Chapter 34
The Waning of Manuscript Production
The Period of Transition
The introduction in the late 1450s of printing with movable metal type appears in retrospect as a watershed in European culture, and was greeted rapturously even by some contemporaries.1 Yet the new technology did not instantly make the old obsolete.2 Script and print coexisted for at least a generation after Gutenberg, and Latin texts continued to be copied by hand well after 1500.3
In many ways, the earliest printed books can be regarded as simply an extension of contemporary manuscripts.4 Early typefaces were naturally modeled on existing script, abbreviations, ligatures, and all.5 Thus, Italian Humanistic book hand gave rise to the Roman type used by Sweynheym and Pannartz. Humanistic cursive produced the familiar “italic” type popularized by Aldus Manutius, who may have used the hand of the Paduan scribe Bartolomeo Sanvito as his model.6 Gothic book hands generated the Fraktur or “black-letter” preferred for law books, service books, and bibles. In the Low Countries, the Brethren of the Common Life developed a typeface modeled on their distinctive script style. Some familiar conventions of the printed book (e.g., the running head, indexing, tables of contents) can be traced back to late medieval manuscripts. One new development was the title page, which emerged, sporadically and for reasons still unclear, in the first decades of printing.7 Its occasional adoption by late fifteenth-century scribes shows that print conventions could influence manuscripts as well as vice versa.
The absence at this period of a rigid distinction between script and print holds good for reception also. Fifteenth-century booklists often specify whether a given entry represents a manuscript or a printed book, but typically list them in a single sequence; owners seem to have stored them side by side. Library catalogues do not consistently separate printed books from manuscripts until the later seventeenth century.8 Indeed, doing so would often have caused serious difficulty, since printed books and manuscripts were frequently bound together.9
Print had its limitations, especially in its early stages. Incunabula often include handwritten elements (or space left blank for them): illuminated capitals, penwork, diagrams, illustrations, musical notation, Greek. But the press’s repertoire grew rapidly. The technical challenges of non-Roman alphabets were overcome relatively quickly. The first printed book in Greek (an edition of the pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia) was published in 1475. Books were printed in Hebrew as early as the 1470s and in Cyrillic by 1491. Still more complicated was the case of music, which required careful alignment and (at least with early techniques) several passes through the press. The obstacles were not insuperable, and printed music was circulating widely by the early sixteenth century.10 Even so, large liturgical books (antiphonals and graduals) continued to be produced by hand, and hand-copying remained important for musical scores well into the 1700s.11
Absent technical issues, the promotion of a text to print depended on at least two factors: the availability of an exemplar at a particular date in a particular place, and the printer’s expectation—not always well founded—that the text would find buyers. Works that could not meet both conditions remained in manuscript, at least for the time being.12 First in line for the press were scriptural texts (Gutenberg’s Bible, the Mainz Psalter) and popular works such as Donatus’ grammar. Printing also had obvious utility for lengthy reference works like Giovanni Balbi’s Catholicon and for legal texts, which were much in demand but expensive and time-consuming to copy. In the wake of humanism, classical texts could also look for a fair-sized readership. Most of the major Latin authors had reached print by 1485, though a few had to wait longer (Phaedrus, for example, until 1596). Post-classical writers were more haphazardly served.13 Many significant medieval texts still await a printed edition.
Yet as late as 1500 readers are still found copying classical texts by hand, even when the work had already made its way into print. Indeed, it is by no means uncommon to find that a late fifteenth-century manuscript has been copied from a printed book.14 This practice, startling at first glance, becomes explicable in the context of early printing and distribution practices. As we shall see, some such volumes were commissioned by patrons who placed a premium on a handwritten manuscript. In other cases the copyist may not have been able to afford a printed book, or may not have had access to one other than the exemplar. The practice has an important corollary for students of transmission. For most texts, the products of even a small print run are likely to have outnumbered all extant manuscripts. It follows that any manuscript written after the publication of the corresponding editio princeps is very likely a copy of a printed book.
Manuscripts at the Margins
By the last decade of the century, it was clear that the balance had shifted. The memoirs of the Florentine cartolaio Vespasiano da Bisticci (d. 1498) look back wistfully to a golden age of manuscript production. At Venice the Dominican scribe Filippo della Strada (active into the 1490s) wrote scathing poems against the technology that was eating away at his livelihood.15 Some of those involved in scribal book production looked for other lines of work. Others made the transition to the new technology successfully. Some of the early printers, including Peter Schöffer, Colard Mansion, and Johannes Mentelin, had in fact begun their careers as scribes.16 The Brethren of the Common Life, having previously supported themselves by copying, now did so by manufacturing printed books. Hand-copying continued into the sixteenth century (and beyond), but was increasingly restricted to certain types of book.17
At the high end are deluxe copies. As contemporaries noted, the new technology had a democratizing effect. It multiplied copies, lowered their price, and spread book ownership further down the social scale. But in the process it enhanced the value of the hand-copied and illuminated volume as a unique object and a status symbol. In the early fifteenth century, for example, Books of Hours were among the most popular scribal productions, turned out by workshops in northern France and Flanders and exported all over Europe.18 Printed Books of Hours were a natural development, and are found by 1475 in Italy and 1485 in France. Yet individually written and illuminated hours did not disappear; they continued to be produced into the early decades of the sixteenth century. The advantages of printing—economies of scale and low marginal costs—had less weight here. The manuscript-makers already benefited from a degree of mass production, and the cost of illumination could not be reduced without an obvious drop in quality.
When they set out to form a library, wealthy fifteenth-century patrons still turned to scribes and illuminators, commissioning classical and humanistic texts directly or through intermediaries. These bespoke codices are generally on parchment, with heavy illumination and decoration, and bound elaborately. Earlier examples are written in Humanistic Rotunda, the script proper to their largely classical content, though after 1480 Humanistic cursive is increasingly common. (As with many deluxe books today, the excellence of the presentation often goes hand in hand with a striking indifference to the accuracy of the text.)
Three such libraries are worth mention here. Starting around 1465, in Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro (1422–82) built up a major collection (most of which is now in the Vatican), with the aid of his advisor Ottaviano Ubaldini della Casa. Many of the books were deluxe copies commissioned from the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci.19 Often quoted is Vespasiano da Bisticci’s comment: “In that library the books are all beautiful to the highest degree, all written with the pen, and there was not a single printed book—it would have felt embarrassed [i.e., to be numbered among such objects].”20 This is sometimes taken to imply deliberate exclusion of print.21 In reality Federigo did own at least a handful of incunabula, and his heirs certainly had no reservations about acquiring them.22
A great mythology has grown up around the library of the Hungarian monarch Matthias Corvinus (reigned 1458–90).23 Employing Italian scribes and illuminators, Matthias established on the frontiers of Christendom the second-largest library then extant. His successors were less intellectually inclined: individual volumes were sold or wandered off, and what remained of the library was plundered by the Turks in 1526. Some 200 extant volumes have been identified, a fraction of the original total.
Yet a third example is the library of Raphael de Marcatellis (1437–1508), illegitimate son of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, who became abbot of St. Bavon in Ghent (while managing to spend most of his time in Bruges).24 Over 50 manuscripts survive from his personal library: they are large, specially commissioned volumes, many copied from printed books (which the library resolutely excluded). Their contents reflect humanist interests, but their main purpose was clearly to serve as “exponents of their owner’s sense of grandeur.”25
In the early decades of the sixteenth century there was still work for professional scribes. They were needed to produce personal or presentation copies, of the sort written in England by Peter Meghen (d. 1540) for John Colet, or in Italy by Ludovico Arrighi (1475–1527) for Machiavelli and others.26 The tradition of the deluxe illuminated codex generated late masterpieces like the Psalter of Paul III (1542) or the Farnese Hours (1546).27 Italian chanceries, and especially the papal curia, needed scribes to generate briefs and bulls. In the process, Humanistic cursive acquired a new life as a documentary script, cancellaresca.28 The need for training in the script was filled by a succession of writing manuals, notably Arrighi’s Operina (1522).29 Yet such works also indicate a weakening of traditional training; handwriting is now an artificial skill to be acquired from a (printed) book, rather than taught in a scriptorium or mastered in the course of an apprenticeship. And, of course, it was print, and the skill of engravers, that allowed the writing masters to reach a broad audience rapidly.
For secular patrons like Corvinus or de Marcatellis, the manuscript had value as an object, to be desired and possessed like a painting or piece of silver. For others, the manuscript’s meaning lay at least as much in the process that generated it as in the product itself. This is the case with monastic copying, which remained important in some areas through the end of the fifteenth century and even into the sixteenth. Its persistence may owe something to a continuing need (not yet met by printers) for specialized service books. But it also represented an ideological commitment to writing as a part of monastic discipline. There is evidence of continuity in training and scribal practice at various houses of the Melk Congregation, including Melk itself, Kremsmünster, and Augsburg.30 Manuscript production also continued in the northern monastic houses of the Windesheim and Bursfeld reforms.
A key document for this movement is the 1492 treatise De laude scriptorum of Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), abbot of Sponheim, whose intellectual interests ranged from ecclesiastical bibliography to cryptography and the occult.31 Trithemius defends the practice of hand-copying on pragmatic grounds: printed books are subject to problems of availability and cost; not everything has yet been printed. He draws qualitative distinctions: printers are often careless, and books written on parchment are more durable than printed books on paper. But he also emphasizes the spiritual benefits to be gained from copying Scripture and devotional works. It is easy and tempting to take the work as a kind of rearguard action. But other facts complicate this picture. Trithemius was no hidebound conservative. He speaks admiringly of the new technology in other contexts and acquired printed books for the Sponheim library. He had many of his own works printed—among them, in 1494, the De laude scriptorum. For Trithemius copying retained its value as instrument of monastic discipline, even in the age of print. The same symbiosis is found elsewhere. SS. Ulrich and Afra at Augsburg, for example, housed both a thriving scriptorium and an active printing operation.
A notable characteristic of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century scribes is their versatility. Professional scribes were prepared to write a variety of hands, depending on their patrons’ expectations and the type of work being copied. A good example is the fifteenth-century Dutch scribe Theodericus Werken, active in Cologne, Italy, and England, whose known manuscripts are so diverse in style that they might be mistaken for the work of several different men.32 We also see a nascent historical sense and an interest in reviving earlier scripts. Leonhard Wagner (1454–1522) a monk of SS. Ulrich and Afra, Augsburg, was responsible (by his own account) for at least 50 manuscripts. Of these, one of the most interesting is the Proba centum scripturarum una manu exaratarum, an album of palaeographical samples, intended for presentation to the Emperor Maximilian I.33 It includes attempts at the reproduction of older hands dating back to the twelfth century. Such experiments had a practical as well as an antiquarian side. A scribe might be called on to supply material missing from an older, fragmentary manuscript; such “supply leaves” sometimes employ an archaizing script. In a monastic context there might be an attempt to preserve or revive a “house style”; such imitation of twelfth- and thirteenth-century script is found in English monasteries such as Christ Church, Canterbury, in the years immediately preceding the Dissolution.34 Scribes were even prepared to imitate the productions of the press. An early printed edition of Jean Gerson’s opuscula in the Huntington Library includes an additional treatise copied by hand; the scribe has made an effort to reproduce the style and layout of the printed text.35
At the other extreme from the work of professional scribes are what we might call “subprint” manuscripts—those copied by occasional or nonprofessional scribes and containing texts whose nature or content made printing unnecessary, economically unfeasible, or problematic in other ways. This does not necessarily imply a lack of interest or readership. Works of an ephemeral or topical nature—political satires, for instance—might be widely read without ever achieving print publication; they circulated virally, like the ubiquitous email forwards of the early 2000s. Works might be individually too short or collectively too miscellaneous to fill a printed volume: hence the manuscript anthologies of lyric poems (especially in the vernacular) or epigraphic texts that persist well into the early modern period.36
Other texts presupposed a readership too small to make a print run worthwhile: copies of letters, for instance, or local and family histories. Some types of material were meant primarily for the writer’s own use: a teacher’s lectures, a student’s notes, a gentleman’s commonplace book. Early modern scholars transcribed and collated the manuscripts of classical authors. Antiquarians might copy documentary texts, such as English monastic charters, many of which circulated in manuscript well into the seventeenth century.37 Transcripts of this kind shed light on early modern scholarship; they can also be valuable witnesses to manuscripts now lost or subsequently damaged.38 To this group we can add texts of a less rarefied sort: calendars, recipes, medical notes, and the like, accumulated or compiled for daily use.
Yet another subcategory is constituted by prohibited or dangerous texts: works on the Index (in Catholic areas), or Catholic service books (in post-Reformation England). Early modern regimes had little success in suppressing printers (who could simply move across the nearest political or religious border), but somewhat more in confiscating printed copies or stopping them at the frontier. When printed texts were unavailable, such works circulated in manuscript, which also had the advantage of being less identifiable to a cursory inspection.
Sometimes several of these factors were at work. In the early years of the sixteenth century there had been a substantial informal trade in the natal charts of well-known individuals, which were collected and exchanged by astrologers.39 Such geniturae were a natural candidate for manuscript circulation: they were relatively short, were generated on an ongoing basis, and often existed in multiple versions. They involved figures and diagrams that were time-consuming to engrave and typeset. They were of intense interest to a specialist community, but required considerable knowledge to interpret. Their formal publication could potentially cause offense to living subjects. It is scarcely surprising, then, that no printed collection appeared before the publication of Girolamo Cardano’s Libelli in 1538.
Physically, such sub-print manuscripts are at the other extreme from the opulent codices of a Corvinus or Montefeltro. They typically employ more casual scripts: bastarda, secretary, or various kinds of cursive. Apart from basic rubrication they are usually undecorated, and written on paper, not parchment. Formats are generally smaller; for some of these books, portability was a major consideration. Their late date and lack of art-historical appeal have left most little studied, except as vehicles for the texts they contain. As a group they would repay more detailed investigation.
Digital Scriptorium Illustrations
Plate 34.1 New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, NYPL Spencer 027, fol. 1 “Corvinus Livy.” http://images.nypl.org/?id=427402&t=w.
Plate 34.2 Huntington Library, HM 64, ff. 154v–155. Astrological and Medical Compilation, s. XVex. Recipes and charms; ownership note of John Wallton. http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf?Description=&CallNumber=HM+64.