zo4 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (1990) 2

those rolls." 85 The bakers were evidently ready to put up with a con­;iderable amount of strangeness when their business was involved. For rudges and citizens alike, religious boundaries in Venice were the com­Jlex result of faith, interest, and everyday practice.

: would like to thank H. C. E. Midelfort, Duane J. Osheim, and Marjorie Plummer for :heir comments and suggestions upon reading this paper.

85. Processi 4:45, lines 81-84. "Interrogatus se lui crede che questa usanza sia intro­ltta contra noi Christiani, cioe in vittuperio dei noi Christiani, respondit: Questo non so dir, e vero che quando fu posto il zerlo del pan in terra non restavano di tirarne

1elli scovoli."

Idem : italics and the genetics of authorship

JO SEPH F. LOEWENSTEIN, Washington University

How does one designate the truly authentic? An answer, as much tech­nological as rhetorical: by means of italics. Another version of this question and a related answer:

How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one's resources and riches, but also with one's discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.1

For Foucault, to author is to regulate signification, to normalize mean­ing, to render the emphases of the letter merely personal. This coun­ter-Hegelianism, which begins with the dangerous spirit of meaning and ends with the disciplined flesh of the author, is anything but ma­terialist. "One can reduce it"; which "one"? What material force seizes on authorship as its solution? What follows is a contribution both to a history of authorship and a history of emphasis.

It may be that the first official English investment in an author of rights to regulate the reproduction of his or her text was conferred c. 1517. The colophon to Thomas Linacre's Progymnasmata advertises that work as "empryntyd ... by John Rastell with ye privylege of our most suverayn lord kyng henry the .VIII. grauntyd to the compyler therof. that noo man inthys hys realme sell none but such as the same compyler makyth pryntyd for ye space of ii. yeere." 2 One can only say that this may be the earliest English grant of authorial rights of copy since the language of the colophon is intriguingly ambiguous. In an early chapter of his Early Tudor Drama, A. W. Reed construes "the

Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20:2, Fall 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Duke University Press. CCC oo47-2573/90/$L5o

1. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?," Textual Strategies, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 158-59.

2. On the date of this publication see A. W. Reed, .Early Tudor Drama (London: Methuen, 1926), 11-12, 177, 187-88.

205

206 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I 990) 2

compyler" as a reference to Rastell; he takes it as a reference to Linacre in a later one.3 Subsequent convention suggests that the colophon re­ferred to Rastell. Certainly in the next few years, many such privileges were granted to stationers and very few to writers. The colophon pri­marily protects Rastell's interests and there is no evidence that Linacre himself stood to gain in any way by the sales of Rastell's Pro gym­nasmata. But the matter need not be adjudicated. That a context existed sufficiently competitive to provoke suit for protection of the rights of copy is at least as important as a determination of the precise object of protection. The Rastell/Linacre colophon reacts to the fact that, in the immediately preceding years, two other printers, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Warde, had both been producing school grammars; it enables us tentatively to describe this production as competition. Rastell probably wanted to guarantee a quick return on his investment in ma­terials and labor, for he was about to undertake an expensive (and eventually abortive) voyage to Nova Scotia, so he sought the royal protection to secure the Progynmasmata from the kind of competition that de Warde and Pynson had been inflicting on each other. Royal authority, vested in the will of "the compyler," now takes up the work of regulating competition within the book trade.

This regulatory tactic was not unprecedented; on the other hand, neither was it native. Rastell seems to have been borrowing a regulatory device that had developed in the far more competitive Mediterranean printing markets. It cannot be fortuitous, therefore, that the first Eng­lish printing privilege in an individual book protected a work written by England's first teacher of Greek, physician to Henry VIII, a man who had come to Padua for medical training in I496, who was be­friended-to focus more precisely on Linacre's pivotal status-by the Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, who translated Prod us into Latin for Aldus in I499, who, in the same year, assisted with the Aldine edition of Aristotle in Greek, and who based his translation of Galen's De Methodus Medendi on a Greek text printed in Venice. Linacre could help England across the threshold of capitalist intellectual prop­erty in I 5 I 7 precisely because he knew a good deal about the printing of Greek in Venice at the end of the previous century.

The Venetian connection is crucial, and not only because Venice

3· Ibid., I 12, 177·

Loewenstein • The genetics of authorship 207

was the printing capital of Europe by the end of the fifteenth century.4

A highly developed municipal trade protectionism had flourished in Venice, competition within the Venetian book trade had long been heated, and a number of experiments at regulating that competition had already been undertaken there.5 Indeed, state regulation of the Venetian press was precisely as old as the Venetian press itself. When John of Speyer brought printing to Venice in the I46os, his first print­ing efforts (editions of Cicero's Epistolae ad F amiliares and of Pliny's HistoriaN aturalis) so impressed the members of the Venetian Collegia that on I 8 September I 469 they decreed, in response to his request (ad humilem et devotam supplicationem magistri), "for the next five years, let no one but Master John himself, however willing and capable, dare to engage in the said art of printing books within the noble city of Venice or its territories." 6 It had been customary since the preceding century to encourage the immigration of specially skilled foreigners by extending just such privileges; in I42 I, the offices of Consules maris were created in Florence primarily for the purpose of bringing new industries to the republic.7 Often the motive in such practices was fiscal,

4· Lucien Febvre and H.-J. Martin point out that in the eighties surviving Venetian imprints number about 156, to 82 editions issuing from Milan and 67 from Augsburg, while nearly a quarter of the x,8z 1 European editions issued between 1495 and 1497 were printed in Venice ; L'apparition du livre (Paris: Michel, 1958), 190- 91.

5· On the origins of Venetian trade protectionism, see E li F. H ekscher , Mercan­tilism, trans. Mendel Shapiro, ed. E . F. Soderlund, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1955 ) , 2: l4D--41.

6. Rinaldo Fulin, "Documenti per servire alia storia della Tipografia Veneziana," Archiv io veneto 23 (1882 ): 99; for more on John of Speyer, see Victor Scholderer, "Printing at Venice to the End of 1481," The Library, series 4, 25 (1924) : 130-31.

7· The tradition of extending special trade permissions to foreigners begins in England at roughly the same time, during the reign of Edward III, who sought to develop the native textile industry by encouraging the immigration of skilled alien workers; see Harold G . Fox, Monopolies and Patents: A Study of the H istory and Future of the Patent Monopoly (Toronto : University of T oronto Press, 1947 ), 43-46. Edward twinned such protection of foreigners with inducements extended to those natives willing to participate in the royal campaign for industrial expansion ; see Arthur Allan Gomme, Patents of Invention (London: Longmans, 1946), 9-10; and Edward Wyndham Hulme, "The Early History of the English Patent System," Select Essays in A nglo-American Legal History, 3 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1909), 3: I x8-19. In his History of English Law ( 7 vols. [Boston: Little, Brown, 1924]) , William S. Holds­worth cites Y.B. Ed. III Pasch. pl. 8 (ff. 17-18) , in which one can trace the deliberate effort to justify what clearly presented itself as a novel extension of royal power: "Et issint nota que artificers ou sciences queux sont pur le publike bien, sont graundement favon! en le ley etc. Et auxy le Roy come chiefe gardain del common wele ad power et auctority per son prerogative, de graunter mult des privileges par le pretence d'un

208 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I 990) 2

the desire to preserve a favorable balance of payments by decreasing reliance on imports. Venice was particularly aggressive in developing this protomercantile policy, not only welcoming foreign craft, but in some cases financing its local exercise.8 (Paradoxically, the spread of technical knowledge made possible by the growth of printing during the next century obviated the importance of such mechanisms for at­tracting foreign expertise). That the I469 decree fits into this early tradition of privilege is suggested by the fact that the decree makes so much of the printer's arrival with his wife and family in Venice, and of their introduction of a hitherto unknown art; the grant, moreover, is referred to as solitum, customary, even though it is the first industrial monopoly recorded in the Venetian archives.

The motive for all such formal welcomes, which had heretofore in­volved permission to engage in a trade and not a monopoly of that trade, is that they clear an industrial space outside the regulatory structure of the local guilds for the autonomous exercise of a new craft or of a radically new technique in an established craft. 9 Such invitations thus protect the foreigner from the institutional hostility of native artisans to alien laborers, they safeguard against the unrest that might arise from jurisdictional disputes, they confer on the innovative industry a special freedom to develop adaptive economic structures, and they secure the direct allegiance of the industry to the state.10 (As the in-

publike bien, commen que (prima facie) il appiert merement encontre comen droit" (Holdsworth, 4:344 n.)

The earliest continental effort to attract foreign industry with which I am familiar is a grant in I236 by the mayor of Bordeaux of fifteen years' exclusive rights to local cloth manufacture after the Flemish and English manner. For this grant, and for the Florentine consules maris, see Maximilian Frumkin, "Early History of Patents for In­vention," Transactions of the Newcomen Society 26 (I947-49): 48-;6.

Horatio F. Brown discusses some of the motives for the grant to John of Speyer, though without placing that grant in the context of Venetian institutional history, in his Venetian Printing Press: An Historical Study Based upon Documents for the Most Part Hitherto Unpublished (London: Nimmo, I89I), sz-53·

8. "As early as 1332, Venice maintained a special privilege fund, as shown by a document of that year, reciting a payment from that fund to one Bartolomeo Verde, who had promised to erect a windmill. Verde had six months to complete his installa­tion and to make it work. On failure to do so, he had to refund the privilege money at once; otherwise, within I2 years," Frank D . Prager, "A History of Intellectual Property from I545 to I787," journal of the Patent Office Society 26 (I944): 7I4.

9· On the shift from letters of protection to the grant of monopoly in England, see Fox, Monopolies and Patents, 45·

IO. Though the economy of Venice depended on state-regulated commerce, the Republic was very chary about the award of monopolies. Though cartels open to all Venetians were encouraged, the government was ruthless towards exclusive and monopolistic cartels. Clearly, the state wished to identify itself as the ground of trade,

Loewenstein · The genetics of authorship 209

vitational "letter of protection" evolved toward the monopoly grant, thus reorienting protection from the exotic to the ingenious, this last function became more and more significant, eroding guild power, securing a national orientation as the condition of economic behavior, and promoting the decisive linkage, within the absolutist subject, of economic self-interest and political self-identification: each man mo­nopolized his own economic powers, but only within the authority of the state.) The award of an industrial monopoly was new, but its func­tion, allowing John of Speyer to operate freely without the interfer­ence of, say, the local text writers, was old enough: in I 3 o I, the glass makers' guild was explicitly prohibited from making the eyeglasses that had recently been invented abroad; such manufacture was thrown open to the general public, a deregulation which drastically undermined the hegemony of the guilds within the industrial sector.

I mean to deny neither the novelty nor the value of the Collegia's award to John of Speyer. It gives the principle of industrial protection a novel clarity of articulation, takes the principle to new extremes. And the value of the decree was not merely economic, for it may well have been equally important as a sign of municipal favor and interest; the privilege confers symbolic singularity by means of the token of in­dustrial monopoly, thus inviting both cultural patronage and industrial capital.11 The latent economic value of the monopoly became obvious soon enough, for John of Speyer died in I47o, and-no doubt to the dismay of his brother and partner, Wendelin-his monopoly lapsed. By I 4 7 3 there were I 34 presses operating in Venice.

The dynamics of the ensuing competition deserve comment. One of the most prolific Venetian printers of the seventies, Nicholas Jensen,

to make the perimeter of the market congruent with the borders of the republic: the open cartel identified the aspirations of merchant capital with the will of the state. See Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, I973), I44· Lane goes on to argue (p. I45) that the restrictions on shipping-the government's limits on the number of ships making specific voyages within a particular period of time-actually worked to control the extent of monopolistic trade, despite its apparent support for such monopolization.

Of the importance of securing new industries, such as printing, from the institutional hostility of related trade organizations perhaps more might be said, if only by way of noting that John of Speyer might well have sought such protection as a preemptive measure. In Genoa, the copyists' guild petitioned the Senate in I474 to expel the printers who had recently set up shops in their city.

I I. The privilege not only provides an incentive for the large outlay of capital neces­sary to apply such technical innovations as printing with moveable type, it is also in a sense a governmental guarantee of support, useful as security on potential loans.

2IO Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I99o) 2

appropriated one of John of Speyer's original titles, the Historia Naturalis, which he printed in I472. Jensen's choice is characteristic: one effect of the capital pressures on the new industry seems to have been a remarkable conservatism in the choice of titles-at least ten Venetian editions of the HistoriaN aturalis, two of them Italian trans­lations, between I469 and the end of the century and at least sixteen editions of the Ad Familiares during the same period. Regularly print­ing the already-printed, early Venetian printers showed a nervous ten­dency to risk considerable competitive erosion of the marketplace for the security of concentrating in areas of proven demand.12 Printers frequently went out of business pursuing a fairly inelastic market for traditional manuscript titles rather than diversifying production. In I4 7 3, output from Venetian presses dropped to 2 5 titles, after outputs of 6 3 titles for I 4 7 I and 7 I for I 4 7 2. (In England, the shift to what might be called "literacy production" -the printing of grammars, prim­ers, and psalters-was a major breakthrough, since these titles were aimed at a new market, and one which printing is particularly well equipped to enlarge and satisfy. A further evidence of the creativity of London printing was the turn to printing of law books not specifically associated with the legal curriculum, but ultimately of considerable use to the practicing lawyer and instrumental in the legitimization of Tudor government, a practice which transformed the growing London legal corps into a major sector of the English print audience.) In Venice the obsessive conservatism of early press output took place in a highly competitive local economy, one in which guild and state pro­vided pockets of various industrial and trade protections, so it is easy to see how the effects of market constriction might manifest themselves as much in an appetite for market monopoly as in a pressure for diversi­fication of production.

The Collegia's next grant of a printing privilege, made on I Septem­ber I486, suggests how very mixed their intervention-how uncertain their relation to the new medium-could be:

Infrascripti domini Consiliarii deliberarunt et terminarunt, quod opus prefatum [the Rerum V enetarum Libri XXXIIl'] per Mar­cum Antonium [Sabellicum] prefatum dari possit alicui diligenti

I 2. Early in the history of the Venetian press, such straitened humanist production may not have seemed in the least bit incautious: to some degree, printers were simply relying on the very specific university market in nearby Padua.

Loewenstein • The genetics of authorship 2II

impressori, qui opus illud imprimat suis sumptibus et edat, sicuti convenit elegantiae historiae, dignae ut immortalis fiat, et nemini praeter eum liceat opus illud imprimi facere sub pena indigna­tionis Serenissimi Dominii et ducatorum quingentorum tam in V enetiis quam in quacumque civitate et loco Serenissimi Dominii.

[The undersigned Conciliar lords have considered and resolved that the aforementioned work of Marcantonio Sabellicus be given to a diligent printer to print and publish at his own expense as be­fits so fine a history, one that deserves to be immortal, and that no one else be allowed to have the work printed either in Venice or her dominions under penalty of the displeasure of the most serene Lord and the Council of Fifty.] 13

Many historians identify this decree as the first grant of authorial copyright, yet the terms of the decree are not so simple. 14 It was the future printer who gained exclusive rights to print the work; for the author, the decree simply secured publication. Venetian printers had not cultivated a market for works of contemporary historiography, and they were loath to take risks, so the Collegio was making an ex­traordinary gesture of patronage on behalf of the glory of the Re­public. In a sense, however, their expression of civic pride was deriva­tive: in I482, Sabellicus had presented his first book, a history of Friuli, to the city council of U dine, which had thanked him warmly, decreed that the work should be printed for the glory of the city and the region, and donated a paltry ten ducats toward the cost of publication.15 When Sabellicus wrote a history of Venice and presented it to the Venetian Collegio, they simply followed suit. They were intervening for the first time since I469 in the workings of the local book trade, and this time creating a monopoly in a single intellectual work (thus saving themselves even the ten ducats that had been disbursed in U dine).

Such regulatory practices were in the air: in I474, the Senate had

13. Cited in Carlo Castellani, La stamp a in Venezia dalla sua origine all a morte di Aldo Manuzio seniore (Venice: Ongania, I889), 70-7I.

I4. The grant has most recently been described as an author's copyright by Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I979), 28; and Ruth Chavasse, "The First Known Author's Copyright, September I486, in the Context of a Humanist Career," Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 69 ( I986): I I-J8. And see also Carlo Castellani, I privilegi di stampa e Ia proprieta letteraria in Venezia dalla introduzione della stampa nella citta fin verso Ia fine del secolo XVIII (Venice: Visentini, I888), 6-7.

IS. Chavasse, "The First Known Author's Copyright," I6-I7.

2 I 2 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I 990) 2

passed a law requiring the registration of "any new and ingenious arti­fice," securing ultimate rights in such new inventions to the state, and providing for ten years' exclusive industrial rights in the invention to the registrant.16 But the I486 intervention in the printing industry was confusing in that it encouraged the printer to risk a venture outside the usually narrow focus of early Venetian print production, and at the same time safeguarded him from competitive pressures that one would expect to most inhibit only a more conventional project. The Collegia was clumsily attempting both to stimulate demand and to regulate sup­ply. We are still fairly far from modern copyright: though the Collegia was praising the historian, it was protecting the printer, encouraging the dissemination of a useful text by securing the disseminator from competition. Protection gravitated to the manufacturer of a widely marketable object, not to the author-to the faber, not the inventor.

Six years later, the Collegia shifted its support when it granted a privilege to Pierfrancesco Tommai da Ravenna for his F oenix, a treatise on the art of memoryY This privilege, dated 3 January I492, stipu­lates that the work may be printed only by permission of the author, by a printer "quem prefatus doctor praelegerit." In a gesture of expla­nation that marks the slight uncertainty of the cultural moment, the grant invokes that legal principle fundamental to the development of that particular conception of copyright as an author's right (rather than as a social policy) "ne alieni colligant fructus laborum et vigiliarum suarum" which the privilege was meant to protect in this case.18 The next printing privilege, granted three weeks later to J oannes Dominicus Nigro, is similarly grounded: "ne fructum laborum et impensarum suarum alii opere et impensae expertes percipiant." But here the Col­legia was not rewarding authorship: Nigro was granted ten years' ex­clusive right to print two manuscripts that he had merely acquired.19

16. Cited in Frumkin, "Early History of Patents," from Giulio Mandich, "Le privative industriali Veneziane (I450-1550)," Rivista del diritto commerciale (1936), 515. And see Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia, 2d ed., 10 vols. (Ven­ice: Fuga, 1912-20), 4:485.

17. My sense that this is a shift puts me in slight disgreement with both R. Fulin, editor of the useful collection of the "Documenti per servire alla storia della Tipografia Veneziana," inArchivio veneto 23 (1882): 88, and with Carlo Castellani, who follows him. In his I privilegi di stampa, p. 7, Castellani argues that the decree on Sabellicus's behalf is essentially identical with the grant to Tommai.

18. Cited in Castellani, La stampa in Venezia, 71. 19. Fulin, Documenti, no. 5· This grant to Nigro offers evidence that the nonprinting

capitalist publisher had become a familiar figure within the Venetian book trade of the 1490s (but see Lowry's strictures on the use of the term, The World of Aldus Manutius,

Loewenstein · The genetics of authorship 2I3

So the modern principle of intellectual or creative labor was only beginning to be objectified by Venetian legislation. We do not seem to find a more highly developed sense of authorial property until the Collegia's I493 grant to Daniele Barbaro for his brother Ermolao's Castigationes Plinii.20 "Arbitrantes quod qui onus et impensiam habue­runt, consequantur etiam utilitatem et commodum, non autem alii illud ab eis auferant" [judging that they who have done the work and borne the expense should also receive the use and benefit and, furthermore, that others should not steal these from them], the Consiglieri not only reified Ermolao's right to mediate control of the dissemination of his work, but confirmed that right as heritable. The grant significantly grounds itself not only on the author's right to the fruits of his intel­lectual labor but also on the general usefulness of that labor.

Venetian printers had begun to diversify their output by this time, which put the industry on a far more sturdy footing, but diversity of production was as yet far from the norm. In little more than a year, Daniele Barbaro complained before the Collegia that his privilege had been infringed. Apparently, rival printers had not been cowed by the decree of the Collegia. Perhaps these printers refused to recognize the possibility that industrial rights could be made continuing rights; cer­tainly there is no reason to suppose that such continuity was regarded as natural. But, as would be the case in England during the I pos, au­thorial rights did not occupy the center of the Collegia's regulatory attention. The granting of privilege was predominantly an industrial matter, a relatively inexpensive means of securing market control.

Applications for privileges proliferated during the I49os, with the Collegia rewarding editors, printers, capitalist publishers, and some­times authors. According to Castellani, "during the last decade of the fifteenth century, printing privileges were awarded so frequently that one can hardly find a single book printed in Venice at this time that does not carry the phrase cum gratia et privilegio." 21 Many of the privileges involved rights to publish Aristotle and his commentators, particularly lucrative grants, since the relatively stable academic mar-

17). Arguably, no other government in Europe was more sensitive to the rights of investment capital, so this development in the regulation of the local book trade is hardly surprising. John of Speyer had elicited state protection for his venture in a capital-intensive manufacture; Nigro receives protection for capital per se.

20. Fulin, no. 18; and see Brown's discussion of authorial grants on pp. 53-54 of The Venetian Printing Press.

2 1. Castellani, I privile gi di stampa, 8; my translation.

2I4 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I99o) 2

ket for books in Padua lay under the regulatory control of the Venetian Collegio.22 Late fifteenth-century Venice was one of the great centers of the new philology, and several of the privileges granted in the early nineties vest valuable rights in scholars and scholarly printers who offer "newly corrected" classical texts to the public.23 In making these grants the Venetian patriciate had found a new form of patronage, a way of rewarding a cultural expertise that was distinctly Venetian. Note that, by constraining competition, it transferred the immediate costs of cul­tural patronage to the purchasers of books. This new patronage was distinguished by its abstraction; it provided the conditions for a notion of cultural labor in service of a newly generalized consumption. It be­came more and more difficult for an author to know for whom he or she wrote: the Public, Posterity, Myself came to seem figures of audi­ence as plausible as any other.M

All told, the grants of the nineties did not so much celebrate as regu­late. Though they often evidenced official pride in scholarly activity, they also recorded the emergence of new forms of competition within book culture, for as the number of presses began once more to increase, new irregularities seemed to crop up. Two applications for printing privileges from March I 496 describe the practice, possibly widespread, of disaffected printshop workers absconding from their employers with the proofs from uncompleted editions, which they sold to unscrupu­lous rival printers; the Collegia's privileges were being sought as a re­sponse to forms of competition represented and, no doubt, increasingly

22. Occasionally applications for privileges were accompanied by endorsements from university officials.

23. See Vittore Branca, "Ermolao Barbaro and Late Quattrocento Venetian Human­ism," in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Faber, 1973), 218-43 and Brown, Tbe Venetian Printing Press, chaps. 4 and 7· Brown points out that by the 148os, the output of Venetian presses had shifted its focus. The initial attempt to compete with copyists for an aristocratic market had meant that the earliest printed books were fastidiously composed to appeal to aesthetic connoisseurship. Yet "the movement towards the cheapening and universal diffusion of books manifested itself quite early in the history of the art in Venice. The decline in the quality of the workmanship was extraordinarily rapid; and by the year 1480, books infinitely inferior to anything pro­duced in 1470 were not only common, but the rule, although the great printers con­tinued to publish editions de luxe for the use of their more wealthy patrons;" Tbe Venetian Printing Press, 35, and see also pp. 33-34.

24. On the problems of social integration at such transitions in the relations of cultural production, see Raymond Williams, Tbe Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken, 1982), 44-50. See also Elizabeth Eisenstein, Tbe Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 153-58.

Loewenstein · Th e genetics of authorship 2I5

experienced as industrial abuses. 25 The invention of print had changed the reproduction of information; now it was irreversibly transforming the circulation of information, as the book became a modern market commodity, as regulation slowly resolved nebulous competitive tensions into a constellation of rights.26 Nothing registered this transformation so uncannily as the events surrounding the publication, in Lyons, of a pocket edition of Vergil's Opera. Published in I 50 I by Baldassare de Gabiano, the Lyons Vergil is a beautiful little book, typographically simple and elegant-this owes largely to its having been set in a delicate new typeface-and quite cheaply produced. These are perhaps equiv­ocal virtues, since they are not exactly the fruits of de Gabiano's labor: his V ergil is almost an exact copy of that which issued from the Aldine press a year earlier-the first book printed in italics. 27

So in I 502 Aldus appealed to the authority of the republic, and the Senate, not the Collegia, awarded him a privilege on the grounds of what he had done for scholarship, what effort he had put into the edi­torial and mechanical production of books, and "necnon quantum im­penderit impendatque in ipsa admodum et digna sua provincia," not least, how much money he had and would spend in his enterprise.28 It

2 5. Fulin, "Documenti," 121-22. These applications, from Bernardino Rasma and Benedetto Fontana, nicely exemplify the academic nature of the privileged books: protection is sought for texts by Galen, Scotus, and Aristotle, and for Ancarano's commentary on the Decretals.

26. See Graham Pollard, "The Company of Stationers before 1557," The Library, series 4, 18 (1937): 16-17. The shift toward wholesaling is not entirely attributable to the invention of printing. Paul Saenger has pointed out that, at least in France, "in­creasing division of labor was introduced into fifteenth-century scriptoria, particularly those serving the aristocracy. Copying, illumination, and marginal decoration developed into separate standardized procedures divided among many workers. The result was a new speed in the preparation of deluxe illustrated manuscripts" ("Colard Mansion and the Evolution of the Printed Book," Library Quarterly 45 [1975]: 407). Standardiza­tion and "Taylorization" of production was already underway before the invention of printing. But the evidence for increased efficiency must be measured against the appar­ent absolute decline in production described by Carla Bozzolo and Ezio Ornato. In their important study, Pour une bistoire du livre manuscrit au moyen age: trois essais de codicologie quantitative (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1980), Bozzolo and Ornato make the case for a "cultural stagnation" between 1350 and 1450 (114-21), a phenomenon partly due to the near-saturation of (demographically constrained) reading markets with acceptable texts by the late fourteenth century.

27. Even A.-A. Renouard, the great nineteenth-century bibliographer, a specialist in the work of Aldus and his heirs, was himself briefly taken in by the counterfeits, for in 1807 he paid a very large sum for an Aldine Vergil which he later discovered to be inauthentic. It is not surprising that modern bibliographers look to Renouard for the fullest account of the history and range of the Lyonnais counterfeiting industry.

28. I quote here, not from the senatorial decree of 17 October, but from the ducal

2I6 Journal of Medieval and R enaissance Studies, 20 (I99o) 2

was a grant for ten years' exclusive printing of works in Greek or of Latin works in italic ("quos vulgo cursivos et cancellarios dicunt") characters.29 This was not the first grant for a typographic monopoly: in I498 Ottaviano de Petrucci received a monopoly in the printing of canto figurato and Democrito Terracina received a monopoly in the printing of Arabic. Yet Aldus had pioneered: in I496, he had received a twenty-year grant of exclusive rights to whatever he should choose to print in Greek and a monopoly in his own particular method of printing in Greek. Two years later Nicola Vlasto and Gabriele Brae­cia da Brasichella each petitioned for, and received, exclusive rights in their own distinct methods of Greek typography. Braccio also received specific monopoly rights in four works (including Aesop's Fables), yet after bringing out two of them in a Greek cursive font remarkably similar, both in typeface and font design, to the Aldine Greek he dis­appears from the historical record, and his business associates soon move from Venice to Milan.30

So it seems to have been the case that Aldus-who was, after all, re­markably well-connected by this time-was able to make the terms of his privilege stick; indeed, in I499 he printed, in a collection of Greek letter-writers, some epistles of Phalaris included in Braccio's privilege, as if to crow over his triumph.31 When Thomas Linacre joined the ranks of scholars engaged by Aldus between I495 and I498 to work on a Greek text of Aristotle, he was joining one of the most advanced philological projects of the quattrocento; yet what was truly revolu­tionary about the Greek projects of the Aldine press was the unprece­dented amount of protection that had been sought and secured on their behalf. Linacre is celebrated for having brought Greek studies to Eng-

letter of the next month, ratifying that decree (itself a ratification of the 150 r grant from the Collegia); the decree is reproduced in Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Aide Manuce et l'Heltenisme a Venise (Paris, 1875; rpt. Brussels: Culture et CiYilisation, 1966), 479-8r. For the causes of this compounding of legislation, see the discussion below.

29. Ibid .. 479-80: "Suppliciter petiit, ne alius quisquam in domino nostro queat Gracas litteras facere contrafacereve aut Graece imprimere nee Latinarum quidem characteres, quos vulgo cursivos et cancellarios dicunt, facere contrafacereve."

30. Braccio saw fit to have his privilege reaffirmed a couple of months after the initial grant. On the somewhat intense competition in the printing of Greek during the last few years of the quattrocento, see Robert Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: The Bibliographical Society, 1900), 99, 111-13; and Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, 127. In The Venetian Printing Press, Brown points out how frequently the Collegia hedged its privileges by granting them with the proviso that they are not to infringe pre-existing privileges; see 57-58.

31· Aldus was perhaps acting out of justified pique: Proctor notes (The Printing of Greek, 1 1 1) that the preface to Braccio's Phalaris contains a studied insult to Aldus.

Loewenstein · The genetics of authorship 2I7

land, but he bore more cultural capital than a language and a pedagogy; his cargo may have included a regulatory mechanism, the revolution­ary novelty of books published cum privilegio.32

This does not exhaust the importance of Linacre's Venetian con­nection. Aldus's small success at routing such competitors in Greek printing as Gabriele Braccio may have been the impetus behind his most aggressive step, a I 50 I application to the Collegia for a monopoly in his delicate new italic typeface. The Collegia granted his suit in March and he inaugurated the typeface in the following month. 33 That privilege stipulated that for ten years no Venetian could print in italics nor might works so printed abroad be imported for sale. This latter proscription on infringing imports, a particularly intriguing one, was not new in I50I, for from the beginnings of the upsurge in the grant­ing of privileges in I492, the monopolist was protected from both un­authorized printing within the Venetian dominions and from unauthor­ized sales of imported rival editions.34 To this extent the granting of privilege preserved its original intent, not of safeguarding some sort of property, but of encouraging the local economy. Still, the scanty rec-

32· The case for such regulatory importation is not unassailable; it is only highly probable. Printing privileges proliferate in Europe at precisely this moment in the early sixteenth century, but only Venice had a well-developed system of protected printing before the second decade of the sixteenth century. Although it cannot be argued that the Aldine typeface monopoly is the normative privilege, it was certainly the most notorious, Aldus having made such remarkable efforts to enforce it. There is, of course, good reason for thinking that Linacre was especially interested in this particular Aldine privilege.

33· Harry Carter gives a useful and temperate summary of the manuscript anteced­ents and typographical virtues of italics in his View of Early Typography, up to About 16oo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 73-74; see also Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, 130-41. Lowry is appropriately impatient with much of the florid, even hagiographic, writing that has been done on the Aldine types, though I find him a trifle too quick to dismiss the somewhat hard-boiled argument, traditional since first advanced by Firmin­Didot in his Aide Manuce et l'Hellbzisme a Venise (Paris, 1875), that part of the attraction of the italic lay in the fact that the typeface made it possible to squeeze a good deal more text onto a page than was possible with, say, a roman type (see Lowry, 141-42). Lowry properly argues that Aldus did not exploit italics as a means of cutting either his own costs or those of his consumers; on the other hand, the haste with w hich Aldus's Lyonnais and Florentine imitators took up the italic may have a good deal to do with such economic concerns.

34· It is perhaps worth noting that that grant vested responsibility for the enforce­ment of Aldus's privilege in the Council of Ten, a remarkable assignment. Printing privileges were still relatively new, and the problem of enforcement does not leave many traces on the documentary record. There do seem to have been infringements (for which see Brown, The Venetian Printing Press, 58-59), yet those grants that do charge a particular body with enforcement tend not to designate so powerful and prestigious a body: the Council of Ten was charged, after all, with maintaining the security of the state. See Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, 155.

2I8 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I99o) 2

ords of enforcement make it impossible to determine why grants were made in such terms; that is, one cannot be certain whether foreign competition had already become a commercial problem, and so pro­voked these terms, or whether the terms had been introduced into grants of printing monopolies by analogy with commercial regulations long established within older industries. At any rate, we can be sure that foreign competition was a real problem by the end of I50I, by which time Baldassare de Gabiano, acting on behalf of a Venetian pub­lishing syndicate, the Compagnia d'Yvry, had reproduced the Aldine Vergil in Lyons.

It may be anachronistic to speak of the Lyonnais edition as a theft of intellectual property. What had been stolen? The idea of the secu­lar octavo, the pocket book? The design of Francesco da Bologna's Aldine typeface? The format of individual lines of type, of individual pages? Conceiving such a book, the Venetian publisher had done some­thing that did not have to be done in Lyons; designing the typeface, the Venetian typefounder had expended effort that did not need to be ex­pended in Lyons; determining the layout of line and page, the V ene­tian compositor had spent time that was saved in Lyons-though here it must be admitted that much of the labor of typesetting is obviated when the copy text is in verse, since the line need not be justified (so that this theft, if theft it was, was rather pettier than that of de Gabi­ano's later piracy of the I 502 Aldine Valerius Maxim us). Each of these features of Aldus's V ergil-its size, its typeface, its format-was a novelty, and each might make the Aldine text, or its Lyonnais copy, a more attractive commodity than another text of V ergil. Of course, methods of handicraft are often shared, one craftsman copying a fel­low artisan's methods, and without precipitating industrial conflict. Such amity depends, we may reason, on production scales that do not affect the demand for goods: as long as demand remains unaffected, the idea of infringement should not arise. Yet there can be other sources for the sense of infringement. Printing was among the most capital­intensive of early modern industries. As Febvre and Martin point out in their L' apparition du livre, the outlay for paper alone demanded substantial investment, while the low durability of type in the early days of printing and the expense of type-founding was another drain on capitaJ.35 Naturally, competition can cut into the return on an in-

35· Febvre and Martin, L'apparition du livre, 121-24.

Loewenstein · The genetics of authorship 2I9

vestment; it can also slow the rate of return. But it seems likely that the pressures exerted by scarce capital resources, more than the problem of controlling demand, would have created early proprietary attitudes within the book trade. The proliferation of printers would have meant increasing competition, not so much for purchasers of books, as for financial backers.

Shortly after the Lyons forgeries began to appear, Aldus's type­founder, Francesco da Bologna, left Venice, probably lured away by Gershom Soncino of Fano. With his monopoly thus doubly at risk, Aldus went back to the Venetian authorities in I 502, this time to the Senate and the doge, for confirmation of his privilege in italic together with a slightly ridiculous extension of that privilege to include a mo­nopoly on all Greek printing. 36 The extension is surely a specific re­sponse to the loss of Francesco's services, for Soncino claimed in I 503 that his new typefounder had designed and cut all of Aldus's types, including the ingenious Greek fonts. 37 Aldus also made an extraordinary appeal to the pope at this time, asking for an international extension of the Venetian grants. His request was granted.38 Though the papal de-

36. The Senate was trimming the duration of his Greek privilege from twenty years, awarded in 1496, to ten years, yet the 1496 privilege had entailed a monopoly in the Aldine Greek printing technique and in whatever texts Aldus chose to print in Greek whereas the 1502 privilege forbade anyone but Aldus to engage in any Greek printing for ten years. The appeal to senatorial authority for the grant is itself remark­able. Fulin lists only two precedents: one, a ten-year privilege granted in 1492 for the printing of the Bible with the Glossa ordinaria (Fulin, no. g); the other, also for ten years, granted in 1493 for the printing of Domenico da San Gimignano's commentary on the Decretals (no. 14). Several years after the grant to Aldus we find two instances of direct grants of privilege from the Council of Ten itself; see Fulin, nos. 166 and 178.

37· The mature Aldine Greek fonts are cut in such a way as to allow the insertion of compact, separately cast accents and breathings, thus obviating the problems of earlier, less economical Greek types, which required either the casting of letters with accents (which meant casting a huge variety of sorts of type) or the casting of full­sized accent and breathing types which were then set on the line above their letters (which meant wasted paper due to a sparsely printed page).

For Soncino's charges against Aldus, see G. Manzoni, Annali tipografici dei Soncino, 3 vols. (Bologna: Romangnoli, 1886), pt. 2 (vol. 3) :26-28a.

38. "Quoniam dilectus filius Aldus Manutius Romanus ad communem doctorum utilitatem novis excogitatis characterum formis, assiduam operam libris emendandis, imprimendisque impendit, magnosque in ea re labores, sumptusque facit, vereturque ne insurgente invidia, aemulationeque excitata, aliqui sumpto de eius characteribus ex­emplo, ad eandem formam libros imprimant, deque alterius invento novum sibi lucrum quaerant, Iccirco nobis fecit humiliter supplicari, ut eius indemnitati de opportuno remedio providere dignaremur. Nos quoniam ea, quae ad literatorum commoditatem spectant libenter annuimus, huiusmodi supplicationibus inclinati, ut ingenia ad plura, melioraque in dies invenienda excitentur, librique sublata omni aemulatione diligentius prodeant impressi, et emendati, confidentes de diligentia dicti Aldi, de cuius doctrina, et in libris emendandis studio fide dignorum testimonio facti sum us certiores, omnibus

2 20 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I 990) 2

cree vaguely detailed the works protected, it precisely and significantly extended the geographical range of the protection: there was to be no printing of counterfeits within all of Italy (and there were special penalties for counterfeiting within Rome and the papal states) and no importing of such counterfeits from outside of Italy. (The subsequent bull of Julius II extends the area of the primary prohibition, on print­ing, to all of Christendom.) That Aldus sought to reinforce his original privileges by appealing to these supplementary authorities is significant, for it suggests anxiety about the actual force inhering in the Collegia's original decree, an uncertainty about potential enforcement that mani­fests itself in an attempt to shore up legal expression.

Despite his efforts, the piracies kept coming. In Fano, Soncino repro duced, with Francesco's help, the new italic typeface; in Lyons the Aldine editions of V ergil, Horace, Juvenal and Persius, Martial, Lucan, Terence, Propertius, Catullus and Tibullus were reproduced, however hastily.39 But Aldus had not exhausted his defensive resources. On I 6 March I503, he published a Monitum against the printers of Lyons identifying the manifold defects of the Lyonnais editions: their bad paper and slovenly printing; the "grandiusculae ... deformes," ab­sence of ligatures (the Aldine italic had at least 6 5), and-resourceful chauvinism-the unpleasantly "gallic" quality of the Lyonnais type­face; the textual errors.40 Aldus intended to equip the consumer to de­tect the imitations by their flaws, but the international book-buying public showed no particular loyalty to the Aldine productions. In his attempt to mobilize a consumerist connoisseurship, Aldus succeeded primarily in proofreading for his competitors-in subsequent editions,

& singulis impressoribus et artem ipsam in Italia exercentibus sub excommunicationis, illis autem, qui in Alma urbe nostra, et terris nobis mediate, vel immediate subiectis morantur, sub eadem, & confiscationis librorum impressorum poenis, quas contrafaci­entes absque alia declaratione eo ipso incurrere volumus, districtius inhibemus, ne per spatium decem annorum ab tempore cuiusvis libri, tam graeci, quam Iatini ab eodem Aldo impressi illis ipsis, aut similibus characterum formis pro eorum voluntate, aut ad instantiam quaruncunque personarum cuiuscunque dignitatis, status, gradus, ordinis, nobilitatis, praeeminentiae, vel conditionis fuerint, quovis modo praesumant. V olentes, ut omnes, & singuli librorum venditores, penes quos dicti libri, & si extra Italiam im­pressi essent, inventi forent, similes poenas incurrant." I cite the text as given in A. A. Renouard, Annates de l'imprimerie des Aide, zd edition, 3 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1825), 3:226-27. Renouard also provides texts of the fifteen-year extension of this papal privilege ordained in 1513 by Julius II and Leo X (228-n).

39· His types and editions were also being copied in Brescia and in Florence, though he probably remained unaware of these activities until at least the end of 1503.

40. The text of the Monitum is reproduced in Renouard, Annates z: 325-30.

Loewenstein · The genetics of authorship 22I

the Lyonnais printers emended the errors noted in the Monitum-but he is again pioneering in his attempt to shape the market for the printed word.

We have here a liminal moment in the history of the book, a Janus­moment. Scorning the absence of ligatures in the Lyonnais counter­feits, Aldus defends an aesthetic of nostalgia, for the ligature expresses an effort to disguise the reductive mechanism of the press, to reproduce the aesthetic freedoms of scribal handicraft, even of nonprofessional handwriting. Indeed, the Aldine italics are themselves profoundly nostalgic, deriving as they do from a cursive, first used with frequency by the eminent antiquarian Niccolo Niccoli, and elaborated most sig­nificantly by midcentury archaeologists; the archaeological pedigree of this typeface is confirmed by its aesthetically jarring reliance, for the forms of its upper-case letters, on the squared-off capitals of ancient monumental inscriptionsY But for all this nostalgia, Aldus's italic en­terprise has a remarkably progressive tendency, anticipating a con­trolled international economy, property rights in industrial processes, and a transpolitical economic collective (the "Italy" and the sphere of "humane letters" designated in the papal decrees) that is benefited by individual ingenuity and that ought to reward it.

Rastell imported, or translated, more than the mechanism of the Venetian printing privilege. His I 517 edition of Linacre's Pro gym­nasmata also Englishes the burgeoning sense of propriety /property registered in Aldus's campaign against his competitors. Not only the privilegium but also the Monitum has its counterpart in the Progym­nasmata; if the privilege recorded on the colophon protects against competition from such publishers of school texts as de Worde and Pynson, a poem prefatory to Linacre's text protects against more proxi­mate challenges to Rastell's enterprise:

Guliel. Lilii p [ro] gymnasmata gramatic. Linacri a plagiaro vindicata

Pagina que falso latuit sub nomine nuper Que fuit et multo co [ m] maculata Into

Nunc tandem anthoris p [ er] scribens nomina veri Linacri dulces pura recepit aquas.

41. See Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, 40; and James Wardrop, The Script of Humanism, 146D-1560 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 11-36.

2 2 2 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (I 990) 2

[William Lyly on Linacre's Grammatical Exercises Reclaimed from Plagiarism

The Page which not long since lay hidden beneath a false name, caked thick with muck, now printing out the true author's name­Linacre, is cleansed, washed in fresh water.]

The Progymnasmata had already appeared in another edition, a flawed edition, according to Lyly's poem, though in the absence of a surviving text the truth of the charge cannot be assessed. These verses may sim­ply be another strategy for protecting Rastell's investment: from the Monitum forward, impugning the workmanship of a competitor was a recurrent tactic in competition within the book trade. So both front and end matter, prefatory warning and conclusive privilege, mark and strive to control the incidence of new competitive pressures.

These pressures condition the emphasis on the authority of the privileged edition; because of industrial competition genitives of pos­session crowd into Lyly's verse: "authoris perscribens nomina veri I Linacri." The nominal excess, the transformation of the authorizing nomen into the redundant plural, nomina, originates in commercial necessity of product differentiation. The colophon may be vague in its designation of the "compyler" who received the royal privilege, but Lyly's poem is lavish in its namings. The poem discovers, instigates a specifically modern authorship, a name flaunted as an instrument of monopolistic competition.

Rastell's Linacre does not differ so very much from Aldus's italics. Whereas the capitals of the roman typeface imitate antique, monu­mental, incised letterforms, and the lower-case roman letters imitate the formal book hand evolved in the late fourteenth century in imitation of the carolingian minuscule, italics imitate an informal epistolary and note-taking hand, a hand that developed within antiquarian circles slightly later than the roman lettera antica.42 Italic printing, that is,

42. This schema needs the slight qualification that during the first half of the fifteenth century, the monumental capital influenced both the cursive (which seems to have been the only hand used for the transcription of old inscriptions, and therefore shares some features with the letter-forms on the monuments under scrutiny) and the lower-case lettera antica (which was slowly adjusted in the direction of the prestigious monumental letter-form) . For a prudent treatment of the intellectual history of humanist letter-forms, see Wardrop, Tbe Script of Humanism, 6-39. Wardrop notes that the italic only began to be used as a book hand in the 1470s; Aldus's italic texts should thus be taken as carrying with them a certain informality, a textual disinvoltura.

Loewenstein · The genetics of authorship 223

counterfeits and multiplies handwriting. The Lyons Vergil mechani­cally counterfeits and multiplies mechanical counterfeits of handwrit­ten copies of Virgil. It would surely be anachronistic to speak of this proliferation as inherently vertiginous; it would be somewhat less anachronistic again to invoke Foucault's question, "How can one re­duce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world?" for it addresses, albeit abstractly, the disseminative flood that print initiated. His answer, that we master the technology of dissemi­nation with "the author," is extremely powerful, registering as it does how new technology calls out, produces a newly emphatic authorial authority. But powerful as is this Foucauldian answer, it is also partial. If "the author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning," it is neither the first nor the only one. The industrial monopoly be­tokened by the printing privilege is both similarly and more strictly speaking thrifty; to put it otherwise, thrift is a first principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. English printing privileges seem to have been modelled on Venetian ones, perhaps particularly on Aldus's privileges. And authorial copyright evolved, slowly and fitfully, from the printing privilege.43 In England, within a century of the first privi­leges, authors began to become important to the confirmation of sta­tioners' copyright in instances of property disputes within the guild; that is, authors occasionally figured in contests over intellectual prop­erty, a fact that eventually led to authorial assertions of their own rights within the book trade. Although statutory authorial copyright was a much later development-the key statute was the Statute of Anne of I 709-by the early seventeenth century authors began to conceive of the book-buying public as itself a potential patron. They therefore

43· For this development, see my "For a History of Intellectual Property: John Wolfe's Reformation," Englisb Literary Renaissance 18 (Winter 1988); and Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyrigbt in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968) . The continuity of this development was not recently discovered. It is implied, contested, lamented, acknowledged, ignored, and mooted-but inevitably recognized within those key eighteenth-century cases, Millar v. Taylor ( 1769) and Donaldson v. Beckett (1774), that decisively construed the Statute of Anne.

By late in the sixteenth century, some English authors were in fact writing solely for compensation by publishers (or by acting companies); having established a book­buying (or play-going) audience, they wrote in hopes of compensation from stationers (or acting companies), not patrons. It matters to them who holds the privilege insofar as that person is the central conduit of compensation. Note, too, that in England, the printer of heretical or treasonable works is as often punished as the author: indeed, the early licensing statutes aim specifically to constrain stationers and not authors. Thus, the sense of ideological responsibility is by no means detached from the book trade.

224 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (1990) 2

began to make a psychic investment in the book trade and this invest­ment led to the evolution of authorial copyright. Of course, strenuously felt-or at least strenuously urged-literary auctoritas is not a sixteenth­or seventeenth-century invention; but such auctoritas was decisively transformed by the invention and proliferation of the printing privilege. One might say that the author, the modern proprietary author, de­scends from a typeface.

Aldus used the italic as what printers call a body type; in Italy and elsewhere in southern Europe whole books continued to be printed in this type. In England, italics were first employed in Wynkyn de Wordes' edition of Wakefield's Oratio de laudibus trium linguarum, a text which also contains (printed from block, not type) Arabic and Hebrew: the context thus insists on the obtrusive novelty of the italic letterform. It stood out, and continued to do so.44 At first, English printers used both italics and roman as differential types, but, curiously, roman soon lost its emphatic quality; when black-letter lost its domi­nance of the English printed page, roman took its place. Italics, how­ever, retained their alien aura. Having failed to assert his control over Lyons, Aldus extended his influence to London, for there the italic re­mained the typeface of privilege, as the type of quotation, of accuracy, obtrusion, assertion. In the rhetoric of the English page, the italic is the master trope, the chief figure available to print. To print in italics is to fracture the English body type, so to print other, more highly authored words. Thus do we make the muffied authority of mere impression give way to authentic inscription.

Insofar as authorial copyright evolves from the printing privilege, one may say that the author evolved from a typeface. They are, in fact, in many ways the same, idem: authoris perscribens nomina 'Ueri.

Research for this essay was generously supported by both the National Endowment for the Humanities and Washington University.

44· On the differential use of italics, see Carter, A View of Early Typography, 125-26.

In search of the sacred: Jews, Christians, and rituals of marriage in the later Middle Ages

ESTHER COHEN, Ben Gurion University of the Neger ELLIOTT HOROWITZ, Bar-llan University

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Israel Abrahams argued that "probably the give and take between Church and Synagogue is marked in the wedding more than in any other social rites of the Mid­dle Ages." 1 Giving his words a social rather than institutional empha­sis, it is very likely indeed that a great deal of interaction took place between Jews and Christians in the field of public social rituals. Jews lived among Christians in most of Europe for centuries. Despite mutual prejudice and distrust, the two groups were in daily verbal and visual contact, sharing (albeit perhaps unwittingly) information about cus­toms and social life. Part of this information inevitably concerned the performance of public and familial rites. The extent to which Jews and Christians breathed the same air, walked the same streets, inhabited similar houses, and wore similar clothes still awaits a detailed investi­gation.2 It was not so much a question of the influence of one society upon the other, but more of shared elements in a common culture that were put to use in two languages of ritual, operating in two contiguous societies. Nor was the ideological polarity between the two a bar to this sharing. Rituals were probably far more familiar to members of coterminous different cultures than the respective ideologies, and there­fore far more historically significant for the purpose of cross-cultural study.

Marriage-ideological and idealized framework, social institution, and daily routine all in one-reflects popular beliefs and practices as well as theoretical disquisitions and formal rulings. It is therefore an

Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20:2, Fall 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Duke University Press. CCC 0047-2573/<)0/$1.50

1. Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1896), 203.

2. Such an investigation was conducted by S. D. Goitein for medieval Egypt. See volume 4 of his Mediterranean Society: Daily Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). For Europe, the only extensive study is Moritz Gi.idemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Kultur der abendliindischen Juden (Vienna: A. Holder, r88o-88), which requires considerable updating.

225