Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

118. Martin Lowry, ‘The Manutius publicity campaign’, in David S. Zeidberg and F. G. Superbi (editors), Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998, pages 31ff.

119. McGrath, Op. cit., page 15, for early edition sizes.

120. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 162.

121. The first move was when publishers agreed not to print a second edition of a book without the author’s permission, which was only granted on payment of a further sum. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 164.

122. Ibid., page 217.

123. McGrath, Op. cit., page 18, says the price of a Gutenberg Bible was equivalent to that of a large town house in a German city in 1520.

From the start, books were were sold at book fairs all over Europe. Lyons was one, partly because it had many trade fairs and merchants were familiar with the process. It was also a major crossroads, with important bridges over the Rhône and Saône. In addition, to preserve the fair, the king gave the merchants in Lyons certain privileges – for example, no merchant was obliged to open his account books for inspection. Some forty-nine booksellers and printers were established in the city, mainly along the rue Mercière, though many of them were foreign. This meant that books in many languages were bought and sold at the Lyons book fair and the city became an important centre for the spread of ideas. (Law books were especially popular.) The main rival was at Frankfurt (not far from Mainz). There too there were many trade fairs – wine, spices, horses, hops, metals. Booksellers arrived at the turn of the sixteenth century, together with publishers from Venice, Paris, Antwerp and Geneva. During the fair they were grouped in the Büchergasse, ‘Book Street’, between the river Main and St Leonard’s church. New publications were advertised at Frankfurt, where the publisher’s catalogue seems to have started, and it also became known as a market in printing equipment. Thus Frankfurt slowly became a centre for everyone engaged in the book trade – as it still is for two weeks every year in October. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin went through these Frankfurt book catalogues in their study on the impact of the book and they found that, between 1564 and 1600, more than 20,000 different titles were on offer, published by 117 firms in sixty-one towns. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) had a catastrophic effect on book production and on the Frankfurt fair. Instead, political conditions favoured the Leipzig book fair and it would be some time before Frankfurt regained its preeminence. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 231.

124. Ibid., page 244.

125. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods, London: Macmillan, 1996, pages 172–173.

126. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 246.

127. Ibid., page 248.

128. See for example, Ralph Hexter, ‘Aldus, Greek, and the shape of the “classical corpus”’, in Zeidberg and Superbi (editors), Op. cit., page 143ff.

129. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 273. See McGrath, Op. cit., pages 24ff and 253ff, for the rise of vernacular languages caused by printing.

130. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 319.

131. Ibid., page 324. See McGrath, Op. cit., page 258, for Robert Cawdry’s The Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (1604), which listed 2,500 unusual or borrowed words.

132. Hexter says Aldus promoted Greek as well as Latin. Hexter, Op. cit., page 158.

CHAPTER 18: THE ARRIVAL OF THE SECULAR: CAPITALISM, HUMANISM, INDIVIDUALISM

1. Jardine, Worldly Goods, Op. cit., pages 13–15.

2. Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, volume 2, New York: Dove, 1965, page 549.

3. Charles Homer Haskins, The Twelfth Century Renaissance, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927, though William Chester Jordan, in Europe in the High Middle Ages, Op. cit., page 120, wonders whether the twelfth century just saw ‘an exceptional series of towering figures’.

4. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960, pages 3, 25 and 162.

5. Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague, New York: Harper Collins, 2001, page 203.

6. Ibid., pages 204–205. For Florence and the plague, see Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983, pages 40ff.

7. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300–1600, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, page 410.