THE KNOWLEDGE HORIZON
Knowledge in Christendom had been the preserve of the few, its nature restricted by what constituted science, its circulation constricted by the privileged environments of its acquisition and transmission. The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed an expansion in what was defined as knowledge, in the spheres where it could be gathered and transacted, in the number of those who could access it and the geographical range over which it travelled. The orbit for knowledge expanded. The research facilities in Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) were staffed with ‘Merchants of Light’, whose task was to gather ‘the books, and abstracts [i.e. summaries], and patterns of experiments’ from around the globe, while ‘Depradators’ collected them from books and ‘Compilers’ collated them. That dream would have been unimaginable a century previously.
Knowledge communication changed with separate but related innovations in travel, postal services and printing. The interactions between these three created the infrastructure upon which mercantile traffic depended, through which diplomatic intelligence flowed, and by which news was carried from beyond and around Europe. The republic of letters was reliant upon that infrastructure. These changes redefined what it was (in cultural terms) to be local, sharpening the division between those who had access to literacy and knew how to deploy it, and those who did not.
Such cultural tensions have been interpreted as a division between a popular and an élite culture. In the minds and debates of the learned, that cultural distance had long existed. The Devil exploited the ‘superstition’ of unlettered people. The imperatives for religious and moral reform that followed the Reformations (Protestant and Catholic), coupled with missions overseas, certainly increased the perception of a larger gulf between those who understood and those who had to be taught what to believe and how to behave. The demands for greater obedience to authority – expressed in ecclesiastical doctrines that were written down, sworn to, memorized and internalized, and in municipal and state edicts and ordinances that subjects were expected to be familiar with – also increased the perceived gap between the well-endowed literate and the literately deprived. The complement to the weakening social cohesion during this period was a diminishing cultural cohesion.
Knowledge was power and profit. There were limits to its circulation, imposed by stakeholders (princes, patrons, printers and stationers). Yet the cultural assumptions about secrecy were changing. Humanists advertised their role in ‘exposing to the light that which had been buried in the dust of Antiquity’. Protestant theologians insisted that the Reformation brought God’s truth into the open, placing the Bible in people’s hands for them to read for themselves. Paracelsus said he liberated medicine from physicians. But the same Protestant theologians understood that people needed to be guided in how and what they read into biblical texts. Alchemical and Neo-Platonic texts were ‘occult’ not simply because they uncovered hidden forces in nature, but also because their authors thought they uncovered energies so powerful that they should be kept out of the public domain. Cornelius Agrippa was reluctant to publish the details of his magic because his readers would accuse him of being a sorcerer. ‘You should communicate vulgar things to vulgar friends; but higher and arcane things only to higher and secret friends; give hay to an ox, sugar to a parrot,’ was Abbot Trithemius’s advice to him. Paracelsus enveloped his teachings in obscure language, partly to keep them out of the hands of empiric and quack physicians.
Although much information was susceptible to being regarded as secret, the new breed of natural philosophers and practitioners had a more open attitude to sharing their know-how with others. Sebastiano Serlio, the son of a leatherworker who trained as an artist, illustrated and published his compendium on Architecture (1537–51) because God had given him his talent and he should not keep it ‘buried, hidden in my garden’. Daniele Barbaro justified his commentary on Vitruvius’s treatise by saying that he had acquired the knowledge he had through the openness of others (such as stonemasons and mathematicians) and that he wanted to honour that debt of gratitude. The ceramics expert Bernard Palissy published his inventions in Admirable Discourses (1580) and criticized alchemists for their secrecy.
By the early seventeenth century, knowledge was becoming seen in some quarters as a commodity. Scholars were merchants, trading facts. The Jesuits sometimes referred to themselves as engaged in godly ‘merchandise’. Samuel Hartlib, an exile in London from the Thirty Years War from the late 1620s onwards, wanted knowledge to be a public commodity at the service of the ‘reformed Commonwealth’. A librarian would be a ‘Factor or Trader for helps to Learning’ required to ‘give an account of his Trading and of his Profit in his Trade’. He proposed an ‘Office of Address’, following a similar venture established in Paris by Théophraste Renaudot, to act as a knowledge conduit.
Access to information was also promoted by published reference works. They became an established part of Europe’s cultural life. Atlases and gazetteers, dictionaries, bibliographies and encyclopaedias proliferated. Even those for specialists grew more detailed and useful. Prior to 1500, there was just one set of planetary tables (the Alfonsine Tables) to record the movements of the planets across the heavens, a compilation based on a small number of observations from Toledo. By 1650, there were over a dozen different printed sets available. Numerous non-specialist reference works were designed to offer access to the material which Europe’s notability were expected to have at their side in order to be considered well-educated. Of the over 150 dictionaries printed in Europe before 1650, some were monolingual (Latin or vernaculars). Others were multilingual, offering translations from or into one or more languages. The most widely reprinted reference book of all was Ambrogio Calepino’s Dictionarium (1502), a work which gave the title to the genre. Beginning life as a Latin dictionary, it had 150 editions by 1600.
Bibliographies and published sale catalogues were also useful reference works, a way of keeping track of publications that were out of print, false imprints, pseudonymous works and pirated editions. Dictionaries of quotations offered miscellaneously arranged collections of useful or morally improving sayings. The first book to carry the term ‘encyclopaedia’ in its title was Alsted’s 1630 Encyclopaedia. Reference works for the non-specialist became an important staple for printers and publishers. They not only sought to bring together the growing amount of information in the public domain from Europe and around the world, but also sought to collate it so that it would be accessible. The emergence of tabular diagrams to indicate content (dichotomy tables of the kind favoured by Ramist educators), indexes of people, places and topics, marginal indicators, cross-referencing, different typefaces to highlight different sorts of information at a glance, and footnotes offered ways to structure larger amounts of information.
THE POWER OF CARTOGRAPHY
Map-making exemplified the growing knowledge horizon. Printed world maps became more detailed and accurate on the basis of collated information from pilots, sailors, captains, explorers, cartographers and mathematicians. Europe’s representation of the coastline of southern America, for example, took several generations of trial and error. The chartrooms of the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies became recording centres for details about winds, sea currents, water depths, as well as measured distances and coastal details. Despite their efforts to keep such information to themselves, it percolated into the public domain. So, Dutch knowledge of the Malay peninsula in the 1590s was relayed to Petrus Plancius by a Portuguese source, thereby orientating Dutch expeditions. The Dutch East India Company’s geographical intelligence is measured in the maps distributed by its Amsterdam cartographic publisher – the Dutch published maps as proclamations of their claims to predominance in ocean sea-lanes and territorial possession. From 1617 onwards, the official cartographer for the company, Hessel Gerritsz, laid down a uniform protocol for the company’s maps so that their grids were comparable.
Producing world maps was an art in itself. Martin Waldseemüller, an educated humanist from Freiburg, initially led the way. Working for his patron, René II, duke of Lorraine, he linked a printed world map (over 6 foot wide, the first to cover 360° of longitude and to show the African coastline) with a printed world globe and an introduction to ‘cosmography’. He referred to a letter from the Florentine merchant Amerigo Vespucci, edited and published in a German translation in 1505. In it, the Florentine dressed up the New World discoveries of Columbus as his own. Waldseemüller took him at his word: ‘Since another fourth part [of the world] has been discovered by Americus Vesputius, I do not see why anyone should object to its being called after Americus the discoverer, a man of natural wisdom, Land of Americus – or America, since both Europe and Asia have derived their names from women.’ Six years later, he had second thoughts, preferring to call it ‘Terra Incognita’. But it was too late: the accretion to the continental myth had been born, and contemporaries began similarly to understand Europe as that space represented for it on a globe.
The revised spatial representation of the continents was consolidated on world maps by the next generation of cosmographers, concentrated in Venice, the Rhineland, Flanders and Paris – places where the skills existed alongside patrons to support cartographic workshops. Their know-how was handed on through dynasties of map-makers. Gerhard Mercator collaborated on his first printed globe in 1535–6 with the engraver and globe-maker Gaspar Van der Heyden, the mathematician, surveyor and cosmographer Regnier Gemma Frisius and the imperial diplomat Maximilianus Transylvanus. Van der Heyden provided the copper plates of twelve segments (‘gores’) which, pasted together onto a papier mâché globe provided the image. Gemma Frisius coordinated decisions about representation. The resulting globe offered a depiction of the world from space which claimed to correspond with what was currently known. Where knowledge did not exist, the globe printed a disclaimer.
Mercator followed in 1541 with the largest printed globe yet produced. Dedicated to Nicolas Perronet de Granvelle, Charles V’s minister, it offered a revised geography, putting into global context the significance of the Hispanic discoveries. It also included a spiral of rhomb lines that demonstrated the difference between Ptolemaic and magnetic North. Mercator’s geography bore the imprint of the changing political and religious world. Imprisoned at Louvain as a suspect ‘Lutheran’ in 1543, he fled to Duisburg, abandoned his imperial patrons and became a spectator of the crisis engulfing Flanders in the 1560s. In 1566, as newly appointed cosmographer to the Protestant duke of Jülich-Cleves, he conceived how to map our knowledge of the universe. ‘I had decided at the beginning,’ he recalled later, ‘to investigate thoroughly the two parts of the universe, the celestial . . . and the terrestrial.’ But he then came to see that they were united by history. The resulting cosmography therefore linked time and space, a chronology of world events from Creation to the present, supported by a world map. This was published in 1569 as a wall map, embodying for the first time in that form his cylindrical map projection. However, the explanatory panel did not elucidate how navigators should use it, still less how cartographers might reproduce it. Not until thirty years later would trigonometric tables become available from the mathematician Edward Wright to provide an explanation. For Mercator, its significance was only understood alongside his Chronologia (1569), published at the same time. In the latter, he synchronized world history into a chronology whose climax was an imminent apocalypse. Mercator concluded with one final, predictive date: 1576, the Initium cycli decemnovalis, the decade of fallow for the earth predicted by Hosea, after which the Lord would ‘be as the few unto Israel’. Mercator’s ‘Projection’ was part of a universal millennial history to which European space was related.
Wall maps grew larger with more information, but they also became impractical. The solution was to divide them into regions and compile them into books or portfolios. Mercator published one which carried the title: Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations (1585). The first plates concentrated on the Low Countries, France and Germany. Other parts of Europe followed after his death, in the complete edition published in 1595. The result was pure spatial information. The sheets for Flanders benefited from the triangulation of the region in accordance with mathematical procedures established by Gemma Frisius in 1533, and made easier by its flat terrain and succession of church steeples. Those for the British Isles depicted 2,500 geographical names. Individual sheets could be replaced by new engravings as more accurate information came to hand. Cartographers increasingly emphasized the reliability of their methods of enquiry and their up-to-date representations. By 1650, printed atlases were accompanied by gazetteers of European place-names and the representation of locality in western Europe was substantially mastered.
The new geography linked space to power. Maps determined the routes of French armies invading Italy in the sixteenth century just as they plotted the fortifications around England’s southern coastline, constructed by Henry VIII. William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s secretary of state and Lord Treasurer, mapped noble estates, taxation assessments and local government boundaries. He probably secured the appointment of Christopher Saxton as Surveyor of England and Wales in 1573. Similar political and commercial imperatives led the Dutch Republic and Bourbon France to sanction the publication of maps of their political space. Cartography became an instrument of empire. Diogo Ribeiro, Charles V’s cartographer, developed maps for the first circumnavigation of the globe. In 1527, he updated the Royal Register or planisphere, the first map to include illustrations of navigational instruments. The astrolabe was placed on the map in the Pacific Ocean at an unmarked line of longitude, 180° east, with a tiny Portuguese flag to the west, and a much larger Spanish flag to the east. That laid claim, by means of navigation and cartography, to an anti-meridian, the equivalent the other side of the earth to that agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas (7 June 1494) by which Spain and Portugal divided the spoils of the Atlantic between them along an arbitrary line, a hundred leagues west of the Azores.
Portugal’s discovery of the Moluccan Spice Islands in 1512 furnished Ribeiro with the evidence to assert this anti-meridian, placing the Moluccas within the Spanish sphere. He was one of the Spanish negotiators at Badajoz–Elvas in 1524 that tried, and failed, to resolve the contested claims to the Moluccas by both Spain and Portugal. Cartography and navigation were equally deployed in the resolution of the conflict in 1529 with the signing of the Treaty of Saragossa. Portugal paid 350,000 ducats in return for an agreement to a line of demarcation in the eastern hemisphere that was the equivalent of 17º east of the Moluccas, which Ribeiro and his colleagues worked out as being just to the west of the furthest island of what the Spanish hoped would be their Spice Islands, and which would be colonized by Spain from 1542 as the Philippines. The sense of space which lay behind the notion of Europe was part of the assertion of a colonial dominion.
Organized space was an instrument of rule. Emperor Charles V impressed foreign dignitaries with maps emphasizing the extent of his dominions. Map murals decorated the private quarters of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence for Duke Cosimo I. Pope Gregory XIII ordered the construction of a Gallery of Maps, almost 400 feet long, at the Vatican. A contemporary described Pope Gregory walking its length ‘considering how best to administer and govern’. At the end was a portal containing an anamorphosis, a mirror displaying an image of the Eucharist reflected from a distortion in the ceiling above, thereby linking geographical and holy power.
Despite its divisions, the European landmass was traversed, and not just by the élites. From the second half of the sixteenth century travellers had printed itineraries to guide them. In 1552, Charles Estienne published his Guide to the Roads of France. He was no seasoned voyager but he was a shrewd printer. His typography enabled him to fit a large amount of information legibly on to very small pages. Estienne started a trend in travel guides. By 1650, Europe’s bookshops were full of Deliciae, Itineraria and Descriptiones. Rome accommodated tens of thousands of pilgrims each year. A census of 1526–7 enumerated 236 hostelries in the city, one for every 233 inhabitants. Not surprisingly, there were no fewer than 193 travel guides to Rome published before 1650.
Travel literature combined adventure, curiosities, ethnography, scientific enquiry and moral edification – all from the comfort of one’s armchair. That from the New World was the equivalent of science fiction, and enterprising editors published collections of explorers’ tales. Ramusio’s three-volume Navigations and Voyages (Navigationi et viaggi), which popularized the travel stories of Marco Polo and Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage as recounted by Antonio Pigafetta, was quickly emulated. In England, Richard Eden published travel stories organized into four sections (one for each ‘corner’ of the world). That was also the principle adopted by Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations, Traffiques and Discoveries (1589).
Travel diaries came of age, desirable companions for educated Europeans on the move. Many of them found their way into print by 1650. Thomas Coryat, a clergyman’s son from Odcombe in Somerset, published Coryat’s Crudities in 1611, ‘hastily gobbled up’ during five months’ travel to Venice. Over half the journey was on foot and he hung up his boots in the parish church on his return to prove it. His contemporary Fynes Moryson published his diary covering a decade of travel in 1617. Travelogues became a staple for fictional writing, the backbone of the picaresque novel. Diarists commented on the roads, cities, inns, beds, food and money. For Montaigne, dictating his travel diary to his secretary as he went to Italy in the early 1580s, the size, comfort and cleanliness of the inns were important. German inns were the best, with Baden getting his five stars. Even in thinly populated rural Europe, you could generally find a bed for the night, though a traveller in Muscovy in 1602 noted with surprise that ‘one can go for twenty or thirty miles without coming across a single town or village’. Moryson recommended carrying a portable bed in the coach in readiness for such eventualities.
Travellers noted curiosities in accordance with the advice contained in the advice-books on the ‘science of travel’ (ars apodemica). The authoritative work of the genre, probably more praised than read, was Theodor Zwinger’s weighty Travel Method (Methodus apodemica, 1577). Zwinger had already made a name for himself by editing a dictionary of quotations compiled by his stepfather Conrad Lycosthenes. The travels of his youth, Zwinger explained, had been a waste of time because he had not been properly prepared. His book instructed young people on how to observe, digest and record systematically the knowledge that they gained from travel. He had been taught by Ramus in Paris so the work is a succession of unmemorable branching tables, laying out the moral and practical advantages of travel, with some useful advice on note-taking. By 1650, Europeans were travelling in and outside Europe as never before, and recording and transmitting their experiences in more systematic ways.
WRITING, READING, COUNTING
Humanists used ‘emblems’ to encapsulate the multiple meanings conveyed in an image. The term came from the title which Andrea Alciato gave to an encyclopaedia of illustrated epigrams which he published in Augsburg in 1531. His idea was that each emblem presented the viewer with a scene suggesting an implied or unexpected message for which it then became a mimetic device. By 1621 Alciato’s work had become a 1,000-page volume with numerous imitators. ‘Emblemata’ found their way onto family crests, bookplates, buildings, tableware and embroidery. His first emblem for Mercury, for example, depicted the upper half of a nude male torso emerging from a pile of stones at the intersection of three roads, the god’s trident pointing towards the middle of the roads. The epigram explaining the motto ended: ‘We are all at the crossroads and in this path of life we err, unless the god himself shows us the way.’ Other emblematists present Mercury as the winged messenger of the gods. Either way, the god became a symbol of the speed and power of reading and writing. By the 1620s, the word ‘Mercurius’ was synonymous with manuscript and published newsletters carrying the latest information.
The power of Mercury depended on the ability to read and write. The fissure between the literate and the non-literate constituted the biggest cultural division in European society and the greatest obstacle to its reformation. Of the two skills, writing was harder and longer to acquire. Writing-masters and school-masters realized that the printing press afforded the opportunity to publish teach-yourself manuals. The result was a raft of copybooks, directed towards teaching children to write, which stole ideas and illustrations from one another to advise the novice on how to sharpen the quill, prepare the ink and rule the paper, and when to lift the pen following which letters. Many of these copybooks taught writing and simple arithmetic as one operation. Reckoning-masters also published manuals with examples and illustrations to teach the operations of number. Arithmetic manuals were alert to the problems that those involved in commerce were likely to encounter, and mixed mental arithmetic with practical calculation. The arithmetic published by Peter Apian in 1527 was depicted in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. Holbein showed it open at a page demonstrating a handy way to divide by twelve, and placed it adjacent to a globe displaying the meridian of longitude agreed at Tordesillas. It was a reminder that mathematics and literacy were important components in all walks of life.
The pressures to become literate and numerate were particularly strong in urban Europe. Trade guilds demanded the ability to write as well as read from their apprentices. In London, for example, the ironmongers’ guild required a signed oath from their apprentices; 72 per cent managed it in the surviving register from 1520–50 – rising to 94 per cent in the second half of the century. The second largest group of books published in Strasbourg in the sixteenth century was technical manuals – treatises on the fabrication of dyes, pamphlets on metal-working, books on land-surveying. They were published for a literate, artisan laity who had acquired functional literacy.
This was often first-generation literacy – insatiable, unstoppable and encouraging its possessors to get the wrong end of the stick. Hans Sachs, the eponymous Meistersinger of Wagner’s opera, was the son of a tailor who became an apprentice shoemaker. He gained his literacy at the Latin school in Nuremberg before taking off as a journeyman. When he returned in 1519 it was as a shoemaker who devoted himself in his spare time to writing. According to his own reckoning, he had, by 1567, written 4,275 master-songs, 208 dramas, and 1,558 fables, dialogues, psalms and tavern songs. There is a curious fountain in the piazza of Montereale Valcellina in northern Italy which depicts a wheel of cheese, minus one slice, with water trickling through the holes in the cheese. It commemorates Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, the local miller. Menocchio was another first-generation literate, more interested in finding things out from the books he read than from sermons. From reading, he told the inquisitor, he deduced that the world had evolved ‘just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels – and among [them] was God’. Menocchio was tried by the Venetian Inquisition, found guilty and executed.
Many people picked up how to read informally. The evidence from the tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition suggests that significant numbers learned to read and write on their own, or from relatives. For the religious reformers of the sixteenth century, the household was an important cradle of literacy, and basic literacy was important to the functioning of catechism classes. In these and other environments, reading was not a private activity. It accommodated itself to well-established patterns of sociability. Reading was out loud; texts were recited. Taverns had printed handbills pasted to the walls for the purpose. Noël du Fail, born in rural Brittany, published a collection of old wives’ tales and sayings in 1547 that he remembered as being sung and retold in the evenings by firelight. What he published was only one version of a more unstable spoken artefact. In his Household Economy (1529) the Lutheran reformer at Eisenach Jost Menig recommended the regular reading of Scripture around the dinner table. A Protestant linen-weaver from Cambrai explained before the judges in 1566 that he had been ‘led to knowledge of the Gospel by . . . my neighbour, who had a Bible printed at Lyon and who taught me the Psalms by heart’. Inside schools as well as out, peer-led oral learning, auto-didacticism and memory played an important part in acquiring functional literacy and numeracy.
What we know about elementary schools is fragmentary. Petty (petites écoles), back-street (Winkelschulen), commercial (abbaco – after the commercial arithmetic in which they specialized), ABC (writing), guild, private and municipal schools taught basic learning skills, and contemporaries distinguished them from the Latin schools into which they sometimes fed. City fathers regarded local educational provision as important to the welfare and standing of their locality. When asked how the town of Coburg in southern Saxony supported three vernacular schools in the 1560s, the local official replied: ‘because we have so many artisans, journeymen and vine dressers here’. In urban environments, petty schools taught basic skills to large numbers of boys, but Venice is one of the few places where we can document it. In 1587, at least 26 per cent of boys between six and fifteen years of age attended schools in the city, and over half of them were in vernacular rather than Latin schools.
Historians are cautious in interpreting the evidence of how many people could write, let alone read. There is no shortage of documents which people signed. But being able to sign one’s own name is not a reliable guide to one’s ability to write, and still less to being able to read. A signature was not universally recognized as the best way of authenticating a document. In Hungary, for example, a seal was more important since signatures (and writing in general) were regarded with suspicion. There is also a definable difference between those who signed with ease and others who struggled to do so. The judges in the tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition were particularly interested in suspects’ ability to read and write, and graded them accordingly, recognizing that there was a difference between those who had some basic ability and those who had fluency.
Two generalizations hold good. The first is that literacy was most marked in towns. By the mid-sixteenth century, up to half the population of London could probably, to some degree, read and write. European towns of over 10,000 inhabitants struggled to meet that figure before 1600 when they had high levels of immigration from rural hinterlands. In the Castilian city of Cuenca, only 25 per cent of the men born between 1511 and 1530 could sign their name, although that figure had risen to 54 per cent for the generation born between 1571 and 1590. There was a literacy vortex in early-modern towns where cultural assumptions were dominated by the lay literate who governed overall patterns of attainment and expectation. These oases of high city literacy linked the urbanized corridor running from London, through the Low Countries and down the Rhine to the cities of northern Italy.
The second is that these abilities were concentrated in the hands of men. Only 28 per cent of a sample of women who signed contracts before notaries in Lyon in the 1560s and 70s could do so with their full name. One man in three could not sign the parish register when he married at Amsterdam in 1630; two out of every three brides declined to do so. In Hungary, even aristocratic women struggled with the pen. The second wife of Count György Thurzó was illiterate when they married in 1592. Two years later, she had learned enough to write a few words in her letter to him, when he was besieging a Turkish castle in the Turkish-Hungarian wars, and he was delighted: ‘You have traced some words with your own hand, my sweetheart, which is much to my liking . . . I shall bring back some fine Turkish wares as presents.’ Wherever else they acquired their basic learning skills, Europe’s children were not likely to learn to read at their mother’s knee.
A GOOD EDUCATION
‘A good education [bonae litterae] makes men,’ wrote Erasmus, the best-known intellectual of his day. What he meant was that only a classical education really counted. The philosophy, theology, history and literature of Antiquity, studied through their original texts and languages, contained an integrated programme of what was needed to equip boys (mostly) with a love for the wisdom and virtues of classical Antiquity and thereby inculcate them with the civic values and Christian piety to serve the commonwealth. It is easy to overestimate the achievements of humanist pedagogues. Their advice was principally directed towards the private tutors of princes and magistrates, or the Latin schools for urban élites.
The impact of humanist educators reflected their ambitions. Out of the window went the ‘barbarous’ methods used by old-fashioned grammarians, obsessed with teaching dull rules of Latin grammar and syntax with the aid of a birch. Humanists exaggerated for effect. ‘I have no patience with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children’s heads,’ wrote Erasmus in his little treatise Upon the Right Method of Instruction (De ratione studii, 1511). He sketched out instead how ‘student-centred learning’ could be fun. The tutor should ‘lead’ the student, after a short course in grammar, to the texts themselves, ‘a limpid spring’. Students should read them for themselves, abstract passages from them, put them (like proverbs) around door-frames, inscribe them on rings or cups, turn them into jokes and make them part of their lives. A student would come to grasp the ‘meaning and force of every fact or idea that he meets’ and acquire the confidence to talk and write in the language himself. Practice was preferred over precepts, methods over specified content, and organized learning over simple memorization. The outcome was a performer: a (Latin) speaker, qualified to interpret texts, comment on them, translate, speak and write off the cuff. Eloquence (portrayed as Mercury in later editions of Alciati’s emblems) was an essential skill for politics. Government in the eyes of humanist-trained princes, magistrates and notables was about persuasion.
Humanist educators did more than sketch out an educational programme; they provided teaching materials too. None was more popular than Erasmus’s Adages and his Colloquies. The first showed how to abstract a passage and comment on it. Initially published in 1500 with about 800 sayings and brief explanations, it grew with each succeeding edition until it contained over 4,000 extracts by Erasmus’s death. The result was a portrait of learning, organized into quotable distillations of wisdom, by turns curious and funny. Several of them survive today in vernacular phraseology (for example: ‘to champ at the bit’ and ‘no smoke without fire’). Latin students in this period were brought up to compile their own excerpts into ‘commonplace’ books, portable libraries of learning that influenced how sermons were preached and books were written.
Common-placing was one way by which contemporaries handled the increasing amounts of information coming their way. Taking handwritten notes was a way of mentally absorbing the material they contained. Those who purchased books were encouraged to use tables of contents and indexes as models for how to structure their notes into topics, and to annotate the books in the margins. The naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi found himself overwhelmed with the notes that he had taken over the years. The scholar Fabri de Peiresc was, according to his contemporary Pierre Gassendi, never to be seen reading without a pen in hand. Peiresc used the common technique of taking notes on loose leaves, and started a blank page for each new item so that he could add to it later on. Each sheet was then annotated with a heading and bound into registers so that he could retrieve the relevant note at a future date. The effort in keeping track of his notes, however, was considerable: ‘he would frequently excuse himself that all in his House was nothing but a confused and indigested Masse’. Finding one’s way through a morass of material was the common predicament of scholars by the early seventeenth century. Help was at hand, however, from an English school-master – Thomas Harrison, a friend of Samuel Hartlib. His ‘booke-invention’ of c. 1640 involved taking down ‘epitomes’ of relevant information on slips of paper and then storing them as facts in what amounted to a cabinet of curiosities: a filing cabinet.
Like the Adages, Erasmus’s Colloquies also became a runaway success. It first appeared in a modest eighty-page edition without the author’s permission from Basel in 1518, a manual to help boys with their conversational Latin. By March 1522 it had gone through thirty reprints. It remained a staple on bookshop shelves and student reading-lists. In this age of travel, Erasmus began with dialogues that got students practising their greetings and farewells – from the exquisitely polite (‘Greetings, my incomparable patron’) to the temptingly rude (‘Greetings to you, bottomless pit and devourer of cakes’), with lessons in civility on the way (‘To greet one who is belching or breaking wind carries politeness too far’). Erasmus played on every register of communication: written, spoken, gestured, implied, unsaid. Jokes, irony and word-play, often at the expense of his critics, reminded the alert reader that almost every word and sentence contained a surprise. The Colloquies were far more than an educational handbook; they were an invitation to step into a wider world of civilized learning, a ‘republic of letters’.
That phrase (res publica literaria) was used by Erasmus to signify an imagined club of humanists. Latin was its lingua franca, and you could show that you belonged by writing in a sloping italic script instead of a vertical Roman script. Such handwriting was initially scoffed at as a novelty and then associated with heresy. But italic then appeared in print (the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius being the first to adopt it). Gerhard Mercator used it to engrave the place-names on his maps. When applied to handwriting, it saved time because more letters could be joined up. Student autographs reveal generations signing up to the club.
Membership was by correspondence. Over 3,000 letters to and from Erasmus have survived – something approaching a map of the multiple nodes linking the humanist commonwealth in the early sixteenth century: Oxford, Paris, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Basel, Venice, Vienna and Cracow. It was a self-appointed élite of the educated, the successful and the powerful, clergy as well as laity, embracing central and eastern Europe. To be a corresponding member raised suspicions in parts of Mediterranean Europe where there was an Inquisition in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. But there were ways around their hostility. Galileo did not correspond directly with Kepler but used a third-party correspondent in Prague. Marin Mersenne acted as an intermediary for other contacts in the Netherlands and England. Like Gassendi and Peiresc, Mersenne found France in the early seventeenth century ideally placed to be a communication medium between Italy and Protestant northern Europe.
Printed books were often collaborative works, their production aided by an unseen telegraphy of correspondents and manuscript circulation. Sebastian Münster’s Cosmography, for example, would have been impossible to produce without its collaborators. Through Beatus Rhenanus, Erasmus kept abreast of what was going on in the central Rhineland. His friend and correspondent Guillaume Budé – ‘the marvel of France’, Erasmus called him – told him all he knew about their friends at court and the French capital. The creation of an engaged and literate public was as important to the anticipation of change in and around the Reformation as the printing press. Such a club created resentments among those who believed they did not belong, were excluded, or felt threatened by what it claimed to stand for. Besides creating political divisions, the Protestant Reformation partially decomposed this invisible republic, its gradual re-composition in the first half of the seventeenth century being one of the many signs that Europe was finding the ways and language to outgrow its religious contentions.
Within the republic of letters was an evocation of the moral and civil virtues of friendship. In his little manual on teaching, Erasmus took the example of Virgil’s Second Eclogue. It was about friendship among equals, he said, where ‘the stronger and the more numerous the ties of taste and interest the more durable the bond’. In parenthesis, Erasmus presented his picture of friendship among like-minded people: ‘I mean the frank, open and abiding friendship which alone deserves the name.’ Erasmus’s correspondence exemplified the ideal – though it was a contrivance, based on Ciceronian conventions. Another Erasmian runaway success, On Composing Letters (De conscribendis epistolis, 1522), laid out how to write a good letter. It went through fifty-five editions before 1550. The exchange of letters presupposed an exchange of objects. Paintings, coins, curiosities, manuscripts – all the worldly goods valorized in the Renaissance – became objects of exchange, transformed beyond their commodity value into symbols of shared values and ideals.
There are two surviving oil paintings of Matthäus Schwarz, chief accountant at the house of Fugger in Augsburg. The earlier of the two, painted in February 1526 by Hans Maler, depicts the 29-year-old wearing a stylish hat and a costume of black ermine, and strumming a lute. In that of 1542, painted by Christoph Amberger, he is forty-five years old and has put on weight. There is a glass of red wine (a reference to his family’s mercantile origins in the wine trade) and his rich clothes are set off against a Renaissance painting behind him. Schwarz has a humanist veneer but his interests seem to lie more in the practicalities of life rather than in what people were thinking or reading. Beginning in 1519, he kept a voluminous manuscript diary, entitled The Run of the World (Der Welt lauf). All that remains is its adjunct: The Book of Clothes, a picture book with 137 miniature pictures of Schwarz in the costumes that he wore. It runs almost literally from cradle to grave, the first image showing him in nappies and the last one as a mourner at Anton Fugger’s funeral in 1560. They show him in his school uniform, leaving school (dancing on his school books) and in his outfits as a travelling merchant. That in the autumn of 1525 includes a reversible jacket, bright red on the outside, green on the inside so that, when travelling through the Tyrol accompanying silver transports for the Fuggers, he could turn green, the colour of the insurgent peasants. He is depicted tobogganing in winter, and wearing a red and yellow festive costume for the wedding of his master, Anton Fugger, in 1527. We might see this as the equivalent of a personal photograph album from the sixteenth century, evidence for a new ‘individuality’. Yet, in June 1526, months before his thirtieth birthday, two miniatures of Schwarz show him in the nude. The contemporary belief was that, on Judgment Day, we appear before God naked. In reality, Schwarz’s book is an account of his life in the world as others would see him – in his clothes. His self-awareness is clothed by self-fashioning. But his nakedness was not a depiction of either. Rather it was recognition that he would have to account for himself in another world, where clothes and self-awareness counted for nothing. Humanists changed European’s perceptions of their place in the world. But that did not mean that they had thereby been put in touch with modern individualism.
‘POST-HASTE’
Letters were at the dynamic heart of Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Letters patent were the preferred instruments of state. Letters of nomination furnished you with an office in it, or a benefice in the Church. Letters of commission gave you powers to govern a province or a colony. Letters of indulgence provided promissory notes of pardon for your sins (until Protestants called foul). By 1520, resident diplomats and the regular despatches which accompanied them were becoming habitual at the courts of western Europe, drawing on the example of the northern Italian principalities (Milan, then Florence and Venice). King Francis I inherited the throne of France in 1515 with only one resident ambassador. At his death in 1547, France had ten throughout Europe in order to counter the diplomatic sophistication of its Habsburg rivals. As Europe’s commercial networks expanded, so larger mercantile firms made much greater use of commission agency to operate at a distance, letters being the means by which they managed these operations. In Venice, letters of news arrived at the Rialto (the mercantile heart of the city) from across Europe, one of several nerve-centres of Europe’s communications, where news was power, but not exclusively in the hands of the conventionally powerful.
The despatch of an extraordinary courier was not novel. Medieval universities had provided organized postal services of their own so that students could keep in touch with their families and be sent money and belongings. What changed was that these were supplemented by relay routes of post-horses, organized by governments but available for a fee (and at the discretion of couriers) to private individuals. The addresses on letters indicate how widely the service was used – often accompanied by messages to the carrier: ‘with the speed of a bird’; ‘day and night’, ‘post-haste’, ‘non celeriter sed fulminantissime’ (‘not just fast, but like lightning’). Franz von Taxis, the general postmaster of Philip of Burgundy, ran the postal services for the Habsburg empire (and gave us the word ‘taxi’). A painting of von Taxis in around 1514 shows him with the symbols of his office: a letter-box with its silver finial, a quill-pen, a letter, a seal-ring and some gold coins. In the contract signed by Philip’s son Charles on 12 November 1516 with Franz and his nephew Johann Baptiste von Taxis, they guaranteed a regular service of ‘ordinary posts’ from Brussels throughout the empire. The operating times stipulated in the contract were not significantly improved before the later eighteenth century.
On 14 June 1520, two weeks before his election as Holy Roman Emperor, Charles granted Johann Baptiste von Taxis the exclusive right to appoint and dismiss postmasters in his lands and call himself ‘General Postmaster’. As a result, news travelled fast in the empire. The first report of the Anabaptist revolution in Münster was through the letters of its bishop, sent on to Worms and then distributed by the Taxis network. The unexpected meeting of Pope Clement VII and Charles V at Bologna in February 1530 was known in Antwerp a week later by the same route. By the early sixteenth century, the north of Italy was criss-crossed by a fast postal system. By 1568, there were five resident postmasters in Rome (those of the kings of Spain and France as well as the republics of Genoa and Venice, in addition to the pope himself), whence letters and parcels were despatched at least once a week for Venice, Milan, Genoa, Naples and Lyon (for France and the Low Countries). The Antwerp bourse displayed a timetable of carriers. From 1558, the expatriate Italian banker Prospero Provana ran a postal service for King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland which left Cracow on Sundays, reached Vienna on Wednesday and arrived in Venice the following Tuesday. By the early seventeenth century, a postal network served all the major towns in the northern Netherlands. John Taylor’s The Carriers Cosmographie (1637) mapped the postal routes to the shire towns in England and also explained which postal carriers left from which tavern, and on what days of the week.
Postal networks served only major towns. They were expensive and things then, as now, could go wrong. But contemporaries made allowance for upsets and, when one examines how the news reports of the major events spread across Europe, it is the volume and contradictory accounts that frustrated contemporaries, not the slowness with which they reached them. Literate Europe came to depend on communication at a distance, and not just across the European landmass. With the cycles of commercial traffic to and from colonial America and the East Indies it was easy to incorporate reports and papers from overseas into domestic circulation. Jesuit missionaries were encouraged to provide information on natural history and curiosities. Their colleges beyond Europe (Lima, Goa, Macao) were, like their counterparts in Europe, nodes in knowledge circulation. San Pablo College in Lima, for example, taught missionaries, prepared and published grammars of local Indian languages, had one of the largest libraries in southern America, and its pharmacy became a renowned centre for indigenous medicinal plants. By the seventeenth century, Jesuits sent shipments of medicaments and rarities back to Europe on a regular basis, their reports then appearing as Annual Letters which were published from around 1550.
BOOKS SEEKING READERS
Printing was hailed as a world-changing event. Luther famously described it as ‘God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward’, a sign of the coming millennium: ‘the last flame before the extinction of the world’. At face value, such remarks reinforce the impression that there was a ‘printing revolution’ in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In reality, however, the situation was more complicated than that. The well-established technologies of ‘scribal publication’ (circulation by multiple, often selective, copying of materials for limited distribution) continued to provide a convenient means for circulating ideas around Europe’s republic of letters, easily adapted to its learning media, relatively unencumbered by censorship and requiring little capital investment. Yet the possibility of accurate textual reproduction in large quantities was not an anodyne change, especially when it was linked to the advent of print culture – i.e. the existence of enterprising printers, publishers, book-markets, distribution networks and an adapted reading public. That print culture was the achievement of this period. By 1650, it is impossible to imagine Europe without it.
Print culture was a tribute to commercial rather than technological success. By 1520, printing was out of the cradle and almost all the technical innovations that made it possible were in place. Printing presses and print-shops in 1650 looked much as they had done over a century previously. What changed was their cultural footprint. Global estimates remain impressionistic. In 1520, there were between 250 and 270 printing centres in Europe, almost all of them in cosmopolitan cities, university towns or in the shadow of a princely court. By 1650, those figures had not doubled, but there was an increasing concentration of printing presses in a limited number of lead-sites. In 1550, Paris and Lyon occupied a dominant role in France. Venice published over half the production in Italy, a preponderance matched in the Netherlands by Antwerp. Only the German market remained one in which there was no dominant centre. One should perhaps imagine 150–200 million copies being produced from these presses in the sixteenth century. The comparable figure for the eighteenth century would be of the order of 1,500 million.
Changes of that magnitude meant finding new readers and persuading them to buy printed materials in greater quantity. Alongside the triumphal trope of the providential printing press went another in the sixteenth century: that of the over-production of books. Luther deplored the ‘abundance of books and writers’, complaining of ‘an infinite sea’ and ‘ocean’ of books. The English martyrologist John Foxe agreed: ‘since the republic of letters is indeed all but overwhelmed by an infinite multitude of books flying forth on all sides,’ he wrote in his Latin martyrology, ‘my labours at putting hand to pen seem superfluous . . .’ There may even have been a crisis in the production of scholarly books by the early seventeenth century. We tend to think that, in the pioneer age of printing, readers were chasing after books. The reality was the reverse: books chased readers.
Europe’s printers and booksellers knew how to lure them. It mattered how books looked because, for Europe’s literate élites, printed books were for keeping, and not just communicating. At the top end of the market especially, they were objects of luxury and value, presented as gifts and treasured. Since books were generally sold unbound (in albis), booksellers offered bespoke binding services. For printers and publishers, therefore, an illustrated frontispiece was of particular significance – something to be displayed in the shopfront or pinned up at the book fair. Woodblock prints were cheaper to produce, easily integrated into the printing process and recycled from one edition to another. Copperplate intaglio printing was more expensive and copper in restricted supply. Both the engraving and printing took longer and required more skill. But the greater clarity and sophistication of the image were advantageous when covers sold books, and engraved frontispieces gradually prevailed for more expensive titles.
Title-pages tempted the reader with bold claims – true histories, prodigious marvels, strange wonders. They advertised new editions and improved readability – better layouts, indexes, notes and illustrations. Catalogues helped readers to know what was available and their layout was improved. One sixteenth-century German printing dynasty from Lübeck (Johann Balhorn and son) were so renowned for ‘improving’ their texts from one edition to another that they became the eponym in German for altering something until it no longer made sense (verballhornen). A mass-produced book needed features to distinguish it from the competition and printers were sophisticated in finding ways of doing so. German printers adopted a Teutonic rival to roman type, known now as ‘Fraktur’, to give their works a distinctive appearance in local markets. Lyonnais printers tried to popularize a civilité italic font for works for the French market. Claude Garamont modelled his Roman and Greek fonts on designs produced for the press of Aldus Manutius in Venice, the modern Garamond typeface being based on designs by one of his successors, Jean Jannon.
Title-pages were sometimes modified to sell into different markets, or changed to dispose of remaining stocks. Prefaces persuaded people to buy, men of letters badgered to provide dedications. In some regions, printers diversified into playing-cards, greetings cards, calendars and albums. In northern France, the founder of a publishing dynasty in Troyes, Nicolas Oudot, began printing books of prayers, romances, fables and almanacs very cheaply. They became known as ‘the blue library’ (bibliothèque bleue) from their coloured covers. They were marketed regionally across northern France through pedlars (colporteurs) hawking them at fairs and from town to town. Oudot’s contemporaries in Amsterdam, Paris and London sought out other markets for ephemeral publications, particularly newspapers and journals. Everywhere, printers and publishers knew that a popular book was one that appealed to diverse groups of readers, whose tastes and interests they had to cultivate. By 1650, there was a striking correlation between a country’s book production and its per capita gross domestic product. The relationship was not that of cause and effect, but it reflected a new reality: that printing had become by the middle of the seventeenth century a reliable indicator of underlying economic prosperity.
Succeeding as a publisher required commercial acumen, business contacts and good luck. The career of Christophe Plantin, one of the most enterprising printers in sixteenth-century Europe, illustrates how it was done. Like many printers of his day, he was an émigré, arriving in Antwerp having been born in the Loire valley. In 1555, he began printing books, combining this initially with leather-work, binding and the selling of French lace. He used family and friends to raise his capital, and some of his friends were also ‘family’ in the sense that they belonged to the Family of Love, followers of the domestic piety advocated by Hendrik Niclaes. Plantin developed his contacts in Paris, gearing his early works to the French market, careful to balance his output between prestige publications and lower-range but steady-sale titles. By 1566, Plantin and Co. had seven presses and employed thirty-three printers, compositors and proof-readers and had moved premises from ‘The Golden Compasses’ (one of Plantin’s regular printing devices) in the Kammenstraat to the Vrijdagmarkt. There, the Officina Plantiniana featured on the tourist map – as it does today.
Plantin’s greatest success, however, was to use his contacts in high places to secure printing monopolies. The politics of book censorship grew in the sixteenth century out of the desire of printers themselves to protect their publications from competition. They sought ‘privileges’ to do so and governments realized that they could become a weapon in the battle against religious controversy. Publications therefore carried an ‘imprimatur’ which offered the printer-publisher economic advantages but at the same time obliged him to submit his texts for official examination. Plantin, however, landed the most tempting of monopolies. With the help of Antoine Perrenot (known as Cardinal Granvelle), he secured a royal subsidy (1568) and papal privilege (1572) to print and market throughout Catholic Europe the multilingual Polyglot Bible. In 1570, he also gained a papal privilege giving him sole rights to print and market the new breviary (the liturgy for the Roman Church) recommended by the Council of Trent. In 1571, the privilege was extended to Spain and its overseas territories. Consignments of books by the thousand were shipped from Antwerp and Plantin’s publishing pre-eminence briefly assured. But no publisher was ever secure for long. In a competitive environment, rival printers in Cologne, untroubled by his privilege, produced their own breviaries. Political crises, while they generated demands for printed copy, disrupted supplies and markets. With the renewed civil war in the Netherlands in 1572, he almost went bankrupt. Even this most successful of publishers signed himself off in his letters in the later 1580s as ‘from the once-flourishing’ Plantin.
Libraries were the embodiment of the new print culture. The growth of private collections can be measured, in part, through surviving inventories. In Florence, Amiens and elsewhere, the evidence is of a growth in the availability of domestic printed reading-matter, and particularly in the development of medium-sized urban collections (30–200 items). Specially built libraries were also constructed for larger collections, symbolizing the link between books and power. In 1515, the Venetian Senate decided to build a library to house the books that had been left to it by Cardinal Bessarion. The Senate’s resolution referred to the ‘good government’ that would come about through following the ancients in fostering learning. The royal library at Fontainebleau formed part of Francis I’s cultural agenda, which included the founding of a royal printing house and a system of legal deposit. In Germany, princes rivalled one another in founding libraries and appointing scholar-librarians. Libraries, in short, became spaces that were either dedicated to the common weal, or (increasingly) privileged environments in which to exalt the dignity of princes.
LANGUAGES AND COMMUNITIES
Language was a barrier as well as a facilitator to communication, whether by word of mouth or in writing. How many languages were spoken in Europe in this period? The answer is not straightforward since what is classified as a European language is determined by those which have survived. A recent estimate puts the figure at somewhere between forty and seventy. The awareness of Europe’s rich linguistic heritage was growing. Contemporaries often linked the quality of languages to the perceived moral character of the people who spoke them. So the philosopher and magistrate Michel de Montaigne regarded Gascon, the language spoken in southwestern France, as ‘male’ and ‘military’, while his contemporary the Parisian barrister Étienne Pasquier thought Italian was ‘soft’ and ‘effeminate’. Both Montaigne and Pasquier subscribed to that part of the humanist agenda which made language the touchstone of education. Writers rivalled one another in promoting their own native vernacular while denigrating the claims of others. In 1542, the Italian dramatist and intellectual Sperone Speroni discussed the relative merits of Greek, Latin, Tuscan and other Italian dialects for literary composition. The poet Joachim du Bellay followed his example seven years later and condemned his compatriots for not promoting the richness of French in his Defence and illustration of the French Language. In Spain, humanists linked the dignity of the Castilian language to its Latin roots, although other languages in the peninsula had their defenders too. Martín de Viziana sought to prove, for example, that Valencian was the equal of Castilian in drawing its roots from the ancient languages. In 1589, Gudbrandur Thorláksson advanced the claims to purity of the Icelandic language. There was hardly a vernacular that did not have its champion.
Is this evidence for the triumph of the vernacular? The reality was not that straightforward. There was a constant tension between spoken and written languages, between the pressures of localism and the desire for uniformity. Linguistic pluralism remained a fact of life in Europe. In the Engadine valley in central Switzerland, the Salis family corresponded with one another in five different languages in the later sixteenth century. The sons away at school wrote back in Latin but the rest of the family used German, Italian, French and (the women) their native Romansch. Bilingualism was common, too, in eastern and central Europe, where speakers of Hungarian and Slovak, Czech, German, Croat or Italian lived in proximity. In Lithuania, five languages cohabited – Lithuanian, Polish, German, Ruthenian and Latvian. People readily accommodated themselves to belonging to more than one language community. Which language they chose to use, and in which context, became a social and cultural statement about who they were and where they belonged at any particular moment.
Latin was the language of Christendom. It remained the most important ‘virtual language’ that defined who you were, socially and intellectually. As the English schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster said, it was the language of ‘the learned communitie’, ‘the mother tongue of the learned’. It was the last component of Christendom to crumble. In dual-language parts of Europe, Latin remained the lingua franca for justice, administration and getting about. Many municipal and court records in Poland were kept in Latin until the seventeenth century. In Vienna, Hofkammer officials corresponded in Latin with their counterparts in Bratislava. The records of the German and Hungarian Diets were in Latin. When English travellers wanted to make their wishes known in Hungarian inns they used Latin. A Flemish Capuchin wrote to Rome in 1633 that ‘in Hungary the peasants and shepherds speak Latin more fluently than many priests do elsewhere’. Latin remained the formal language of diplomacy and of the Roman Catholic Church. The majority of books for sale at the Frankfurt fair were still in Latin by 1650. It was not the only virtual language (Jews used Hebrew and Church Slavonic was the lingua franca among the Orthodox) but Latin remained a residual trace-element and linguistic frontier delineating what had once been Christendom.
The tensions within the Protestant Reformation were reflected in its languages. Although humanists preached the utility of reformed vernacular languages, states could not impose a language. The Edict of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) referred to the ‘maternal French language’ as what should be used in French courts. But it did not exclude other languages from being accepted. That same year, the Polish Sejm ordered that all its laws and edicts should be published in Polish, but that did not impact on other parts of its localized administration. The Act of Union between England and Wales in 1536 required oaths to be taken ‘in the English tongue’, although Welsh continued to be used into the next century. The following year, the Act of the English Order limited the use of Irish in public, thereby turning English into a resented colonial language. In 1561, the Inquisition made Castilian obligatory in Catalonia, creating similar resentments, which would resurface in the 1640s. In the seventeenth century, the Swedes attempted to restrict the use of Danish and Finnish in its new empire, while the Habsburgs sought to impose German in Czech lands after the battle of the White Mountain (1620). By 1650, there were emergent dominant linguistic communities in Europe, reflecting a redefining of the local in Europe. There were also languages in clear retreat: Basque, Breton, Gaelic. For others – Catalan, Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch – the prospects lay in the balance.
The linguistic choice facing intellectuals was between broadening their impact (Latin) and deepening it (a vernacular). Erasmus had no difficulty in choosing the former. Everything he wrote was in Latin, a language he spoke (with a Dutch accent). Yet, in the preface to his Greek edition of the New Testament, he advocated putting it into vernacular languages so that ‘the lowliest women’ (omnes mulerculae), Scots and Irish, Turks and Saracens could read it, ploughmen sing the Scriptures at the plough and weavers keep time to them at their loom. The greatest linguistic tensions of the age of the Reformation were: what language should one use in church, and how should one address God. Latin remained the language of the Catholic liturgy. But the evidence from church visitations is that a substantial proportion of the parish clergy, at least before the impact on clerical education of Catholic reform, did not know much of it. Whether that mattered, and what language was used for sermons and homilies, is difficult to determine. Simple Latin may have been approachable to speakers of Romance languages if interlaced with the vernacular. It is not clear that their congregations would have understood a vernacular any better – unless their priest happened to be fluent in their patois.
Protestant reformers chose deepening over broadening, but with difficulty. Luther advocated retaining a Latin liturgy for educational purposes and wrote his theological works in Latin. Huldrych Zwingli, whose spoken language was a Swiss dialect, made language central to the way we understand and worship God. When he reformed the liturgy in Zürich (1525), it was in the Swiss-German of the eastern Swiss cantons that worshippers said the ‘Gloria in Excelsis’. It was only in Latin that his theological works gained him a broader hearing. Jean Calvin used both Latin and vernacular French but struggled to render his works in the latter. Translating the Bible was a challenge for all the religious reformers. Martin Luther translated it into German for ‘the common man’ (der gemeine Mann). But what German? In his Table Talk he recognized that ‘German has so many dialects that people living only thirty miles apart do not understand one another’. In his Bible translation he chose to follow the model of the Saxon court at Meissen, known as ‘Meissen officialese’ (Meissner Kanzleisprache). Vernacular Scriptures divided Protestantism over the issue at the heart of the Reformation: how one was in touch with God.
THE POWER OF IMAGES
There was significant innovation, sophistication and imagination, beyond printing, in the use of wood-block images, engravings, etchings, music- and ballad-printing, medal production and tapestry-work. Scholars, artists and engravers understood that an image conveyed layers of meaning. Mechanical reproduction assisted in the manufacture of globes, armillary spheres, sextants and astronomical rings and improved clarity and accuracy. The increased reliability of numerical tables (for geographical positions, trigonometry, logarithms and planetary ephemerides) facilitated their use. Dichotomy tables made it possible for the structure of information to be taken in at a glance. Images enabled techniques to be better conveyed and standardized. The quality of illustrations, coupled with the arrangement of image with text, contributed to the success of anatomical textbooks, botanical handbooks, mathematical treatises and atlases.
Pictures were suited to the focus on the particular. Naturalistic representations of plants closed the gap between discursive texts about nature and the direct experience of it. Vesalius supervised and paid for the eighty-three woodcut images of the human body contained in the Fabrica (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body), telling the reader: ‘How much pictures aid the understanding of these things and place a subject before the eyes more precisely than the most explicit language.’ Scales on maps, measurements, accompanying descriptions of images and hand-coloured artefacts supplemented the sense of a denoted reality. Knowledge of the world could also be represented in diagrams and formulae which constructed ways of seeing the world and structuring knowledge. The illustrations which accompanied Descartes’s optical treatise thus combined anatomical dissection with optical geometry. Engravers and artists were not merely adjuncts to the processes of knowledge representation, but active collaborators in it – sometimes figuring directly in the works which they represented.
Far from fossilizing knowledge in a static medium, pictures represented its acquisition as a dynamic process. Heinrich Vogtherr (the Elder) was the first to produce anatomical illustrations with layered flaps in order to show the body internally and externally. Hans Baldung Grien contributed ten woodcuts to Walter Hermann Ryff’s 1541 anatomical atlas depicting the successive stages of a cranial dissection. Galileo’s Starry Messenger included sequenced engravings of the irregularities which he had seen on the moon’s surface and the spots on the sun as a visual narration of his astronomical theories.
Images sold books, and also ideas. Lutheran propagandists incorporated already familiar motifs (monsters and portents) into their anti-Catholic pamphlets, justifying them as ‘for the simple folk’. Images could transcend the literacy gap – could become the ‘bible of the poor’ (Biblia pauperum), as the Second Nicene Council (AD 787) had called it. Zwinglian-Calvinist (Reformed) Protestantism had second thoughts, however, about pictures, especially in a devotional context. Images encouraged idolatry, and Old Testament biblical precepts proclaimed them dangerous to true faith and to be destroyed. There was no such reticence in Counter-Reformed Catholic Christianity. Images were important, as Jesuit missionaries emphasized, in the armoury of persuasion. Francis Xavier arrived in Goa in 1542 with wood-block prints, paintings and statuettes of the Virgin Mary.
The religious art of the High Renaissance and early Baroque – Michelangelo, Raphael, Zuccaro, and (later) Rubens and Carracci – travelled around the world in engravings and etchings. Luís Fróis, one of the Jesuit missionaries in Japan, reported in 1584 that over 50,000 devotional images were needed for distribution to its growing Christian community, adding that these pictures were so coveted as gifts in India and China that a priest might set out with a thousand of them, but be persuaded to part with them before he reached Japan. The solution was to found an indigenous ‘school’ of painters, attached to the Jesuit seminary in Japan. Begun in 1583, it was headed by the Jesuit Giovanni Niccolò. Under his direction, Japanese lay brothers copied European engravings in oil paintings on copper, wood panels, watercolours and ink drawings on a substantial scale, many of them exported to China.
Images were chosen for their appropriate effect in a particular environment. In China, for example, they were as much part of Matteo Ricci’s missionary strategy as clocks, astronomy and maps. He initially replaced images of the Madonna with those of the Salvator Mundi because the Chinese confused the Virgin Mary with Guanyin, the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy. Later, however, he and his successors took advantage of the affinity. Like his fellow-Jesuits in Japan, he also avoided the Crucifixion and scenes of the Passion because locals regarded them as humiliating. Jesuits related how pictures created great excitement among host populations. The impact of European representational art was powerful. ‘This is a living Buddha,’ Chinese Emperor Wan-Li said when regarding an oil painting of the Salvator Mundi from the Jesuit workshop in Rome, shown to him in 1601. Visitors to the Jesuit residence in Beijing in 1605 were ‘amazed by the books of images’ they were shown. They apparently thought ‘they were sculpted and they could not believe that they were pictures’. Others were reported as saying that paintings and engravings had a supernatural quality because the eyes of the Virgin or of Christ seemed to follow them as they moved around.
Accommodation to local tastes was encouraged among those missionaries who were convinced that a softly-softly approach (il modo soave) was the best way of winning secure converts to Christianity. Europe’s mechanically reproduced media were an important adjunct to global Catholic Christianity. An Antwerp engraving from 1550 served as the model when Nahua Indians in Mexico depicted the Virgin of Sorrows in feather-work. In 1578, the first Mexican feather-painting, based on a European engraving of Mary Magdalene, was recorded as making its way via the Philippines to China. The 153 images in Jerónimo Nadal’s Pictures from the Gospel Stories (1593) were based on a cycle of drawings first made in Rome in the late 1550s or early 60s. Printed in Antwerp, they had a considerable impact on missions in Asia and Latin America. ‘By placing an image before people’s eyes,’ said Ricci, ‘we can explain what we could not perhaps put into words.’