Introduction to the study of incunabula (2008)

Day 1. Morning

Lecture 1

The invention of printing

Objective of Lecture 1. To outline the historiographical tradition, including the myths about Johannes Gutenberg and his invention; what we do know and how we know it; current research on Gutenberg, his invention, and the Gutenberg Bible.

Source material. Evidence used in this lecture will include archival sources, and some of the earliest surviving items printed in Gutenberg type, including the Gutenberg Bible itself.

Summary of Lecture 1.

The most important archival sources relating to Gutenberg will first be analysed in terms of the intention behind their creation. This will clarify how we can use them to further our understanding of the invention of printing – the surviving archival material was created to document completely different matters. The documents which may throw some light on when Gutenberg was born, and the documentation which relates to the politico-economic reasons for his periods of exile from Mainz will be considered. Special attention will be paid to three sets of documents. First, those which throw light on Gutenberg’s technical enterprises while he was resident in Strasbourg. A close reading of the texts will enable us to discuss how far the meaning of the words used can be understood to bear on the invention of printing. The second document to be looked at in more detail will be the letter written in 1455 by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini about the printing of the Bible. The last document considered more closely will be that drawn up during the legal dispute between Johannes Fust and Johannes Gutenberg in 1455.

We will look briefly at whether Gutenberg might have had some association with cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus, and this will take us back to an examination of the meaning of the surviving texts and an examination of some of the earliest surviving items printed in Gutenberg type, namely letters of indulgence.

The examination of the Gutenberg Bible itself will begin with a discussion of the recent theories put forward by Blaise Agüerra y Arcas and Paul Needham, who have used digital technology to challenge the assumption that Gutenberg produced type in the way which became standard a few decades after the invention.

Having discussed the type, we move on to the evidence provided by the Gutenberg Bibles themselves. This indicates that three major changes of technical process took place during the production phase of the Gutenberg Bible. This analysis gives us an opportunity to have a first look at issues about the use of the paper itself as evidence, as well as printers’ ink, another of Gutenberg’s innovations, and the process of printing in red as well as the manuscript addition of red headlines, rubrication.

The lecture will end with a short discussion of the original buyers of Gutenberg’s Bible, the purchase price they paid, and the Bible’s users.

Day 1. Morning

Lecture 2

A historical introduction to incunable catalogues

Objective of Lecture 2. To outline the development of the study of incunabula and to show how the approaches followed by important early incunable catalogues reflect the interests of their authors and their intellectual world, and how these approaches affect the ways in which these catalogues can be used by students of incunabula today.

Source material. Evidence used for this lecture will be the historical catalogues themselves, supported by photographs of key texts.

Summary of Lecture 2.

The lecture will bring out how we make catalogues work best for us if we see them as part of a hermeneutic process, mediating between potential users of books and the books themselves, both as physical objects and as conveyors of meaning.

Most modern library catalogues probably have no pretension to be more than neutral heuristic tools. Even so, they rest on assumptions about what is of importance to users, or possible to manage for library administrators. Many incunable catalogues are, however, much more explicitly ambitious, displaying very divergent approaches to their material, making different selections, and organising their material in many different ways. Their underlying assumptions, not always explicit, are the more important for the user to understand.

Beginning with the first comprehensive study of incunabula, Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, De ortu et progressu artis typographiae dissertatio historica (Cologne, 1640), the lecture will look at how incunabula gained independence as a category and in the process touch on several catalogues which contain incunabula conjointly with other materials, such as the one complied by the French Jesuit Philippe Labbé, Nova bibliotheca MSS librorum sive specimen antiquarum lectionum latinarum et græcarum in quattuor partes tributarum ...ac suplementis decem (Paris, 1653). As the title indicates this is primarily a catalogue of manuscripts and is chiefly concerned with the transmission of texts. Incunabula, defined as books printed before 1501, do however get attention in an appendix. The lecture will examine in more detail the work of the Anglo-French Michel Maittaire (1668-1747), which began being published in 1719 and, of course, that of Georg Wolfgang Panzer, Annales typographici ab artis inventæ origine ad annum MD. (ad annum MDXXXVI. continuati) (Nuremberg, 1793-1803).

We will also touch upon the importance of the book trade in creating an interest in incunabula, and find that it is well worth having a look at some of the catalogues created by the book trade or by auctioneers. We will focus on two: one a sale catalogue of a collection sold as a result of the French revolution, Franc.-Xav. Laire, Index librorum ab inventa typographia ad annum 1500. Catalogue des livres de m *** par G. de Bure, pt 1 (Sens, 1791), and on a Dutch catalogue of a predominantly Italian collection, Catalogue des livres de M.Pierre-Antoine Bolongaro-Crevenna (Amsterdam, 1789).

Day 1. Afternoon.

First hands-on session at the Bibliothèque Municipale

While the second lecture itself will focus on historic catalogues, the practical session following the first two lectures will be based on exercises in using the most important catalogues now in use, beginning with the Ludwig Hain’s Repertorium bibliographicum, published 1826-38, but focusing mainly on catalogues created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and emphasizing differences of approach, strengths, weaknesses, and how they complement one another.

Day 2. Morning

Lectures 3-4

The bibliographical basics

Objective of Lectures 3 and 4. To provide an understanding of the means available for obtaining bibliographical information about incunabula through a critical analysis of the most commonly used methods.

Source material. The source material can be divided into two parts: first, explicit statements and their interpretation, mainly contained in colophons, and second, implicit information which can be derived from an analysis of incunabula as man-made objects which reach us mediated by the five centuries of subsequent history. All types of evidence will be illustrated.

Summary of lectures 3 and 4.

These two lectures are conceived as one unit.

Many incunabula contain little or no explicit information about their production and this leads to a brief introductory discussion of the view that this is because incunabula imitate manuscripts.

We will first look at incunabula which contain explicit information, mainly in colophons, which can enable the identification of printers, publishers, place and date of production. It examines how this type of information can – and cannot – be interpreted. We will look at the names of producers as they appear in colophons, and at what information they convey about the financial and practical involvement of individual men or firms. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which colophons can help us understand the organisational complexities of the book production itself. We will take a special look at the complex commercial relationships often documented in Parisian colophons, where printers frequently collaborated on production and where they might work either with or for a publisher, or sometimes partly for a publisher. This will provide the occasion for a short introduction to the information provided by printers’ devices.

Next, the lecture looks at the ways in which production dates are expressed (the ancient Roman style, dating by the Christian liturgical year, and the modern secular style), how information about dates can be interpreted, in combination with indications of year, whether regnal years or calendar years, and the points from which the New Year was calculated in various parts of Europe, with greater or lesser consistency.

For many printers and publishers there was apparently no reason to include such information. The lecture will examine the implications of this for the status of the information which we seek, and how this affects our interpretation of the process of production.

For, as far as the fifteenth century is concerned, the main body of evidence for the production process and its history are the books themselves. The earliest manuals telling us in any detail how books were produced are from the seventeenth century. In presenting the methods used for understanding book production, the lecture will bring out the implications of a circular argument: we use an understanding of the production process to interpret the book in front of us, but we can only know the details of the production process as a result of analysing the book themselves.

The two lectures will follow the production process in a linear way – something of an abstraction, but helpful in clarifying how we use our understanding of the production process to interpret the books in front of us.

The lectures will begin with paper and vellum, and move on to the production of type. We will next examine the work in the printing house from the composition of type, via imposition, press work, and end with the printed registrum and the collation of the sheets – and with our own representation of this process through the collation formula. It will present and critically discuss assumptions about how people in a printer’s workshop normally went about things, either because of their habits or because their tools were made in specific ways. The lectures will describe both the associated physical activities leading up to the creation of a book, and how our understanding of the processes helps us to interpret the evidence presented by the incunabula themselves. The lectures examine the underlying assumptions used when the evidence is interpreted and set out to give an impression of how one can assess the scope and the limitation of each type of evidence when used separately or jointly.

Both lectures will bring out how we can use the evidence of surviving books to suggest changes which took place in the production process during the fifteenth century, in particular by looking at the evidence for changes to the printing press itself.

Day 2. Afternoon

Second hands-on session at the Bibliothèque Municipale

The hands-on session of the afternoon will take the form of practical exercises involving real incunabula as well as the solution of problems derived from descriptions in catalogues. It will concentrate on tools available for the identification of type, and on collation.

Day 3. Morning.

Lecture 5

Presenting the text: lay-out and illustrations

Objective of Lecture 5. To examine how incunabula give us information about the texts which they contain, the techniques the book producers used to convey to readers the material they were confronted with, and how they could find their way around the text.

Source material. The sources used for the this lecture will be images of incunabula illustrating various strategies employed by printers to articulate text on the page, ranging from blank space to illustrations.

Summary of lecture 5.

The previous two lectures looked at how we can gain information about the production of the book from the book itself. However, even before this process began in the printing house, the printer would have had in mind an idea of how the text would be presented on the page. This will be the focus of this lecture.

After an exploration of how books begin and end – ranging from the incipit statement to the various forms of title page, and from explicits to colophons – we will examine how the text and its structure is expressed visually, and how hierarchical differences between various text elements are expressed though the lay-out. Throughout this lecture the dialectic process between the producer and the user of the book-as-text is borne in mind.

In many editions, several of the elements which traditionally guided the user through the text are left blank by the printer, either to be filled by another person professionally involved with books, or by the user him/herself. Blank spaces and their relative sizes, initials (printed or supplied by hand), as well as running headlines, and rubrics are all elements which to a greater or lesser extent can involve the final user in making decisions about the text and its structure.

We will look at the elements of lay-out from the point of view of different genres, exemplifying lay-out of prose and poetry, classical texts and vernacular fiction, bibles, legal text, letters and posters.

Woodcut and metal cut illustrations will be seen in the context of lay-out, and according to the different levels of importance and roles played by them in various genres of texts. We will look at illustrations in romances and other popular narrative works, such as fables and works of history and chronology. This will be demonstrated through some of the most famous illustrated books of the fifteenth century which belong to these two related genres, such as Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum , the Nürnberg Chronicle, and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The lecture will look at illustrations in genres of book with a practical, professional purpose, where they can be seen as closely related to that of a commentary, in some case essential for comprehension, notably in geometrical texts.

Day 3. Morning

Lecture 6

Editions and bodies of texts: the producer, the owner, the librarian

Objective of Lecture 6. To explore how an examination of fifteenth-century uses of texts, as well as their production circumstances, modifies the appropriateness of the basic bibliographic concept of ‘edition’. We will then reassess the importance of collections of texts and perceived bodies of texts.

Source material. Explicit statements about printers’ intentions, whether fixed or changeable, are found in tables of contents, colophons and title pages. Implicit information can be gathered from lay-out, design, or signatures. The chief evidence of bodies of texts as perceived by users is constituted by surviving or dispersed sets of texts or volumes of texts, with their marks of use.

Summary of lecture 6.

The sixth lecture will begin by examining the absence or presence of explicit or implicit markers of the extent of the unit of publication. This will serve as a first indication of the scope which a producer allowed both himself and his buyers in determining what could be sold, bought, and used jointly or separately. The lecture will then look at how this flexibility on the part of the producer can be documented, looking at title pages created for groups of texts which have also survived in forms which indicate that they were conceivable as independent editions, but also at the value of less explicit indicators of the extent to which units were produced to be either separate or to form coherent larger units.

Next the lecture will look at how users created their own coherent bodies of texts, whether the components were produced by one or several printers. This will take the form of analysing examples of sets of volumes made up to form a unified corpus of text, as well as the more frequently examined individual volumes which have been bound together and which indicate that the texts were conceived at one level as a coherent unit, often containing a combination of printed and manuscript texts.

The study of texts which share a history of use has not been a central part of the study of incunabula, and much of the documentation for the shared life of texts has been lost. We will look at the reasons why volumes, or sets whose texts were once seen as having a shared significance, have been split up. This will take into consideration the attitudes of collectors, of antiquarian book sellers, and of librarians who have sought to record and shelve their books according to systems which were incompatible with the preservation of original evidence. We will look at how our appreciation of past practices can provide us with tools for the virtual reassembling of items now split up – even belonging to different institutions – but which previously shared a life under one set of covers.

Since the beginning in the early twentieth century of the large incunable cataloguing projects the emphasis of researchers has shifted considerably towards an interest in the texts of incunabula. The incunable catalogue of the Bodleian Library in Oxford has focused on a detailed textual examination as well as on ownership-related issues. The lecture will therefore end with an examination of a small selection of the tools which are at our disposal to identify authors and texts, based on some of the descriptions from the Bodleian catalogue.

Day 3. Afternoon

Third hands-on session at the Bibliothèque Municipale

The hands-on session in the afternoon will introduce the most important reference works on illustrations in incunabula, and will look at incunabula exemplifying the elements used by the printer to present the structure of the text to the reader or to enable the reader to do so himself. We will look at examples of the most common types of lay-out and at a volume of texts bound together for an early owner

Day 4. Morning

Lecture 7

When is a book ready for use? Rubrication, decoration, and illumination.

Objective of Lecture 7. To examine the place of manuscript elements in printed books in the production process, their function in preparing the text for use, and their relation to notes resulting from use.

Source material. The sources for this lecture will be illustrations, with images of selected incunabula showing, for example, manuscript additions to the text and the work of professional rubricators, from strokes marking capitals to high quality miniature painting.

Summary of lecture 7

We have seen how printers in many cases designed books to have manuscript elements added to them, often elements which were of crucial importance for making a text useable. In the seventh lecture the point of view is reversed by taking the hand-finishing of books itself as the point of departure, bearing in mind that quite often the blank spaces were left blank or were filled by an owner rather than by a professional.

The lecture will look at manuscript additions which were a fundamental part of the text, such as passages in Greek, and then examine the hierarchy of the elements of the manuscript finishing of books. We will begin with the simple underlining and the hand marking-out of printed capital letters, moving on to the addition of text most often in red ink, including a discussion of certain types of marginal notes which may on occasion have been part of the work of professional rubricators.

We will look at supplied initials, both those which are placed in blank spaces over manuscript or printed guide letters, or indeed painted over printed wood-cut initials. Finally we will examine decorative border decoration, and illustrative miniature painting.

Some work has focused on the illumination in books produced in individual printers’ workshops. We will assess how the evidence provided by some copies of the Gutenberg Bible enables us to understand how it was distributed and where it was decorated. The output of Fust and Schoeffer and later Schoeffer in his own German printer’s workshop has been studied in some detail and the results of this work will be discussed.

The work on illustrations found in the works published in Paris by Antoine Vérard will be introduced. We will also look at some examples of one of the styles which can be associated with the workshop of Koberger in Nuremberg which, in contrast to bindings associated with books produced by him, has not been studied.

The study of Italian decoration has enabled art historians to identify bodies of work by individual miniaturists who did not work for a single workshop, and in one case the name of a known artist has been attached to a body of work, both hand painted and in wood-cut form. We will in particular examine recent scholarship which has used Italian decoration and illustration to throw light on the relation between printers, publishers and patrons.

The relation of the hand finishing of printed books to the decoration of manuscripts will be discussed, as will the various strategies adopted to speed up the immense task of finishing the many copies produced. In the case of Italy, we will present work which relates the producers of manuscript illustration to the producers of woodcut decoration.

Concluding the lecture we will examine the ways in which current knowledge allows us to use decoration as evidence for the exportation and distribution of books.
Day 4. Morning

Lecture 8

Provenance: owners from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century.

Objective of Lecture 5. To examine the aims of provenance research as well as the types of evidence which are available for the identification of owners.

Source material. The sources used for this lecture will be ownership inscriptions, ex dono inscriptions, book plates, coats of arms or devices, bindings, decoration and rubrication, marginal notes and other marks of use, shelfmarks, historical catalogues, and archival documentation.

Summary of lecture 8

The eighth lecture will begin by looking briefly at how books were distributed in the fifteenth century, the role of printers, publishers and booksellers, the fairs in Frankfurt, Leipzig and Lyon, and the role of itinerant booksellers. Some of the main trade routes will be illustrated with examples.

The lecture will then introduce some of the types of research which draw significantly on provenance-related information. For convenience they will be grouped into two. We will first explore fields of research relating to books owned by people contemporary or near-contemporary with the books: this will include economic history, work on the collections and interest of individuals, on the collections and/or interest of early modern social or geographical groups, on the reconstitution of dispersed collections, and work on the study of the reception of the works of an author or of a genre.

The second group of research topics relying on provenance information relates mainly to later owners, and is especially concerned with the history of taste and connoisseurship, the history of the antiquarian book trade, and the dispersal and building of private and institutional collections.

The history of modern collections will be discussed as a research topic in its own right but the lecture will also examine the way in which knowledge about the nature of our collections enables us to evaluate and assess the surviving material as evidence for the ownership and use of books in the early modern period.

The bulk of the lecture will be devoted to presenting the range of evidence available as well as some of the tools which can be used in its interpretation. This will not be comprehensive but will aim at introducing the type of information sources which are available for identifying owners and donors, institutions and places, coats of arms, mottos, members of the book trade, notes of prices paid, stamps of ownership. Bindings will be discussed as an important part of the process of identifying, dating and locating geographically personal or institutional ownership. Examples will also be given of the importance of using archival materials documenting the collecting history of libraries.

Day 4. Afternoon

Fourth hand-on session at the Bibliothèque Municipale.

We will examine some examples of styles of decoration and hand finishing. We will look at the most important works used for identifying fifteenth- and sixteenth-century bindings and look at some examples. Finally we will look at examples of a variety of types of ownership inscriptions and at on-line resources both for provenance research and for bindings research.