Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xI:2 (Autumn i980), 265-286.

Anthony T. Grafton

The Importance of Being Printed

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cul-
tural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. By Elizabeth L. Ei-
senstein (New York, Cambridge University Press, I979) 794 pp.
I $29.50 & II $24.50 or $49.50 the set

Anyone who wishes to know what an early printing-house was

like should begin with the Orthotypographia of Jerome Horn-
schuch. The engraving by Moses Thym that precedes Horn-
schuch's text shows a printer's staff hard at work. In one small
room a compositor sets type, a corrector reads copy, a ware-
houseman sorts paper, a printer and an inker work a handpress,
and a workman lifts wet sheets to dry on a ceiling-level rack.
In the background, a girl comes through the door, clutching a
jug of beer, the pressman's traditional perquisite; in a corner, an
author speaks excitedly to an unidentified companion. In the fore-
ground, dominating the scene, stands the master-printer-a
majestic, Prospero-like figure, who seems to be counting on his
fingers.1
The picture alone reveals some of the complexities and the
fascination of early printing and, above all, its unprecedented
employment under one roof of intellectuals and craftsmen, schol-
ars and entrepreneurs. Hornschuch's text tells us even more. It
was written by and for correctors, the new class of educated
printing workers. It demanded that they master a range of skills
no earlier job would have required. They had to grasp the me-
chanics of printing and the intellectual principles of consistent
spelling, punctuation, and proofreading. It asked the author as

Anthony T. Grafton is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

0022-1953/80/020265-22 $02.50/0
() I980 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History.

i Philip Gaskell and Patricia Bradford (eds. and trans.), Hornschuch's Orthotypographia,
1608 (Cambridge, I972). I follow the excellent analysis in Percy Simpson, Proof-Reading
in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1935), I26-130.
266 ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

well as the printer to stretch himself. He was require

ciate the possibilities printing offered for exact and a
production of his work, to learn to give his printers
to help them choose an appropriate type-face, and to
alone to get on with printing and proofreading his w
cation as we know it, that drawn-out struggle am
businessmen, and craftsmen, had come into being.
Early modern historians have long been intereste
strange little world of the printing-house. Eisenstein
them to do more. The burden of her book is that th
house was more than an important locus of cultur

Fig. 1 A Renaissance Printing House.

SOURCE: FromJerome Hornschuch, Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608), courte

Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.
ON PRINTING | 267

change; it was the crucible in which modern culture was formed.

But since cultural historians have persistently ignored its pervasive
influence, they have given a distorted account of the Renaissance,
the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
Eisenstein began to work this thesis out more than a decade
ago. She developed it in a series of brilliant polemical articles, all
of them distinguished by absolute independence from received
ideas, an extraordinary range of interests, and a considerable
breadth of knowledge. Now she has stated it in the powerful
form of a two-volume study teeming with ideas and information.
No historian of early modern Europe will be able to avoid a
confrontation with the problems she has raised; for that alone we
owe her a great debt.2
To be sure, Eisenstein is far too learned and too subtle a
scholar to claim that printing by itself brought about the Renais-
sance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. Nor does
she claim that it affected every area of culture in the same way.
Indeed, one of the great strengths of her book is its insistence on
the enormous variety and frequent contradictoriness of the de-
velopments linked with printing. Yet it is still clear that she sees
printing as far more than one among many "factors in modern
history." It changed the directions of existing cultural movements
as suddenly and completely as a prism bends and transforms a
beam of light. If printing did not create the Renaissance, for
example, it nonetheless made it undergo a sea change. Printing
made an Italian movement of limited scope and goals into a
European one. It preserved in unprecedented quantities and dis-
seminated at an unprecedented speed the classical discoveries of
humanists, thus preventing their classical revival from being as
limited and transitory as those of the Carolingian period and the
twelfth century. And it made enough sources of information
about the past available to all readers so that men came for the
first time to see the ancient world as something clearly different
from their own. Without printing, the characteristic Renaissance
sense of history and sensitivity to anachronism could never have
widely established themselves.

2 Eisenstein, "Clio and Chronos," History and Theory, Beiheft VI (I966), 36-64; idem,
"The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance," Past & Present, 45 (I969),
I9-89; idem, "L'Avenement de l'Imprimerie et la Reforme," Annales, XXVI (I971), 1355-
1382.
268 ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

In the field of religion, printing had rather different

It spread Luther's message with amazing speed and so
it from the suppression that had been the fate of medieva
But that, after all, has long been a commonplace of Re
historiography. For Eisenstein, the role of printing in
the way for the Reformation holds more interest than
spreading it. She argues persuasively that the printin
much to undermine the authority of the Church simpl
ing available to a wide public Biblical texts, with al
apparent contradictions, as well as by spreading new f
devotional literature and changing old ones.
For science, finally, printing served still other ends
ing available complete and newly accurate texts of th
cient works, above all those of Ptolemy and Galen, it
new foundation of theories, methods, and data on wh
tioners of the classical sciences could build more syste
than would ever have been possible in the age of s
making possible the accurate reproduction and system
provement of illustrations, it literally revolutionized the
and checking of data about the natural world. The wid
of classical and modern texts enabled scientists to educate them-
selves and to become aware of contradictions that had not both-
ered the less well-informed readers of medieval times. And it did
more than any other force to create the disciplinary communities
and standards that characterize modern science, with its emphasis
on collaboration and competition.
The protagonist in each of these movements is the master-
printer, a pioneer both as businessman and as intellectual. It was
in his shop that artisans came together with intellectuals to create
the greatest works of the new science; it was his opposition to
authority, something almost inherent in the nature of his calling,
that turned networks of printing-shops into the relays along
which ran messages of change.
These are only some of Eisenstein's main arguments. No
summary can do justice to so rich a book. Every reader will have
his favorite pages; my own, perhaps, are those in which she treats
the divergence between popular and learned traditions in religious
literature after the Reformation and those in which she speculates
strikingly about the effects of manuals of "civility" on the rela-
tions between parents and children. Every reader will also profit
ON PRINTING | 269

from the many epigrammatic obiter dicta that enrich the book.
Eisenstein is often more perceptive than professional students of
the fields she treats. She is absolutely right to point out that the
Renaissance recovery of classical scientific works was not a retreat
to blind worship of authority but the indispensable foundation
for the Vesalian and Copernican revolutions-a point on which
many historians of science still go wrong. More generally, she is
right to hold that historians of ideas, especially in the English-
speaking world, have paid far too little attention to the social,
economic, and material realities that affected past intellectuals,
and to point out in particular that the conditions of publication
deserve a more prominent place among those realities than even
the broadest-minded intellectual historians have accorded them.
For all of the excitement it inspires, however, Eisenstein's
book also leaves the reader with a certain uneasiness. It is not
surprising that in 700 pages of vigorous argument she has som
times missed her aim, or that at times she seems to be tilting
windmills rather than real opponents. What is more surprisin
and causes more concern, is that many of her errors and exag
gerations seem to stem directly from the goals at which she aim
and the methods she has chosen.
Eisenstein has decided to do her research not in primary but
in secondary sources. She herself describes the book as "based on
monographic literature not archival research" (xvi). What she
does not explain is why she has abstained so rigorously from
studying the thousands of published primary sources on the effects
of printing that are available in any major scholarly library. An-
thologies of early prefaces and other documents can help to initiate
a reader into the field. The colophons of incunabula give us a
chance to watch dozens of editors and printers at work, and
thousands of such texts are accurately reproduced in the modern
catalogs of early printed books. The letters of many of the most
influential editors can be read in well-annotated modern editions.
And, of course, the early printed books that fill the shelves of the
Folger Library, where Eisenstein did much of her reading, are
their own best witnesses.3

3 The best place to begin is Hans Widmann, Horst Kliemann, and Bernhard Wendt
(eds.), Der deutsche Buchhandel in Urkunden und Quellen (Hamburg, I965), 2v., which
provides samples of almost every relevant sort of document. For prefaces, see, e.g., Beriah
Botfield (ed.), Prefaces to the First Editions of the Greek and Roman Classics and of the Sacred
270 ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

One need not do "archival research" to master these mate-

rials; but though Eisenstein has consulted some of them, they
have not left much of a precipitate in her book. What a pity, on
feels, that she has filled her pages with ungainly chunks of quo
tation from modern textbooks and articles, with other scholars'
summaries and descriptions. Such passages block the lively flow
of her prose. It seems a shame that she did not replace them wit
direct readings of the sources and with well-chosen plates (she
uses no illustrations at all). What a pity, for example, that she di
not enrich her discussion of the spread of Luther's writings wit
a quotation from Johann Froben's splendid letter to the reforme

The Leipzig book dealer Blasius Salomon gave me a selection o

your writings at the last Frankfurt Fair. Since they received much
applause from scholars I reprinted them at once. We have sent 60
copies to France and Spain. They were bought up in Paris, and
were read and praised by the scholars at the Sorbonne, so our
friends have reported to us ... Calvo too, the Pavian book dealer,
a well-educated man and a friend of the Muses, took a considerable
number of your writings to Italy in order to retail them in every
city. In doing so he is concerned not to make money but to serve
the new devotion as best he can. He promised that he would send
epigrams applauding you by all the scholars in Italy . . .Moreove
we have sent your works to Brabant and England.4

Here we see a printer taking on just the sort of innovative role a

both entrepreneur and intellectual that Eisenstein's thesis calls for.

Scriptures (Cambridge, I86I); Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (ed.), The Prefatory Epistles of Jacque
Lefevre d'Etaples and Related Texts (New York, 1972); Giovanni Orlandi (ed.), Aldo Manuzio
Editore: dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi (Milan, I975), 2v. (the rich introduction by Carlo
Dionisotti is by far the best study in existence of Aldo). The richest single source fo
colophons is the Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museu
(London, 1963-1971; rev. ed.), I2v. The serious student will also consult older work
above all Ludwig Hain, Repertorium Bibliographicum (Stuttgart, 1826-1838), 2 v.; t
supplements by D. Reichling (1905-1914) and W. A. Copinger (1895-1902). He will g
when possible to the greatest of all such lists, the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, whic
is now being continued after a hiatus of many years and is up to the letter F. For editors
letters see, for example, P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod (eds.), Opus
Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford, 1906-1958), I2v.; A. Hartmann (ed.), D
Amerbachkorrespondenz (Basel, 1942-1974), 8v. Naturally, many sixteenth-, seventeenth-,
and eighteenth-century editions remain indispensable-for example, Pieter Burman (ed
Sylloge Epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum (Leiden, 1727), 5v.
4 Widmann et al., Der deutsche Buchhandel, I, 345.
 ON PRINTING 271

A rather limited amount of reading-certainly less than

work, and she worked for ten-would have enabled her to
up many passages as revealing as this one and to exc
unnecessary dead patches from every chapter. As the boo
Eisenstein's few excursions into the documents tantalize the reader
without satisfying him. Again and again, the book comes alive
as an early intellectual is quoted or an early book or print is
discussed; but all too soon we are back in a world of textbook-
style generalities.5
In some ways, too, the general plan of Eisenstein's structure
is as troubling as its foundations are disappointing. She has not
told a story but carried on a series of arguments about the im-
portance of printing in a great many fields over two centuries. As
a result, she has tended to pull from her sources those facts and
statements that seemed to meet her immediate polemical needs,
both positive and negative. Sometimes the statements that she
quotes are torn so far from their original context that they take
on a meaning that their author could not have intended, or are
denounced for failing to meet standards that their author could
not possibly have reached. Eisenstein criticizes textbooks as if
they had been meant to meet the same rigorous standards as
monographs. She dissects incidental remarks as if they had been
meant to describe complex events and situations in a complete
and final way. And she tends, especially in her chapter on the
Renaissance, to criticize modern historians in the light of her own
interests and knowledge rather than in that of their intellectual
contexts. Thus, she does not try to understand why Jacob Burck-
hardt saw the Renaissance as a piercing of a veil that had long
hung between men,and the natural world; instead, she suggests
that his views should be "reformulated" to take into account the
role of printing and the continuities between medieval and Ren-
aissance culture that historians have discovered since Burckhardt's
time (226). Surely it would be more sensible to try to understand
Burckhardt's methods and standards than to criticize him for not
living up to ours. These tactics infuse into parts of Eisenstein's
book an unpleasant, and certainly unintentional, tone of hector-
ing.

5 For example, Eisenstein's excellent discussion of Andrew Maunsell, though suggestive,

breaks off all too soon (I06-107).
272 ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

Yet these attacks on other scholars, however unneces

cause less unease than the ways in which Eisenstein som
deploys the evidence that they have given her. Facts as
obiter dicta tend to be pulled out of shape by the force with
she sets upon them. At one point, for example, she argu
the systematic historical study of the ancient world cou
come into being until printing had made it possible to h
equate equipment" for "systematically reconstructing a
ilization" (I87). In support of this claim she quotes so
from a well-known essay by Momigliano, describing th
antiquarians of the sixteenth century. What she does not
his description, in the same passage, of the work of earl
quarians-in particular, that of Flavio Biondo, whose syst
survey of Roman civilization, Roma Triumphans, was co
in the 1450s, well before the existence of printing could
any impact on the author. "It required at least a century
ing," says Eisenstein, "however before a 'systematic coll
of relics .. . could occur" (187). But what of Biondo's am
complete and accurate description of the material relics o
Rome, Roma Instaurata? That was completed in the I440
is fully described in another work that Eisenstein know
The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. I do not th
anyone who has read the works on which Eisenstein relie
agree that her account of them is entirely judicious. And
of the antiquarians is, unfortunately, not exceptional. It i
see how anything but the desire to prove a point could
Eisenstein to repeat the old canard that the humanists knew
nothing about the Middle Ages (I90o-19). The great h
histories-Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine Peo
Biondo, Decades-were precisely histories of medieval Ita
on wide reading in medieval chronicles and an impressive
of digging in the archives. These facts are clearly present
standard works of Ullman, Baron, and Hay.6

6 Arnaldo Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," Studies in His

(London, I966), 5-6; Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical An
ford, 1969), 68-70; B. L. Ullman, "Leonardo Bruni and Humanistic Histor
Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome, I955), 321-344; Hans Baron, "Das Er
historischen Denkens im Humanismus des Quattrocento," Historische Zeitschr
(1932-33), 5-20; Denys Hay, "Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages," Proceed
British Academy, XLV (1959), 97-I28.
ON PRINTING | 273

These problems of method and approach affect more than

isolated points of detail. No craftsman is better than his tools, and
at times the defects of Eisenstein's equipment have injured the
very substance and structure of her book. Both her lively survey
of the change from script to print and her suggestive speculations
about its intellectual consequences suffer seriously from her one-
sided presentation of the evidence.
Eisenstein wishes to emphasize how radical the break was
between the age of scribes and that of printers. To do so she
minimizes the extent to which any text could circulate in stable
form before mechanical means of reproduction became available.
She suggests that almost no reader in any age of manuscripts
could have access to a large number of texts. She both argues and
implies that the scribal book trade was a casual and ill-organized
affair; she clearly holds that no single scribe could produce any
large number of books. She relies heavily on De la Mare's pi-
oneering demonstration that Vespasiano da Bisticci, the most
famous Florentine manuscript dealer, operated on a far smaller
scale than traditional accounts suggest. And she tends to down-
play evidence that lay literacy was increasing rapidly even before
printing was invented.7
I cannot feel that Eisenstein has done justice to the available
evidence. She talks a great deal about Vespasiano's backwardness,
but not at all about that well-organized and productive scribe
Diebold Lauber, who was innovative enough to issue written
broadsides listing and advertising his wares. She says very little
about the effects of the new educational institutions that popped
up like mushrooms in many parts of Europe during the period
1350 to 1500, which must have had a sizeable impact on the level
of literacy among members of the lay elite: for example, the ten
German universities, all with law faculties, that were founded
between 1365 and 1472. And though she criticizes Kristeller for
suggesting that a work preserved in three copies "attained a cer-
tain diffusion" (21 I), she says nothing at all about the well-known
studies by Soudek and Schucan, both inspired by Kristeller. These
two scholars have proved that some of Bruni's translations from

7 Albinia De la Mare, "Vespasiano da Bisticci, Historian and Bookseller," unpub. Ph.D.

diss. (University of London, I965). This rich work, which Eisenstein uses in a highly
selective way, provides much further evidence both for and against her thesis.
274 | ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

the Greek were literally best sellers before printing. Of one of the
works studied, more than 200 manuscript copies survive; of the
other, more than 300. Many more must have perished. The extant
copies belonged to an extraordinary cross-section of the literate,
one that included merchants as well as clerics, teachers as well as
lawyers and notaries. Such cases make a rather formidable excep-
tion to the norms Eisenstein describes.8
Nor does Eisenstein say much about the evidence that a
private scholar could assemble quite a large and varied library of
manuscripts. Niccoli and Salutati had some 800 manuscripts each,
which they catalogued carefully and made available freely to other
scholars. And even a much poorer man like Poggio, while still a
secretary in the Papal Curia, could assemble an astonishingly
diverse collection of Latin and Greek texts of every kind. When
such men could simply buy manuscripts, they did so. More often
they borrowed texts and paid a scribe to copy them. This process
had its difficulties--Poggio referred to the scribes who worked
for him as "the excrement of the universe"-and collectors were
not uncommonly forced to make their own transcripts. Yet t
results were libraries far more diverse and rich than one would
expect from Eisenstein's account.9
Facts like these suggest that the Renaissance might not have
been another transitory revival even if printing had not been
invented. They suggest that the experience of collectors and read-
ers changed rather less sharply than one might expect with the
advent of printed books. And they suggest that earlier scholars
may well have been right to hold that it was new forms of
8 For the text of Lauber's broadside, see Widmann et al., Der deutsche Buchhandel, I, I5-
I6. For a discussion of the document, see Widmann, Geschichte des Buchhandels vom Altertum
bis zur Gegenwart (Wiesbaden, I975), I, 37; Eisenstein mentions Lauber once in passing
(13, n. 28). On universities, see Karl Heinz Burmeister, Das Studium der Rechte im Zeitalter
des Humanismus im deutschen Rechtsbereich (Wiesbaden, 1974), 40-51. On Bruni's transla-
tions, see Josef Soudek, "Leonardo Bruni and his Public: A Statistical and Interpretative
Study of his Annotated Latin Version of the (Pseudo-) Aristotelian Economics," Studies
in Medieval and Renaissance History, V (I968), 49-I36; Luzi Schucan, Das Nachleben von
Basilius Magnus 'ad adolescentes.' Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des christlichen Humanismus (Ge-
neva, I973).
9 B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua, 1963), chs. 9-II; idem and
Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolo Niccoli, Cosimo de
Medici and the Library of San Marco (Padua, 1972), ch. 2. Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus
Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1914), 104-IIO. For further information on the contents of
libraries before the invention of printing, see Pearl Kibre, "The Intellectual Interests
Reflected in Libraries of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," Journal of the History o
Ideas, VII (1946), 257-297.
ON PRINTING 1 275

education and changes in the nature of governments, rather than

the invention of printing, which created the new lay reading
public of the Renaissance. At all events, one must regret that
Eisenstein's decision to write in so polemical a vein led her to
neglect them.
Eisenstein's picture of the printing-house is as bright as that
of the scribe's study is dim. These "new centers of erudition,"
ruled by laymen, became Europe's most active centers of cultural
change. We should think in terms of "many print shops located
in numerous towns, each serving as an intellectual cross-roads, as
a miniature 'international house'-as a meeting place, message
center, and sanctuary all in one .. ." (448). In these new circum-
stances, "the printer's workshop attracted the most learned and
disputatious scholars of the day." "Learned laymen . . . were less
likely to gather on the church steps than in urban workshops
where town and gown met to exchange gossip and news, peer
over editors' shoulders, check copy and read proof" (309). Indeed,
"Most inhabitants of the sixteenth-century Republic of Letters
spent more time in printers' workshops than in 'secluded studies' "
(154).
This description certainly fits a few of the great Renaissance
print-shops at certain periods: those of Aldo Manuzio in the time
of his Academy, Froben in the I520s, and Christopher Plantin in
the 156os. But I fear that it has little to do with the printing shops
that most citizens of the Republic of Letters knew best. Some
shops, to be sure, like that of Anton Koberger in Nuremberg,
were orderly and well-disciplined operations where the workers
arrived and departed at fixed times, while work followed a re-
markably regular schedule. But most plants, as McKenzie and
others have shown, were typical pre-industrial places of work.
Filled with the noise of machinery and the curses of workers
when the presses were in operation, noisy with quarrels and dirty,
the printing-house was not the sort of place that a gentleman
wanted to frequent.10 And we must not let our prejudices prevent

Io On Koberger, see J. C. Zeltner, C. D. Correctorum in typographiis eruditorum centuria

(Nuremberg, 1716), I5-I6. This work remains the richest collection of information on
the activities of correctors in the first two centuries of printing; like many other products
of eighteenth-century erudition, it is unjustly ignored by modern scholars, whose own
works are rarely as rewarding. D. F. McKenzie, "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on
Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices," Studies in Bibliography, XXII
(I969), 1-75; Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972), 48-49.
276 ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

us from seeing that most early modern intellectuals saw them-

selves as gentlemen. They constantly complained that, as Profes-
sor Martinus Crusius of Tubingen put it, "the printers' journey-
men hate to set Greek but want plenty of tips; [they're] an ill-
behaved, ignorant rabble."1l Even scholars whose close friends
and relations were printers sometimes indignantly denied that
they themselves had ever worked for pay in a printing-shop.12
The presence of workmen was not all that made many print-
shops unattractive. There was also the absence of scholars. Nat-
urally there were shops, especially the famous ones, where master,
correctors, or both were learned and original intellectuals. Paolo
Manuzio, for example, bargained with his authors in the perfect
Ciceronian Latin that befitted the scholar whose commentaries on
Cicero were standard works until the nineteenth century. When
Commelin printed a school text of the Greek poet Theognis "to
keep his workmen busy," he could add interesting text-critical
and exegetical notes of his own. Such masters naturally attracted
the interest of scholars. But I fear that Eisenstein has extended
this model of a printing-shop rather too far. Estienne tells us-
admittedly, in a polemical context-that most of his colleague
were ignoramuses who printed whatever works academic con
men offered them, scrimped by refusing to buy good base texts
to print from, and hired hacks to write Greek and Latin prefaces
under their names, which most of them could not even read. As
to the correctors, even Hornschuch admitted that if they were
really learned men, "most of them would be off like a shot from
this sweat-shop, to earn their living by their intelligence an
learning, not by their hands." 13
Ample evidence suggests that most Renaissance print-shops

I Widmann et al., Der deutsche Buchhandel, II, 28: "Die Truckergesellen setzen ungern
Graeca: hetten aber gem vil Trinckgaclts. Ein loses ungelehrts Gesindlin." Cf. also Angel
Poliziano, Epistolarum libri XII (Amsterdam, 1642), 4IO: ". . . semidocti illi qui librorum
excusoribus operam navant" ("those ignoramuses who work for printers").
12 Allen et al., Opus Epistolarum Erasmi, IX, 398 (Ep. 2581); Isaac Casaubon, De rebu
sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI (Geneva, I655), 38b-39a; also cited by Zeltner,
Correctorum centuria, o18-o09.
13 See the interesting series of letters to Marcantonio Natta in Epistolarum Pauli Manutii
libri XII (Leipzig, I603), III, I55-172. Jerome Commelin (ed.), Theognidis, Phocylidis
Pythagorae, Solonis et aliorum poemata gnomica (Utrecht, I659), ep. ded., sig. A 2': ". . . ne
operac, dum majora paramus, cessarent." Henri Estienne, Epistola de statu suae typographiae
in idem (ed. F. G. Roloffius), Pseudo-Cicero (Halle, 1737), ccclxii-ccclxiv. Gaskell and
Bradford, Hornschuch's Orthotypographia, 27.
ON PRINTING | 277

were much less sophisticated places than Eisenstein would have

us believe. Her account conveys little of the variety, fragility, and
tiny scale of the majority of printing shops. One thinks of the
English printers of the sixteenth century, almost all of whom
were small-scale operators of no great skill. One thinks, too, of
the starving petits imprimeurs of the faubourgs Saint Jacques and
Saint Marcel, described so well by Parent, clinging together to
survive in companies that grew and disintegrated with amazing
speed, like primitive organisms seen through a microscope.14
The intellectual level of many printing shops was as low as
their finances were unsound. Consider Estienne's gloomy story
about a corrector he had met:

I met one of these fellows who was doing the job of a corrector
with such savagery that he ruined every passage where he found
the word procos (suitors) by putting porcos (pigs) in its place . . .
"I know," he said, "that porcos is the name of a real animal; but I
don't think that procos refers to animals or anything else in Latin." 15

Anyone experienced in working with early books knows that

many of them were, if not untouched by human hands, at least
uninspected by human brains in the course of printing. Take the
strange case of Paul the Silentiary's epigram from the Greek
Anthology. Since this poem was written in extremely short
verses, Aldo printed it in two columns to save space, with the
verses in the following order:
I 2

3 4
5 6.

When the Giunti reprinted Aldo's edition of the An

ever, they did not bother to read the epigram and
with column 2 following rather than flanking
poem thus became incoherent. The proudest editors
in Europe-Badius, Gelenius, Estienne, and Wech
14 Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literar
I960; orig. pub. 1928), 28I;James Binns, "STC Latin Books: Evidence f
Practice," The Library, XXXII (1977), 1-27. Annie Parent, Les metiers
XVIesiecle (1535-1560) (Geneva, I974), I33-I35.
I5 Henri Estienne, Artis Typographicae querimonia, in idem, Pseudo
ccclxxvii.
 278 I ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

another proceeded to reprint the poem in the same unintelligible

form, thus providing striking proof that not one of them em-
ployed a corrector who knew Greek. Worse printers made even
worse blunders. No wonder, then, that some texts deteriorated
so far in the course of several editions as to become unintelligi-
ble.16

After all, printers were businessmen. They had to make

money. When, as often happened, this need or the practical dif-
ficulties it imposed interfered with scholars' plans, the scholars
tended to fly off the handle. Often they were blind to the printer's
point of view. Martin Luther, enraged at the bad state of some
proofs he had been sent, refused to send any more copy "until
I'm convinced that these Schmutzfinken and Geldmacher are less
interested in their own profit than in the books' utility for read-
ers." True, he later changed his mind and sent the proofs. But he
never ceased to berate the printers who not only reprinted his
works without permission but also made such a bad job of them
"that at many points I didn't recognize my own work." 17 Simi-
larly, Nicolaas Heinsius saw the Elzeviers' insistence on printing
his works in their favorite small format as the result not of com-
mercial necessity but of an incomprehensible stinginess: "Our
printers have been irremediably infected by that wretched custom.
They think their books are worthless unless they can be carried
around handily by someone who is out for a walk."18 Given
these clashing values and interests, it is not surprising that so
many scholars felt that the association with commerce had ruined
what could have been the liberal art of printing.19
I would not deny that Eisenstein's brilliant picture conveys
something of the feel of a great house like Plantin's. It is certainly

I6 A. A. Renouard, Annales de l'Imprimerie des Aide, ou Histoire des trois Manuce et de leurs
editions (Paris, i834; 3d ed.), 43. Aldo, too, sometimes made use of incompetent correctors,
as well-informed contemporaries complained. See Allen et al., Opus Epistolarum Erasmi,
XI, 288-289 (Ep. 3o00); Daniel Wyttenbach, Opuscula (Leiden, 1821), I, 360-36I. On the
deterioration of some other classical texts, see the evidence collected by Estienne, Epistola
de statu suae typographiae, cccxxxviii-cccli.
17 Widmann et al., Der deutsche Buchhandel, II, I6, 327.
I8 Hans Bots (ed.), Correspondance de Jacques Dupuy et de Nicolas Heinsius (1646-1656)
(The Hague, 1971), 78. On Heinsius's relations with the Elzeviers, see the exemplary
study by F. F. Blok, Nicolaas Heinsius in dienst van Christina van Zweden (Delft, I949), 92-
99.

I9 See the evidence collected by Zeltner, Correctorum centuria, I8-20; Orlandi, Aldo
Manuzio Editore, I, I70. Luther quoted in Widmann et al., Der deutsche Buchhandel, II, 327-
328.
ON PRINTING | 279

true that bookshops-which, however, were not always printing-

shops as well, especially in the seventeenth century-and the great
Frankfurt bookfair were gathering places for intellectuals. It is
also true that many of the most original products of early modern
scholarship and science-Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Ter-
rarum (Antwerp, 1570) and Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis
Fabrica (Basel, 1543)-were the result of unusually close collabo-
ration between innovative scholars and responsive printers. But
I do think that she paints a pastel-colored picture of the printing
house and of the connections that it fostered between town and
gown. I wonder if, even in those presses that became the meeting
places of learned men, it was not the attraction of the master-
printer's scholarship, rather than the nature of his activity, th
drew others to him. In that sense, was the attraction of Plantin'
printing-house so very different from that of Cujas' study? W
ought to remember that when Lipsius and Plantin held their mos
serious conversations about religion, they left the work-place an
went for a long walk in the country.20
The exaggerations in Eisenstein's account of the shift from
script to print inevitably affect her account of the shift's ramif
cations for intellectuals. She holds that the writer in an age of
scribes had a fundamentally different relation to his public tha
the writer of a printed book. The scribal author could not hop
that his work would be distributed in anything like a stable form,
or even under his name. He could not bring out his privat
idiosyncrasies for public inspection as Montaigne could in h
printed Essays. Nor could he hope to win lasting fame from work
that were so unlikely to be preserved. "The conditions of scrib
culture," as Eisenstein remarks in another context, "thus held
narcissism in check" (233). Indeed, it is probably wrong even to
speak of "publication before printing," as scholars sometimes do
Here, too, I fear, there is a measure of exaggeration. Surely
an author like Petrach deserves more part in the development o
the modern notion of authorship than Eisenstein accords him. H
20 Certainly some great printers took enormous pride in the excellent work that thei
craftsmen did and made no bones about working right alongside their men in the sho
Paolo Manuzio added a legend to each of the three volumes of his 1554 edition
Demosthenes, stating that he himself had served as corrector (Zeltner, Correctorum centuri
334). But I would still hold that Eisenstein overstates her case. On Lipsius and Plantin, s
B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano (1527-1598) (London, 1972), 102, I56-I57-a stimulatin
book, but one to be used with caution. See Basil Hall, "A Sixteenth-Century Miscellany
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXVI (1975), 318-320.
280 I ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

took the greatest care to edit and polish his works before he
allowed them to be seen. He cut up and rearranged his letters,
not so much to portray himself in a better light as to give what
he felt would be a clearer picture of his spiritual development. He
even concluded one of the collections of his letters with a formal
"Letter to Posterity," in which he speaks to the future reader very
much as man to man. True, he feared that some of his works
might not survive to find readers, and Eisenstein helps us to grasp
the pathos of that fear. Yet he clearly did not find in scribal culture
the fearful constraint on self-expression that Eisenstein de-
scribes.21
In fact, I am not entirely convinced that the process of pub-
lication itself changed so radically as Eisenstein holds, especially
from the author's point of view. Kristeller showed long ago that
publication followed the same course for a fifteenth-century au-
thor whether the book in question was to be copied or printed.
The author either made or had made a fair copy of his work,
called the archetypum. This he gave either to a scribe to copy or
to a printer to print. The book was said to be "published" (editus)
"on the day on which the author first allowed the completed
archetypum to be reproduced by others." In either case, the au-
thor's part of the activity of publication remained scribal in char-
acter.22

21 Aldo S. Bernardo, "Letter-Splitting in Petrarch's Familiares," Speculum, XXXIII

(1958), 236-241. For the Latin text of "Letter to Posterity" see Petrarch (ed. Giovanni
Ponte), Opere (Milan, I968), 886-900; English translation in David Thompson (ed.),
Petrarch: A Humanist Among Princes (New York, 1971), I-I3. Petrarch expresses the
suspicion that future readers will "have heard the bare titles" of his works: Petrarch,
Opere, 886; Thompson (ed.), Petrarch, I. In fact the Epistula posteritati remained incomplete
and was therefore not included among Petrarch, Seniles. But the majority of Petrarch's
works did circulate in a very carefully finished form; see Hans Baron, From Petrarch to
Leonardo Bruni (Chicago, I968), 7-IOI. In braving the difficulties of publishing his works-
and in believing that they would win him eternal fame-Petrarch was, of course, following
a path that the Roman authors he knew best had laid out. See esp. Horace, Odes III.30 and
Epistles, 1.20; Ovid, Tristia, IV.io. He thus had more reason than Eisenstein suggests to
believe that his works would survive pretty much intact. In general, Eisenstein's account
fits the histories of technical texts-lexica, grammars, commentaries, and handbooks-and
vernacular literary texts far better than it does that of classical or late medieval literary
texts, in Greek and Latin, which were valued for the exact form of their wording.
22 Paul Kristeller, "De traditione operum Marsilii Ficini," Supplementum Ficinianum
(Florence, 1937), I, clxviii-clxxxi, esp. clxix-clxx, clxxiii. Kristeller's analysis has now
been supplemented and slightly revised in its details by Silvia Rizzo, II lessicofilologico degli
umanisti (Rome, 1973), 303-323; but his general arguments remain valid. Rizzo's work is
essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the relations among intellectuals,
ON PRINTING 28I

If we combine these facts with the findings of stu

sixteenth-century printing-with the fact that few authors
wrote in printing-houses, and the fact that few even ca
printing house to correct proofs-we may see a less rad
in the life-experience of writers than Eisenstein sugg
take into account the vast amount of time that any ear
writer spent in copying-in taking notes, copying unpu
rare books, and writing his own works-we may be e
inclined to feel that the pace of change has been ex
Scholars remained scribes for a long time. Some of us s
In the end, however, it is less the process of publica
its intellectual consequences which Eisenstein seeks to i
Her book must be tested as a piece of intellectual histor
regard, too, it not only brings rewards but inspires m
Eisenstein tries to show that it was printing, not i
developments in Italian culture, that did the most to
Renaissance sense of history. To prove this point she m
a number of influential modern interpretations. She m
for example, that Panofsky was wrong to suggest tha
aissance came to see the ancient world "from a fixed distance"
and thus to gain a "total and rationalized view" of it. In Eisen-
stein's words, "That a 'total rationalized' view of any past civi-
lization could be developed before the output of uniform reference
guides and gazeteers seems implausible to me" (I86). She admits
that such "scribal scholars" as Lorenzo Valla had "a growin
sensitivity to anachronism." But they lacked a "fixed spatial-tem
poral reference frame" (I87). They had little sense of the chro
ological order in which ancient texts had been composed or
the great disagreements that had sometimes separated their au
thors. And to reproach early scholars for making historical or

scribes, and printers during the fifteenth century. See also the excellent case study b
Helene Harth, "Niccolo Niccoli als literarischer Zensor. Untersuchungen zur Textg
chichte von Poggios 'De Avaritia,'" Rinascimento, VII (i967), 29-53.
23 On authors' participation in proof-correction, which took every form from standi
over the printers while they worked to complete neglect, see the evidence collected b
Simpson, Proof-Reading; Widmann, "'Die Lektiire unendlicher Korrekturen,'" Archivff
Geschichte des Buchwesens, V (i963-64), 777-826; Binns, "STC Latin Books." See also
Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, I I . For evidence of the "scribal" efforts of
scholars long after the invention of printing, see, for example, Bibliotheca Universita
Leidensis, Codices Manuscripti, II: Codices Scaligerani (praeter Orientales) (Leiden, I91o); ibid
IV: Codices Perizoniani (Leiden, 1946).
282 | ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

philological errors, as Seznec and others have done, is to forget

the inevitably narrow limits of what they could know.24
Here, too, I fear, Eisenstein's eagerness to prove her thesis
has led her to play down a large amount of contrary evidence.
Why Renaissance men developed a new historical sense I cannot
say. But I do know that they began to do so earlier and had far
more success at the enterprise than Eisenstein believes.
One finds a new interest in historical and philological ques-
tions among Italian intellectuals from the very beginning of the
fourteenth century. Take the case of Giovanni of Verona and the
two Plinys. Both the Natural History of the elder Pliny and the
letters of his nephew, Pliny the Younger, which vividly described
the uncle's life and death, were widely read in the Middle Ages.
Vincent of Beauvais, for example, quoted hugely from both
works. Yet both he and other medieval readers attributed both
works to the same man, even though the letters made clear that
this view was impossible. For some reason, Giovanni read the
two Plinys in a new way. He realized that the elder Pliny could
not have written a letter about his own death. And he found this
discovery so exciting that he wrote a little treatise about it, which
began "It is known that there were two Plinys." The treatise, in
turn, found some diffusion in Renaissance manuscripts of the
Natural History-a fact that suggests that Giovanni's interests and
viewpoint were shared by others.25
Discoveries of this kind multiplied throughout the fourteenth
century. Petrarch, in particular, made his life into a joyous ex-
pedition across the mare magnum of classical literature. Modern
scholars, especially Nolhac and Billanovich, have taught us to
follow the stages of his journey in the margins of his many books.
And they have proved that he amassed a systematic enough
knowledge of the ancient world to solve many technical problems
in a way that can still be accepted. He emended corrupt passages
in Livy with impressive dexterity. And he did a better job than
a whole team of twentieth-century classicists at identifying some

24 For the fullest statement of his views, see Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences
in Western Art (New York, I969). Jean Seznec (trans. Barbara F. Sessions), The Survival
of the Pagan Gods (New York, 1953).
25 Elmer Truesdell Merrill, "On the Eight-Book Tradition of Pliny's Letters in Verona,"
Classical Philology, V (19o1), 175-188. Giovanni de Matociis, Brevis adnotatio de duobus
Pliniis Veronensibus, ibid., 186: "Plinii duo fuisse noscuntur, eodem nomine et praenomin-
ibus appellati .. ."
ON PRINTING 283

of the sources from which the ancient scholar Servius drew his
enormous commentary on Virgil.26
Later generations were even more sophisticated and knowl-
edgeable. Salutati and Valla discovered and exposed clear chron-
ological errors in the ancient accounts of Roman history. Bruni
wrote a perceptive and well-documented life of Aristotle that set
the philosopher's life into a general chronological system (that of
the Greek Olympiads) and carefully distinguished his ideas from
those of his teacher Plato. Polenton compiled a comprehensive
and critical history of Latin literature. He assimilated many of the
discoveries of earlier scholars; his section on the Plinys, for ex-
ample, begins: "Lest anyone be deceived by their identical names,
I think I should begin by pointing out that there were two Plinys,
uncle and nephew." And he added new ones of his own. He
showed that Cicero could not have praised Virgil's sixth Eclogue
even if ancient scholars claimed that he had: "Chronology shows
that Cicero, who died before the battle of Philippi, could not
possibly have praised what Virgil wrote after it." Biondo and
Cyriac of Ancona assembled with painstaking care the material
relics of the ancient world.27 Biondo also rightly argued that the
ancient Romans must have spoken Latin, not Italian-thus show-
ing a considerable ability to imagine a civilization different from
his own.28 By the end of the fifteenth century such scholars as

26 Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarque et l'humanisme (Paris, 1907; 2d ed.), 2v.; Giuseppe Billan-
ovich, "Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, XIV (I95I), I37-208; idem, Un nuovo esempio delle scoperte e delle letture del Petrarca.
L"'Eusebio-Girolamo-PseudoProspero" (Krefeld, I954). I cite only two of Billanovich's most
important works. The serious student will find many more studies by him and his students
in the journal Italia Medioevale e Umanistica. For a particularly revealing case study, see
Lucia A. Ciapponi, "I1 'De Architectura' di Vitruvio nel primo Umanesimo," Italia
Medioevale e Umanistica, III (1960), 59-99. On Petrarch and Servius, see Eduard Fraenkel,
Kleine Beitrdge zur klassischen Philologie (Rome, 1964), II, 372-373.
27 Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati, 98-99; H. J. Erasmus, The Origins of Rome
in Historiography from Petrarch to Perizonius (Assen, 1962), 28-29 (though excellent as an
analysis of Valla's argument, this work somewhat overstates Valla's superiority to his
contemporaries); Bruni, Aristotilis vita, in Ingemar Diiring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biograph-
ical Tradition (G6teborg, 1957), 168-178; Sicco Polenton (ed. B. L. Ullman), Scriptorum
illustrium Latinae linguae libri XVIII (Rome, 1928), 227, 82. In addition to Weiss, The
Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, see Riccardo Fubini, "Biondo, Flavio," Di-
zionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1968), X, 536-559; Bernard Ashmole, "Cyriac of
Ancona," Proceedings of the British Academy, XLV (1959), 25-41; for a contrasting case, see
Charles Mitchell, "Felice Feliciano Antiquarius," ibid., XLVII (1961), 197-221.
28 John Rowe, "The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology," American Anthropolo-
gist, LXVII (1965), 1-20, reprinted in Regna Darnell (ed.), Readings in the History of
Anthropology (New York, I974), 72.
284 | ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

Angelo Poliziano had arrived at an extraordinarily sophisticated

historical understanding of both Latin and Greek culture and had
formulated most of the technical methods which modern scholars
still use in editing and explicating ancient sources.29
Eisenstein is right to say, as others have before her, that
printing dramatically affected the nature of scholarship-that it
broadened the range of available sources, made it much easier to
learn Greek, and made cross-checking and collation of texts far
more practicable.30 But she certainly exaggerates the historical
ignorance and ineptness of those whom she demeaningly calls
"scribal scholars." By trying to prevent scholars from modern-
izing the Renaissance unduly, Eisenstein has made the Renaissance
less modern than it really was.
Eisenstein's account of the Reformation seems to me alto-
gether more rewarding. She is right to point out that the rela
tionship between printing and the Reformation did not begin with
the publication of Luther's first broadside. Printing did offer ne
careers and a newly widespread power to the reforming literat
of Erasmus's generation. It did offer new opportunities to ped
dlers of indulgences. I suspect that she is also on the right track
when she suggests that printing by its very nature worked against
clerical authority.
Yet here, too, exaggeration and unimaginative research
sometimes harm her arguments. One would not suspect from he
account that there was a rather successful Catholic translation of
the Bible into German-much less that it appeared in print before
Luther's complete Bible and went through some o00 editions,
seventeen of them during the sixteenth century.31 And her ac-
count of Simon's contributions to biblical exegesis is less history
than travesty. More engagement with the sources, then, could
have enriched this already fascinating chapter and made possible
a more subtle approach to the problems it raises.32
29 See now Grafton, "On the Scholarship of Politian and Its Context," Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XL (1977), I50-I88, with extensive references to olde
studies.

30 As Eisenstein says, this point had been made before, above all by P. S. Allen, Erasmus:
Lectures and Wayfaring Sketches (Oxford, 1934), 30-40.
31 Widmann, Geschichte des Buchhandels, I, 69.
32 Cf. Eisenstein, 321, with Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Suivant
la Copie, imprimee h Paris, I680), I, I6-23, 49-50. Whatever Simon was doing-and that
is a complex question-he was not "casting in the role of an archivist the prophet who
was once believed to have received the Ten Commandments from God on Sinai .. ."
ON PRINTING 285

About the Scientific Revolution, finally, Eisenstein makes

some of her best points. Her whole second volume is allotted to
science. It makes fresher reading than the earlier chapters, perhaps
because it is based on more recent research. It rests on a compel-
ling, though incomplete, account of the historiography of science
Many of its arguments carry conviction. In particular, it does
seem that the revival and transformation of such descriptive sci
ences as anatomy, botany, and zoology clearly stemmed, althoug
in different ways, from the new possibilities offered by printin
for the checking and correction of data. And her suggestion tha
the connection between Protestantism and science may have re-
sulted from the relative lack of censorship in Protestant Europ
seems plausible.
But even Eisenstein's volume on science suffers from a ten-
dency to exaggeration. She overestimates the instability of man-
uscript texts and the difficulties involved in gaining access to
them. She underestimates the effectiveness of the communications
networks that bound intellectuals together across Europe long
before I450-above all, the networks that linked monastic houses
and universities. She plays down evidence that does not fit her
thesis-for example, Regiomontanus's mastery, derived entirely
from manuscript sources, of precisely those problems in astron-
omy that most exercised Copernicus.33
These remarks have been intended only to begin a debate
that will probably be long and lively. But they do suggest that
Eisenstein's enterprise suffers from two flaws at its heart: inade-
quate foundation in research and exaggerated claims of explana-
tory power. Even the most suggestive pages of the book contain
too much that is misleading.
Eisenstein considered it more "urgent" to amalgamate her
ideas in this form than to do further reading, but I confess that I
am not certain why she felt this way. Her views have received
extended expression in some of the most influential historical
journals in the Western world. Since she began to work in this
field, moreover, intellectual historians have begun to show far
33 See, e.g., M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, a.d. 500 to goo
(London, I957; 2d ed.), 229; L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A
Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford, I974; 2d ed.), 82-I05.
Eisenstein's account quite rightly stresses Regiomontanus's pioneering activity as a pub-
lisher (584-588); she lays much less stress on the great originality of his work as an
astronomer.
286 | ANTHONY T. GRAFTON

more interest in the phenomenon and the effects of prin

best recent American survey of Renaissance and Refo
culture-Eugene F. Rice, Jr., The Foundations of Early
Europe, 1460-1559 (New York, I970)-begins with a lo
cussion of printing and its effects. Historians of science h
begun to show more interest in the effects of printing
formation of scientific disciplines. And a vastly product
influential group of historians of printing, including both
and American scholars, has done much to give the subje
publicity and to win younger scholars to its study.
circumstances, Eisenstein might well have taken the time
out case studies using primary sources.34
"Books do furnish a room"; whether they do anythin
depends on those who read them far more than on th
copy or print them. The story of early modern intellectu
in the end be a history of ideas, however unfashiona
enterprise has come to be. Like all good histories of ideas
have to be based on the primary sources. The role of scr
printers will certainly form part of that history, and we
that in some part to Eisenstein's work. But the story
medium cannot be substituted for the story of the messa

34 For Eisenstein's earlier publications, see n. 2 above. For the history of sci
for example, Robert S. Westman, "Three Responses to the Copernican Theory
Praetorius, Tycho Brahe, and Michael Maestlin," in idem (ed.), The Copernican Ac
(Los Angeles, I975), 285-345. For recent work on the history of printing and
see Eisenstein, 29, n. 71; 30, n. 72.