Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 19 · dbnl

boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 19

bron

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 19. Uitgeverij Vantilt, Nijmegen / Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging, Leiden 2012

Zie voor verantwoording: https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_jaa008201201_01/colofon.php

Let op: werken die korter dan 140 jaar geleden verschenen zijn, kunnen auteursrechtelijk beschermd zijn.

i.s.m.

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[Nummer 19]

Redactioneel

Eind september 2011 werd aan de Universiteit Antwerpen een internationaal congres gehouden met als titelBook design from the Middle Ages to the future: traditions and evolutions. Het was de bedoeling om de vormgeving en lay-out van zowel handgeschreven als gedrukte boeken over een lange termijn te behandelen en om na te gaan welke vormelijke kenmerken in de loop der tijd werden doorgegeven of verdwenen, welke veranderingen er plaatsgrepen en hoe het boek van morgen eruit zou kunnen zien. In de oproep voor bijdragen werd wetenschappers en vormgevers gevraagd om dit onderwerp vanuit een internationaal perspectief te benaderen en om waar mogelijk ook het verband tussen vorm en inhoud te onderzoeken.

De aankondiging van het thema van het congres werd door de internationale onderzoeksgemeenschap met gretigheid beantwoord. Uit alle hoeken van de wereld stroomden voorstellen voor bijdragen toe, veel meer dan op twee dagen tijd konden worden gepresenteerd. Uiteindelijk stelde het academisch comité een programma samen van zeven sessies van telkens drie of vier lezingen, 22 in totaal, waarin de vormgeving van boeken vanuit diverse invalshoeken werd bekeken. Wat volgde was een druk bijgewoonde, intense uitwisseling van ideeën, van nieuw en lopend onderzoek, van vragen en antwoorden - en van nog meer vragen.

Dertien lezingen werden tot artikelen uitgewerkt en vormen de inhoud van dit negentiendeJaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis. Zoals ze hier zijn gebundeld, geven ze een goed beeld van de breedte en de diepte van de onderwerpen die op het congres werden aangesneden. In de tijd bestrijken de bijdragen elfde-eeuwse handschriften tot e-books. Behalve druktechnische aspecten die invloed hebben op vormgeving van boeken wordt ook aandacht besteed aan het gebruik van lettertypen en de indeling en geleding van teksten, waarbij ook puur fysieke aspecten van het boek - het papier, de katernen, de boekband, het omslag - aan de orde komen.

In zijn keynotespeech benutte David McKitterick de gelegenheid om de reeks van enigszins bekende en misschien verwachte vragen over vormgeving van boeken nog uit te breiden met de even eenvoudige als fundamentele bedenking: ‘In welke mate zijn gebruikers zich bewust van veranderingen, en hoe kunnen we dat op basis van ver-

schillende historische bronnen aantonen?’ Terugblikkend - en dat is precies wat de historicus doet - zien we het boek, de gedrukte tekst, inderdaad spectaculair veranderen over een periode van ruim vijf eeuwen. De hoofdtekst wordt metparatext omkleed, het boek krijgt een volwaardige titelpagina (soms meer dan één),

inhoudsopgaven, indexen en ga zo maar door. Binnenin wordt het ferme, perfect rechthoekige tekstblok visueel opengebroken, teksten worden opgedeeld in steeds kleinere kavels. Bekend is de invoering van versnummeringen in bijbels rond het midden van de zestiende eeuw, een techniek die niet lang daarna ook in Thomas à Kempis'De imitatione Christi zal worden toegepast - de tekst waarvan de vormgeving in dit artikel centraal staat. Natuurlijk is een dergelijke ingreep niet zonder gevolgen voor de manier waarop teksten worden gelezen. Elke geleding legt een subtiel accent en oefent er invloed op uit.

Werden deze veranderingen opgemerkt? Uiteraard. In de eerste plaats door de typograaf - tijdens het ancien régime doorgaans een en dezelfde persoon als de drukker en in veel gevallen een van de eerste lezers van een te drukken tekst, oud of nieuw. Voor hem vereiste elke wijziging ten opzichte van de vorige uitgave een adequate oplossing, dat wil zeggen, een oplossing die meestal zo nauw mogelijk aansloot bij de heersende traditie en de koper, de volgende persoon in de keten van lezers, zo weinig mogelijk verstoorde. Meestal slaagden drukkers daar ook in, getuige het schaarse aantal echo's met commentaren van auteurs, drukkers en lezers over de minuscule maar niettemin meetbare veranderingen. Zelden was een typografische vernieuwing zo gedurfd dat ze geschreven reacties uitlokte, maar of ze daarom onopgemerkt bleef?

In verschillende bijdragen in deze bundel wordt direct of indirect naar tradities verwezen, de weerbarstigheid waarmee ze in stand worden gehouden en de traagheid waarmee vernieuwingen uiteindelijk toch ingang kunnen vinden. Vaak gaat de aandacht uit naar discrete details, die zowel voor vormgevers als voor lezers van groot belang kunnen zijn. Voorts zijn vormgeving en typografie ook uitingen van maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen, hoe moeilijk het ook kan zijn die precies te benoemen.

In een periode waarin grondstoffen en kennis nog schaars en duur waren, werd daarmee bijzonder zorgvuldig omgegaan bij het maken van boeken. Voor elk type boek werd een - vaak impliciet voorgeschreven - werkwijze gevolgd. Net daarom roepen perkamenten manuscripten uit de elfde en twaalfde eeuw met een opvallend smal formaat vragen op bij Erik Kwakkel. Op de zoektocht naar het hoe en waarom van de lange en smalle ‘holsterboeken’ komen we meer te weten over de

gebruikelijke praktijk en mogelijke redenen waarom men daar in specifieke contexten van afweek.

Zowel Claire Bolton als Christoph Reske behandelt formele aspecten van de typografie die, hoewel ze in elke gedrukte tekst aanwezig zijn, nauwelijks worden opgemerkt. In haar bijdrage maakt Bolton duidelijk wat het belang van de ‘em’-spatie (een vierkant stukje wit ter breedte van de hoofdletter M) is geweest voor de ordening van tekst en afbeeldingen in incunabelen. Uiteraard is het wit niet bedoeld om te worden opgemerkt, maar boekhistorici die weten hoe de em de lay-out van een tekstpagina kan beïnvloeden, krijgen een beter inzicht in de beperkingen en de mogelijkheden waarmee de typograaf werd geconfronteerd.

Christoph Reske schetst een indringend beeld van de manier waarop de technische

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instrumenten en procedés waarmee letters op papier worden gezet invloed uitoefenen op het letterbeeld - of dat nu met de pen tot stand werd gebracht, dan wel met een van de vele druktechnieken die sinds Gutenberg werden ontwikkeld. Het zetten met lood, de offset, de rakeldiepdruk, het fotomechanisch zetten en zelfs het afbeelden van tekst op de allernieuwste elektronische leesapparaten - elk van deze technieken heeft beperkingen, die voor het ongeoefende oog misschien niet altijd onmiddellijk zichtbaar zijn, maar steeds een uitwerking hebben op het uiteindelijke ontwerp.

Hoewel met vele procedés goede resultaten konden worden behaald, werd bijna nooit de perfectie bereikt; meestal moest de esthetiek het afleggen tegen

economische overwegingen.

Het zetten met de hand van loden letters, het specifieke hoogdrukprocedé dat rond het midden van de vijftiende eeuw werd uitgevonden en met rasse schreden de wereld veroverde, domineerde de boekdrukkunst tijdens het hele ancien régime en werd ook nog lang daarna beoefend. Al gauw werd het arsenaal van typografisch materiaal uitgebreid en werden behalve gotische lettertypen ook romeinen en cursieven gesneden. Goran Proot gaat in zijn bijdrage na hoe drukkers in de zuidelijke Lage Landen tussen 1541 en 1700 gebruikmaakten van gotisch en romein in drukwerk in de volkstaal. Hoewel beide lettersoorten in vele ateliers tegelijkertijd aanwezig waren en typografen de romein al vanaf de jaren dertig van de zestiende eeuw benutten voor de tekst van Latijnse werken, duurde het nog vele tientallen jaren voor deze letter ook gebruikelijk werd in Nederlandstalige publicaties. Analyses van het gebruik van deze lettertypen op typografische titelpagina's maken duidelijk dat het om zeer geleidelijke processen gaat die het beeld van een titelpagina op lange termijn volstrekt kunnen wijzigen. Daarnaast wordt aangetoond dat soortgelijke tendensen in de hoofdtekst zelf, afhankelijk van het tekstgenre, sneller dan wel trager verlopen, wat aangeeft dat deze patronen met bredere, culturele veranderingen samenhangen.

In hun bijdrage over Griekse schoolboeken uit de periode 1771-1830 onderzoeken Niki Sioki en Mary C. Dyson de manier waarop met nameABC-boeken werden vormgegeven. Ze gaan daarbij na hoe die evolueerde en in welke mate

vernieuwingen in de lay-out de uiteindelijke functie van deze boeken ondersteunden.

Ook in deze studie duikt de vraag op wie nu de grootste invloed uitoefende op de uiteindelijke vormgeving: de auteurs of de drukkers?

Drie artikelen gaan over de buitenkant van het boek. Nicholas Pickwoad zoekt de wortels op van de in de negentiende eeuw steeds wijder verspreide techniek waarbij gedrukte boekbanden apart van het boekblok werden geproduceerd en om het boekblok werden gezet. De later zo populaire pocket uit de twintigste eeuw blijkt in zeker opzicht al Duitse voorlopers te hebben uit de jaren twintig van de vijftiende eeuw.

Erik Geleijns brengt voor het eerst een ruimer overzicht van de opkomst van de bedrukte omslag en de bedrukte band in de Nederlandse boekproductie voor 1801.

Daarvoor put hij uit deShort-Title Catalogue, Netherlands (^STCN), nog steeds een voortreffelijk uitgangspunt voor voortgezet onderzoek naar - onder andere - materiële aspecten van het handgedrukte boek in Nederland in de vroegmoderne tijd. Geleijns begint zijn artikel met een algemene schets van dit fenomeen en voert vervolgens een analyse op van de uiterlijke kenmerken van bedrukte banden, waarbij hij niet nalaat op

trends en evoluties te wijzen. Met sprekende voorbeelden brengt hij dit zeldzame materiaal tot leven en krijgt de lezer direct voeling met de vindingrijkheid en creativiteit waarmee drukkers, uitgevers en boekverkopers met de buitenkant van boeken omgingen.

Met zijn uiteenzetting over de beroemdeLivre de poche wekt Bharain Mac an Bhreithiún een belangrijk hoofdstuk in de geschiedenis van het Franse boek vanaf de jaren vijftig tot leven. In het bijzonder belicht hij de rol vangraphic designers, ontwerpers van omslagen en grote uitgeverijen die met behulp van goedkoop geproduceerde pockets een brede markt wilden aanboren. Het is een tijd waarin de Franse intellectuelen uitgebreid over democratisering debatteren en geloven dat de toegang tot en het circuleren van boeken en literatuur daartoe kunnen bijdragen.

Zoals Mac an Bhreithiún duidelijk maakt, reikten de maatschappelijke ambities van uitgevers van pockets aanvankelijk erg ver, maar werden de verwachtingen niet ingelost.

Het artikel over de vormgeving van deOxford English Dictionary (OED) van Simon Rosenberg slaat een brug tussen de typografische vormgeving van naslagwerken in de vroegmoderne tijd en de hedendaagse praktijk. Hij gaat na hoe de drie opeenvolgende edities van deOEDtypografische middelen en technieken benutten om woordenboeken voor de gebruiker toegankelijker te maken. Het is daarbij opvallend hoe oude gewoonten verhinderen om daarbij voluit te gaan. Hoewel betere alternatieven beschikbaar zijn, blijven traditionele opvattingen hun stempel drukken op de manier waarop woordenboeken zelfs online worden gepresenteerd.

De mening dat het klassieke, papieren boek gedoemd is om te verdwijnen, wordt niet gedeeld door Geoffrey Brusatto. Deze onderzoeker, die daarnaast als vormgever met beide voeten in de praktijk staat, is ervan overtuigd dat het boek nog lange tijd een grote rol zal spelen - áls vormgevers de materiële kenmerken die eigen zijn aan het klassieke boek tenminste beter zullen exploiteren. Dat kan concreet worden verwezenlijkt door de unieke eigenschappen van de drager - het papier - en de manieren waarop dat tot katernen wordt gevouwen anders te benutten. Brusatto toont aan hoe op die manier verschillende leespaden ontwikkeld kunnen worden die de lezer uitnodigen tot interactie.

In zijn bijdrage over de vormgeving vanThe book of Mormon neemt Markus Polzer ons mee naar het Amerikaanse continent in het midden van de negentiende eeuw.

Hij schetst de ontstaansgeschiedenis van de mormoonse beweging en de zich voortdurend uitbreidende religieuze canon die zij tot stand bracht. Kenmerkend voor deze godsdienst zijn de profetieën waarmee de officiële leer van de kerk steeds weer wordt gevoed. Ondanks sommige opvallende inhoudelijke parallellen met het Oude Testament bijvoorbeeld, week de vormgeving vanThe book of Mormon aanvankelijk sterk af van die van de bijbel. Polzer legt op een bevattelijke wijze uit hoe canonieke teksten van de mormonen zich confirmeren aan de traditionele schema's en welke rol de Britse missie daarbij speelde. Opmerkelijk in dit verhaal is de stille kracht die uitgaat van ogenschijnlijk eenvoudige, alledaagse paratextuele elementen zoals een voetnotenapparaat.

Tot slot bespreekt Herbert Binneweg twee recent verschenen uitgaven die mooi aansluiten bij het thema van dit jaarboek:Letterfontein en Bodoni's Manuale tipografico.

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David McKitterick

How can we tell if people noticed changes in book design?

Early editions of the Imitatio Christi

A conference that addresses the history of changes in the presentation of texts, whether in manuscript or in print, and that ranges from the middle ages to the twentieth and even twenty-first century, presents itself with several questions. This is quite apart from the challenge of a very considerable chronological range, and the differing practices and assumptions that accompany changes in literacy, the use of the written and printed word, and the technical knowledge that itself makes change possible. At the risk of asking too much in too small a space, I propose here to examine a little of the linked - and further - challenge. How much do people actually notice change, and how can we determine this from different kinds of historical evidence?¹

Many changes are directly linked to the use of books. A primary example is the introduction of verse numbering in the printed Bible. This dates not from an obvious and ambitious folio edition, as one might at first guess, but from a 16mo edition of the Greek and Latin New Testament published by Robert Estienne at Geneva in 1551.²The practical value of the innovation was immediately recognised. Apart from being used in Estienne's complete Vulgate in 1555, it was taken up in Dutch-language Bibles in 1556 (by Gillis van der Erven, in Emden), and in English-language Bibles in the translation printed at Geneva by Conrad Badius in 1557 (in Geneva because the Catholic Queen Mary was on the English throne), and then, from 1560, in the best-selling Geneva Bible itself: this was the dominant translation and much printed in England until the second decade of the seventeenth century.³The introduction of verse numbering allowed a new precision of allusion, whether for marginal cross-references within the Bible or for anyone - preacher or private individual - who wished to refer to a particular passage.

The typographical presentation of the Bible, and the successive alterations and experiments, is a story of quite exceptional complexity. It is not one for which there is

1 For another approach to questions of how much users noticed or cared about the details of books, see C. Dondi, ‘Libri da compagnia printed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy’, in:

Quaerendo 41 (2011), 183-192 (at 186).

2 T.H. Darlow, H.F. Moule,Historical catalogue of the printed editions of holy scripture in the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society. London 1903, vol. 2, 587-589.

3 For Bible typography at this time, see M.H. Black, ‘The evolution of a book-form. The octavo Bible from manuscript to the Geneva version’, in:The library, 3rd ser. 16 (1961), 15-28.

space here. Nonetheless, it holds a general truth. If there is an overall pattern, one that we can perceive in many different kinds of literature, it may be summed up in the ways that texts are fragmented so as to create the means for us to locate portions of longer works in a rapid and visual way before we even begin to read the text itself.

This tendency can be seen, for example, in the ways that in early medieval

manuscripts words were separated, and sentences were indicated by an increasing range of punctuation marks.⁴The Bible is broken up into chapters, then into verses.

These processes of reduction have a direct effect on meaning, in that they direct our attention to reading in particular ways. We can observe a similar process happening on computer screens, in the snapshots of information or text that are caught on each screen, in the truncated paragraphs of information or opinion that are a feature of most websites (think only of the way that news is presented in this medium), and in the well-known reluctance of most users of web pages to read more than a very few pages before becoming bored, exhausted, or merely irritated. A similar typographical revolution that led to a reading revolution is to be seen in the presentation of textual commentary on theological or classical texts, in the change from the dense wrap-round commentary familiar in late medieval manuscripts and in early printed editions to that set out at the foot of the page - or, later (and for some people a retrograde step) at the end of the volume, quite separate from the text with which it was concerned. The history of the typography of the note, with its range of referential diacriticals employing numerals, letters, and assorted signs such as asterisks offers a particularly fruitful field for the study of how we read and how we arrange texts so as to distinguish their different authorial and supplemental

components.⁵

Obviously, new kinds of texts can require new lay-outs. In the twelfth century, the scribes and artists at Canterbury compiled a multi-text psalter, consisting of three parallel Latin texts (Romanum, Gallicanum, Hebraicum), accompanied by the English written very small over the Romanum text, and the French (incidentally among the earliest witnesses we possess of written Anglo-Norman) written in small characters over the Hebraicum text.⁶In print, the Complutensian polyglot Bible (1514-17) sets out the Hebrew, the Vulgate and the Septuagint, plus interlinear Latin translations and marginal notes of the Hebrew roots. Both in print and in manuscript, columnar organisation was supplemented by inter-lining in smaller characters. As different concepts and ideas were developed, whether in mensural music exemplified in the work of Petrucci in early sixteenth-century Venice,⁷or in the work of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century surveyors and cartographers, or in the mathematical tables for logarithms developed by John Napier in the early seventeenth century, or in the presentation of mathematical information by means of graphs, or in the invention of railway timetables in all their

4 M.B. Parkes,Pause and effect. An introduction to the history of punctuation in the west.

Aldershot 1992.

5 A. Grafton,The footnote. Cambridge, Ma., 1999.

6 Trinity College, CambridgeMSR.17.1. See M. Gibson e.a. (ed.),The Eadwine Psalter. Text, image and monastic culture in twelfth-century Canterbury. London 1992.

7 I. Fenlon, P. dalla Vecchia (ed.),Venezia 1501. Petrucci e la stampa musicale. Mariano del Friuli 2001; S. Boorman,Ottaviano Petrucci. Catalogue raisonné. Oxford 2006.

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wonderful complexity that links chronological, linear and two-dimensional topography to information about particular on-board facilities such as food,⁸or in the presentation of statistical information by means of pictograms developed in the isotypes created by Otto Neurath in the mid-twentieth century,⁹we see typography meeting - and further enabling - the needs of social and intellectual change.

These in their turn have absorbed the possibilities of the more ordinary page. We may note, for example, the changing ways that direct speech has been presented in manuscript and in print, the invention and use of double and single quotation marks, their employment either in the margins or to mark out passages within the lines, the use of other means to indicate speech such as dashes, the deployment of paragraphs, including paragraph indentation, to present conversation, the use of italics for emphasis in the ceaseless struggle of presenting the spoken word on the written or printed page or on screen. The conventions for all this are by no means universal, and we can frequently see the ways here that the personal conventions of handwriting are translated into the conventions and formalities of printed characters and printed arrangements. Amidst all this there are the more obvious national and linguistic conventions and distinctions such as ¡! and ¿? in representing speech.

Much of the history of the appearance of print has not unnaturally followed the preoccupations of type-founders, printers and their relationships to the written word.

For this we have a vocabulary which, if very far from universally accepted or universally applicable, does at least have the bones of convention that make the management of print and the type-manufacturing trade possible. The work of G.I.

Lieftinck and his colleagues in the early 1950s and of Albert Derolez much more recently, has demonstrated some of the difficulties and frustrations in trying to describe, distinguish and pigeonhole different late mediaeval gothic hands.¹⁰In 2011, Derolez published an exploration of some of the cognate problems in distinguishing and describing humanistic script.¹¹It might be thought that the history of the designs of printing type would be more easily agreed, but the complexities of gothic to gotico-rotunda, fere-humanistica and other hybrids, Italian traditions merging into roman faces in fifteenth-century Italian and German-speaking regions, and the debates as to what exactly represents the ‘first’ roman type, are just some of the topics that colour the discussions of type-faces in the standard works on the subject.

There are the more obvious derivations of the written word in type: the complex relationships of gothic to roman scripts, the variations of both in the typographic history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the relationship of italic handwriting to italic type, and the extent to which it was, or was not, absorbed into local and eventually national traditions, or the ways by which roman type displaced black letter faster for

8 M. Esbester, ‘Designing time. The design and use of nineteenth-century transport timetables’, in:Journal of design history 22 (2009), 91-113.

9 O. Neurath,International picture language. London 1936 (facsimile reprint: Reading 1980).

10 B. Bischoff, G.I. Lieftinck [et al.],Nomenclature des écritures livresques du IXe au XVIe siècle.

Paris 1953; A. Derolez,The palaeography of gothic manuscript books. From the twelfth to the early sixteenth century. Cambridge 2003.

11 A. Derolez, ‘The nomenclature of humanistic scripts’, in:Quaerendo 41 (2011), 162-171.

some purposes than for others.¹²In London at the end of the seventeenth century, the diarist Samuel Pepys noted the change from black letter to roman type in popular street ballads, and associated the change with roughly the turn of the century: ‘My collection of Ballads... continued to the year 1700. When the form, till then peculiar thereto, vizt of the Black Letter with Picturs seems (for cheapness sake) wholly laid aside, for that of the White Letter without Pictures.’¹³The change in these widely sold, cheaply produced, and much printed and reprinted sheets was much more complex than Pepys suggested; but he was reacting to the most obvious change of all in English typography in the seventeenth century, as roman type was increasingly adopted across the range of printing, and black letter was mostly restricted to roles in legal and liturgical printing, and for emphasis especially on title-pages.¹⁴

If Samuel Pepys, even in so limited a field as sheet-ballads - of which he possessed an exceptional collection that remains one of the most important parts of his library - could be so approximate, and so wrong, in his summary of the English typographic tradition, how much greater is the potential for mis-judging developments and change in the infinitely more complicated issues raised in the design of books, which are created for so many purposes, subjects, social groups, and reading skills.

Pepys was, of course, concerned only with English printing - or, more specifically, just with London. In that, there is a limitation that does not always help us in our understanding of the histories of typographic conventions and typographic change.

For this is a profoundly international subject: international because books are traded and read internationally, printers move between countries, new editions of books may be printed far from where they were first begat, and because the very

foundations of printing, the type-founding trades, are international - in the twentieth century as in the fifteenth. Such issues incidentally remind us of one of the most important issues before us, as we move away from the series of national histories of the book that have dominated much of the history of the book during the past thirty or so years. The subject is unavoidably international, and always benefits from being thought so.

Some of these issues are further addressed in the following pages, but I want to raise here a question that underlies all our studies. Apart from what as historians of various persuasions and specialities we now seek to analyse, how can we discover, and how can we measure, what is - or was - actually noticed by readers? The questions are perhaps more easily answered for writers than for readers, since they have to make a choice in the way that they present their work, so that it is fit for purpose. This may involve discussions with printers, and it will almost always involve compromises; but we can at least recognise a purpose behind it. We cannot so readily do the same with readers.

12 These and other issues are magisterially addressed in H. Carter,A view of early typography up to about 1600. Oxford 1969 (repr. with an introduction by J. Mosley. London 2002). More particularly, see C. Killius,Die Antiqua-Fraktur Debatte um 1800 und ihre historische Herleitung.

Wiesbaden 1999; P. Bain, P. Shaw (ed.),Blackletter. Type and national identity. New York 1998.

13 Magdalene College, Cambridge: Pepys Library, collection of ballads, vol. 1.

14 Cf. J. Moxon, who in hisMechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (1683-1684) wrote of the compositor, ‘English obsolete Words he Sets in the English [i.e. black letter] Character.’

(Ed. H. Davis, H. Carter: Oxford 1962, 218.). See also G. Proot, ‘De opmars van de romein.

Het gebruik van romein en gotisch in Nederlandstalig drukwerk uit de zuidelijke Lage Landen, 1541-1700’ in thisJaarboek.

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TheImitatio Christi from manuscript to print

In the rest of this article, I reflect a little on some of these questions, looking for evidence as to how we can measure change, where it can be seen as an international phenomenon. In order to do so, I turn to one of the greatest international best-sellers of all time, a short text that has found audiences among many shades of Christian opinion since the fifteenth century. My approach, to a single book in particular, is somewhat different from those adopted by the authors of the collection of essays edited in 2004 by Annie Charon and others,La mise en page du livre religieux, XIIIe-XXe siècle, who were concerned with groups of texts. Instead, I have been looking at successive editions of one text.

TheImitatio Christi is never out of print. It has been printed for all kinds of readers, in all kinds of formats, and in languages across the world. The fullest bibliography, by Augustin de Backer (Liège, 1864) is now very old, and seriously misleading in many respects. It listed over 2,900 different editions and translations. As some of these were only by report, and unreliable report at that, De Backer suspected that this was an overestimate. But on the other hand further editions published by 1864 have been discovered and recorded since; and to these of course must be added all those which have been published since that date.¹⁵

The necessary starting point is the manuscript, written by Thomas à Kempis, a German from Kempen (in Cleves, on the lower Rhine) who after training at Deventer with the recently established Brothers of the Common Life spent most of his life at the monastery of Mount St Agnes, in Windesheim, near Zwolle, taking an active part in the brothers' commitment to the preparation and circulation of manuscripts.¹⁶ He died in 1471, and an autograph manuscript of theImitatio dated 1441 survives in Brussels, written ‘in monte sancte agnetis prope zwollis’. It was studied and edited by Delaissé in 1956.¹⁷This manuscript is small, about 13 × 7 cm, and the handwriting is correspond-

15 M. von Habsburg,Catholic and Protestant translations of the Imitatio Christi, 1425-1650.

Farnham 2011. This book appeared just as I was about to send this article to the editor, who had already graciously agreed to a delayed submission date. I have not been able to study Dr von Habsburg's work more than very superficially. It is ‘grounded upon a bibliographical investigation of theImitatio from the 1470s to 1650’ (p. 9), printed in an appendix (p. 253-307).

Unfortunately this summary list, marred by inaccuracies, also includes many books whose existence cannot be substantiated, and it omits others that do survive. For both, it is helpful also to consult (for example) such standard on-line resources as theIncunabula Short Title Catalogue (http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc) and Edit 16 (for Italian sixteenth-century books:

http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it). See also M. Delaveau, Y. Sordet (ed.),Édition et diffusion de L'imitation de Jésus-Christ 1470-1800. Paris 2011.

16 The background literature is copious. See for example the 500th anniversary exhibition, Thomas a Kempis et la dévotion moderne; catalogue d'exposition. Bruxelles 1971; R. Post, The modern devotion. Confrontation with reformation and humanism. Leiden 1968; Th. Kock, Die Buchkultur der Devotio moderna. Handschriftenproduktion, Literaturversorgung und Bibliotheksaufbau im Zeitalter des Medienwechsels. 2nd ed. Frankfurt a.M. 2002; U.

Bodemann, N. Staubach (ed.),Aus dem Winkel in die Welt. Die Bücher des Thomas von Kempen und ihre Schicksale. Frankfurt a.M. 2006; J. van Engen, Sisters and brothers of the common life. The devotio moderna and the world of the later middle ages. Philadelphia 2008.

17 L.J.M. Delaissé,Le manuscrit autographe de Thomas a Kempis et ‘L'imitation de Jésus-Christ’.

Examen archéologique et édition diplomatique du Bruxellensis 5855-61. Paris 1956; for the date of compilation, see alsoThomas a Kempis et la dévotion moderne, no. 45. Others are reproduced inThomas a Kempis et la dévotion moderne, plates 20-22. A larger selection is reproduced in P. Puyot,Héliotypies des principaux manuscrits du livre De imitatione Christi.

Paris 1898.

ingly tiny. The foliation now on it was added in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century, perhaps, Delaissé suggests, by an owner or one of the text's editors such as the Jesuit Heribert Roseweyde whose edition first appeared at Antwerp in 1617.

A facsimile edited by Charles Ruelens of the Bibliothèque Royale was published in 1879, and of this Delaissé is rightly critical.¹⁸For our purposes it is of only limited use partly because it gives no idea of the context of the text of theImitatio, one of several texts gathered together in this volume; it omits Thomas's general list of contents, and it omits the various autograph marginalia. (In parenthesis, by no means the least interesting part of the history of theImitatio is the way in which it was at first published or bound up by contemporary or later owners with other religious texts, whether in the theological assembly at Augsburg or in the popular devotional traditions of the Low Countries.)

There is not space here to comment in detail on Thomas's distinctive punctuation, nor on the rhythmical nature of his prose, which was only properly recovered in the nineteenth century. But it is important to remember its small format - in common with many of the manuscripts that were copied out of this text during the rest of the fifteenth century as well as long into the following century. Several hundred

manuscripts of theImitatio were made: a widely accepted figure suggests eight or nine hundred.¹⁹The first printed edition bears only a limited relationship to the original, and for many years the text was far more circulated in manuscript than it was in print. Nonetheless, it is a help to notice when we turn to the printed editions that not only the manuscripts attributable to the Brothers of the Common Life, but also those from further afield in Germany and elsewhere, tend nearly all to be quite small. The text enjoyed a popular circulation during Thomas's own lifetime, and there were many variants, later to be reflected partly in the printed editions. As for the authorship, while there was a long tradition that attributed the work to Jean Gerson, the Augsburg tradition clearly attributed the work to Thomas.

For a study of changes in typographical taste, theImitatio offers an unusual opportunity. In its original form it is a straightforward text, divided into four books and each book divided into numbered chapters which are given titles, ‘De doctrina veritatis’, ‘De meditacione mortis’ and so forth.

The first edition of this book was printed after Thomas's death, at Augsburg by Günther Zainer in 1472 or 1473.²⁰Unlike those manuscripts for popular circulation and convenient for meditation, it was a small folio, printed on chancery paper (fig.

1). It was printed - and published - as part of a collection of tracts by Jerome, Augustine, Jean Gerson and others that survives in various groupings, all in the same typeface and evidently intended to be issued and studied as a group: unusually, Zainer also printed, on a separate sheet, a list of this group: copies of this list survive pasted into the front of

18 Delaissé,Le manuscrit autographe de Thomas a Kempis, 103.

19 S. Axters,De imitatione Christi. Elenchus codicum manuscriptorum in quingentesimo anno ab obitu Thomae Hemerken a Kempis. Een handschrifteninventaris bij het vijfhonderdste verjaren van Thomas Hemerken van Kempen (1471). Kempen-Niederrhein 1971. For some further details, see Von Habsburg,Catholic and Protestant translations, 55-59.

20 Apart fromCatalogue of books printed in the XVth century now in the British Museum. London 1908 (BMC), see H. Gier et al. (ed.),Augsburger Buchdruck und verlagswesen. Wiesbaden 1997, Personenregister,s.v. Zainer.

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several bound-up collections. The number of texts bound up together vary in number, perhaps according to what stocks were available, rather than what individual readers and customers desired.²¹In the autograph, Thomas makes frequent use of the colon to punctuate and give rhythm. Leaving aside the various minor differences in the text, Zainer's edition is minimally punctuated, using a full stop and a mid-point that occasionally coincides with the colon in the autograph. The text, set solid, depends on rubrication for navigation beyond the main chapter headings.

Figure 1: The first edition of Thomas à Kempis,Imitatio Christi. Folio (Augsburg: Günther Zainer, 1472 or 1473). Trinity College, Cambridge

21 For a summary of the printed list of contents found with some copies of the several tracts, seeBMC11, 318. Zainer's printed advertisement of 1474 (reproduced in Gier,Augsburger Buchdruck, 57) lists them together, with minor differences and with a note ‘Subscripti tractatuli continentur in vno volumine’. For a detailed description of a copy of the collection, seeThe Garden sale at Sotheby's (New York 9 November 1989), lot 12 and H. Tenschert, Catalogue 24,Incunabula. Rotthalmünster 1991, no. 9, both with illustrations. The Sotheby catalogue draws attention to the textual similarity between the printed edition and Harvard University fMS lat.246, formerly owned by the Carthusian house at Buxheim.

Format and typography

The sequence of editions of theImitatio after this first edition from Augsburg in 1472 or 1473 is a reminder of the continuing power of the manuscript as a means of circulation. This did not become an instant best-seller in print. Apart from an edition of the first book (alone) printed at Metz in 1482²²and a Catalan translation printed at Barcelona in 1482, the next edition appeared at Venice, not until 1483 - ten years after Augsburg.²³There was no edition in the Low Countries until an undated one by Johannes de Westfalia at Leuven in the mid 1480s. It was a quarto. It too ignored Thomas's punctuation, and used mid-points for full stops, besides introducing a few vertical slashes roughly where we might now put commas.²⁴

Given the appeal of this book in small format manuscripts to northern European audiences, it is perhaps surprising that the first octavo edition appeared south of the Alps, at Brescia in 1485 - twelve years after the editio princeps. It was also the first printed in roman type. The printers were Angelus and Jacobus Britannicus, who had established their press at Brescia only a few months earlier, and who in 1486 were to follow their edition of theImitatio with one of Augustine's Sermones ad heremitas set in the same type, and to a very similar page design. For the Imitatio (here idiosyncratically attributed to St Bernard) the printers set the lists of chapters at the start of each book, and added a preface commending the book to the faithful reader.

With these points in mind (the varying textual traditions, the move in format from folio to quarto to octavo, the move from gothic to roman type, the variations in author attribution, the changes in punctuation), let us now turn to some further typographical changes in the presentation of a text that was, at its heart, short and comparatively simple. Such a book ought to suggest some of the broader changes in typographical conventions over the years. Before moving to questions of detail, there are several general developments to be observed. Whereas the earliest editions of theImitatio, whether in Germany or Italy, made little attempt to break up the text, and instead presented it as a dense, almost continuous mass of print, there was a substantial movement to offer a text that was better articulated typographically with regard to meaning, and paying attention to the changing needs of readers. This is not a movement driven by printers. It can only have been in response to demand, whether from editors and translators, or from those who used the book. It is a part of the revolution in reading practices that occurred in the late fifteenth and then - more dramatically - in the sixteenth century. In turn, the design of the page dictated the ways in which the book was to be read. It was

22 BMC III, 663.

23 Von Habsburg,Catholic and Protestant translations, 255, also lists on insufficient evidence editions of 1472 (Tubingen), 1480 (Cologne), 1481 (Brescia), 1481 (Paris), 1481 (Strasburg [sic]). In a world-wide search, no copies of these are recorded in theISTC.

24 There were two undated editions by J. van Westfalen, both quartos, cf. G. van Thienen, J.

Goldfinch,Incunabula printed in the Low Countries. A census. Nieuwkoop 1999 (henceforth

ILC), nos. 1262 and 1263. M.-L. Polain,Catalogue des livres imprimés au quinzième siècle des bibliothèques de Belgique. Bruxelles 1932-1978 (henceforth Polain), nos. 2046 and 2047.

See alsoILCfor three other editions, one by Mathias van der Goes, also quarto, also undated:

between 1486 and 1491:ILC1264, Polain 2048.

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fragmented. While much was made possible by the increasing typographical resources available to printers, and their willingness to invest in ranges of type-faces, the articulation of white space was instrumental in this revolution.

So, we may summarise very briefly some of the changes in the principal features of the early editions. I have here been deliberately brief, for my purpose is not to offer a survey of all changes and relationships. TheISTC, for example, lists seventy-seven separate editions, and the sixteenth century produced several hundred.

After choice of format and paper size, the most obvious is the choice of number of columns. The first edition, a small folio, was in one column; those printed at Venice in 1485 and 1486 were in two. The Augsburg quarto of 1488 was also two columns.

As a typographical context to this we might place first the introduction of running heads, and changes in their use. This is as much a feature of the relevant printers' normal practice as of any particular considered appropriateness to theImitatio. The earliest editions have no running heads. Nor does the early octavo edition, printed at Brescia. A quarto Venice edition of 1485, simply has theLiber number at the head. The running heads in the quarto edition printed at Augsburg by Erhard Ratdolt in 1488 display the book number (LiberIetc) set in roman capitals, where the text is set in a Venetian style of gothic.

The earliest editions had no title-pages. They were used, for example, in the closely related editions printed by Flach (Strasbourg, 1487) and Trechsel (Lyon, 1489) and became normal in the French editions.²⁵The introduction of title-pages brought also opportunities for an illustration of a generic kind, designed to assist meditation, for example in the first French translation, printed at Toulouse in 1488 and with a woodcut of Christ carrying the cross.

The introduction - and exploitation - of the range of text (as distinct from display) typefaces - black letter, roman and italic - with which we are now familiar is of course a principal theme of the period between roughly the 1480s and the 1540s. It followed different trajectories in different countries. Apart from the main letter-forms, the introduction of an extended choice of sizes and weights of type brought new means of emphasis. By the time that Josse Badius Ascensius printed Thomas a Kempis's collected works at Paris in 1523, he was using black letter increasingly sparingly, and only for display.²⁶By the 1530s, roman type was increasingly established, for example in the 16mo Antwerp edition of 1536 issued by the humanist Joannes Steels,²⁷where earlier Low Countries editions in Latin and vernacular had been in black letter. As was to be expected, the Italian version printed by Francesco Bindoni and Maffeo Pasini at Venice in 1538 was in roman type.

The use of type in hierarchical ways developed from long experiments in the manuscript traditions. But whereas scribes were limited only by their skills and by the size of the page onto which they had to fit their text, for printers the limitation was a technical one as well as a commercial one, involving investment in a range of fonts of type.

25 For the rapid increase in the later 1480s in the number of books having some form of title-page, see M.M. Smith,The title-page. Its early development, 1460-1510. London 2000, 50.

26 Ph. Renouard [et al.],Imprimeurs & libraires parisiens du XVIe siècle. Paris 1969, vol. 2, 217.

27 W. Nijhoff, M.E. Kronenberg,Nederlandsche bibliographie van 1500 tot 1540. 's-Gravenhage 1923, 358 (no. 990).

Like those of scribes, so printers' and compositors' decisions and choices were also subject to the size of the page. As the most expensive part of the costs in printing any book, paper was the major determinant. To print hundreds of copies rather than write just one was an entirely different kind of investment. Hence it is worth

considering what kinds of printers printed a particular text, and considering why, if they possessed a considerable range of types, they chose particular ones. Most of these who printed theImitatio, at least in the first years, possessed comparatively little in this respect. Zainer, the printer of theeditio princeps, owned just one size of gothic type at the time of printing theImitatio.²⁸The Britannicus press at Brescia possessed only one roman text type small enough for the format required. More ambitiously, the octavo Cologne edition of 1501 printed by Martin of Werden (fig. 2) uses a large formal black letter on the title-page, with an illustration of the Christ-child with his mother and St Anne, then uses three sizes to launch the text: ‘liber primus’,

‘Incipit...’ (notice the two capital C's in Christi and the oddball Capitulum), and the text itself.

Figure 2: Thomas à Kempis,Imitatio Christi. Octavo (Köln: Martin of Werden, 1501). St John's College, Cambridge

28 BMC II, 314.

21

Page numbers took the place of folio numbers quite late, for example in the 16mo edition produced at Antwerp by Steels in 1556, one of a number of editions for which he was responsible.²⁹Although the same tiny format as Steels's edition of 1536, again with 20 lines to a page and with a type marginally smaller, this new one in fact differed in important ways. The work was now attributed to Thomas à Kempis rather than to Gerson. The chapter heads and numbers were centred on the page, which they had not been in 1536, where the heads had been inserted with an opening paragraph mark, and with the chapter numbers set against the right-hand margins.

In all this, we can see a connecting thread, in the changing provision being made for readers, and in the increasing influence of the printer as the arbiter of textual presentation. Script gives way to print, most obviously perhaps in the introduction of decorative initials at the beginnings of sections, in place of small printed guide letters that characterise the early editions. We find historiated initials as well as merely decorative ones, and we find the use of metal cast decorative initials, as in the Giunta edition published at Florence in 1509. That these innovations were not always of an expected kind is illustrated in the Venice edition of 1500, with its decorative opening Q[ui sequitur me] showing (rather incongruously) two huntsmen following a dog.

Illustrations were a key part of devotion, manifest in innumerable prayer books, either painted or printed, or as printed images pasted in. TheImitatio was

comparatively lightly illustrated for many years. It is noticeable, for example, in a copy of the Amerbach edition of 1489 bound up with Bertholdus of Ratisbon's Horologium devotionis circa vitam Christi, printed by Amerbach in the same year, that the Bertholdus has hand-coloured woodcuts, but theImitatio has no pictures at all.³⁰That some readers found a need for images is demonstrated in a copy of the edition printed by Jean Petit at Paris in 1515, bound up with Bernard of Clairvaux's Meditationes and Augustine's Sermones ad heremitas. An early owner has added at the front a crude coloured drawing of Christ's suffering.³¹When printed illustrations were introduced, they were for many years of the very simplest: a crucifixion scene (Paris, 1498), a small image of Christ (Venice, 1500). The octavo Cologne edition of 1501 has just a woodcut of the Christ-child between the Virgin Mary and St Anne.

The Venice edition of 1538, in Italian, broke with this tradition, instead using a woodcut of Christ calling a disciple, with the words ‘Sequere me’, Follow me. More ambitiously, a later and undated Italian edition printed at Venice by Mattio Pagano was described on the title-page as ‘di belle figure adornate’.³²Apart from an opening woodcut of the road to Calvary, the chapters in this edition were headed with smaller woodcuts, often repeated.

All this bears on the typographical relationships between editions, and the extent to which they were imitated visually. Peter Löslein's Venice printing of 1483 was followed closely by Peregrinus de Pasqualibus two years later, both editions in two columns with

29 E. Cockx-Indestege [et al.],Belgica typographica, 1541-1600. Nieuwkoop 1968-1994, no.

9183.

30 St John's College, Cambridge, Yule a.1489.1.

31 St John's College, Cambridge, Yule a.1515.2.

32 Dated by Edit 16 as not before 1542; a cautious suggestion, as Pagano was not printing before that date. He was active until 1562.

type similar in size, and occupying the same number of pages. I have already mentioned the 16mo Antwerp editions. Another instructive pair for comparison is the two Giunta editions published at Florence in 1509 and 1514. Basically, they are very similar: both the same octavo format. Both are printed on the same size of sheet of paper. But in the latter, page numbers were added, running heads were added, and the use of a new and more compact typeface resulted in a saving of a whole sheet of paper - the volume ending with sheet h, rather than sheet i. In other words, an edition was produced more economically but in a way that is better articulated for the reader.

Finally in this very summary list, it is pertinent to note the treatment of the margins.

Much here depends on the size of the sheet of paper, the type area taken up on each page, and the size of the type. For books that were to be sold cheaply, it was desirable not only to use an economical type, but that the proportion of the type area to the page size should be as high as possible. The generously designed octavo edition printed by Johann Zainer at Ulm in 1487 is in a larger type (82 mm) than the octavos printed at Brescia (77 mm) and by Johannes Leoviler at Venice (64 mm) in the previous two years. It also has a wide margin, suitable for annotation. TheImitatio is replete with biblical references, but in the early editions no attempt was made to add guidance for readers. Where space was available, early owners occasionally wrote in their own references to the passages of the Bible alluded to in the text, as (for example) in a copy of the Cologne, 1501 edition.³³We shall return to this question of marginal references a little later.

English innovations

Most of the comments so far on the early editions of theImitatio have concerned the Latin text and translations into Italian. While differing in detail, the same kinds of questions apply to other translations. But with the first English translation, in 1503, we are in entirely different territory - typographically as well as geographically. It was printed at London by Richard Pynson, and is a small quarto.³⁴As the title explains, it was translated ‘at the specyalle request and commaundement of the ful excellent Princesse Margarete moder to our Souerayne lorde Kynge Henry the. vii.

and Countesse of Rychemount and Derby’ (fig. 3). Lady Margaret Beaufort was famously devout, and an enlightened patroness not just of translators and printers, but also of education: two Cambridge colleges owe their existence to her.³⁵Above the title was a woodcut of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ.³⁶But the full-page woodcut at the opening of

33 St John's College, Cambridge, Yule a.1501.1.

34 A.W. Pollard, G.R. Redgrave,A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland,

& Ireland (...). 2nd ed., completed by K.F. Pantzer. Oxford 1976-1991 (STC), 23954.7 and 23955. Unique copy of the former at St John's College, Cambridge. No English edition of the Imitatio seems to have been printed between 1503 and 1517, but the extreme rarity of early editions makes it impossible to be certain about this. Von Habsburg (279) attributesSTC23956 (dated [1518?-1519?] inSTC) to [1515], without giving a reason.

35 M.K. Jones, M.G. Underwood,The King's mother. Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby. Cambridge 1992. C.H. Cooper, Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby. J.E.B. Mayor (ed). Cambridge 1874, remains valuable for its wealth of documents.

36 Reproduced in E. Hodnett,English woodcuts, 1480-1535. Repr. with additions. Oxford 1973, fig. 128.

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the text left no room for doubt (fig. 4). This was political, personal and religious. It repeated the sacred monogram,IHS, five times. It also included the Tudor rose and portcullis four times, two of the portcullises having the English crown above them.

This same inclination to politicisation is to be seen in the English translation after Castellio's adapted text by Edward Hake printed by Henry Denham in 1567.³⁷Facing the opening of the text in this small octavo edition was the device of the Duke of Norfolk, whose religious affiliations - Protestant or Catholic - were repeatedly in doubt, and whose political volatility brought him to the executioner's block in 1572.

Figure 3: Thomas à Kempis,A ful deuout and gostely treatyse. Quarto (London: Richard Pynson, 1503). Title-page. St John's College, Cambridge

37 STC23969.

Figure 4: Thomas à Kempis,A ful deuout and gostely treatyse. Quarto (London: Richard Pynson, 1503). Opening of the text. St John's College, Cambridge

TheImitatio was, first and most importantly, a devotional text, to be read (for example) in preparation for receiving mass. The multitude of small format editions, some of them tiny, are eloquent testimony to this purpose, and in this it also fits well with other devotional texts, whether in the Low Countries, France or Italy. As we saw earlier, it began life as a part of a collection. If we leave aside the various collections of the work of Thomas à Kempis alone, which were by no means universal in including theImitatio amongst his writings, we do not find very many folios. The folio collected works printed by Hochfeder at Nuremberg in 1494 opens with the Imitatio, and has an important exchange of letters between Georg Pirckheimer and Peter Dannhausser at the start, but it was typographically and editorially

straightforward. So, for all its French renaissance modernity, was the folio edition of the collected works printed by Badius Ascensius in 1523. The same tendencies can be seen in Jean Roigny's folio edition of the works printed at Paris in 1549,³⁸ which opens with theImitatio, now firmly established as the work of Thomas à Kempis.

38 H.M. Adams,Catalogue of books printed on the continent of Europe, 1501-1600 in Cambridge libraries. Cambridge 1967, K15.

25

By the English translation of 1580, the work of Thomas Rogers and printed at London by Henry Denham, this popular devotional work, so much in demand by people of all kinds of wealth, religious persuasions and backgrounds, and printed in all kinds of formats and sizes from 16mo to folio, had taken on a significance that varied as its audiences changed, overlapped, disagreed, accepted received - and often much altered - versions of the text, and were presented with a book of varying length where the text became a field for experiment among multiple religious and textual authorities.

Figure 5: Thomas à Kempis,Of the imitation of Christ. Duodecimo (London: Henry Denham, 1580). Title-page. St John's College, Cambridge

The translation printed at London was a disarmingly small book, in duodecimo. It was, in the words of Rogers, ‘now newlie corrected, translated, and with most ample textes, and sentences of holie Scripture illustrated’. It was a modern attempt to produce

an elaborate and specifically Protestant version of a text that had, by general consent, much in it that was spiritually and morally good but that could hardly be taken wholesale into the Protestant tradition.

Figure 6: Thomas à Kempis,Of the imitation of Christ. Duodecimo (London: Henry Denham, 1580). Opening showing marginal Biblical references and two-line running headlines. St John's College, Cambridge

As Rogers put it in the introduction, ‘I haue rather folowed the sense of the Author, than his verie wordes, in some places.’ ‘I haue left out nothing but what might be offensiue to the godlie.’ Rogers in fact did rather more than this, restoring some passages that had been lost, changing one of the chapter divisions. Slightly apologetically, he remarked that he had not followed the example of Erasmus in editing a text, noting the textual alterations. He explained that his work was ‘for the simpler sort’. He at first omitted the fourth book, theSoliloquium animae, which appeared separately a little later. He worked with his printer, to present not only a better than usually produced devotional book, but also to present it as a scholarly text. The references to Aristotle, Plato, Demosthenes and others in his introduction were hints of

27

how he came to his task. Most importantly, he was a pioneer in showing how the text related to passages in the Bible: ‘Besides, I haue not onlie shewed the chapter, but the verie sentence also of euerie chapter where what is written maie be found:

a thing which, that i heare of, none afore me hath done.’ In its crowded title-page, with the title of the book in a woodcut cartouche at the head, through the unequivocal author statement, through Thomas Rogers' own name set in small capitals, the three quotations from the New Testament - that from St Mark highlighted in brackets, to the imprint and the royal privilege at the foot, here was a title-page not only providing information and an invitation, but also one that uses different type-sizes, italic, roman lower case, and capitalisation for the whole of the most significant words (fig. 5). In a carefully planned display, the printer contrived a lay-out that in its sequence of long and short centred lines suggested a chalice, with the cup at the top, a series of waists, and the foot represented by the imprint at the bottom. For a book designed to be read prior to receiving communion, it was a specific visual as well as textual introduction where word and image complemented each other.

When we move inside the book, we find the same consideration to articulating the text, and to presenting it in a way that will help readers (fig. 6). The body of the text is broken up into short paragraphs, most of them consisting of a single sentence.

The marginal Biblical references that Rogers alludes to in his introduction as an innovation are signalled in the text by superior small letters. The page heads are set in two lines and in two sizes of type, so that the chapter number, the subject of the chapter, the page number and the title of the book can all appear. The format of the book - duodecimo, with accordingly very narrow pages into which two columns have to be fitted, one in a smaller size of type than the other - is not ideal, as can be seen in the superior reference letters left hanging at the start of some lines, but this is an ambitious and creditable performance.

Into the seventeenth century

By the end of the sixteenth century, this popular devotional book, published in several languages, across much of Europe and in various formats, was changing into a text demanding some attention as to its received accuracy. The important editions in this respect did not appear in large formats: it is noticeable how many of them are very small indeed. Sebastian Castellio (or Castalio) at Basel in 1563 had not only altered the book to suit his Protestant tastes; he had also apparently wantonly altered the Latin. In 1575, Franciscus Tolensis, at Antwerp, dealt with some of Castellio's changes to the Latin, but left the text substantially the same. Then in an edition dated 1599 Henricus Sommalius tackled the book again, using various German manuscripts and another at Liège, in an edition printed by Jan Moretus and, once again, in a disarmingly small format considering the care claimed for its editing. Yet another version appeared, this time in Paris, when the edition of Constantino Caietano produced his edition in 1616, edited ‘ex veteri manuscripti’.