Read in conjunction with Elizabeth Eisenstein's analysis of the so-called printing revolution, Sheila Edmunds' essay "From Schoeffer to Verard: Concerning the Scribes Who Became Printers" provides us with a more lucid understanding of the transition from scribal manuscripts to printed books. Almost by necessity, Eisenstein has to take a very broad glance over many issues in order to analyze, not merely state, the effects printing has had on Western culture; accordingly, as she readily admits, she cannot thoroughly cover every aspect of the Printing Age in her attempt to understand the exigent and over- arching ramifications of this age. Thus, Sheila Edmunds' essay works nicely as a compliment to Eisenstein's text because it focuses on a very particular issue concerning the so-called age of incunabula: scribes who became printers. Instead of concentrating solely on concepts, abstractions, and those ubiquitous paradoxes, Edmunds' text makes us remember the human variable involved in the pervasive technological and cultural changes which compromised the printing revolution; we may forget when Eisenstein refers to "scribal culture" or "the age of incunabula" that she no doubt intends the workings of humans who, whether or not records of their endeavors remain, did what they did for a myriad of reasons and contributed something to fill out Eisenstein's conceptual paradigms; rather than needing broad paradigms such as "scribal culture" the concentrated focus of Edmunds' essay allows her to turn to the scribes-turned-printers with surviving records in order to emphasize that these were actual humans who had to either remain aloof to, adapt to, or obstinately refuse, the radical innovation of the printing press.
Instead of stating something like, "[b]y placing more emphasis on the shift from script to print, many diverse trends may be accommodated without resort to an indiscriminate melange and in a way that avoids prolongation of intellectual feuds" (Eisenstein, 257), Edmunds provides brief case studies of eight people who actually made the "shift from script to print." This shift could not possibly have been an easy one for it entailed a less than secure change in occupational procedure [we should try to understand that this new-fangled printing was probably quite daunting at first]. However, before delving into the case studies, Edmunds begins her text by reminding the readers that not all scribes were clerics or monks preserving texts out of a zealous sense of religious duty; laymen also copied manuscripts and they did so for various reasons (Edmunds, 26). Furthermore she gives us some awareness of the pragmatics of the personal life of a scribe in her brief account of Burkhard Zink (23-24). Edmunds gives this ostensibly impertinent information in order to establish a background and to prime us for her actual argument which is two-fold: 1) "[t]he true nature of each scribe's occupation would determine whether or not he was attracted to printing" (24); and most importantly, 2) she intends to repudiate any vague notions we may have concerning the "axiomatic" assumption that 'countless scribes' made an easy and obvious transition to printing (which we may have either assumed or never even gave much thought to one way or the other when reading Eisenstein's text).
Unfortunately, Edmunds finds herself in the same quagmire as Eisenstein because reliable records and viable information are often unavailable in order to resolutely establish concrete evidence; thus, perhaps there were more scribes who became printers during the age of incunabula but Edmunds' criteria relies upon extant manuscripts attributable to the scribe-turned-printer. Out of a potential pool of seventeen, only eight scribes starting from Peter Schoeffer and ending with Antoine Verard (hence the title) meet her criteria. As well as relying on the colophon of extant manuscripts as evidence, she looked at tax collection records in order to establish who were called scribes and then later printers [in the instance of Hans Bamler he was entered as a "schreiber" in 1453 and only in 1477 was he considered a "trucker," or printer]. Her reliance on tax rolls may explain her attention to the pragmatic, economic aspect of scribe-printers. The concern with economics is one of the characteristics loosely shared among these select eight for as Edmunds mentions, "scribes as a group had a low economic position" (26); whereas the position of printer required plenty of capital. Nonetheless these eight did have some advantage as printers: some of them [Schoeffer, Mansion, Bamler, and Arnald] relied on their patrons from when they were scribes to fund their forays into printing; furthermore they knew where to find the manuscript sources and they had some idea of what the market desired (Edmunds, 39).
Now to be meta-critical: the juxtaposition of Edmunds' essay with Eisenstein's book provides us with a fairly good example of inter-textuality. Perhaps Eisenstein implicitly alludes to this concept of textual relationships when she speaks of dissemination and her chapter about the interaction between "the book of nature" and the printed book. Whatever the case may be, Edmunds' text compliments and in some manners supports Eisenstein's text; however, I don't think Edmunds' text could stand on its own for our purposes. We definitely needed the contextualization and conceptualization of Eisenstein's _The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe_ in order to place Edmunds' analysis in perspective. That being stated, "From Schoeffer to Verard" does have its merit. This essay attempts to prove that scribes deciding to become printers was not the norm. Although the numbers may not be completely reliable, Edmunds figures that scribes-turned-printers [including the nine who didn't have extant manuscripts along with the eight who are justifiably considered to be one-time professional scribes] compromised roughly 4 to 6 percent of the total number of printers working in the age of incunabula (40). This extrapolation by Edmunds seems to support Eisenstein's assertion that the onset of print was a revolution and not an evolution. There was no seamless transition from scribe to printer; the two occupations were quite disparate. In one of her paradoxes, Eisenstein states how Schoeffer's shift from scribe to printer seems fluid in end product but in terms of the production, the means were radically different (Eisenstein, 21). Indeed, Edmunds mentions that Schoeffer felt his printing work at first to be a facsimile of manuscript, or 'the art of writing artificially' (Edmunds, 28-29). Edmunds describes how the eight scribes-turned-printers did incorporate many of the outward aspects of manuscript in their printing [such as using red-lettering and type very similar to their calligraphic work, etc]; but soon even the outward manifestations began reflecting the revolutionary change intrinsic in the methods of printing.
The issues of inter-textuality and the role of the reader, which have been mostly implied so far, will perhaps be more pertinent now as the class moves on towards aspects of hyper-textuality. Although I can't say there is a direct analogy between those eight scribes becoming printers and our situation with hyper-text today, there is some correlation. As I alluded to above, one has to be a fairly intrepid individual to get over the initial period of apprehension accompanying new technology; just as Edmunds ends her essay by reminding us about "the doubts and agonizing experienced by these middle-aged scribes as they familiarized themselves with the operations of that new invention, the press" (40) some people are hesitant and uncertain about what to do with the potentialities of hyper-text [take for instance the new tele-communications bill which recently passed both the House and Senate and which the Clinton administration is more than likely to accept - part of the bill calls for some regulation of material provided through the internet]. Furthermore, somewhat similar to the change in occupational procedure experienced by the scribe-turned-printer, I'm sure the use of hyper-text has affected the manner in which some people perform their jobs. Once again this is not completely analogous to Edmunds' essay but four or five years ago I wrote all of my papers exclusively in script and then just typed them up so they were more legible for the instructor; but then WordPerfect (5.0 at the time) changed the process of how I wrote my papers and, in a sense, how I thought; now I compose my papers exclusively on word processing programs because I have become accustomed to transposing my thoughts onto the screen and then arranging them or amending them or deleting them or whatever with the program commands. Well, anyway [I can't help but write more informally through the e-mail medium - even when the assignment is a serious paper like this] Edmunds' text does provide us with a more isolated and esoteric focus than Eisenstein but still informs us and allows us to find connections [or desperately stretch for some, as the case may be] to the exigencies at hand: the constant flux of writing technology.
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