European Blockbooks

Lately I’ve been looking at a lot of medieval manuscripts.  And thinking about mostly just… medieval manuscripts.  Which is great; I’ve seen amazing things in the last few days and my dissertation is coming along nicely.  But I’d like to think about something else for a bit, so while this topic is actually kinda still medieval, at least it’s a form of printing.

Blockbooks appeared in northern Europe at almost the same time as movable type, during the mid-fifteenth century, and may have developed from the printing of patterned fabric, individual devotional images, and playing cards.  They can be differentiated from other types of early printed books because they didn’t use movable type: text was always carved into the block along with the images.  This process is labor-intensive and sort of a bitch if you screw up or decide to change something, but it allowed for quick, cheap reproduction.  Pages were printed on one side by rubbing the paper against the carved and inked block, and the blank sides were often glued together before binding.  Hand-coloring of the illustrations was also common.  These were cheap, popular, and ephemeral publications, similar in that way to the broadsides that would become ubiquitous in later centuries.  Blockbooks were probably owned by a range of people, including the illiterate, and may have been common teaching aids.  This is mostly speculation, though, as few copies remain and we have little material evidence of their use.

Blockbooks developed into a handful of extremely specific genres, usually based on older manuscript books and traditional illustration cycles.  Here are examples of a few:

Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying): You’d think that once at the deathbed there couldn’t be much left in the way of sin.  After all, you can’t move enough to commit murder or adultery, and you’re probably not in the mood for gluttony.  Unfortunately, this is incorrect.  In the medieval Christian worldview death was a time of significant temptation and obviously the most important time to resist.  The Ars moriendi were guides to a good death, explaining the types of sin that the dying could fall into, and counseling both the sick and his or her family on how to behave at this crucial time.  In the illustrations saints and demons fight over the soul of a dying man, who eventually goes to heaven.  In the image below, from the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (which has a nice selection of digitized blockbooks), the dying man is tempted by devils into deathbed-specific sins such as despair, impatience, and pride.

Apocalypse:  These blockbooks are based on the Book of Revelation, one of the most visually interesting parts of the Christian Bible, and their format and illustrations come from manuscript traditions that are extant in an illuminated Apocalypse held by the Bodleian Library.   The image below, of the mouth of Hell, is from a hand-colored Apocalypse at the University of Glasgow, which was featured as their website’s book of the month in August 2005.  The site includes lots of images and a really excellent discussion of this particular book of the Bible and the blockbooks it inspired—highly recommended.

Danse Macabre (Dance of Death): This was a widely popular series of illustrations that originated in the late Middle Ages, probably as a response to widespread mortality during the plague, and it appeared in many variations in books and artwork.  In each image Death takes someone, from children, paupers and farmers to merchants, scholars, knights, kings, and popes; the lesson being that Death can come at any moment and he doesn’t care how much money or power you have.  Potentially humbling for the rich, darkly humorous for the downtrodden.  BibliOdyssey has posted a nice set of images from a German Totentanz at the University of Heidelberg: below, death takes (what I assume is) a haughty queen.  Interestingly, in most of the pictures Death looks jovial, but here he seems pretty annoyed by the queen’s attitude.  The coloring in these is also nicely done.

Biblia Pauperum (Poor Man’s Bible):  Some might say it’s the ideal Bible for the easily distracted internet generation.  The Biblia Pauperum compresses the the whole thing into 40 pages— mostly illustrations of the life of Christ.  From the Herzog August Bibliothek, a page featuring a scene from Genesis.  I really like the serpent, though a it’s bit odd that Eve seems to be the one offering the fruit.  Here you can see that the quality of script carved into a piece of wood could easily be less than optimal.  The text in the Ars moriendi above is much better.

Typecasting on Film

Via Typoretum, short films featuring Stan Nelson of Atelier Press, part of a planned 30 min documentary on letterpress printing called Out of Sorts.  These four shorts are extremely well-done, making it easy to see and understand what’s happening in the fairly complex process of type production.  The assembly of a mold from its component parts, which I’ve never seen on another video, is worth its metaphorical weight in gold.  And the tempering segment is quite exciting— another fine example of why books are not as safe and boring as they’re made out to be.  I’ve listed the films in chronological order below (just keep in mind that the first starts a bit abruptly with the tempering of the matrix rather than its initial creation).  I’m looking forward to seeing more clips and the completed film.

1: Striking and tempering matrices

2: Assembling a 72 pt. mold

3: Casting type

4: Dressing type

Watch your backs stone tablet makers!

Got Medieval just lambasted Arianna Huffington’s confusion regarding book history.  Don’t miss this.  It’s very funny and there’s a graph that I want to hang on my wall.

Reading List Update:

The excellent Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Jonathan Rose and Simon Eliot, is now available in a significantly lower-priced paperback edition in both the US and Europe.  (It is available in all three formats from amazon in the US.)

That is not most books.

I wanted to point out a great interview at The Casual Optimist with Ben and Eric of the Book Cover Archive.  They talk about the impetus behind the site, favorite cover art, and books they’d love to redesign.  The last question is the inevitable ‘Are we finally seeing the end of print?’  The response is thoughtful and, in my opinion, spot on.  Eric explains that most books are not anything special, and that e-books could actually lead to more readers and a renewed emphasis on fine books and independent bookshops.

(That’s my opinion as a book lover, techie, and environmentalist.  The historian part of my brain shouts, ‘But we can learn about a culture from their trashy novels!’  Oh, shut up for once historian lobe.)

What to Read…

…if you’re interested in book history: a short list of foundational works and other helpful material.  This list is very Europe and print-centric, but I would encourage you to become comfortable with the theoretical aspects of the material and then branch out to whatever sub-topics interest you.

The Coming of the Book (L’Apparition du livre) by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1958):  Lucien Febvre was one of the founders of the influential French Annales School, which emphasized a sociological approach to history rather than the ‘important people/events’ perspective that had dominated nineteenth century historical discourse.  Whereas earlier historians had analyzed the impacts of specific printers or nations, Febvre and Martin saw printing as a social movement intimately connected to the intellectual and cultural environments of early modern Europe.  The Coming of the Book provides a detailed overview of printing history, beginning with the introduction of paper into Europe and moving on to the technological issues of printing, the structure of printing firms and the journeyman system, the geographical distribution of printing, the book as commodity, and the cultural impact of print.

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts by D.F. McKenzie (1986):  This book, based on a series of lectures given in 1985, is a crucial theoretical work in book history.  McKenzie explains that the importance of bibliography (the description and classification of texts) lies in what it can tell us about history.  Rather than a dry recitation of facts about the structure of a text, bibliography should be used to establish a broad socio-historical understanding of text producers, book readers, and their cultures.  Most importantly, he demonstrates that the structural aspects of a text (of any kind) affect its reception and use, and explains the impacts of evolving materiality on reception.  (Some of his ground-breaking work was done on New Zealand history and the reception of the Treaty of Waitangi; it is included in the volume.)

The History and Power of Writing (Histoire et pouvirs de l’écrit) by Henri-Jean Martin (1988):  Writing is such an integral part of our lives that we seldom step back to look at it critically, asking what meaning it had to past societies and what it means today.  It is important, though, to understand the ways that our ancestors viewed the written word.  Similar to The Coming of the Book, The History and Power of Writing is a social history of writing throughout western history, from the development of the first alphabets to industrial printing.  My favorite part was Martin’s discussion of writing in ancient Greece, where the art was viewed with skepticism as a mental crutch, particularly by Plato.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979):  This is definitely the most controversial work of book history.  Eisenstein’s thesis is that the fixed and stable nature of print led directly to the scientific and Protestant revolutions because, for the first time, many accurate, identical copies of books could be quickly produced and distributed.  Her book generated intense debate immediately upon its release and in the years following, but today most book historians reject the bulk of Eisenstein’s theory as overly deterministic.  Rather than social change occuring as the result of a specific technology, they see printing as one part of a complex of cultural, intellectual, religous, and technological changes.  Additionally, historians such as Adrian Johns have pointed out that printed text, especially in its first centuries, was not as fixed or reliable as Eisenstein described it.  For responses to Eisenstein, see ‘How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?’ by Anthony Grafton, in The American Historical Review, volume 107 (1) pp. 87-106 and also ‘The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book’, the introduction to The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns.  Digging deeper, Eisenstein’s work owes a debt to that of Marshall McLuhan – The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962).

The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns (1998):  Our society automatically attributes different forms of authority to books.  We trust that the title, author, and publisher listed are accurate and that the contents are what they claim to be, but this has not always been the case.  Johns’s lengthy but thoroughly engaging work provides an in-depth description of the culture of book production in early modern London, from the roles of authors, booksellers, and printers to the influence of the government and the powerful Stationer’s Company.  But, beyond the descriptions of everyday life in the early modern book world, he lays out a powerful argument about the nature of print and the ways that authority is not inherent in the technology (as Eisenstein states), but is constructed by individuals and social forces.  I would recommend this work not only to those studying the histories of books and technology, but to anyone interested in modern copyright law and piracy issues.

The Business of Enlightenment by Roger Darnton (1979):  I’ve been a fan of Darnton since my undergrad days, before I even knew that book history was its own field.  A cultural historian focusing on eighteenth-centuy France, Darnton directs much of his gaze to books and their creators.  The Business of Enlightenment explores, in great detail, the personalities, business decisions, and social forces behind the publishing history of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.  If you’re not up to 600+ pages on an encyclopedia then I definitely recommend his other books, especially The Great Cat Massacre (1984), a collection of essays on ‘episodes in French cultural history’ revolving around text and written in Darnton’s lucid and engaging style.  And yes, there is a real cat massacre.

ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter and Nicholas Barker (first published 1952, continually revised and updated):  This is a delightful book for anyone interested in book collecting and book history.  A reference work that’s actually intended to be read, it’s essentially an encyclopedia of important book terms with often witty explanations (as an example, see the entry for ‘chronological obsession’).  While the ABC is available as a free pdf from the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, I recommend checking out the print edition, as part of the enjoyment of the book comes from the labeling of its parts with their correct names such as ‘free-endpaper’, ‘fore-edge’, and ‘pagination’.

A few more that I don’t have time to write about:

• A History of Reading in the West ed. by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier
• A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
• The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose
• The Order of Books and The Culture of Print by Roger Chartier
• The English Common Reader by Richard Altick
• A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism by Jerome McGann
• Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

Memento Mori Part II

A few weeks ago I wrote about the evolution of anatomy illustrations, promising that the second part of the series would appear the following week.  If you’ve been waiting, I apologize, but I have a good excuse—Scientific American contacted me about doing a similar slideshow for their website, which has just gone live.  Very exciting!  There are ten images, a couple are based on my previous post, but most completely new: check it out.

Memento Mori Part I

Quid me mihi detrahis? Who is it that tears me from myself?     – Ovid, The Metamorphosis Book VI

I recently began an essay on the evolution of images in anatomy books between 1450 and 1800, and I thought I’d share some of my early research.  All the images I’ve used are from the National Library of Medicine, which has an excellent historical anatomy exhibit.  Clicking on the pictures below will take you to the appropriate section of the NLM website for more images, biographies, and bibliographies.  (And a word of warning, some might find the illustrations graphic, disturbing, or not safe for work.)  Part II will hopefully appear sometime next week.

Sources:

• Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning by Andrea Carlino
• The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture by Jonathan Sawday
• The Art of Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today by Rifkin, Ackerman, and Folkenberg.

—

Although curiosity about the body has long been a feature of human culture, anatomical science stagnated during the Middle Ages, a time when the words of classical authorities were valued over discovery.  Rather than working from observation or experimentation, medieval scholars compiled, rewrote, and annotated older medical works, particularly those of Galen.  It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages and Renaissance that increasingly literate and intellectual segments of society, renewed interest in science and discovery, and advances in printing resulted in the production of new anatomical treatises that eclipsed the achievements of the past and led to the foundation of modern anatomy.  But these new volumes were not purely scientific or didactic.  Luxury texts intended for an erudite, upper-class audience beyond the medical profession, they mixed art, science, and religion to create dramatic meditations on the natures of flesh and soul and the meaning of the body’s short existence.

Fasciculus de medicina

The first printed anatomy book was published in Venice in 1492 by the Gregorio brothers.  A Latin translation of a work by a little known German physician named Johannes de Ketham, it was planted firmly in the medieval medical tradition.  The book, which included treatises on subjects such as bloodletting, urinoscopy, and dissection, became an important teaching text, but its sumptuous woodcuts were also geared toward an audience of wealthy intellectuals.  A major success, it was republished in 1493 with new illustrations showing contemporary medical scenes including a dissection, and it appeared in twelve editions within a decade.  Though produced by a workshop, the designs are good examples of the clean, classical style of Venetian Renaissance illustration.  Below is the traditional zodiac man as well as a dissection scene, which portrays an anatomy lesson as performed in the late Middle Ages.  The young lector reads from an anatomical text, most likely Galen, while the sector, an uneducated barber/surgeon, preforms the dissection, and the ostensor, a high ranking professor, translates the words of the lector and directs the sector.  At this time dissection was not an act of observation and discovery, but was a tightly controlled public ritual intended to reinforce the authority of classical medical texts.  The illustration indicates the importance of the text by the prominent placement of the lector relative to the other figures, including the higher ranking ostensor.

Isagogae breves

This book, published in 1522 and 1523 by the humanist physician Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, is credited as the first printed anatomy text based on direct observation of the body.  Berengario was deeply skeptical of traditional anatomical practice, saying that a good anatomist ‘does not believe anything in his discipline simply because of the spoken or written word: what is required here is sight and touch.’  Though the woodcuts are artistically and anatomically crude, part of their importance lies in their reflection of Italian Renaissance culture.  Berengario was an art collector, and many of the figures are based on rediscovered classical art, religious images, and important works by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.  Berengario recognized the importance of anatomical knowledge for artists, and he recommended his book for their use as well as that of medical students.  The half-flayed figure below is in the traditional pose of an Apollo with light rays.  Other illustrations represent the redemptive potential of dissection, which was believed to help atone for the sins of the criminals whose bodies were commonly used for this purpose.  Several images of partially draped female nudes indicate a tension between sexual modesty and the display of dissected reproductive organs.

De humani corporis fabrica

One of the most famous medical texts of all time, The Fabric of the Human Body (1543) by Andreas Vesalius, was the first truly modern anatomical book.  Vesalius was a Flemish surgeon of the University of Padua who had been trained in the Galenic tradition.  Based on his own experience with dissection he rejected Galen as the ultimate authority and argued that surgeons should make their own observations, and he corrected many Galenic mistakes, such as the multi-lobed liver, that had been passed from text to text through the Middle Ages.  Vesalius and his collaborators were also some of the first people to grasp the full potential of the printed book, using the title page, illustrations, initials, and chapter/paragraph subdivisions to create a harmonious and practical work.  Vesalius’s illustrations were most likely based on his own careful drawings, and he worked closely with the woodcut artist Jan Stefan van Kalkar, a member of Titian’s studio.  This partnership resulted in extremely accurate and detailed work, better than anything that proceeded it.  But these are not just sterile medical images—the cadavers display human emotions of sadness, despair, and mourning.  The skeleton below ponders mortality in a memento mori which would reappear throughout western culture, including in Shakespeare.  The second appears to pray, or to be bent in agony.  Throughout the book dead trees and barren landscapes, representing death, are contrasted with churches and the promise of eternal life.

De dissectione partium corporis humani

Charles Estienne, a member of the famous printing family of Paris, began work on this book during the 1530s, hoping it would replace the Isagogae breves of Berengario.  He had been a student in Paris at the same time as Vesalius, sharing the former’s interest in dissection and the belief that direct observation was more important than the words of authorities.  Unfortunately, while Estienne’s book contributed some new discoveries to the science of anatomy, it was plagued by legal issues regarding the artwork and was not published until two years after De humani corporis fabrica.  One of the interesting aspects of Estienne’s book is that it includes a number of woodcuts of nude women that were, according to Rifkin, originally intended as ‘genteel humanist erotica’, but were altered by partial dissection and the inclusion of anatomical information relating to reproductive anatomy.  Included are Bathsheba being spied upon by David (below), as well as the goddesses Venus, Antiope, and Proserpina.  A good example of the complex relationships between art, medicine, books, and sex during the early modern era.

CSI: Rare Book Room (cue the dramatic music)

There’s a piece in Wired today on a North Carolina State University professor who’s investigating the use of DNA analysis for medieval manuscripts.  He hopes to create a database of manuscripts with known provenance for comparison with unknown manuscripts.  While I find this intriguing, and do think it could be a good tool in combination with textual and palaeographic methods, I find myself becoming wary at talk of one technology solving all our historical problems.

In addition to pinpointing manuscript origin, such a taxonomy could flesh out the as-yet-murky transition from monastic to commercial publishing.

“When did books become a business, as opposed to something monks did? That’s a puzzle nobody knows,” said Stinson. “This could be a social history of producing a good for trade.”

Actually, we know a lot about this subject already.  Lay scribes and illuminators (usually transient) were common in the late Middle Ages, and they often worked on books cooperatively with monastic communities.  During the twelfth century monastic influence waned and urban universities developed, increasing the need for  both secular and religious books.  Scribes began to settle down and became integrated into academic communities, and the stationer system was developed in order to protect students and provide some university control over book production (a bit like the authorized campus bookstores we have today).  Licensed stationers loaned scribes exemplars called pecia, from which they copied texts.  Because each pecia was only part of a book, multiple scribes could work on a text simultaneously.  It was this early mass production/piece-work system that paved the way for the printing press in the fifteenth century.

DNA analysis could help fill the gaps in our knowledge of this period, but I certainly wouldn’t describe it as solving ‘a puzzle nobody knows’ or the forging of a new type of social history.  I’m not inclined, however, to blame the researcher, as I assume that Wired has focused on only the most exciting bits from the interview.

The internet broke for a week and I realized that I need a hardcopy dictionary.

I’m very happy to report that the Great University of London Residence Hall Internet Outage of 08-09 has finally ended.  I spent the last week and a half snatching web time in-between sessions of ‘real work’ when the British Library was open.  On Sundays and holidays (of which there have been many recenty , if you hadn’t noticed) I was just screwed.  Opening my RSS reader again yesterday was a terrifying experience, and I’m really sorry to report that I had to strike off as unread nearly one hundred CuteOverload and I Can Has Cheezeburger posts.

But anyway, to catch up with some things that happened over the holidays:

— Jimmy of the Occam’s Razor tattoo very kindly sent me an email providing further details about it.  Here’s what he had to say regarding the script:

Font-wise, I was just going for a feather quill pen dipped into an inkwell look.  After working with my tattoo artist for a month or so, that font just fit the bill.  I originally wanted a script that was more in tune to 13th-14th century handwriting, but after seeing some actual examples, I decided to go for aesthetics in lieu of period-appropriate verisimilitude since the writing from that era looked sorta ugly.

I have to agree with that.  A 13th century blackletter hand would certainly not be first pick for a permanent inscription on my body.

— Next, two good blogs have been brought to my attention:

Mercurious Politicus, covers “early modern books, history, and culture”.  In other words, all my favorite stuff.  And the author, Nick, is an MA student at sister institution Birkbeck, just across the street.  <waves!>  Definitely check this blog out for the fantastic, in-depth posts.  I particularly like the one on bookcases.

The Cynic Sang is the collaborative blog of the William Blake Archive, which covers issues related to Blake and to digital humanities in general.  I’m very excited about this one because I love William Blake, but also because I did a lot of interesting reading about the Archive in my digital humanities course over fall term, and I’m looking forward to keeping up with their blog.

I was also quite pleased to see the recent post on criticisms of the digital era as analysed through a book history perspective.  This is exactly the same topic I chose for my digital humanities essay, (in fact, I used the Library of Alexandria as one of my main examples) but I was completely unaware of the interview with Clay Shirkey in the Columbia Journalism Review, which appeared about the time I was finalizing the paper.