In Our Time: more outtakes

L’esprit d’escalier – the art of thinking, as you walk down the stairs, of the bon mot you should have said in the drawing room. Or, in this case, the studio. On Thursday, after recording In Our Time, we were escorted down in the lift, but since then it is as if I have been on a staircase where the steps are never-ending. I am continually conjuring up in my mind the things that should have been said. So, here are some more ‘outtakes’ from the programme on Caxton and the printing press.

For me, the most interesting question Melvyn Bragg asked was one that was unscripted: did print increase the authority of the written word? Both myself and Julia Boffey gave answers to the question, pointing out the limited literacy rates and the continuing significance of the hand-written word. But the answer I would now like to have given would run something like this: the written word was in no need of having its authority improved, thank you very much. Print was not ‘the coming of the book’ – the book had arrived and had its feet well under the table long before the new technology was on the scene. On occasion, it had a mystique, a sacred aura to it which may even have been weakened by the products of the printing press, with the broadsides, the newsletters and the cheap prints making it difficult not to realise for what ephemeral purposes the written word could be used.

A separate issue that is going around in my mind is an heretical thought that I mooted in conversation with my fellow participants after the programme had finished. I mused whether Caxton’s engagement with print was a successful businessman’s retirement project. He was in his fifties when he began to show interest in the new technology. His first major publication in the Low Countries was his own translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s History of Troy, a text that, by his own admission, he had worked on intermittently for several years – it sounds very much like a pet pastime. His early printings may have made him suppose that his new-found hobby might be financially viable as well as enjoyable. But his choice of texts when he finally returned to his homeland, after his long career abroad, was not necessarily the most obvious ones from which to make money – perhaps his interest in the vernacular works was, in fact, a reflection of personal taste rather than any shrewd judgement of the market. That is not to say we should revive the erroneous image of him as a printer-scholar: it was clear that he did have an eye to what would be profitable, but those products were perhaps less often the vernacular texts in which he took a personal delight than the ephemeral prints he was commissioned to produce, or the sure-fire best-sellers of liturgical texts. An implication of what I am saying is that we may want to think further about how he considered the finances: did he see it less as a matter of making his fortune but, rather, as a way of spending some of the money he had already amassed. Of course, business acumen may not have deserted him: he may have allowed himself some self-indulgences – paid for by selling indulgences. In other words, maybe he worked to minimise any losses his personal predilections may have caused. And, perhaps for that very reason, he made a better fist of print as a business than others – like Gutenberg himself – who perhaps thought that it could be a source of wealth, only to find instead that it could be a fairly quick route to bankruptcy.

In Our Time: the outtakes

So, if everyone is allowed fifteen minutes of fame, I must now be overdrawn from the fame-bank to the tune of 25 minutes. I have just walked away from Broadcasting House where Richard Gameson, Julia Boffey and myself were discussing with Melvyn Bragg ‘Caxton and the printing press‘. Of course, there are, in fact, no outtakes from BBC  Radio Four’s In Our Time, as it is broadcast live — a fact that yesterday I was facing with equanimity until a friend pointed out that it has an average audience of 1.5 million (thank you, Jonathan). But it would be unnatural not to rewind in one’s mind what was said and, more importantly, what we did not have time to say. As I think any listener would have discerned, the participants all enjoyed the conversation and could not stop discussion afterwards, so in some way this is a little insight into what happens in the interview room over tea and croissants after the programme is done.

There is so much I would have wanted to say: I talked about Caxton working with a printing press in Ghent or Bruges and made the point that Bruges is a more significant commerical city than London in these years, but I did not have chance to expand that further. It would have been useful to explain more fully how ships from the Mediterranean travelling north might stop off at Southampton or London but there final destination was usually Bruges; that this traffic made the Channel and the North Sea a thoroughfare rather than a barrier; and that books crossing from the Low Countries to serve an English market were no new thing with print, since there were manuscript Books of Hours made in Bruges speculatively for potential owners in the British Isles.

We also talked about Caxton’s rivals printing in England — Theoderic Rood in Oxford, John Lettou and later Richard Pynson in London — as well as Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s protege and successor in Westminster. But perhaps we did not draw out clearly enough that Caxton is unusual for being English: in most countries, the first printer was a German, and in England the print market was dominated by immigrants, into the sixteenth century. This was not an entirely new phenomenon, as I explained in my chapter in The Production of Books in England edited by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, but the intensity of English debt to continental expertise was increased by the intervention of print.

That continental expertise was also increased by print’s preference for paper over parchment — here was a technology that helped make print possible, and that was known across Europe, with paper being used in England. But, apart from ten years at the end of the fifteenth century, there was no paper-mill in England: in other words, the vast majority of paper used in books was imported. That includes every page printed by Caxton. Without continental materials, there would have been no printing in England in the 1470s or 1480s. Nor was this a passing phenomenon: after the closure of that first mill, there was not another until well into Elizabeth’s reign and even then the import trade remained the main supply.

And I am sure I used the ‘b’ word live air: England was a backwater. Of course, in other of my studies, I am emphasising the contrary — the engagement of England in humanist activities suggests cultural proximity within a shared civilisation, not unbridgeable distance. But, in terms of print, and partly through Caxton’s idiosyncratic choice of texts, England was certainly at the periphery, with many of its leading scholars, like Thomas More or Richard Pace (let alone visitors like Polydore Vergil), preferring to have their major works printed on the European mainland.

What a good interview I could have given! But, then, if I had said all this, the programme would have had to have been so much longer, and consequently I would be in debt to the fame-bank to such a degree I would be as likely to go bankrupt as many early printers were — excepting Caxton.

Cambridge Incunables on-line

The learned dottoressa Nuvoloni, felicitously forenamed Laura considering her gifts for humanist study, has moved on from the success of the volume on Bartolomeo Sanvito, the leading exponent of the italic script that refines textual presentation to a level of sustained elegance. More on the Sanvito volume, which builds on the work of the late A. C. de la Mare, another time. Laura’s new project demonstrates that she is one of those rare scholars who can combine both manuscript and incunable expertise — a combination that remains all too rare. She is now ensconced in Cambridge, working with their incunables, and — the casus belli for this post — is providing with her research an enlightening and wonderfully illustrated blog.

Her work, already finding evidence for the lives of the volumes she handles, also reminds us how incunable studies have developed since Oates’s 1954 catalogue of incunabula in Cambridge libraries. Building on previous generations’ work, some of the most interesting — at least for someone like myself interested in issues of provenance — research has been on the history of individual copies. This approach, in Britain, is best demonstrated in the Bodleian Catalogue of Incunables to which several scholars contributed. It is excellent to know that Cambridge has a similar project, though the description of it suggests that the information will, in the main, be provided on their main on-line catalogue. Let us hope that it is also made available in other ways, and that the project will provide an opportunity for an exhibition to follow in the footsteps of ‘Cambridge Illuminations.’ Forza, Laura!