The Rise of the University

2009-05-01T16:16:00Z

An important event of the 12th and 13th centuries is the rise of a merchant class; a social and economic group whose function in the world is to move merchandise from one locale to another - who make their living buying and selling goods, instead of making things or growing food. A rising merchant class and a new rise of cities, also meant a rising interest in the outside world.

The first European university was founded in Bologna, Italy in 1119. Universities were established in Siena in 1203 and Vincenza in 1204. By the end of the 13th century, universities had been established in Paris, Bologna, Padua, Ghent, Oxford, Cambridge. These were major sites for the institution of a new relationship to books, to learning, and to the Word of God.

These were important institutions because, prior to the advent and rise of the university, learning in Europe had been dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. With the advent of the secular university, students were no longer studying for the clergy. While some students were still from the aristocracy, others were the people who lived in the cities where the universities were located, who had time to attend lectures and take part in the intellectual life of the university.

In many cases, the university consisted of lecturers who lived in the town. If a group of people wanted a class they would go hire a lecturer and pay him to give a series of lectures.

The shift from a religious focus on the next world and the worship of God to a secular focus on the present world and an interest in the natural world. Merchants have different interests from priests.

These new centers of learning created new demands for books. These students didn't have access to the books locked away in monastaries. so they had no access to books. With the rise of this new form of learning, they needed access to new kinds of books not readily available - e.g. non-religious texts.

So the university created a system of demand for books as well as a system for the use of books in ways not used with religious texts.

This effect of the university on book production is what Febvre and Martin take as more revolutionary than the advent of the printing press.

Two new kinds of institutions grew up around the universities to provide for that demand: stationers and book copiers. These folks provided paper and libraries of text books that had been carefully studied and compared to other books for accuracy. They made these books available for copying by students. When a student needed a text for a class, he would go down to the stationers and copy them - by hand. Or he could pay a book copier to copy the book for him.

There are several problems with this mode of book production. The most obvious is that inaccuracies get introduced as the book gets copied.

Second, stationers may try to get accurate copies of the texts, but they have no way to really know how accurate their copies were.

The combination of these factors lead to a compounding of inaccuracies in the texts people used. Mistakes get compounded as copiers get tired, bored, or simply pass along mistakes they don't catch.

But this also created a snowball effect that led to more demand for books well in advance of the advent of the printing press's ability to meet that demand.

Books needed were not just religious texts so much as books on more secular subjects:

The first book on Surgery, the Chirurgi Magna was written in 1363.

The Development of Print Technology

2009-04-30T19:33:00Z

In the Mid-15th Century, things begin to change with the advent of the printing press. In 1452, Gutenberg conceives of the idea for movable type. In his workshop, he brings together the technologies of paper, oil-based ink and the wine-press to print books. The printing press is not a single invention. It is the aggregation in one place, of technologies known for centuries before Gutenberg.

One thing to remember is that Gutenberg gets credit for an invention that is thought to have been developed simultaneously in Holland and in Prague.

The other inventions brought together by Gutenberg in his pursuit of a printing press were:

The adaptation for printing, of the wine or olive oil, screw-type press that had been in use for hundreds of years, throughout Europe and Asia.
The adaptation of block-print technology - known in Europe since the return of Marco Polo from Asia at the end of the 13th century.
The development of mass production paper-making techniques. Paper was brought from China to Italy in the 12th C. but was thought too flimsy for books.

Prior to the advent of the printing press, books were made of vellum (calf or lamb skin) because of its durability. Vellum is extremely durable. In San Simeon (also known as Hearst's Castle), there are lampshades that William Randolph Hearst had made from 15th century Gregorian prayer books and the vellum is still in excellent condition. For books that took more than a year to produce, paper was too flimsy.

However, for print books, vellum was too costly to produce. The development of oil-based inks. These had been around since the 10th century, but smeared on the vellum used to make books. The religious manuscripts used an egg-based tempera. This was unsuitable for printing with type.

Gutenberg's contribution to printing was the development of a a punch and mold system which allowed the mass production of the movable type used to reproduce a page of text. These letters would be put together in a type tray which was then used to print a page of text. If a letter broke down, it could be replaced. When the printing of the copies of one page was finished, the type could be reused for the next page or the next book.

These technological improvements stretch across five centuries. They do not cluster around Gutenberg's time. But the advent of the printing press did not bring about a great shift in the social organization of learning in Europe. The first books to show up in print shops were bibles and religious tracts. The next books to attract publishers were the "humanist" texts brought back from Byzantium by the Crusades, and other texts of antiquity but there was little or no printing of new ideas.

Many people went into the printing business and went right back out again. The reason was that the distribution of books was poorly organized. The market was there, and the potential for filling the demand, but the transport and control and "advertising" mechanisms were not in place.

In addition, there was still a low literacy rate in Europe. Most people did not know how to read at all. But non-literates were still affected by the book trade because the elites, who controlled society, were affected by books. And people who could not read still had access to book culture because there were traveling raconteurs who stood in the market and read from books as a means of making a living as entertainers.

The situation was improved by the introduction of the Frankfort Book Faire. Cities in Europe held yearly fairs, featuring whatever kinds of things the city and surrounding area was good at producing. (The county fair of today is the descendant of these early commerce fairs). Frankfort was an early center for printing and so it sponsored a book fair which drew publishers, booksellers, collectors, scholars, who could find what they needed for their livelihoods. This helped coordinate supply and demand. The fair also produced a catalog of all the works shown at the fair - an early Books in Print.

None of this is to say that new book printing posed much of a challenge to the power and prestige of the church.

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The Rise of the University

The Development of Print Technology