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Electronic Reserve Text: From James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed, Ch. 4 "Matter of Fact"
Like every other
fact that underpins our relationship with the technology structuring
our lives, we trust it. We are trained to accept the facts of science
and technology no matter how frequently the same science and technology
renders them obsolete. Yet the concept of the generally accepted 'fact'
is a relatively new one. It came into existence only five hundred years
ago as a result of an event that radically altered Western life because
it made possible the standardisation of opinion. In the world that
existed before this occurrence, contemporary references reveal the people
of the time to have been excitable, easily led to tears or rage, volatile
in mood. Their games and pastimes were simple and repetitive, like nursery
rhymes. They were attracted to garish colours. Their gestures were exaggerated.
In all but the most personal of relationships they were arbitrarily
cruel. They enjoyed watching animals fight and draw blood. Much of their life
was led in a kind of perpetual present: their knowledge of the past
was limited to memories of personal experience, and they had little
interest in the future. Time as we know it had no meaning. They ate
and slept when they felt like it and spent long hours on simple, mindless
tasks without appearing to suffer boredom. The medieval adult was in no way less intelligent than his modern counterpart, however. He merely lived in a different world, which made different demands on him. His was a world without facts. Indeed, the modern concept of a fact would have been an incomprehensible one. Medieval people relied for day to day information solely on what they themselves, or someone they knew, had observed or experienced in the world immediately around them. Their lives were regular, repetitive and unchanging. Illustration, p. 90: Early sixteenth century examples of the effects of printing. Above, science and technology were enhanced and made more accurate by the comparative work made possible through books. Below, Church authority was strengthened by illustrated Bibles. Here we seethe spies returning from Canaan. |
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[92] There was almost
no part of this life-with out-fact that could be other than local. Virtually
no information reached the vast majority of people from the world outside
the villages in which they lived. When all information was passed by
word of mouth, rumour ruled. Everything other than personal experience
was the subject of hearsay, a word which carried little of the pejorative
sense it does today. Reputation was jealously guarded because it was
easily ruined by loose talk. Denial of a rumour was difficult, if not
impossible, and credulity was the stock in trade of the illiterate. What medieval man
called 'fact' we would call opinion, and there were few people who travelled
enough to know the difference. The average daily journey was seven miles,
which was the distance most riders could cover and be sure of return
before dark. There was much
intermarriage in these isolated communities, and each had its share
of idiots. In an age when experience was what counted most, power was
in the hands of the elders. They approved local customs and practice,
and in matters of legal dispute they were the judges. They resisted
change: things were done because the elders confirmed that they had
always been done so. The dialect spoken
in one community was all but incomprehensible fifty miles away. As Chaucer
relates, a group of fourteenth-century London merchants shipwrecked
on the north coast of England were jailed as foreign spies. Without
frequent social or economic exchange between communities, the language
remained fragmented in local forms. For the illiterate
dialect-speaking villager, the church was the main source of information.
The scriptures illustrated holy themes, recalled the work of the seasons
and pointed morals. Biblical tales glowed from the stained-glass windows.
Gothic cathedrals have been called' encyclopedias in stone and glass'.
The news of the world, both ecclesiastical and civil, came from the
pulpit. In communities
that had for centuries been isolated and self-sufficient, the social
structure was feudal. There were three classes: noble, priest and peasant.
The noble fought for all. The peasant worked for all. The priest prayed
for all. On the very rare
occasions when news arrived from outside, it was shouted through the
community by a crier. For this reason few villages were bigger than
the range of the human voice, and towns were administratively subdivided
on the same scale. Village laws and customs were passed on by word of
mouth. Living memory was the ultimate judge. It was a legal commonplace,
even in town courts, that a live witness deserved more credence than
words on parchment. Manuscripts were
rare. They were, after all, little more than marks of doubtful significance
on dead animal skins. To the illiterate, documents were worthless as
proof because they were easy to forge. A living witness told the truth
because he wanted to go on living. Legal proceedings were conducted
orally, a practice that continues to this day. Parties were summoned
by word of mouth, sometimes with the aid of a bell. Charges were read
aloud to the defendant. In the late Middle Ages the litigant was obliged
to speak for himself, so there was little justice for the deaf and dumb.
The court 'heard' the evidence. Guilt or innocence was a matter for
debate. Illustration: The agriculturally based life of the Middle Ages was split into three orders, each dependent on the other: knights for protection, priests for salvation and peasants for food. Note the peasant's lower status, separated from the conversation. |
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[93] Without calendars
and clocks or written records, the passage of time was marked by memorable
events. In villages it was, of course, identified by seasonal activity:
'When the woodcock fly', 'At harvest time', and so on. Country people
were intensely aware of the passage of the year. But between these seasonal
cues, time, in the modern sense, did not exist. Even in rich villages
which could afford a water clock or a sun dial a watchman would call
out the passing hours, shouting them from the church tower. The hours
would echo through the surrounding countryside, shouted along by the
workers in the fields. Units of time smaller than an hour were rarely
used. They would have had no purpose in a world that moved at the pace
of nature. Months were measured
only approximately, since major divisions of the calendar such as the
spring equinox happened at different times each year. Easter was a source
of considerable confusion because its date depended on the positional
relationship of the sun and moon, and this conjunction often occurred
when the moon was not visible. Important events in life were recalled
by more reliable markers, such as a particularly hard frost, an abnormal
harvest or a death. Saints' days were unreliable. Even the great Erasmus
was not sure whether he had been born on St Jude's or St Simon's Day. Illustration:
The importance of agriculture is shown in this twelfthcentury church
calendar, where, after the signs of the zodiac, the months are depicted
by their appropriate seasonal work. Bottom right, September harvests
the grapes. |
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[94] Illustration:
Opposite: A backward-looking world, illustrated by this eleventh-century
reproduction of the cosmological interrelationships of the four ages
of man, the four humours, seasons, compass points and elements. The
material is simply a new arrangement of concepts unchanged in the previous
thousand years. [95] Such temporal markers
were important as they would often be needed to determine birthdays,
of vital concern during the Middle Ages in regard to inheritance. In
an oral life the acts of giving and taking were complicated by the need
to have witnesses present. In 1153, for example, the gift of a salt-pan
was made to the Priory of St Peter at Sele, in Sussex, 'Many people
seeing and hearing.' The use of the oath to reinforce the legality of
the event was, and still is, a means of reinforcing the testimony of
an oral witness. Even when, in late
medieval times, documentation began to be introduced on a wide scale,
the old habits died hard. Symbolic objects were still exchanged to represent
a transaction. Knives were favourite symbols. The transaction would
often be recorded on the knife haft, as in the case of a gift made in
the middle of the twelfth century to the monks of Lindisfarne in northern
England. The monks had been given the Chapelry of Lowick and the tithes
due to it. On the knife haft is written sygnum de capella de lowic ('to
represent the Chapel of Lowick'). But it was the knife, not the inscription,
that symbolised the event and that served to jog the memory. The same
reasoning lay behind the use of the personal seal on letters, and the
wearing of a wedding ring. Documents were
often forged. In the Middle Ages, it was common to write undated texts.
One out of three was false. Canterbury monks, concerned that the Primacy
in England should not pass to their rivals in York, 'found' papal bulls
dating from between the seventh and tenth centuries which supported
their cause. The manuscripts had 'turned up inside other books'. The
monks admitted that they were 'only copies, but nonetheless valid. ..' The general laxity
in the transmission of information affected many aspects of medieval
life. Travel was more hazardous because of it. For the majority of those
who were obliged to move about, journeys consisted of brief periods
of security in the communities along the route, interspersed with hours
or days of fear and danger in the forests. This was not primarily due
to the presence of outlaws or wild animals lurking in the trackless
woods that covered most of Europe at the time, but because the majority
of travellers had only the haziest notion of where their destination
lay. Illustration: The Great Seal of Richard the Lionheart of England. The symbol, rather than a signature, served to assure the illiterate of the authority and source of what was contained in the document.
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[96] There were no maps,
and few roads. Travellers had a keen sense of direction which took account
of the position of the sun and the stars, the flight of birds, the flow
of water, the nature of the terrain, and so on. But even information
gleaned from another traveller who had previously taken the same route
was of limited value if he had travelled in a different season or under
different conditions. Rivers changed course. Fords deepened. Bridges
fell. The safe way, indeed
the only way, to travel was in groups. In the Middle Ages, a lone traveller
was a rare figure. He was usually a courtier on the king's business,
trained to repeat long messages word for word. Such a message could
not be forged or lost. By the fifteenth century there were regular courier
services working for the Roman Curia and the royal houses of England,
Aragon, the republic of Venice and the university of Paris. In some
places, such as VIm, Regensburg and Augsburg, three mining towns of
southern Germany, there were regular local postal services. One Burgundian
merchant, Jacques Coeur, used his own pigeon post. The Medici bankers
kept in regular contact with their branch managers and their forty-odd
representatives all over Europe by using posting messengers. These went
very much faster than the average traveller, who could not afford to
change horses when they became exhausted. With fresh horses the couriers
could average ninety miles a day, more than twice as much as an ordinary
rider. Illustration: Jacob Fugger, the German banker, dictates letters for transmission through his post-horse network. The files indicate correspondents as far apart as Cracow, Innsbruck and Lisbon. |
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[97] Nonetheless, rumour
coloured the reception of news even in the cities, when it arrived often
after lengthy delays. In the fifteenth century it took eighteen months
for the news of Joan of Arc's death to reach Constantinople. The news
of that city's fall in 1453 took a month to get to Venice, twice as
long to Rome, and three months to reach the rest of Europe. Later, the
perception of the distance travelled by Columbus was coloured by the
fact that the news of his landfall across the Atlantic had taken as
long to reach the streets of Portugal as did news from Poland. For the villager
or household not connected with trade, news came for the most part with
the travelling entertainers, small parties of musicians and poets called
jongleurs, or troubadours. The former was usually the performer, the
latter the writer or composer.. Their acts might also include juggling,
magic, performing animals and even circus acts. Principally, their entertainment
took the form of recitals of poems and songs written about real events. Since the audience
would hear the story only once, the performance was histrionic, repetitive,
easily memorised, and often reworked from the original into local dialect
for the benefit of the audience. The portrayal of emotion was simple
and exaggerated. The entire performance was in rhyme, so that both performer
and audience could more easily remember it. The performer took all the
parts, changing voice and gesture to suit. The more enjoyable the act,
the more money he made. If a poem were particularly successful, other
jongleurs would try to hear it several times in order to memorise and
later perform it themselves. Illustration: A fourteenth-century French ivory bas-relief shows two troubadour minstrels. Their theatrical nature is revealed by their elaboratively carved lute heads and embroidered shoes. |
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[98] The travelling
poets were often used by a patron to spread a particular piece of propaganda.
Poems of this nature were called sirventes. Ostensibly on a romantic
theme, they often concealed political or personal messages. In rare
cases the object of the satire was openly named. In 1285 Pedro III of
Aragon attacked Philip III of Spain in a sirvente. The most famous thirteenth-century
propaganda writer of this type of material was Guillaume de Berjuedin.
The performances of these kinds of poems must have had the desired effect,
because in an oral world where the strongest bond was loyalty, reputation
was of cardinal importance and rumour therefore an effective weapon. The jongleurs would
often meet and exchange parts of their repertoire. These meetings, called
puys, were held allover France and took the form of a kind of poetry
competition at which the jongleurs would display their phenomenal memories.
A good jongleur needed to hear several hundred lines of poetry only
three times to commit them all to memory. This was a common enough ability
at the time: university teachers were known to be able to repeat a hundred
lines of text shouted to them only once by their pupils. Illustration: Mummers arrive at the Nuremberg Shrovetide Fair in the mid-fifteenth century. The vivid, unsubtle costumes they wear reflect the simple and repetitive nature of the material their audience would hear and remember. |
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[99] In a world where
few could read or write, a good memory was essential. It is for this
reason that rhyme, a useful aide-memoire, was the prevalent form of
literature at the time. Up to the fourteenth century almost everything
except legal documents was written in rhyme. French merchants used a
poem made up of 137 rhyming couplets which contained all the rules of
commercial arithmetic. Given the cost
of writing materials, a trained memory was a necessity for the scholar
as much as for the merchant. For more specific tasks than day to day
recall, medieval professionals used a learning aid which had originally
been composed in late classical times. Its use was limited to scholars,
who learned how to apply it as part of their training in the seven liberal
arts, where memorising was taught under the rubric of rhetoric. The
text they learned from was called Ad Herennium, the major mnemonic reference
work of the Middle Ages. It provided a technique for recalling vast
quantities of material by means of the use of'memory theatres'. The material to
be memorised was supposed to be copceived of as a familiar location.
This could take the form of all or part of a building: an arch, 'a corner,
an entrance hall, and so on. The location was also supposed to satisfy
certain criteria. The interior was to be made up of different elements,
easily recognised Illustration: As the markets grew and spread, these international merchants setting up their stalls at the Paris Fair of 1400 were already having problems of accounting and inventory too comp.zex to memorise. |
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[100] If it were too
small, the separate parts of what was to be recalled would be too close
to each other for individual recall. If it were too bright it would
blind the memory. Too dark, it would obscure the material to be remembered. Each separate part
of the location was to be thought of as being about thirty feet apart,
so as to keep each major segment of the material isolated from the others.
Once the memory theatre was prepared in this way, the process of memorising
would involve the memoriser in a mental walk through the building. The
route should be one which was logical and habitual, so that it might
be easily and naturally recalled. The theatre was now ready to be filled
with the material to be memorised. Illustration:
Ramon Lull devised a series of tree diagrams to aid recall of nature,
heaven, hell and so on. This one relates man (homo), on the trunk, to
the elements of nature and logic written on the leaves and branches. |
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[101] This material took
the form of mental images representing the different elements to be
recalled. Ad Herrenium advised that strong images were the best, so
reasons should be found to make the data stand out. The images should
be funny, or bloody, or gaudy, ornamented, unusual, and so on. These images were
to act as 'agents' of memory and each image would trigger recall of
several components of the material. The individual elements to be recalled
should be imaged according to the kind of material. If a legal argument
were being memorised, a dramatic scene might be appropriate. At the
relevant point in the journey through the memory theatre, this scene
would be triggered and played out, reminding the memoriser of the points
to be recalled. The stored images could also relate to individual words,
strings of words or entire arguments. Onomatopoeia, the use of words
that sound like the action they describe, was particularly helpful in
this regard. The great medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas particularly recommended the theatrical use of imagery for the recall of religious matters. 'All knowledge has its origins in sensation,' he said. The truth was accessible through visual aids. Especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the influx of new Greek and Arab knowledge, both scientific and general, made memorisation by scholars and professionals more necessary than ever. As painting and
sculpture began to appear in churches the same techniques for recall
were applied. Church imagery took on the form of memory agent. In Giotto's
paintings of 1306 on the interior of the Arena Chapel in Padua the entire
series of images is structured as a memory theatre. Each Bible story
illustrated is told through the medium of a figure or group in a separate
place, made more Illustration: A detail from the Giotto frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua shows the meeting between Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate. Note the early attempt at perspective. |
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[102] memorable by the
use of the recently developed artistic illusion of depth. Each image
is separated by about thirty feet, and all are carefully painted to
achieve maximum clarity and simplicity. The chapel is a mnemonic path
to salvation. In the frescoes
of S. Maria Novella in Florence the order of seven arts, seven virtues,
seven sins, is depicted. In the painting of the four cardinal virtues,
additional memory cues are provided. The figure of Prudence holds a
circle (representing time) in which are written the eight parts of the
virtue, Putting together the images, the layout, and the use of lettering,
it was thus possible to derive an entire system of knowledge from one
mnemonic fresco. Cathedrals became enormous memory theatres built to
aid the worshippers to recall the details of heaven and hell. Mnemonics were
also used by the growing university population. All lectures were read
from a set text to which teachers added their glosses, or comments.
Many of the instructions to students took the form of mnemonic lists
and abbreviations for use when the time came for examinations. For those who were rich enough to be familiar with written manuscripts, there was a difference between reading and writing which has since disappeared. A member of a noble family would have in his household at least one person who could read and another who could write. Letters were almost never read by the recipient, but by these servants. Moreover, a servant who could read would not necessarily be able to write. As will be seen,
writing was a separate art requiring much more than simple knowledge
of the shape of letters. Our modern word 'auditing' comes from this
practice of hearing, for accounts would be read aloud to those concerned.
Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds heard his accounts once a week. Pope
Innocent III could read, but always had letters read aloud to him. It
was this habit which explains the presence in the text of warnings such
as, 'Do not read this in the presence of others as it is secret.' In
fact, those who could read silently were regarded with some awe. St
Augustine, speaking in the fifth century about St Ambrose, said: '.
..a remarkable thing. ..when he was reading his eye glided over the
pages and his heart sensed out the sense, but his voice and tongue were
at rest.' It was for this
reason that writing fell under the discipline of rhetoric in the schools,
since writing was meant to be read aloud. Early charters, or land grants,
would therefore often end with the word valete (goodbye), as if the
donor had finished speaking to his listeners. Even today, wills are
still read aloud. It was this oral habit which separated reading from writing. The former used the voice, the latter the hand and eye. But even writing was not a silent occupation. In the thirteenth century, with the influx of new knowledge and with the general economic improvement, the demand for manuscripts grew. Monasteries began to partition off one wall of their cloisters, dividing it into small cubicles, some no wider than 2 feet 9 inches, to accommodate monks whose duty it was to copy manuscripts. These cubicles were called 'carols'. They usually had window spaces facing the garden or cloister of the church, and in bad weather oiled paper, rush matting or glass and wood partitions could be erected to fill these spaces. Illustration:
The novel use, in the Arena Chapel, of dramatic and realistic figures
to impress the virtues and vices on the memory. Here, Charity receives
gifts from heaven as generously as she dispenses them to others from
her bowl. Illustration, p. 103: Opposite: A general view of the Arena Chapel frescoes, painted deliberately in vivid and memorable style, which were to be read' in order and remembered by the faithful. The frescoes were completed by 1313. |
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[104] In England there
were carols at Bury St Edmunds, Evesham, Abingdon, St Augustine's in
Canterbury, and at Durham, where there were eleven windows along the
north wall, each accommodating three carols. Each monk sat on
a stool, copying from the original manuscript placed on a reading frame
above his desk. Horizontal lines of tiny holes were pricked across the
page with an awl or a small spiked wheel. There were no page numbers
as we know them, but at the bottom right-hand corner of the 'quaternion',
as the folded page was called, was the number of the quaternion and
of its folded page: 9i, 9ii, etc. Monks seldom completed more than one
text each year. The process was immensely slow and fatiguing. The act of copying
also had liturgical significance. A twelfth-century sermon on the subject,
delivered to the copyists of Durham Cathedral stated:
The copyist would try to reproduce on the parchment exactly what he saw on the original. This was often extremely difficult to decipher, particularly if, as was often the case, it had been penned during times of disturbance or famine, Illustration:
The most famous English carols were at St Peter's, the Benedictine
abbey in Gloucester, now the cathedral. Between 1370 and 1412, twenty
carved stone carols were built; each was 4 feet wide, 1 foot 7 inches
deep and 6 feet 9 inches high, and had two windows. |
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[105] when standards
of writing and scholarship were low. Also, if the writer of the original
had been in a hurry he would have used abbreviations, which might take
much time and effort to decipher. Above all, if the original had been
written to dictation there would often be errors of transmission. The copyist usually
identified a word by its sound. The carols would be filled with monks
mouthing and mumbling, often getting the spelling of a word wrong --writing
'er' for 'ar', for instance --because of the difference between their
pronunciation and that of the original writer. Spelling was a matter
for the individual, while punctuation consisted only of a dash or a
dot. The oral 'chewing' of the words had a dual purpose. The act of prayer was closely associated with reading aloud. The words written in a prayer would therefore take on added significance through being spoken. The reading of holy text was more a matter of savouring divine wisdom than of seeking information. Reading was almost an act of meditation. It was said of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, that 'without resting, his mouth ruminated the sacred words.' And in the 1090s St Anselm wrote about the act of reading: 'taste the goodness of your Redeemer. ..chew the honeycomb of his words, suck their flavour which is sweeter than honey, swallow their wholesome sweetness; chew by thinking, suck by understanding, swallow by loving and rejoicing.' Illustration:
Above left: An early fifteenth-century copyist at work. The text
to be copied is on the upper lectern. The monk has ruled off the pages,
and in his left hand he holds the scraper, used to erase errors. Above: Boredom
led monks to add their own touches to the margins of manuscripts. Here,
an eleventh-century Cistercian scribe depicts the manual work demanded
of |
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[106] [Illustration] |
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[107] All writing held
a kind of magic quality for the reader, most of all that of the holy
texts. The feeling was that the light of God shone on the reader through
'the letters' veil'. Reading was a physical act of spiritual exhilaration,
in which the meaning of the words came like an illumination, much as
light came through stained glass. Books were, in
a sense, miraculous objects. After the growth of the European economy
in the early fifteenth century, demand grew steadily for these wonder-working
texts: Books of Hours, Psalters and Scriptures. Of course the great
books, like the Psalter of Eadwine of Canterbury and the Book of Kells
in Ireland, were relics in their own right. Bound in leather and encrusted
with precious jewels, embellished with magnificently illuminated letters
to help the reader to find his place, these masterpieces were kept in
cathedral treasuries along with the plate and the holy vessels. Such
writing was for God's eyes, not for communicating everyday things to
common men. The problem with
these great works, whose creation involved immense, time-consuming acts
of worship, was that not only were they filled with errors, but very
often the entire texts were irretrievably lost because there was no
way of finding them once they had been written and placed in the monastery
or church. There was no filing system. First of all it was very hard to tell what the name of the author might be, or indeed what the subject of the work was. For example, a manuscript entitled Sermones Bonaventurae could be any one of the following:
Where would such
a book be filed? In spite of this
rather haphazard attitude to placement, the book itself was an extremely
rare and valuable object. Warnings such as this were often added to
the text: 'Whoever steals this book let him die the death; let him be
frizzled in a pan; may the falling sickness rage within him; may he
be broken on a wheel and be hanged.' Even if it were
known in which church or monastery a text was, retrieval might involve
a long and risky journey, which might even then end in failure because
the book was lost within the library through lack of cataloguing. Reference
material of all kinds was therefore at a premium. In spite of the scarcity
of information, however, it was still not considered necessary to corroborate
the accuracy of information contained in a text by comparison with another.
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[108] For this reason
there was no concept of history; there were only chivalrous romances
and chronicles based on widely differing monastic views of what had
happened in the world beyond the community's walls. There was no geography,
no natural history and no science, because there could be no sure confirmation
of the data upon which such subjects would rely. This absence of proven
fact bothered few people. Life was depicted by the medieval Christian
Church as ephemeral and irrelevant to salvation. The only true reality
lay in the mind of God, who knew all that needed to be known and whose
reasons were inscrutable. Into this alien
world of memorising, hearsay and fantasy, the pressure for rational,
factual information began to come first from the traders. For centuries
they had travelled the roads, keeping their accounts by the use of tally
sticks. The word 'tally'
comes from the Latin for 'to cut'. The sticks had a complicated series
of notches in them and were used by all accountants, including the Exchequer
of England, until well into the late Middle Ages. Tally sticks may have
sufficed for the travelling salesman, but they were not good enough
for the early fifteenth-century merchant with international bank accounts
and complex transactions to handle in various currencies. Pressure for access
to information also came from the growing number of universities and
grammar and church schools, whose students were entering an increasingly
commercial world. The kings and princes of Europe also needed ever-larger
bureaucracies to handle the increasing responsibilities devolving on
them as the feudal system gave way to centralised, tax-collecting monarchies.
In fairs allover Europe, from the fourteenth century on, international
trade had been stimulated by the use of Arab mathematics which made
documenting easier than with the old-fashioned abacus and the Roman
numerals of earlier times. Illustration: Tally sticks used by accountants in the thirteenth century. Notches on different sides and positions indicated different currency denominations. The stick was split: the larger piece acted as a receipt and the small segment (bottom) was kept as a copy. |
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[109] The greatest pressure
of all for literacy, however, was caused by the sudden availability
of paper. Originally a Chinese invention, paper had been discovered
by the Arabs when they overran Samarkand in the eighth century. Captured
workmen had been sent to Samarkand from China to set up a papermaking
factory. By the fourteenth century new water-powered technology was
pounding linen rags as fast as they could be collected by the rag and
bone man and turning them into cheap, durable paper. In Bologna at the
end of the fourteenth century the price of paper had dropped by 400
per cent. It was much cheaper than parchment, though there was still
some opposition to its use. 'Parchment lasts a thousand years,' they
said. 'How long will paper exist?' As the paper mills spread, so too did the spirit of religious reform. The Church had long been criticised for simony and equivocal practices, and in the late Middle Ages came the birth of a reforming movement led by the Brothers of the Common Life who preached a simpler, purer form of Christianity. Their devotio moderna attracted many of the scholars of the day, including eminent men such as Erasmus. Above all their schools and others like them began to turn out relatively large numbers of literate clerics. These men rapidly found employment in the scriptoria, or writing shops, which were springing up all Illustration: Early paper-making used the power of a waterwheel to trip hammers which pounded linen rag to pulp (bottom right). The pulp was shaped into squares in trays while wet, then pressed and hung to dry in sheets. |
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[110] over the Continent
to meet the demand for documentation from traders and governments, as
well as from the lawyers and notaries who formed the single largest
and fastest-growing professional body in Europe. The best known
scriptorium was in Florence. It was run by a man called Vespatiano da
Bisticci, one of the new breed of 'stationers', so called because they
had stopped being itinerant paper-sellers and had set up shop. At one
time Bisticci may have employed as many as fifty copyists who were paid
piece-rates for copying at home. He commissioned translators to bring
in new texts, sent out his book list, lent texts on approval, and encouraged
aspiring writers to have their finished works copied. As the price of
paper continued to fall, the development of eye-glasses intensified
the pressure for literacy. Glasses had first appeared in the early fourteenth
century, and a hundred years later they were generally available. Their
use lengthened the working life of copyist and reader alike. Demand
for texts increased. But the apparently
insoluble problem which bedevilled Europe was that there were far too
few scribes to handle the business being generated and their fees were,
in consequence, astronomically high. Economic development appeared to
be blocked. At some time in the 1450s came the answer to the problem, and with it a turning- point in Western civilisation. The event occurred in a mining area of southern Germany, where precious metal was plentiful. Major silver finds had Illustration:
The earliest known illustration of spectacles, in an Italian painting
from 1352. The cities of Florence and Pistoia both claim the invention
as their own. |
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[111] been made there,
and the most powerful family in Europe, the Fuggers, operated a vast
financial empire with its headquarters at Augsburg, the chief City of
the region. The nearby towns of Regensburg, Ulm and Nuremberg had for
long been the heart of the European metal-working industry. These cities were
also centres for the manufacture of astronomical and navigational instruments,
the source of the first engraving techniques, and the home of some of
the best watch- and clock-makers on the Continent. Expert jewellers
and goldsmiths inlaid precious metal on ceremonial armour and made complicated
toys that were operated by wire. The region held many men highly experienced
in the working of soft metals. This would be filled with a hot tin-antimony alloy which, when cooled, formed the first interchangeable typeface which could be used in a printing press. The press itself was a modified linen-press that had been in use for centuries; it was now adapted to push paper down on to an inked matrix of upturned letters, each one of which was close enough in dimension to its neighbour to fit into standard holes in the matrix base. The technique would not have worked with parchment because it was not porous enough to take the Illustration:
A fifteenth-century Czech coiner at work, striking coins from silver
blanks. This was extremely delicate and demanding work, for each coin
had to be struck perfectly with one blow. |
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[112] The man who is
credited with inventing the process was Johannes Gansfleisch zur Laden
zum Gutenberg. His new press destroyed the oral society. Printing was
to bring about the most radical alteration ever made in Western intellectual
history, and its effects were to be felt in every area of human activity. The innovation
was not in fact new. There had been an even earlier attempt, in China,
which produced baked-clay letter founts, but these were fragile and
did not lend themselves to mass-production. In any case the task would
have been daunting, as the Chinese language demanded between 40,000
and 50,000 ideograms. The next step took
place in Korea. In 1126 the palaces and libraries of the country had
been destroyed during a dynastic struggle. It was urgently necessary
to replace the lost texts, and, because they had been so numerous, any
technique for replacement had to be quick and easy. The only Korean
hardwood which might have been used to replace the books using woodcut
techniques was birch. Unfortunately this wood was available only in
limited quantities and was already being used to print paper money.
The solution to the problem did not come until around 1313, when metal
typecasting was developed. The method adopted of striking out a die
to make a mould in which the letter could be cast was well known at
the time, as it had been in common use since the early twelfth century
by coiners and casters of brass-ware and bronze. Due to a Confucian
prohibition on the commercialisation of printing, the books produced
by this new Korean method were distributed free by the government. This
severely limited the spread of the technique. So too did the restriction
of the new technique to the royal foundry, where official material only
was printed and where the primary interest lay in reproducing the Chinese
classics rather than Korean literature which might have found a wider
and more receptive audience. In the early fifteenth century King Sajong
of Korea invented a simplified alphabet of twenty-four characters, for
use by the common people. This alphabet could have made large-scale
typecasting feasible, but it did not have the impact it deserved. The
royal presses still did not print Korean texts. It may be that
the typecasting technique then spread to Europe with the Arab traders.
Korean typecasting methods were certainly almost identical to those
introduced by Gutenberg, whose father was in fact a member of the Mainz
fellowship of coiners. In Europe, prior
to Gutenberg, there are references to attempts at artificial writing
being made in Bruges, Bologna and A vignon, and it is possible that
Gutenberg was preceded by a Dutchman called Coster or an unknown Englishman.
Be that as it may, the Koreans' interest in Chinese culture and their
failure to adopt the new alphabet prevented the use and spread of the
world's first movable typeface for two hundred years. The reason for the late appearance of the technique in the West may be related to the number of developments which had to take place before printing could succeed. These included advances in metallurgy, new experiments with inks and oils, the production of paper, and the availability of eye-glasses. Also significant would have been the mounting economic pressure for more written material and dissatisfaction with the over-costly scriptoria, as well as the generally rising standards of education which accompanied economic recovery after the Black Death. Illustration:
A Chinese paper banknote issued between 1368 and 1399, under the
first Ming Emperor.
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[113] Once introduced,
however, the speed with which printing propagated itself throughout
Europe suggests a market ready and willing to use it. From Mainz it
reached Cologne in 1464, Basel in 1466, Rome in 1467, Venice 1469, Paris,
Nuremberg and Utrecht 1470, Milan, Naples and Florence 1471, Augsburg
1472, Lyons, Valencia and Budapest 1473, Cracow and Bruges 1474, Lubeck
and Breslau 1475, Westminster and Rostock 1476, Geneva, Palermo and
Messina 1478, London 1480, Antwerp and Leipzig 1481 and Stockholm 1483. It should be noted
that almost without exception these were not university cities. They
were centres of business, the sites of royal courts or the headquarters
of banking organisations. By the end of the fifteenth century there
were 73 presses in Italy, 51 in Germany, 39 in France, 25 in Spain,
15 in the Low Countries and 8 in Switzerland. In the first fifty years
eight million books were printed. The price of the
new books was of crucial significance in the spread of the new commodity.
In 1483 the Ripola Press in Florence had charged three florins a sheet
for setting up and printing Ficino's translation of Plato's Dialogues.
A scribe would have charged one florin for a single copy. The Ripola
Press produced one thousand and twenty-five. Not everybody took to the press with the same eagerness. Joachim Furst, Gutenberg's financial backer, went to Paris with twelve copies of the Bible but was chased out by the book trade guilds, who took him to court. Their view was that so many identical books could only exist with the help of the devil. Illustration: A page from the Mainz Psalter of 1457, printed by Gutenberg's ex-partners, using his new typeface. Note the retention of the scribal abbreviations (lines above letters, for example,) to which readers would have been accustomed. |
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[114] The new printing
shops have been variously described as a mixture of sweatshop, boarding
house and research institute. They brought together members of society
strange to each other. The craftsman rubbed shoulders with the academic
and the businessman. Besides attracting scholars and artists, the shops
were sanctuaries for foreign translators, emigres and refugees in general,
who came to offer their esoteric talents. Printing shops
were, above all, centres for a new kind of intellectual and cultural
exchange. Existing outside the framework of the guild system, they were
free of its restrictive practices. The new printers thought of themselves
as the inheritors of the scribal tradition, and used the word scriptor
to describe themselves rather than the more accurate impressor. In the earliest
printed books the scribal style of lettering was maintained. This conservative
approach was in part dictated by the demands of the market. A buyer
was less likely to be put off by the new product if he saw familiar
manuscript abbreviations and punctuation. It was only when the new printed
books were well established in the next century that printers began
to spell words in full and standardise punctuation. The print shop
was one of the first truly capitalist ventures. The printer or his partner
was often a successful merchant who was responsible for finding investors,
organising supplies and labour, setting up production schedules, coping
with strikes, hiring academically qualified assistants and analysing
the market for printed texts. He was also in intense competition with
others who were doing the same, and was obliged to risk capital on expensive
equipment. Illustration:
The print shop of the sixteenth century. On the right, paper arrives,
the type is inked, the pages are printed then stacked by the office
boy. On the left, compositors prepare new texts and the proof-reader
checks a page. |
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[115] It should not come
as a surprise that these men pioneered the skills of advertising. They
issued book lists and circulars bearing the name and address of their
shop. They put the firm's name and emblem on the first page of the book,
thus moving the title page from the back, where it had traditionally
been placed, to the front, where it was more visible. The shops printed
announce ments of university lectures together with synopses of course
textbooks and lectures, also printed by them. In the early years
each printer adopted the script most common in his area, but before
long print type was standardised. By 1480, when the scribal writing
styles had disappeared, texts were being printed in cellia (chancery
script) style, the classical letter shape favoured by the Italian humanists
who were the intellectual leaders of Europe at the time. At the beginning
of the sixteenth century, in Venice, at the print shop of the great
Italian pringer Aldus Manutius, one of his assistants, Francesco Griffo
of Bologna, invented a small cursive form of calcelleria. The style
was designed to save space, and gave Aldus a monopoly the standard type
on the market in books of a size which could be carried easily in a
pocket or saddlebag. The new style of type was called 'italic'. Illustration: Aldus' mark, the Anchor and dolphin. The handwring style used by chancery lawyers (below left) became the standard type chosen by the new printers (right). |
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[116] Initially the market
for texts was limited. The first texts produced after the invention
of printing fell into the following categories: sacred (Bibles and prayer
books), academic (the grammar of Donatus, used in schools), bureaucratic
(papal indulgences and decrees) and vernacular (few, mostly German).
Thereafter the content of the books became rapidly more diverse. By
the end of the century there were guide-books and maps, phrase books
and conversion tables for foreign exchange, ABCs, catechisms, calendars,
devotional literature of all sorts, primers, dictionaries -all the literary
paraphernalia of living that we in the modern world take for granted
and which influences the shape and style of every aspect of our lives. Almost immediately
after its invention print began to affect the lives of Europeans in
the fifteenth century. The effect was not always for the better. Along
with the proliferation of knowledge came the diffusion of many of the
old scriptural inaccuracies. Mystic Hermetic writings, astrologies and
books of necromancy were reproduced in large numbers, as were collections
of prophecies, hieroglyphics and magic practices. The standardisation
made possible by print meant that errors were perpetuated on a major
scale. Apart from the
Latin and Greek classics, all of which were reproduced within a hundred
years, and the Bible, the greatest number of new books sold were of
the 'how to' variety. The European economy had desperate need of craftsmen,
whose numbers had been reduced by the Black Death, the effects of restrictive
practices and lengthy apprenticeships. For centuries these skills had
remained unchanged and unchallenged as they were passed from generation
to generation by word of mouth and example. Through the medium of the
press they now became the property of anyone who could afford to buy
a book. The transmission of technical information was also more likely
to be accurate, since it was now written by experts and reproduced exactly
by the press. The principal effect
of printing, however, was on the contents of the texts themselves. The
press reduced the likelihood of textual corruption. Once the manuscript
had been made error-free, accurate reproduction was automatic. Texts
could not easily undergo alteration. The concept of authorship also
emerged. For the first time a writer could be sure of reaching a wide
readership which would hold him personally responsible for what he had
written. Printing made possible new forms of cross-cultural exchange
without the need for physical communication. New ways were developed
to present, arrange and illustrate books. It became feasible to collect
books systematically, by author or subject. But the most immediately
evident effect of printing lay simply in the production of many more
copies of existing manuscript texts. A prime example of the proliferation of an already established text was the use of the press by the Church to reproduce thousands of printed indulgences. These were documents given to the faithful in return for prayer, penitence, pilgrimage or, most important of all, money. The early sixteenth-century Popes, especially Julius II, had grandiose plans for the embellishment of Rome after the fall of the rival city of Constantinople in the previous century. Rome would become the centre of the world and indulgences would help to pay for the work of expensive artists such as Michelangelo. |
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[117] The widespread
cynicism which greeted this ecclesiastical involvement with the world
of technology was undoubtedly a contributing factor to the rebellion
of the Augustinian friar of Wittenberg, Martin Luther, which sparked
off the Reformation. In 1517, Maximilian I's silver jubilee year, indulgences
were being hawked in great numbers near Wittenberg by one of the papal
commissioners for sales, a certain Tetzel. His techniques were flamboyant,
and the credulous flocked to hear him and to buy his wares. The demand
for indulgences was so great that a thriving black market was generated. Luther reacted
to events by producing ninety-five criticisms of the Church, which he
nailed to a notice board in his church in Wittenberg. He also sent a
copy to his Bishop and one to friends. Luther's expectations of a quiet,
scholarly discussion of his grievances among his friends were rudely
shattered when copies were printed and distributed. Within a fortnight
the 'theses' were being read throughout Germany. Within a month they
were allover Europe. Luther found himself at the head of a rebellious
army he had never thought to command. The only way to make the rebellion
effective was to use the same weapon that had started it: the press. Three years later 300,000 copies of Luther's works were on the market. The broadsheet carried his words to every village. The use of cartoons brought the arguments to illiterates and his choice of the vernacular strongly appealed to the nascent nationalist temper of the Protestant. German princes. 'Print,' Luther said, 'is the best of God's inventions.' The first propaganda war had been won. Illustration:
Above: The papal indulgence form, with the blanks (third row from
top and bottom) where the buyer filled in the amount of his contribution
and his name. Below: The Lutheran use of print as a propaganda
weapon. Scurrilous anti-Pope cartoons like this made their point even
to the illiterate. |
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[118] The new power to
disseminate opinion was seized eagerly by anybody with a desire to influence
others. The printers themselves had shown the way with their advertisements.
Now the broadsheet radically changed the ability to communicate. Broadsheets
were pinned up everywhere, stimulating the demand for education and
literacy by those who could not read them. Public opinion was being
moulded for the first time, fuelled by anonymous appeals to emotion
and the belief that what was printed was true. Centralised monarchies
used the press to enhance their control over the people and to keep
them informed of new ordinances and tax collections. Since the increasingly
large numbers of directives in circulation each originated from one
clearly identifiable printing house, it was easy for Church and state
to impose controls on what could and could not be read. The corollary was,
of course, that dissidence now also had a louder voice, whether expressed
as nationalist fervour -itself fostered by the establishment of the
local language in print -or as religion. The persecution and religious
wars that ravaged Europe in the sixteenth century were given fresh and
continuing impetus by the press, as each side used propaganda to whip
up the frenzy of its supporters. In the political
arena printing provided new weapons for state control. As men became
more literate, they could be expected to read and sign articles of loyalty.
The simple oath was no longer sufficient, and in any case a man could
deny it. He could not deny the signature at the foot of a clearly printed
text. This represented the first appearance of the modern contract,
and with it came the centralisation of the power of the state. Through the press the monarch had direct access to the people. He no longer had to worry about the barons and their network of local allegiance. Proclamations and manifestoes were issued to be read from every pulpit. Printed texts of plays were sponsored to praise and give validity to the king's policies. Woodcut cartoons
glorifying his grander achievements were disseminated. Maximilian of
Austria had one made entitled 'The Triumphal Arch' which simply reproduced
his name in a monumental setting. With the press
came a new, vicarious form of living and thinking. For the first time
it was easy to learn of events and people in distant countries. Europe
became more aware of its regional differences than ever before. As Latin
gave way to the vernacular languages encouraged by the local presses,
these differences became more obvious. Printing also set international
fashions not only in clothes, but in manners, art, architecture, music,
and every other aspect of living. A book of dress patterns in the 'Spanish'
style was available throughout the Hapsburg Empire. |
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[119] printing press
brought Italy before the world, elected that country arbiter of taste
for a century or more, and helped the Renaissance to survive in Europe
longer and with more effect than it might otherwise have done. Printing eliminated
many of the teaching functions of church architecture, where sculpture
and stained glass had acted as reminders of biblical stories. In the
sixth century Pope Gregory had stated that statues were the books of
the illiterate. Now that worshippers were literate the statues served
no further purpose. Printing thus reinforced the iconoclastic tendencies
among reformers. If holy words were available in print, what need was
there for ornamental versions? The plain, unadorned churches of the
Protestants reflected the new literary view. Illustration: The Durer engraving ordered by the Emperor Maximilian. The triumphal arch celebrated the imperial name in every conceivable way. It had more widespread impact on the populace and cost less than a real arch.
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[120] Art in general
began increasingly to portray individual states of emotion, personal
interpretations of the world. It was art for art's sake. Printing removed
the need for a common share of images and in doing so destroyed the
collective memory that had sustained the pre-literate communities. There
also began a new genre of printed illustrated books for children, such
as Comeius' picture book and Luther's catechism. These and others served
to continue the old images in new form. One major result
of printing was the emergence of a more efficient system of filing.
With more than a thousand editions reproduced from the same original,
book-collecting became fashionable. These collections needed to be catalogued.
Moreover, printers had begun to identify their books by title, as well
as author, so it was easier to know what a book was about. Cataloguing involved
yet another new ability. People began to learn the alphabet, which until
the advent of printing had had little use. Early printers found that
their books sold better if they included an index. In scribal times
indexing, when used at all, had been achieved by the use of small tabs
attached to the side of the parchment leaf. Johannes Trithemius, Abbot
of Sponheim, produced the first indexed catalogue in Basel, in 1494:
Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis (The Book of Ecclesiastical Writings). His successor,
Conrad Gesner, went further. His idea was to produce a comprehensive,
universal bibliography listing all Latin, Greek and Hebrew works in
their first printing, using as a source publishers' lists and booksellers'
catalogues. In 1545 he published the Bibliotheca Universalis (The Universal
Collection) of 10,000 titles and 3000 authors. He followed this in 1548
with the Pandectae, a catalogue with nineteen separate headings dedicated
to a different scholarly discipline. Each one contained topical entries
cross-referencing author and title, with dedications that craftily included
the publishers' lists. The work contained more than 30,000 entries. Illustration: This English translation of Aesop's Fables, printed by William Caxton, was one of the earliest nonreligious books to appear. |
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[121] The new interest
in indexing led to a more factual analysis of the older texts. Machiavelli's
father was asked to index Livy's Decades for Vespasiano da Bisticci,
and in doing so he made comprehensive lists of flora and fauna, place
names and other such factual data, rather than taking the scribal approach
of listing everything according to moral principles. The new availability
of data and the novel concept of information as a science in itself
made the collation and use of data easier than before. The principal contribution
to knowledge by the presses, however, lay in the establishment of accurate
reproduction. When books came to be written by men whose identity was
known, writers became more painstaking. After all, the text might be
read by people who knew more of the subject than the author Texts could be
compared and corrected by readers with specialised or local knowledge.
Information became more trustworthy. More books encouraged more inter-disciplinary
activity, new combinations of knowledge and new disciplines. Among the
earliest texts were tables of mathematical and navigational material,
eagerly sought by an increasing number of ships' captains. Ready-reckoners
made technical and business life easier. Above all, the fact that identical
images could be viewed simultaneously by many readers was a revolution
in itself. Now the world was open to analysis by the community at large.
The mystery of' essence' and intangible God-given substance gave way
to realistic drawings which took advantage of the new science of perspective
to measure and describe nature mathematically. Not only was the world
measurable, it could be held in one's hand in the knowledge that the
same experience was being shared by others. New natural sciences
sprang up, born of this ability to standardise the image and description
of the world. The earliest examples took the form of reprints of the
classics. Soon, however, Europeans began describing the contemporary
world around them. In Zurich Gesner, began compiling his compendium
of all the animals ever mentioned in all the printed texts he knew.
He published four Illustration: Gesner's Historia Animalium was one of the first of the new definitive texts describing aspects of nature. This illustration is of an aurochs, or wild ox. |
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[122] |
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| [123]
books in 1557.
Meanwhile, in 1530, Otto Brunfels had produced his book on plants, Herbarum
vivae eicones. In 1535 Pierre Belon of Le Mans published Fish and
Birds. In 1542 came the Natural History of Plants by Leonard
Fuchs. Four years later Georg Bauer's work on subterranean phenomena
was published under his pen-name of Agricola. In 1553, Bauer, who was
inspector of mines in Bohemia, produced the great De Re Metallica
(On Metals). Printing changed
the entire, backward-looking view of society, with its stultifying respect
for the achievements of the past, to one that looked forward to progress
and improvement. The Protestant ethic, broadcast by the presses, extolled
the virtues of hard work and thrift and encouraged material success.
Printing underlined this attitude. If knowledge could now be picked
up from a book, the age of unquestioned authority was over. A printed
fifteenth-century history expressed the new opinion: 'Why should old
men be preferred to their juniors when it is possible, by diligent study,
for young men to acquire the same knowledge?' The cult of youth
had begun. As young men began to make their way in the new scientific
disciplines made possible by standardisation of textual information,
it was natural for them to explore new areas of thought. Thus was born
the specialisation which is the lifeblood of the modern world. The presses
made it Printing gave us
our modern way of ordering thought. It gave us the mania for the truth
'in black and white'. It moved us away from respect for authority and
age, towards an investigative approach to nature based on the confidence
of common, empirical observation. This approach made facts obsolete
almost as soon as they were printed. In removing us
from old mnemonic ways of recall and the collective memory of the community,
printing isolated each of us in a way previously unknown, yet left us
capable of sharing a bigger world, vicariously. In concentrating knowledge
in the hands of those who could read, printing gave the intellectual
specialist control over illiterates and laymen. In working to apply
his esoteric discoveries the specialist gave us the rate of change with
which we live today, and the inability, from which we increasingly suffer,
to communicate specialist 'facts' across the boundaries of scientific
disciplines. At the same time,
however, the presses opened the way to all who could read to share for
the first time the world's collective knowledge, to explore the minds
of others, and to approach the mysteries of nature with confidence instead
of awe. |
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