The Reformation of the Book: 1450-1650

            Antwerp and Oxford will be the twin poles of our study of hand-press book production, the History of the Book, and the re-forming of early modern print culture. We shall begin with a four-night visit to Antwerp in order to conduct hands-on investigation of the technology of hand-press book production and landmark books published at Europe’s third largest printing center. Workshops and a guided tour of the Plantin-Moretus Museum would provide access to unrivaled resources for the study of early printing. The most famous publishing house of its time, Christoph Plantin’s enterprise earned an international reputation as a disseminator of editions of classical texts and scholarship grounded on the humanistic concern with the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. As the world’s only surviving early modern printing and publishing house, the Plantin-Moretus Museum is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Participants would have an opportunity to conduct research in its rich archives.
            Exemplifying the entire process of printing and publication, the Plantin-Moretus Museum houses the world’s only collection of working models of antique hand presses in use circa 1550 to 1700. The survival of a large number of presses exemplifies the vast scale of Continental printing and publishing versus that of England’s small and insular book trade. Other features of this sixteenth- and seventeenth-century edifice include the original type foundry, proofreading room, and book shop; the largest surviving collection of early modern type founts; and archives that include correspondence and accounts related to early book production and examples of every book produced by Plantin and his successors. In addition to attending a private demonstration of 1) manual fabrication and setting of type and 2) operation of a hand press, we would collaborate with our host in Antwerp, Guido Latré, in conducting guided tours of the museum and Antwerp’s old town center. He is Professor of Literary Studies, Faculty of Arts, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Supplementing these activities, a rare-book workshop would allow for hands-on study of English, French, Dutch, Flemish, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Bibles and secular books printed in Antwerp before and during the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, in addition to a variety of non-religious printed ephemera. Books on display would include a unique dialogue that Christoph Plantin wrote concerning printing practices. In addition, Dr. Gergely Juhász will conduct a seminar on the exile in Antwerp of William Tyndale, translator of the first printed New Testament in the English language. Our hotel is close to the site where this translation and other prohibited books were printed prior to being smuggled into England.
            En route from Antwerp to Oxford, we shall stop in London for three days. In addition to providing free time for research at the British Library and/or visits to other sites in London, we shall conduct a workshop focused on treasures of the British Library that may include printed Bibles in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek; New Testament translations by Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale (Anne Boleyn’s copy); and more. In all likelihood, curators will display a copy of the Gutenberg Bible printed on parchment and illustrated by hand. Also included may be Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), which is an influential treatise on witchcraft published in 1487. Secular books on display may include Vesalius’s On the Structure of the Human Body and Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.
            Moving from London to Oxford, we would reside at St. Edmund Hall for the remaining four weeks of our program. It dates back to the thirteenth century. Oxford’s chief attraction is the Bodleian Library. It would offer participants access to one of the world’s strongest collections for the study of early print culture, which they may study in the fifteenth-century library donated by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. (It provides the setting for the library of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter movies.) We plan to begin with a behind-the-scenes tour conducted by Bodley’s Librarian Emeritus and a walking tour of Oxford with visits to the old library of Merton College, which dates back to the fourteenth century, and the original library of Magdalen College.
            Except during our final week, we plan to conduct two three-hour-long seminar sessions plus one rare-book workshop each week. Seminar participants may have an opportunity to select books for the workshops. Our secondary readings would address a broad range of practical issues and theoretical concerns related to Book History. Scheduling only one meeting during the final week plus a roundtable discussion of our findings would permit participants to devote more time to individual research projects that have undergone gestation during previous weeks.
            We would devote our first week in Oxford to “Studies in the History of the Book.” The opening seminar meeting would address pros and cons of seminal theories that propound the existence of a “communications circuit”; the influential – and controversial – claim that printing constitutes an agent of “revolutionary” transformation; conceptualization about the “book as an expressive form” and the “sociology of texts”; and more. In the ensuing session on “Re-forming Reading: Pre-Reformation, Reformation, Counter Reformation,” we would begin by reaching back to the early Christian era. After considering the emergence of silent reading as opposed to reading aloud, we would assess different modes of late medieval and early modern literacy; the argument that a typographical hierarchy corresponded to different levels of literacy; and differing uses of handwritten manuscript marginalia.
            A variety of manuscript and printed books on display at a workshop at the Bodleian Library would build upon these discussions. Several important issues are encapsulated, for example, in a meditative manuscript which was inscribed by a brother at Syon Abbey, a well-endowed monastery near London that housed convents for both monks and nuns. He designed it for binding together with three printed indulgences (c. 1499) that contain religious woodcuts. Those who prayed devoutly before these images were guaranteed remission from suffering in purgatory. One indulgence is of particular interest, because its text was stricken out by a Protestant iconoclast motivated by Luther’s attack on indulgences and the traditional penitential system. We also plan to examine a counterblast against Luther attributed to Henry VIII, which is bound together with a number of other works related to the Henrician Reformation.
            The final three weeks of our program would engage in broad study of “Religious Books: Pre-Reformation, Protestant Reformation, and Catholic Reformation.” Despite this focus, we would not exclude secular books from consideration. Our opening meeting concerning “Illustration of Books: From Manuscript to Print” would consider evidence that suggests that early book illustration was contingent upon a hierarchy of speech acts addressed to different kinds of readers. Art historians share the interest of students of the History of the Book in the use of illumination (i.e., illustration by hand) to make Gutenberg Bibles look like expensive manuscripts rather than relatively inexpensive printed books. Further consideration of books produced at Syon Abbey would address how the insertion of woodcut illustrations into manuscripts demonstrates continuity between manuscript and print culture.
            A meeting devoted to “Printing and the Reformation: English versus Continental Practices” would then consider differences related to the quantity and quality of the production and illustration of books by England’s tiny book trade, as opposed to the massive output of printing and publishing houses on the continent of Europe. The third week would close with a workshop entitled “Re-formatting the Book: Why Size Matters.” Taking place at the Printing Museum of Oxford University Press, which preserves antique printing presses and other equipment related to early printing (e.g., seventeenth-century blocks used in the printing of woodcuts), this event would bring our investigation of hand-press printing technology to a conclusion. Printing equipment and rare books on display at this session would provide insight into the impact upon reading practices of the size of books ranging from large folios that required massive lecterns to diminutive ephemera as small as playing cards or matchbooks.
            Study of “Re-forming Biblical Text, Translation, and Reading” would begin our fourth week with examination of humanistic theories about textual transmission and translation that questioned the authority the Vulgate Bible, a fourth-century Latin translation from Hebrew and Greek that attained sacrosanct status during the ensuing millennium. We would consider the role played by figures such as Erasmus and Luther in the dissemination of Bible translations that inspired different styles of reading and interpretation in continental Europe and England. In pondering the view that the early Christian transition from scroll to codex (a manuscript constructed in the manner of a modern book) promoted a shift from continuous to discontinuous reading, we would address a hypothesis with significant implications for later practices of Bible reading.
            In the following meeting, we would address the publication history of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563-1684) as a paradigm for Book History in early modern England. It was the longest, most complicated, most costly, and best illustrated English book printed during the Shakespearean age. Because the compiler published earlier versions of this martyrological history during exile on the continent, we shall consider the Latin text produced in 1559 by the Swiss master-printers, Johannes Oporinus and Nicolaus Brylinger, in addition to vernacular versions printed after Foxe returned to England. (Oporinus is best remembered for producing Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica.) This comparison would provide valuable insight into the very different printing practices employed in the production of books in learned languages on the Continent as opposed to their vernacular equivalents in England. Woodcuts that portray the practice of burning alleged heretics alive represent an important component of what many contemporary readers considered to be a “holy” book second in importance to the Bible. Our 2007 seminar showed once again how these propagandistic pictures have had a powerful and often disturbing impact through the present day.
            Focused on “Re-forming Reading: Modes of Devotional Reading, Writing, and Printing,” our final workshop would take place at the seventeenth-century library at St. John’s College. Librarians will display rare books selected to fit our particular themes. They may include a copy of the collected English works of Thomas More (1557), which bears the autograph of its donor, William Roper, who was the author’s son-in-law and first biographer. Manuscripts may include Aristotle’s Organon and the Book of Psalms in Hebrew. Other items might be a printed Ethiopian Coptic psalter, an early English grammar (this item is exceedingly rare because students read them to pieces), books from the collection of a Roman Catholic aristocrat who refused to conform to the official English worship service, and the first Bible translated into a Native American dialect (Boston, 1663). Building upon our discussion of selections from the earliest biographies of More and Tyndale, we would give thought to their respective careers as the chief defenders of religious orthodoxy, on the one hand, and Protestant reform, on the other, during the reign of Henry VIII. Moreover, we would compare the very different publishing styles, typography, and book layout employed by printers who produced their books in London and Antwerp respectively.
            In devoting one of two meetings during our final week to “Printing and Reading During the Catholic Reformation,” we plan to consider the response of Catholic exiles to English Protestant books. We would begin by considering the illustration of Latin martyrologies designed to inspire meditative devotion on the part of candidates for priesthood at English seminaries on the continent as well as beleaguered Catholic laity who remained in England. Investigation of Jesuit iconography would enable us to place the fine engravings in these books in conversation with manuscript and woodcut illustrations considered two weeks earlier. Moreover, we would interrogate the widespread assumption that the Protestant Reformation produced a distinctive and dominant print culture by considering evidence concerning the vibrancy of Catholic print culture. In concluding with a roundtable discussion, we would focus not only on participants’ individual and collective findings, but also on how they may apply results from this seminar in teaching, scholarship, publication of books and articles, and so forth.
            This seminar will typically meet in three three-hour-long sessions. The director and co-director will initiate and facilitate collegial exploration of shared concerns by opening meetings with introductory remarks designed to outline issues that might profit from discussion, but we expect the group to collaborate in defining and pursuing our agenda. From the second week, we shall invite participants to lead discussion of group readings and to volunteer to present individual research findings. Although we shall welcome individuals with a reading knowledge of Latin or European vernacular languages, such knowledge is not essential. All of our group readings will be in the English language. Seminar discussions and book exhibitions will provide a backdrop to the participants’ individual research programs, which might take the form of either writing a draft of a paper or compiling an annotated bibliography related to their program of individual study. They will be free to emphasize enhancement of teaching and/or work-in-progress.
            In particular, we plan to recommend that participants consider undertaking a “biography” of a book central to their own teaching and/or scholarship. A good model for this “biography” will be 1) analysis and description of their chosen copy and its peculiarities (i.e., patterns of use, missing pages, corrections, handwritten marginal notes, binding together with other books, and so forth); 2) relation of this book to a theoretically perfect copy of this book, with the caveat that no two copies of a hand-printed book are identical; and 3) the wider importance of their book with reference to reading practices, intellectual life, social movements, religious beliefs, and more. They will have very broad latitude in selecting early printed books written in English, other vernacular languages, or Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. Some possibilities include Latin or English versions of St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Milton’s Paradise Lost, editions of the Bible, or books written by Erasmus, Luther, or their contemporaries.
            The director and co-director plan to conduct private conferences with each member during our week in Antwerp. During the weeks spent at Oxford, they will invite participants to consult with them concerning their individual projects and other matters. Receptions, dinners, and other social engagements will supplement these activities. We shall be happy to offer guidance to members of the group who wish to take advantage of the rich social and cultural resources of Antwerp, London, Oxford, and nearby locations.