian Gnostic sectarians and translated from Greek into Coptic in fourth-centuryhandwriting; included are the famous Gnostic Gospels, which have stirred considerablepublic discussion in the past year. These famous and relatively recent discoveries bring toour attention the two major forms that came down to us from the ancient world forpreserving lengthy written texts: the scroll and the book.What, precisely, was a scroll? Those I have mentioned already were atypical, for the materialmost commonly used was papyrus. Between roughly twenty and fifty sheets of papyrus wereglued end to end. Different qualities of papyrus were often mixed in the making of a scroll,going from the stronger and better pieces down to the weaker ones. The writing began atthe strong end; any leftover at the weak end could be cut off, and the scroll would be re-rolled from the weak end, thus leaving the piece with the strongest fibers on the outside, toprotect all the rest. With few exceptions, only one side of the scroll was written upon.The main alternative to papyrus for scroll material was vellum or parchment: pieces of skinof sheep, goats, or calves that are washed, dressed, and rubbed smooth. Like the scrolls ofleather mentioned before, scrolls of vellum consist of several pieces stitched

together. In the second century B.C. the rulers of Pergamum, a city in western Anatolia,sought to challenge the intellectual primacy of Alexandria. The Egyptians forbade the exportof papyrus. At Pergamum, the technique of preparing sheepskin for writing-perhaps long


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since invented-was greatly refined and extensively used. The Latin for parchment recalls thisperiod of development at Pergamum: the word ispergamena. The utility of vellum wasnever fully realized in the scroll but only later on, in the book.The technical term for book, in English as well as in Latin, is codex (plural: codices). Acodex is a collection of sheets of any material folded and fastened together at the back orspine and usually protected by covers. The forerunner to the book (and the initial meaning ofcodex) was the stack of wax tablets in wooden frames held together with leather thongs, acumbersome arrangement but the original scratch pad nonetheless.The infant codex was a contemporary, roughly speaking, of those other two famous childrenof antiquity: Christianity and the Roman Empire. That is, in about the first century A.D., thefirst codices were made, some of papyrus and others of vellum. Either a single sheet wasfolded down the middle and then several such folded sheets were sewn together at the fold,or else superposed sheets were folded, forming a quire, and the quire was stitched togetheralong the fold and also stitched into a binding case along with other quires.The codex has certain distinct advantages over the scroll. In a codex, both sides of every leafcan be andfusually are used. Moreover, a codex can contain a much longer text, not onlybecause two sides of each leaf are used but because a great many more leaves can be put

together in a book than conveniently strung out in a scroll. We would not normally expect tofind a work longer, say, than the Book of Isaiah, already mentioned, in a single scroll. Yet itwas a common practice to put all the Gospels together, perhaps with the Acts of theApostles as well, in one codex. The thirteen codices of the Nag Hammadi library containfifty-two treatises; these had originally been composed with the smaller format of the scrollin mind; but by the time they were copied, the larger format of the codex had come into use.Still another advantage of the book is that it is far more convenient to consult. One can openit at any point and thus find a passage in it far more handily than one can in a scroll. On thisparticular point, scrolls have most of the inconveniences of microfilm.In the course of the fourth century A.D., the codex won out definitively over the scroll. Thatit did so was not merely a matter of technological superiority, for there were important

associations with each type that either facilitated or inhibited their being judged useful. Allthe important writings of antiquity were preserved on scrolls. The first codices, meanwhile,were notebooks, having inherited from wax tablets such characteristics as impermanence andvariety. Whereas a scroll contained a coherent composition meant to be read sequentiallyfrom start to finish, the earliest codices contained bits and pieces. Some early codices wereused for cheap, popular literature, so to the notion of impermanence is added a taint ofcultural inferiority. More serious uses of the codex included scientific and legal writings, stillnot the main stuff of classical paideia, but busy, workaday stuff.The decisive impetus in the triumph of the codex came from the early Christians, whothereby gave an ideological stamp to this issue. They deliberately chose the commercialpapyrus or vellum notebook to circulate the Christian Gospels. The earliest surviving textsof the New Testament are almost all codices. Henceforth the fate of the codex was firmlytied to that of Christianity; they came of age together in the fourth century. Just as lawyersdid with the legal texts found in codices, Christian preachers and polemicists couldcontinually make comparisons and cross-references, as well as cite specific passages, withfar greater facility when those were written in codices.Like the Roman senatorial class, which was the last major holdout against Christianity,pagan literature was the last holdout against the codex. There were a few exceptions, but thepoint remains that the success of Christianity was the principal source of trie success of the


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codex. The preferred material was vellum, stronger and longer lasting than papyrus; thispreference was already manifest before the supply line of papyrus from Egypt was cut.In the year 538, the great Roman senatorial aristocrat and civil servant Cassiodorus retiredto his estate overlooking the Ionian Sea and set up a monastery with the specific function ofcopying books. There were servants to do the chores, but to the educated, once worldlyaristocrats who lived in this community fell the task of preserving the written heritage ofantiquity, pagan and Christian alike. Besides this material support for the production ofcodices, Cassiodorus provided precise instruction on how to assemble them as well as ajustification for the work of the Christian scribe: Every word of the Lord written by thescribe is a wound inflicted on Satan.The transition from scroll to book was complete. It may be helpful to recall that the writingsfrom the Dead Sea, works of a Jewish sect put down in the first century B.C., are found inscrolls. The Gnostic Gospels were Christian works, copied in the fourth century, in codices.The beginning of the Middle Ages, which some people still think of as a dark, barbarous erawhen high culture languished, was marked by the invention of the book.

Our second sounding will be taken during the feudal period, let us say in the tenth century.

Imagine if you will a Viking raid on a monastery; the monks, if alerted in time, will try to getaway with the communitys most precious belongings: relics and books.The relics are the physical remains of the patron saint of the monastery. The entire life of themonastery revolved about these relics. The saint was a spiritual hero who lived on in them;he was a living presence who could grant protection and other favors, as well as get angry atand punish his devotees. The relics were contained in a reliquary, usually in this time a smallmetal or wooden box covered with gold, silver, and jewels.The word contained in Holy Scripture was as live or active a force as the saint was in hisrelics. And this active, sacred being was housed in a container appropriately precious. I havein mind some of the Bibles from this period I have handled in European libraries: a yardhigh, two feet wide, ten inches thick, containing some three hundred vellum leaves, and with

a richly decorated cover. The jewels and ivory and precious metals on the cover apart, whenwe try to estimate the value of such a book in this extremely poor, subsistence-leveleconomy, we must understand that the main writing surface represents the skins off thebacks of an entire flock, and a large flock at that, of sheep. The writing is large andadmirably clear. The main divisions are marked by exquisitely executed illuminations,especially around the capital letters. The codex had thus become a sacred object, an objectof treasure, and we need to inquire briefly into how this came about.The monastic rule composed by St. Benedict, a contemporary of Cassiodorus, implied thatmonks were to be literate. The monks had to know how to read to prepare for the manyhours they would spend each day in reciting psalms and prayers in the monastic church.Moreover, St. Benedict provided for regular reading in the monastery, mostly of the Bibleand the Church Fathers. The monks were supposed to study these texts all right, but thereading was known as spiritual reading, and this was in essence an act of worship. Themonks were venerating what they regarded as sacred texts (even Benedicts rule they calledthe Holy Rule) and so the codices containing them became liturgical objects.The artistic forms and styles employed in the monumental, illuminated books of feudalsociety derived from the arts of the Celts and of the Germanic peoples during their migrationperiod. The Goths, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Lombards and others invested their greatestartistic skill in appropriately small, portable objects at the time of their long travels, betweenthe fourth century and the sixth, out of central Asia and eastern Europe into the western


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provinces of the Roman Empire. Fortunately our museums contain at least a few of theirpins, clasps, buckles, cups, weapon handles, and the like for us to study and admire. Thesame objects have informed the art historians understanding of the jewellers art that wentinto the making of reliquaries and book covers, and subsequently into the designs thatappear on manuscript pages, some exclusively abstract and geometric, and others with amixture of animal forms, mostly eagles and fish, and only rarely human beings.The early Germanic tribes were warrior societies whose people lived by fighting andgathering booty. They consumed and redistributed the loot they gained in war, with ameasure reserved for the gods and for their dead. We know from the pages ofBeowulfandfrom the archeological discoveries at Sutton Hoo in England and several sites in Scandinaviaabout the treasure that accompanied the dead, whether set out onto the open sea or into theground, ships and all. A major and dramatic (although side) effect of Christianization was theprohibition against the burying of treasure. And as this Christianization remained superficial,the effect of the prohibition in turn was not to halt the flow of precious objects but toredirect it, into those great centers for the perpetuation of ancestor cults, the monasteries.The proper gesture for a victorious Germanic chieftan who had converted to Christianitywas to heap some of the booty gained upon the guardians of the relics of saints. In this way

the monasteries in feudal society acquired vast accumulations of precious metals and jewels(as well as of land) and the most venerated objects they honored were expressed in thetraditional idiom of the jewellers and the gold- and silversmiths.As Christianity was a religion of the book, whose entire message was contained in a book,books played a critical role in the spread of Christianity itself. Perhaps the most famousmissionary of early medieval Europe, St. Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon monk who directed amission in Germany during the first half of the eighth century, often wrote home for books.His letter to the Abbess Eadburger gives an astonishing glimpse into his mission:

And I beg you further to add to what you have done already by making a copy written ingold of the epistles of my master, St. Peter the Apostle, to impress honor and reverence for

the sacred scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach.

Boniface was going to dazzle his illiterate, pagan audience with gold letters. The book, toBoniface and his companions, was a relic, an object of veneration, a treasure. The mediumwas the message.We turn to the thirteenth century to take our third, and final, sounding. There were somelarge, elaborately decorated, and richly bound books produced in the thirteenth century, andso were there in Gutenbergs time, and so are there still today. But the margin of newness inthe thirteenth century is what holds our attention, and what is new is the small book. Theexample I have in mind is a handbook for confessors that is four inches wide, six inches high,and containing a hundred leaves; these are of vellum, although others like it produced laterin the thirteenth century will be made of paper.The text is in Latin but very hard to read. The script of this century, called Gothic just likethe principal architectural style, is difficult to read without training or at least considerablepractice, even when it is neat. But our book, to be typical, is sloppy, showing unmistakablesigns of rapid execution. The writing is small, the margins are small, there are ink blots and aforbidding quantity, for the modern reader, of abbreviations. Moreover, the handwriting inour book is not consistent; it changes several times between start and finish. We must inquireabout how this book was made.


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It came from one of the two dozen or so university stationers located in or near the Rue dela Parcheminerie in Paris. These were shops where masters and students bought books, butalso where students could make some money by copying. The stationer would dismantle abook and then let out a portion of it on security to the copyist along with the requisitecopying materials. The copyist would later deliver the original plus the new copy and pickup his pay. This is how we get a profusion of hands in a single codex.The universities of the modern world had their origins in the thirteenth century. They wereestablished only in cities and were an integral part of the process of urbanization then takingplace all across Europe. This same process was accompanied and also assisted by a three-fold rise in population, the establishment of a market economy with the concomitant growthof a merchant class, and a greatly expanded use and circulation of money as an instrument ofexchange.In the universities, students paid fees (or received scholarships from conscientious bishops)and masters received pay. This was the great age of scholastic inquiry, especially in law andtheology and, at the intersection of these two, in the sub-discipline of moral theology. Thescholastic doctors showed great respect for the Bible and the writings of the Fathers, butthey were not above pointing out discrepancies in these and raising questions about their

meaning.The critics of the scholastics, oldfashioned scholars, thought that these money-grubbing,urban merchants of learning were really more interested in their questions than in the sacredtexts themselves. St. Bernard once stormed into Paris and preached to students with OldTestament furor as well as imagery, urging them to flee wicked Babylon: You will findmuch more in the forest than in books. The woods and rocks will teach you more than anymaster can. Stephen of Tournai lamented: Even on street corners the indivisible Trinity istaken apart and wrangled over. And Peter of Celle warned against the uniwhile speaking infavor of the monastery, which is the true school of Christ:

O blessed scholl, where Christ teaches our hearts by the word of his virtue, where we learn

without studying and reading how we ought to lead blessed lives eternally. No book has tobe bought there, the master of the scriptorium does not get paid, there is no onslaught indisputations, no weaving of sophistries. It is free from involvement in all reasoning andargument.

This is mainly an attack against the new learning, but we cannot fail to notice how Petersingled out the book trade as one facet of the new learning.The new book furthered the work of the university, or in the example I chose, the work of anew apostolic ministry to the laity. But whether in works of scholarly erudition or inhandbooks for preachers and confessors, we find remarkable technical innovations in thethirteenth century. One group of scholars at Paris invented the Biblical concordance, whichis nothing less than a word index of the entire Bible. And similarly the new collections ofsermons, collections of parables to insert in sermons, guidelines for constructing sermons,and guides to problems that frequently arise in confessions all began to appear with indices.Scholars were thus not any longer worshipping texts but rather studying them critically.They tended less and less to memorize long passages of books while becoming moreprofident in doing research in them. We might not take the side of the old-fashionedmonastic scholars, but we can appreciate their point of view. And yet, the scholastics surelydid not intend disrespect toward the Bible, the Trinity, or the Fathers. They expounded theWord, worshipped God, and believed in the Trinity, all the while distinguishing these abstract


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objects of veneration from the physical materials that preserved and transmitted informationabout them.For the thirteenth-century university scholars, the book was an instrument of learning, to bestudied over carefully, examined critically, dissected and discussed thoroughly. The bookperhaps dealt with matters sacred but was itself not an object of veneration; it was a tool.Echoes of all three soundings remain, although with differing intensities. Despite astaggering array of challenges, the essential form of the codex is still with us, and remainsunsurpassed. The Rare Book Room in Neilson Library contains some of the treasures oibook production; these are frequently consulted by historians and art historians, students andprofessors alike, as interested in their form as in their content. Meanwhile the stacks and thereference room are given over to an immense (and rapidly expanding) set of tools, carefullycatalogued and indexed for use by all those who study in this community.

IMGENES DEL DOCUMENTO:

1) A woodcut in a German edition of the works of Horace offers this 15th-century renderingof a classical poet holding his scroll. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Opera, Strassburg, Johann

Gritninger, 1498. All illustrations in this article are reproductions of woodcuts from books inthe Smith College Library Rare Book Room. Although these books are of a later vintagethan those discussed in the article, the woodcuts help to evoke the earlier era. Photos byStephen Petegorsky, except for the one on the facing page, which was taken by JohnLancaster.

2) In a German allegorical text, the Soul has a vision of the Trinity with the Sacred Book.Buch der Kunst, Augsburg, Johann Bamler, 1491

3) The book is part of the nuns accouterments in the costume book by Jost Amman,Gynaeceum, sive Theatrum mulierum, Frankfurt-am-Main, Sigmund Feyerabend, 1586.

4) The woodcut above, found in a memory book, shows the booksellers shop along withother commercial operations just outside the abbey walls. Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo nelqualesi ragiona del modo di accrescere et conservar la memoria, Venice, Sessa heirs, 1575.

5) Finely bound books, with metal bosses, draw attention in this woodcut reproduced from avolume on the lives of the moral philosophers. Diogenes Laertius, Vite de philosophimoralissime, Venice, Niccolo Zoppino, 1524.

6) A classical poet is given lhe furnishings of a medieval scholar in the Gruninger edition ofHorace.

7) Sebastian Brants Ship of Fools begins with th((book fool, at left, or the fool as scholar.Narrensciff, Basel. 1506.

8) Students in a lecture room listen to a professor. Giulio Pomponio Leto, Romanaehistoriae compendium, Paris. Jean Du Pre, 1501.

preface to gutenberg ok

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