Week 3

Our third week will begin with an investigation of why the English book trade lagged behind large and innovative Continental publishing houses. Differences exist in the provision of presses, the production of books in Latin and Greek, and more. In Nuremberg, for example, Anton Koberger employed twenty-four presses at a time when the largest London houses employed as few as four presses. In catering to the sizable book-buying readership on the Continent, large publishing houses in Antwerp, Paris, Venice, Rome, and other cities produced massive quantities of learned books in a manner that inhibited English production of books in Latin and Greek.

Our Wednesday meeting will turn to “Re-forming Biblical Text, Translation, and Reading,” beginning with investigation of humanistic theories about textual transmission and translation that challenged the authority of the Vulgate Bible, which had attained sacrosanct status by the time when Johann Gutenberg published it. We will consider the role played by Erasmus, Luther, Tyndale, and others in the dissemination of Bible translations that inspired different styles of reading and interpretation. In pondering the theory that the early Christian transition from scroll to codex (i.e., a manuscript constructed in the manner of a modern book) promoted a shift from continuous to discontinuous reading, we will consider changes in medieval and early modern reading practices. Giles Mandelbrote, the Librarian and Archivist of Lambeth Palace Library, London, will co-lead this session. He also plans to speak to seminar participants about their individual study projects.

Giles Mandelbrote will join the seminar for this week’s concluding rare book exhibition and workshop. It will contrast books ranging from the largest to the smallest produced during the hand-press era. At one extreme is Vesalius’s On the Structure of the Human Body, an early influential anatomical treatise, on loan from the OSU Medical Heritage Center. Its size dwarfs the most diminutive books, some of which were called “thumb Bibles” because they were about the size of one’s thumb. These curiosities could still be read despite their tiny size. This session will investigate the importance of format and layout in the marketing and reading of books. Big books printed in folio format (i.e., on large sheets of paper that were folded once in the manner of modern newspapers) dominated fifteenth-century printing, whereas sixteenth-century printers favored smaller formats in which sheets were folded two, three, or more times before edges were cut. The sheer bulk of folios could challenge readers, but indexes and other aids emerged to enable browsing rather than reading from beginning to end. We will address why folios tend to survive at a higher rate than small books, which often tended to be “read to death” by multiple readers.

This workshop will also consider medieval and Renaissance approaches to knowledge by contrasting Bartholmaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, an influential encyclopedic compendium, with Vesalius and early Renaissance maps, including Martin Waldseemuller’s Tabvla Terre Nove (1513), designed to accompany a 1505 edition of Ptolmey’s Geography. The exhibition includes pre- and post-Reformation bibliographies by influential bookmen including Johannes Trithemius and Conrad Gesner, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, whose publisher, John Day, made a risky investment when he commissioned the many woodcuts in this massive collection. Some of these were simultaneously manufactured for separate sale as inexpensive woodcut prints that were later incorporated into folio editions. RBML houses one of only four North American collection of all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century unabridged editions of this influential compendium, as well as a series of seventeenth-century abridgements. We plan to consider a hostile rejoinder by the Jesuit Robert Persons; a 17^th century devotional treatise which preserves evidence of a parish lending library; collected works by More, Tyndale, and other reformers; tiny, palm-sized editions of the Psalms and English New Testament; and more.

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