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MEDIEVAL-RELIGION  August 1999

MEDIEVAL-RELIGION August 1999

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Subject:

A summer diversion for you all

From:

Christopher Crockett <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

[log in to unmask]

Date:

6 Aug 99 19:15:36 America/Knox_IN

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (121 lines)

Madeleine Gray wrote:

>...In reply to Chris- it is actually surprising how many people had 
their own prayer books by the early C16, and there was a range of utilitarian
early printings available (see Duffy, *Stripping of the Altars* for details of
some of these). 

Dear Madeleine,

I have no doubt whatever that prayer- and other sorts of service- and
pedagogical-books were around by 1550--many *thousands* of them (in average
printings of a *maximum* of 500); indeed, many *tens* of 
thousands if you wish.

But: within a population of **hundreds** of *thousands*/millions.

What I said was:

>Scarce and *very* expensive items, books; clearly manuscript ones would have
been *way* beyond the purchase of all but the very, *very*   well-to-do and
almost likewise even with printed ones before the 
invention of machine-made paper, stereotyping (printing from plates 
rather than directly from moveable type), and binding machines in the first
half of the nineteenth century.>

When I thus imply that personally owned books were "rare" I meant: rare
relative to the *total* population, not *just* the middle classes of the
cities and towns, or the gentry--nor even the yoemanry--or the much less the
clergy, of the countryside. 

There were *lots* of folks out there (98%?), attached to the land, never
making it into any historical records (save, perhaps, later, baptismal ones),
growing the food for everybody else.

Sorry, Maddy, I'm going to have to hold my quicksand on this one, based 
on little more than the sure and certain knowledge that 

(1) *books (even printed ones) were expensive* and well beyond the reach of
the *vast* majority of the population; and 

(b) literacy was an equally--or congruently--rare (and, for most,
fundamentally useless) diversion.

And my cursory reading of Duffy (esp. pp. 68ff) doesn't shake my faith here;
on the contrary, I would submit that the *relatively* (there's that dang word
again) few--very, *very* few--examples which he cites 
strengthen rather than weaken my point.

"For *clerkis* can both se and rede
In diverse bokis of holy writte...." (emphesis mine)

"...'a good index to the religious and literary tastes and preoccupations of
the *bourgeoisie* in the late 15th c.' " (ditto)

"...The Oxforshire *landowner* and minor *courtier*..." (")

"...rural artisan and church-reeve...agent and man of buisness for the
ecclesiastical lord of the manor of Acle....a man of some consequence in his
own community...." (though, curiously, he later describes this fellow as a
"poor man"; I'm sure he meant to say "relatively poor")

"...a London grocer..."

Don't misunderstand: I believe most fully and heartfully in the existence of
the Guttenberg Revolution; and the fact that, with it, both litteracy and
individual book ownership *did* indeed "spread down the social scale, even to
many women [sic]" in Duffy's happy phrase.

But, I maintain again, both were *relatively* very, very rare.

1500 warn't 1900, and booklarnen was still pretty scarce at the latter date
(as it is increasing becomming once again, in our own benighted 
era).

In a wonderfully erudite and perceptive book which I happened upon 30 years
ago (when I entertained the naive idea that I might like to specialize, as a
dealer, in incunabula), _Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print_
(1943, with a '60's reprint, i believe), the Descriptive Bibliographer and
Historian of the Book, E.P. Goldschmidt, ventures the opinion that, by the end
of the first century of printed books (c.1550) there had appeared some
astonishing number of these 
curious objects (the figure 1,000,000 sticks in my mind, though it 
*might* well have been 5,000,000!), most all, as I said, printed in editions
of less than 500 copies.

Assume, for purposes of arguement, the higher number--5,000,000--clearly 
a *massive* number of books (n.b., not *titles*) with an appropriately- sized
influence--broad across the population and, albeit only slowly and  
over time, deep into it.

But, that figure is for *all* of Europe, which is to say, serves a market with
a total population of *scores* of millions of individuals and hundreds (or
thousands) of hungry institutional collectors.

And refers, of course, to *all* types of books, religious and secular,
Utilitarian and Universalist.

The arithmetic alone will not bear the argument that the private 
ownership of books--of *any* sort--was *really* widespread (percentage-wise)
in 1550, no matter how very much *more* widespread it was then than in the
previous age.

Duffy's (and your own) perceptive observations about the evident widespread
effect of the dissemination of print notwithstanding.

Best to all from here,

Christopher







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