86. Crosby, Op. cit., pages 28–29.
87. Ibid., page 33.
88. Ibid., page 36.
89. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford and London: Stanford University Press, 1997, page 136.
90. Crosby, Op. cit., page 42. Numbers still had their mystical side. Six was perfect because God made the world in six days, seven was perfect because it was the sum of the first odd and the first even number, and because God had rested on the seventh day after the Creation. Ten, the number of the commandments, stood for law, whereas eleven, going beyond the law, stood for sin. The number 1,000 also represented perfection because it was the number of the commandments multiplied by itself three times over, three being the number of the Trinity and the number of days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Ibid., page 46.
91. Jacques le Goff, ‘The town as an agent of Civilisation, 1200–1500’, in Carlo M. Cipolla (editor), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1976–1977, page 91.
92. Crosby, Op. cit., page 57.
93. Saenger, Op. cit., pages 12, 17 and 65. John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Review/Headline, 2002, pages 108–110.
94. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 118. Crosby, Op. cit., page 136. Saenger, Op. cit., page 250.
95. A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pages 147–150. See Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, Op. cit., pages 12–14, for medieval ideas of space and time.
96. Crosby, Op. cit., page 82.
97. Ibid., page 101. Jacques le Goff says there was a great wave of anti-intellectualism at this time which retarded the acceptance of some of these innovations. Jacques le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pages 136–138.
98. Crosby, Op. cit., page 113.
99. The German marks fought for supremacy with
100. Crosby, Op. cit., page 117.
101. Ibid., page 120.
102. Charles M. Radding, A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society, 400–1200, Chapel Hilclass="underline" University of North Carolina Press, 1985, page 188.
103. Piltz, Op. cit., page 21.
104. Crosby, Op. cit., page 146.
105. Albert Gallo, Music of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, volume 2, pages 11–12.
106. In particular a form of syncopation known as the hoquet, a French word for the technique where one voice sang while another rested, and vice versa rapidly. Hoquet eventually became the English word ‘hiccup’. Crosby, Op. cit., page 158.
107. Piltz, Op. cit., pages 206–207.
108. Man, Op. cit., page 87, for the demand stimulated by universities.
109. Crosby, Op. cit., page 215. In intellectual terms, the disputation was perhaps the most important innovation of the university, allowing the students to see that authority isn’t everything. In an era of ecclesiastical domination and canon law, this was crucial. The exemplar system of manuscript circulation also enabled more private study, another important aid to the creative student, and something which would be augmented by the arrival of the printed book at the end of the fifteenth century.
110. Even so, a country like France easily produced 100,000 bundles of vellum a year, each bundle containing forty skins. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 18.
111. Ibid., page 20.
112. Man, Op. cit., pages 135–136.
113. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 50. For early presses see: Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001, pages 10ff.
114. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 54. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341.
115. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 56. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341 on the print quality of early books.
116. Douglas MacMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941, pages 208ff.
117. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 81. See McGrath, Op. cit., page 13, for Gutenberg’s type.
118. Martin Lowry, ‘The Manutius publicity campaign’, in David S. Zeidberg and F. G. Superbi (editors), Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998, pages 31ff.
119. McGrath, Op. cit., page 15, for early edition sizes.
120. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 162.
121. The first move was when publishers agreed not to print a second edition of a book without the author’s permission, which was only granted on payment of a further sum. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 164.
122. Ibid., page 217.
123. McGrath, Op. cit., page 18, says the price of a Gutenberg Bible was equivalent to that of a large town house in a German city in 1520.
From the start, books were were sold at book fairs all over Europe. Lyons was one, partly because it had many trade fairs and merchants were familiar with the process. It was also a major crossroads, with important bridges over the Rhône and Saône. In addition, to preserve the fair, the king gave the merchants in Lyons certain privileges – for example, no merchant was obliged to open his account books for inspection. Some forty-nine booksellers and printers were established in the city, mainly along the rue Mercière, though many of them were foreign. This meant that books in many languages were bought and sold at the Lyons book fair and the city became an important centre for the spread of ideas. (Law books were especially popular.) The main rival was at Frankfurt (not far from Mainz). There too there were many trade fairs – wine, spices, horses, hops, metals. Booksellers arrived at the turn of the sixteenth century, together with publishers from Venice, Paris, Antwerp and Geneva. During the fair they were grouped in the Büchergasse, ‘Book Street’, between the river Main and St Leonard’s church. New publications were advertised at Frankfurt, where the publisher’s catalogue seems to have started, and it also became known as a market in printing equipment. Thus Frankfurt slowly became a centre for everyone engaged in the book trade – as it still is for two weeks every year in October. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin went through these Frankfurt book catalogues in their study on the impact of the book and they found that, between 1564 and 1600, more than 20,000 different titles were on offer, published by 117 firms in sixty-one towns. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) had a catastrophic effect on book production and on the Frankfurt fair. Instead, political conditions favoured the Leipzig book fair and it would be some time before Frankfurt regained its preeminence. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 231.
124. Ibid., page 244.
125. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods, London: Macmillan, 1996, pages 172–173.