to Henri-Jean Martin

First published in French as L'Europe de Gutenberg. Le livre et l'invention de la modernité occidentale (XIII^e-XVI^e siècle), (c) Éditions Belin, 2006

This English edition (c) Polity Press, 2017

Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d'un programme d'aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien de la Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux États Unis, service de l'ambassade de France aux EU. This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux États Unis, a department of the French Embassy in the United States.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7257-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7258-8 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barbier, Frederic, author.

Title: Gutenberg's Europe : the book and the invention of Western modernity / Frederic Barbier.

Other titles: Europe de Gutenberg. English

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016013294 (print) | LCCN 2016041373 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745672571 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745672588 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509509928 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509509935 (Epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Printing–History–Origin and antecedents. | Books–History. | Gutenberg, Johann, 1397?-1468. | Europe–Civilization. | BISAC: HISTORY / Social History.

Classification: LCC Z126 .B36513 2016 (print) | LCC Z126 (ebook) | DDC 686.1092–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013294

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I hope in this book, by a discussion of the very first media revolution, that of Gutenberg in the mid fifteenth century, to offer some insights into the media revolution of the early twenty-first century. It is an essay, not an in-depth study or a scholarly work on the invention of printing – a subject on which a formidable bibliography already exists. It will ask how Western civilizations passed from one communication system (oral and manuscript) to another (printing); how this technological innovation developed and what were its consequences; and how the change in the dominant media influenced not only social structure as a whole, but a number of abstract categories and ways of thought. As a revolution of equal if not greater significance takes place before our eyes, it is important to be able to identify how the changes that accompanied phenomena of the same order came about in the past.

I have chosen not to encumber my book with a bibliography other than that provided by the notes, which refer only to material I have directly and regularly drawn on for this work. A supplementary and much more extensive bibliography on the history of the book may be found on the website of the Centre de recherche en histoire du livre,¹ which includes a complementary iconography specially prepared for this volume. Some of my notes refer to other relevant websites, in particular those of an iconographical nature.

I would like to thank all the colleagues and friends with whom I have discussed the themes developed in this book; and in particular to record my gratitude to the librarians and archivists whose books and records I have consulted over the years, sometimes importunately, in France and in other European countries: Mmes et MM. Jesus Alturo (Barcelona), Pierre Aquilon (Tours), Michella Bussotti (Peking), Max Engammare (Geneva), Sabine Juratic (Paris), Jean-Dominique Mellot (Paris), Matthias Middell (Leipzig), István Monok (Budapest), Philippe Nieto (Paris), Dominique Varry (Lyon) and Jean Vezin (Paris). I am grateful also to the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine for making it possible for me to carry out my research and bring my project to fruition.² Lastly, I warmly thank the members of my seminar on the ‘History and civilization of the book’ at the École pratique des hautes études,³ where a number of the arguments developed below were first presented for discussion.

I show neither sense nor reason, I am foolish indeed to take pride in a multitude of books. I am always wishing for and dreaming of new books, the substance of which I cannot grasp and of which I comprehend nothing…my house is decked out with books, I am content to see them often open without understanding anything inside them…

Sebastian Brant (1498)

Other Media Revolutions

As telecommunications and computing have spread into every aspect of life, the twenty-first century has experienced a spectacular ‘media revolution’. For the historian, however, it is not the first. Other periods have also been marked by far-reaching changes in their systems of social communication. The two crucial periods with regard to written communication were the fifteenth century, with the invention of printing (typography with movable characters), and the nineteenth century, with the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the book and the periodical press, and the invention of the mass book trade.¹ In both cases, the system of communication was totally transformed and contemporaries felt they were living in a time of radical change, giving access to a higher level in the scale of civilizations. The humanists of the sixteenth century looked with such disdain on the medieval tradition of thought that the concept of the Middle Ages, with all its negative connotations, seems today to have been their ‘invention’. At the end of the eighteenth century, Condorcet in his turn would present the progress and diffusion of the Enlightenment through the printed word as taking the human race to a new stage in its history, that of triumphant rationality, hence universal happiness. Such utopian discourse is not unique to the revolutions of the past – it has been revived in our own day, from the Rapport Nora-Minc commissioned by President Giscard d'Estaing in 1978 (translated into English as The Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France, MIT Press, 1980) to the theoreticians of the media revolution: the technical progress of today, we are told, creates the potential for a much-expanded and universally shared knowledge, together with new ways of operating, characterized by the instantaneous circulation and processing of information.

I will begin by looking at other media revolutions in Western civilization. What we call the ‘Gutenbergian revolution’, in the mid fifteenth century, transformed the operating conditions of the societies it first affected, some of which rapidly experienced a phenomenon of mass mediatization. I will then examine the nature of the change. The invention of Gutenberg was essentially technological, and the very word ‘revolution’ that is generally used of it today implicitly emphasizes its novelty and its suddenness. Printing brought one period, the Gothic/medieval period, to an end and initiated another, which would be called the Renaissance, characterized both by its close relationship to classical antiquity and by its modernity; indeed it was in the fifteenth century that the word ‘modernity’ emerged in French. Gutenberg's invention had huge consequences for the evolution of Western societies, but it could only happen as a result of a number of earlier phenomena and changes. For the innovation to have practical applications, and for it to spread effectively, it had to be viable not only at the technological level but also at the economic level; it had to respond to a demand, and the conditions of production and distribution had to be such as to make its use possible.

It is this transition from one state to another that I shall discuss, in its three main phases: a slow rise, accelerating to a peak; the apogee of the invention; and the successive developments of its effects and of its appropriation by large numbers of people. These developments can only be perceived and understood in the medium term, with the passage of two or even three generations after Gutenberg, but their consequences were certainly more profound – and more modern – than might have been expected. In other words, there was a period of change preceding Gutenberg, of ‘Gutenberg before Gutenberg’; but there was also a period of post-Gutenberg repercussions, when all the possibilities of the invention were not yet exploited or its consequences appreciated. The invention itself was the turning point, but I will discuss it in the context of a much longer timescale, which first made this transformation possible then allowed its full potential to be exploited – opening the way to other changes.

My main argument concerns the structuring role of the media. Modernity gave texts a new status and radically changed their content, in ways that were particularly visible in the scientific sphere; how­ever, these phenomena can only be understood through the change in the dominant media. The operating conditions of printing, including the practices linked to it, framed and oriented at every level the production of discourse and the models which underlay this very production.

The Carolingian Reformation

As regards writing and books, the change in Western Europe originated at the end of the first millennium, when the demographic and economic trends began first to fluctuate and then to go into reverse. Until the Carolingian period, the relationship with Latin antiquity had remained fairly direct: some of the monuments had survived, the artists followed Graeco-Latin models, the copyists reproduced such manuscripts as reached them, and the handwriting adopted in the great Carolingian scriptoria was directly inspired by Latin handwriting.² Whether concerted or not, the political project of Charlemagne and his entourage at Aix-la-Chapelle – to restore the Western Empire in the form of a Christian Empire governed by the emperor and the bishop of Rome – has to be understood from this perspective. Its failure marked the start of another period, less closely linked to the ancient models, but oriented towards the construction of a wholly original civilization – that of the Middle Ages proper. It was the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire that paved the way for change and, paradoxically, invention.

The project for Carolingian Reform supposed conditions that did not exist. It needed an effective concept of the state (res publica) and also the material means to ensure the independence of the sovereign and the integration of the territories he controlled. But the kingdom was still seen as a private possession, which the sovereign bequeathed to his successors, between whom it would be divided after his death. The Carolingian Empire disintegrated in the ninth century, to be replaced by the great entities of Western Francia, Lotharingia and Eastern Francia. In the West, in the absence of adequate mechanisms enabling integration, real power was divided between a multitude of local and regional officials who sought autonomy, with the result that the political, economic and cultural spheres fragmented. The break-up was aggravated by the Saracen, Hungarian and above all Norman raids, first signalled in 799; pirates devastated Frisia and then the Channel coasts, sailed up the rivers (sack of Chartres in 857, of Cologne in 881, siege of Paris in 885, etc.) and settled in Normandy (911), from which they conquered England (1066). It was not the distant and too often impotent sovereign but the local powers, the count and the bishop, who were able to organize and coordinate an effective defence against the plunderers. This led, eventually, to the rise of feudalism and the pre-eminence accorded to ties between persons, between the suzerain and his vassal and his sub-vassals. The sacred dimension of his status notwithstanding, the sovereign was in practice no more than the person who sat at the apex of the feudal pyramid.

From the fifth century to the end of the tenth century, the book remained, in the West, effectively confined to the ecclesiastical world, so much so that the word clerk, clericus, initially meaning a man of the Church, took on the meaning of literate and educated. It was the Church which, in the fifth century, when the cadres of state and administrative officials crumbled, took over from the Roman Empire and assured the preservation and transmission of ancient culture. In Gaul, the aristocracy of the Late Empire and the very Early Middle Ages was an aristocracy of Christians of ancient high culture; we need think only of Sidonius Apollinaris, or of Fortunatus, one of Martin's successors in the bishopric of Tours. Scriptoria and libraries were established in the monasteries and in some cathedral schools. The texts were in Latin and their content was primarily religious: the Bible translated into Latin by St Jerome at the end of the fourth century (the Vulgate), the writings of the Fathers of the Church, the lives of saints and martyrs and other liturgical works; to which should be added the texts transmitted from classical antiquity and those of pre-Carolingian and Carolingian authors.

A development of crucial importance followed from the linguistic diversity acquired in the ninth century: classical Latin was no longer either understood or used beyond a very narrow group of educated men, though it remained, in more or less degraded forms, the language of the Church, the administration and written culture. Most people now used the vernacular, Romance languages in the formerly Romanized territories, or Germanic languages where the invaders were in the majority. The vernacular remained essentially oral to the end of the first millennium; in the West, the written material known to us from the ninth century is reduced to very rare and fortuitous texts. Innovation came from the frontier zones: the Oaths of Strasbourg were drawn up in 842 in that key city of the ancient limes. The Canticle of St Eulalia and the Song of Ludwig (Ludwigslied), copied around 870 at the end of a Latin manuscript, came from another frontier, that of Flanders and Hainault.³ In England, the king of Wessex, Alfred the Great (died 899), had the Latin classics translated into the vernacular. In Greater Moravia, Cyril and Methodius created an alphabet adapted to the language of the Slav peoples they evangelized (ninth century); they translated the Bible into Slav and used this language for the liturgy. We shall on several occasions return to the paradoxical role played in the process of innovation by frontier zones or by outlying geographical regions which one might expect, a priori, to be less favoured.

From its beginnings in the second half of the eighth century, the work of the Carolingian scriptoria, after that of St Martin of Tours, marked an important stage in the revival of classical Latin: in the perfecting of the new script, the ‘Carolingian miniscule’;⁴ in the creation of models of book and page layout; and in copying, strictly speaking. The aim was the reform of the Church, with a view to producing a clergy of high quality and strengthening the structure of imperial power. The central role devolved on the small group that surrounded the emperor in Aix-la-Chapelle: Leidrade, born around 743–5 in Bavaria, was a clerk in Freising (a bishopric created in 739), where he followed the rise of the library and scriptorium under the influence of Bishop Arbeo (764–84); he was summoned to Aix in 782, to join the palace school which included Alcuin, Theodulf and St Benoît of Aniane. The latter, sent as archbishop to Lyon in 796 to impose reform on the diocese, created the school of singers and the school of readers, developed an active scriptorium, reorganized the chapters of the various churches and restored the Abbey of l'Île Barbe. Alcuin (died 804), abbot of St Martin of Tours in 796, also reorganized the school and the scriptorium, making this the most important intellectual centre⁵ in the empire. Once again we find the frontiers as crucial zones. Leidrade was a Bavarian, Alcuin came from England (York) and Theodulf from Visigothic Spain. The latter, abbot of Fleury-sur-Loire and bishop of Orléans, reorganized the monastic school, while the scriptorium enriched the library. Great intellectual figures followed one another at Fleury in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, including Odo, Gerbert, the schoolmaster Abbo and Abbot Gauzlin, future archbishop of Bourges. Other centres existed alongside the monasteries, in particular in certain cathedral schools. The powerful oppidum of Laon was also the site of a school inspired by the presence of scholars from the British Isles, in the wake of John Scotus Eriugena (until 870). Its library was particularly remarkable for its Greek manuscripts. Much later, at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Laon was once again made famous, by the teaching of Anselm of Laon, the master of William of Champeaux and enemy of the young Abelard.

Industrial Revolution and Economy of the Sign

Though population estimates for the Middle Ages remain speculative, it is possible to highlight the main elements in a dynamism that was increasingly visible after the year 1000. The demographic situation was fundamental, though linked to economic development, and it is in this context that the trajectory specific to writing and the book has to be discussed. With the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, everything changed, and Western Europe began once again to expand: the continent had some 40,000,000 inhabitants around 1100, but nearer 75,000,000 in 1300. France had perhaps 6,000,000 inhabitants in the eleventh century; according to the État des paroisses et des feux (State of parishes and hearths), instituted on royal orders in 1328, the number had risen to between 16 and 17,000,000, making it the most populous kingdom in Europe. In England, the population grew from 1.3,000,000 in 1087 to 3,500,000 at the end of the fifteenth century. And when Raoul Glaber spoke of the ‘white mantle of churches’ covering Western Europe in the eleventh century, he bore witness to the increasing number and size of the human communities.

The wonderful twelfth century and the apogee of the thirteenth century were followed, however, by more troubled times. A demographic plateau, from the 1340s (sometimes earlier, by 1270 in Castile), was followed by a dramatic decline that reduced the population to fewer than 50,000,000 inhabitants by 1400. Natural catastrophes (the Black Death was responsible for the deaths of at least 30 per cent of the European population between 1347 and 1350, perhaps even 50 per cent in the most exposed towns, such as certain Mediterranean ports⁶) added their toll to that of interminable wars, in particular the Hundred Years War (globally, from Crécy, in 1346, to Castillon, in 1453). Revolts, famines, massacres and underlying insecurity only intensified the crisis. It was not until the fifteenth century that some recovery was visible, and it was only at the end of that century that the population again reached the levels of the 1300s (over 80,000,000 inhabitants). Although this was still an age of underpopulation, and although recurrent crises persisted, aggravated by periodic revisitations of plague, the dynamic was once again more favourable.

Demographic growth, though fragile (as the crisis of the fourteenth century revealed), was made possible by advances in agriculture, transport and trade. Globally, the primary sector was dominant, but the rural world was experiencing profound change. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this took the form of assarting and the adoption of new techniques in agriculture and in certain processing operations: in particular watermills, then windmills, used for grain, textiles and forges, and eventually also for the manufacture of paper. In England, Domesday Book (1085–7) records more than 5,600 mills.

The reception of these innovations drove a growth that fed on itself: this was ‘the first European industrial revolution’ (Fernand Braudel), a horse and milling revolution, which happened between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and which made it possible for more people to be fed.⁸ The increase in production and the increase in population went hand in hand.

As well as these transformations in the rural world, another sector, and one crucial for my subject, was experiencing radical change: the increasing density of population resulted in a process of geographical interconnection and integration, while also encouraging trade and circulation. Although the barter of goods and services remained the norm at the local and even regional level, things were very different higher up. Decisive innovations in shipbuilding followed one after the other in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: improved sails, the invention of the sternpost rudder and the perfecting of the compass. New maritime routes were opened up and the tonnage of ships was greatly increased – hulks and galleys had a carrying capacity of 300 tonnes, the carrack up to 1,000. This meant that ports had to be adapted, and heavier investment was needed to allow trading operations on a larger scale, which led in turn to the development of improved financial techniques. Political development and the gradual invention of the modern state also depended on greatly increased financial resources.

Writing was central to the most important of these developments. Administrative practice saw the invention in Italy of accounting procedures (double-entry book-keeping at the end of the thirteenth century) and sophisticated instruments of exchange (bill of exchange, credit systems). Modern accounting was based on the definition of very precise calculation procedures and the keeping of series of accounts, and then of specialized books of account. This was also a period of growth in the monetary economy and of the rise of banks, which made it possible to mobilize larger capital sums and put them to use. As the rediscovery of Aristotelian thinking underpinned the growth of a new theory of representation and the sign, economic and financial operations, even political activity, seemed increasingly to belong to an economy of the written sign and of its techniques of manipulation. The invention of Gutenberg happened in a world in the process of rapid modernization, but it provided this very process with the means for a radically new development.