The Folio Format in Premodern European Culture a Dissertation

Home , Barnabe Barnes, Book size, Carolus Sigonius, Edward Capell, Folio, Nicholas Okes

University of Nevada, Reno

Speaking Volumes: The Folio Format in Premodern European Culture

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Ian H. De Jong

Dr. Eric C. Rasmussen/Dissertation Advisor

May, 2019

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by

Entitled

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

, Advisor

, Committee Member

, Comm ittee Member

, Committee Member

, Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School

Abstract The history of the premodern book has for decades been built largely upon the

evidentiary model of the case study: inductive reasoning extrapolates general narratives

from specific data. The advent of digital cataloguing is stimulating the diversification of

evidentiary models, including the spread of quantitative study of large populations. This

“quantitative turn” reveals hitherto unguessed-at conclusions about international exchange, book-users’ habits, and conventions of material discourse. It also calls into

question some of the critical narratives which have emerged from the case-study

mentality.

This type of study has been and is being undertaken in a variety of channels, with

intriguing results. However, quantitative methods have not yet been applied to study of

format distributions and incidences in premodern books. This lack permits the survival of

suspect critical narratives about the folio format, in particular—attaching descriptors like

“prestigious” or “high-status” to folios. In this dissertation, I define, describe, and analyze

a large dataset of folios printed between 1455 and 1623, both to fill this gap in critical

format studies and to complicate narratives of folio prestige.

This study illuminates a number of intriguing methodological and historical

conclusions. For instance, it appears that late medieval printers frequently (though not

exclusively) used the folio format to print first editions of classical authors. This practice

seems to have shifted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; by 1623 the

folio was more likely to be a collective repository for works previously printed in smaller

formats. In addition, folios could contain any length of work, not merely large, putatively

prestigious texts. Slender folios deploy reference technologies and illustrations about as

ii frequently as do bulky folios; this suggests that visual and referential elements, often considered “lavish” or “extraneous,” presented both in expensive and inexpensive folio volumes. Methodologically, this study depends on in-person archival research, drawing attention to the gaps in the transmissive affordances of digital facsimiles. It also demonstrates the value of indiscriminately selected, large datasets based on format, serving as a model for future quantitative research into the contents, materiality, and inclusions of premodern format.

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Acknowledgements This project would have been wholly impossible without the support of a

Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Bilinski Educational Foundation. The funds permitted me to spend productive time engaging with folio collections in far-flung archives, including the British Library in London, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in

Stratford-upon-Avon, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. The course release allowed me to spend full days reading, researching, processing data, writing, and revising. I generally tend to procrastinate by teaching; without a teaching schedule, I had no excuse for not finishing this dissertation. The Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship has transformed my approach to research; without the generosity of the Bilinski Educational

Foundation, I would be a radically less efficient, effective researcher.

In a different way, I am equally indebted to the members of my dissertation committee, all of whom offered generous encouragement and trenchant criticism when needed. As chair, Eric Rasmussen has been unfailingly gracious in his criticism and lavish with his time—even when I couldn’t tell “Connor” and “Connors” apart. His commitment to my professional and intellectual development, coupled with his care for my personal well-being, make me proud to call him a friend as well as a mentor. Ashley

Marshall’s astounding work ethic and intentional approach to writing are a constant inspiration. James Mardock’s boundless energy and passion for early modern literature have taught me the value of eager intellectualism. I’ve already begun imitating Dan

Morse’s painstaking attention to professional and critical detail, as well as his commitment to ethical mentorship. Louis Niebur and Rob Gander have set a high

standard for professionalism, critical integrity, and kindness—a standard I can only hope

to meet someday.

Current and former faculty and graduate students at the University of Nevada,

Reno have supported, challenged, and pushed me. Jessica Nakamura continues to inspire

me to be deliberate, professional, caring, and above all creative in my approaches to

teaching and research. Phil Boardman and Dennis Cronan showed me why ignoring the

Middle Ages is a really foolish idea. Kathy Boardman and Ann Keniston opened my eyes

to new-to-me critical methodologies. Peter Picetti, that Renaissance man, has hashed and

rehashed folio questions with me until he’s probably sick of ‘em (not that he’d ever show

it). Thanks, too, to Brendan Johnston for Coffeebar “work” times, Leslie Anglesey for

modeling relentless efficiency in the face of trial, Lee Olsen for much-needed perspective

early on, Karen Norwood and Elisabeth Linn for their enthusiasm for medieval

wackiness, and Landon Lutrick, Andy Ross, and Jonathan Villalobos for their aid with

the Bilinski application.

Colleagues from other institutions have been similarly helpful. The folks in the

2018/2019 Newberry Dissertation Seminar for Scholars of the History of the Book in

Premodern Europe have provided an excellent sounding-board for my research, pointing out what doesn’t make sense and what I’m not seeing. Jeremiah Coogan has been particularly helpful in thinking about reference technologies, and Michael Johnston’s insights on the project’s shape have directed my thinking in useful ways. Adam Hooks has been especially generous with his time and energy. So, too, has Aaron Pratt, at the

Harry Ransom Center; his willingness to drink beer and grumble about critical

commonplaces was stimulating critically and personally. Bart Van Es asked insightful

questions, as did Jim Marino and M. J. Kidnie.

I had the great good fortune to sit under the teaching of people who cared. Sarah

Wadsworth, M. C. Bodden, John Curran, and John Su were key influences in my

scholarly nascence. Particularly formative were classes I took, and conversations I

shared, with the late Diane Hoeveler. Formidable, fiercely intelligent, unflinchingly

feminist, incredibly courageous, ethical, kind, and professional, Dr. Hoeveler shaped my

future course as a scholar and a person. I miss her greatly.

Teachers at Concordia were similarly influential. Brian Harries taught me how to

love the premodern, and continues to mentor from afar. Sally Canapa, another

wonderfully formidable mentor, refused to let me rest on my laurels—her work ethic is

an inspiration to this day. Lori Woodall put up with my nonsense over and over and over

again, and gave me kicks in the butt when I needed them. Tom Wilmeth did not suffer

fools gladly, or at all, which was another essential part of my scholarly development.

Years later, I finally understand why David Eggebrecht and I clicked: he treated me as an

equal, and that gave me a taste of what collegiality could be.

In terms of collegiality, the Endless Seminar of Legend has been ever-present throughout the shifting fortunes of this project. I especially appreciate the opportunity to talk about my research with the group at Great Tangley Manor, including Eric, Peter,

Karen, Elisabeth, Maria McMillen, Lara Hansen, Mike Morse, Vicky Hines, and Elsa.

The Endless Seminar of Tennis has been equally motivational, if not more so, for prompting me to leave the carrel and exercise. Thanks to Maria, Elisabeth, and Elsa (and, it seems, Peter now too)! Team 4 (Gabriel, Lauren, Scooby, Amelia, Jeff, and Elsa) has

vi provided a different sort of diversion—not least in helping me understand the importance of putting salt on everything. The same goes for Alpaca Punch, Kora, Ragú, and Eldeth, despite their apparent constitutional inability to avoid conflict. Similarly, old friends and new at Mount Rose have offered encouragement and hospitality at key moments; Andy

Preston, Adam and Gina Gustavson, Vern Gazaway, and Joe Horvath have been particularly considerate.

I’m fortunate to have conducted this research and written this dissertation in the context of loving, thoughtful families. My father and mother, Brian and DeLou, brought me up to work diligently, ask hard questions, and always track down the answer. Their generosity, encouragement, and optimism has sustained me from afar. My brothers, too, have been faithful friends throughout this process, even though their academic achievements are already outstripping mine. James and Jenette Ochsner have been as important, opening their home on countless occasions and providing exactly what I need—be that a library back-room for focus, a chaotic and delightful break from academia, or a reminder that the world is bigger than the folio. The solicitude and prayers of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins are similarly appreciated.

Most of all, I couldn’t have finished this work without Elsa: first girlfriend, then fiancé, now wife. She’s generous, considerate, self-sacrificial, diligent, sensible, organized, and both wiser and smarter than I. She focuses outward; I have benefited from this on more occasions, and in more ways, than I can count. Thank you, Marvin.

And, of course—

S. D. G.

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Contents Abstract ...... i Acknowledgements ...... iii Contents ...... vii List of Figures ...... ix Introduction - The Presence and Absence of the Folio Format ...... 1 A. Why Folio? ...... 1 B. The Folioness of CHT: A Microcosm of Format Theory ...... 6 C. Replacing “Prestige:” Markers of Intended Permanence ...... 18 D. Replacing “Prestige:” Non-volitional Paratextual Elements ...... 28 E. Methodology: Mechanics ...... 40 F. Project Structure ...... 50 Chapter 1 - Critical Perceptions of the Early Modern English Folio ...... 58 A. Critical Springboards...... 59 B. The Nature of Thin Folio Data ...... 68 1. Definitions and Selection Criteria ...... 68 2. Wholeness in Folio ...... 69 3. Vernacular Print and the Disappearance of the Folio First Edition ...... 85 Chapter 2 - The Rhetoric of Recurring Material Elements ...... 94 A. Volitional Design Elements: Reference Technologies ...... 94 B. Volitional Design Elements: Illustration and Decoration ...... 118 Chapter 3 - The Scriptive Potential of Non-volitional Material Elements ...... 129 A. Nonvolitional Material Characteristics: Dimension ...... 129 B. Slim Folios, Scriptive Things ...... 151 C. Conclusions ...... 170 Chapter 4 - Flux as a State of Cultural Being ...... 178 A. Introduction ...... 178 B. Flux as a State of Cultural Being ...... 179 1. Religious Flux ...... 181 2. Evolutions in Print Technology ...... 184 3. Political Shifts ...... 191 Chapter 5 - Sixteenth-Century Folios on a Spectrum of Mass ...... 204 A. Folios from the Sixteenth Century: A Data-set Description ...... 204

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B. Folios on a Spectrum of Mass ...... 212 1. Sub-1kg Folios ...... 214 2. Supra-1kg Folios ...... 225 C. Conclusions ...... 244 Chapter 6 - Reflections on the Contingency of Incunabular Data ...... 250 Chapter 7 - Technological Evolution and Its Effects ...... 264 A. Technological Evolution: Typography...... 264 B. Technological Evolution: Ornament ...... 272 C. Technological Evolution: Fluid Dimensions...... 288 Chapter 8 - Entangled Definitions, Use-Patterns, and the Weight of Tradition ...... 296 A. Subdividing Incunabular Folios ...... 296 B. False Binaries Between Use-Types, and How to Handle Them ...... 314 C. Folio Diversity and the Incunabular mise-en-page ...... 333 Coda - Implications for Book History; Or, Whither Then? ...... 349 Bibliography ...... 356 Appendix - A List of Folios Consulted ...... 372

List of Figures Figure 1-1 ...... 73 Figure 1-2 ...... 73 Figure 2-1 ...... 99 Figure 2-2 ...... 100 Figure 2-3 ...... 101 Figure 2-4 ...... 103 Figure 2-5 ...... 104 Figure 2-6 ...... 104 Figure 2-7 ...... 106 Figure 2-8 ...... 117 Figure 2-9 ...... 121 Figure 2-10 ...... 125 Figure 2-11 ...... 128 Figure 3-1 ...... 136 Figure 3-2 ...... 137 Figure 3-3 ...... 140 Figure 3-4 ...... 140 Figure 3-5 ...... 143 Figure 3-6 ...... 158 Figure 5-1 ...... 211 Figure 5-2 ...... 211 Figure 5-3 ...... 215 Figure 5-4 ...... 215 Figure 5-5 ...... 217 Figure 5-6 ...... 220 Figure 5-7 ...... 221 Figure 5-8 ...... 221 Figure 5-9 ...... 222 Figure 5-10 ...... 224 Figure 5-11 ...... 226 Figure 5-12 ...... 230 Figure 5-13 ...... 232 Figure 5-14 ...... 233 Figure 5-15 ...... 235 Figure 5-16 ...... 236 Figure 5-17 ...... 237 Figure 5-18 ...... 237 Figure 5-19 ...... 240 Figure 5-20 ...... 242 Figure 5-21 ...... 244 Figure 7-1 ...... 283 Figure 8-1 ...... 298

Figure 8-2 ...... 302 Figure 8-3 ...... 305 Figure 8-4 ...... 311 Figure 8-5 ...... 336

Introduction - The Presence and Absence of the Folio Format “…the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

—Yeats, “The Second Coming”

“…there has been a pressing need for bigger pictures and broader brush-strokes.”

—Sherman, Used Books

A. Why Folio? Reams of paper, countless gallons of ink, and decades of work-hours have been devoted to criticism of the first folio of William Shakespeare's plays—an excessive actuality which Steven Galbraith calls "first-foliocentricity."1 As a term, it neatly captures critical attitudes toward that codex, the one so famous as to be awarded Capital Letters:

"the First Folio" denotes Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies,2 printed by the Jaggard printshop and underwritten by the

Blount/Jaggard/Smethwick/Aspley publishing consortium, first available for sale late in

1623. It makes sense that critical furor should swirl about a material artifact with such a considerable cultural impact. The thoroughness with which scholars have plumbed the conditions of that artifact's creation is also predictable. But the same amount of critical attention has not heretofore been paid to this book's format—one of its most visible attributes. The folio format of CHT is a crucial starting point for this dissertation.

A starting point, not a focus, though: the lack of scholarship on format impinges on broader fields than Shakespeare studies. To date, no sustained examination of the folio

1 “English Literary Folios,” 46. 2 Following Francis Connor, I try to avoid foliolatry throughout this study by referring to this book by an abbreviation of its title: CHT. Cf. Connor, Literary Folios, 123.

2 format in premodern book history exists: nothing centered around content (like religious or historical folios, for instance), no teleological maps of "the rise of the folio," no studies of printers who frequently used folio, no scrutinies of folios in particular areas or eras.

The folio format seems natural to adopt as an organizing principle for a monograph, yet I am aware of only one such adoption.3 Most digital catalogues reproduce earlier print catalogues’ dutiful acknowledgement of format, whether folio is signified “fol.” or

“2mo” or “2°.” This means that most catalogues are searchable by format.4 In addition, the proliferation of digital facsimiles and visualization tools makes access easier and less expensive than ever before. Nevertheless, Mark Bland’s 1998 assessment of format studies still holds true: “There has been no formal study of [format in] the later STC period.”5

This lack of attention is particularly noteworthy given the impact of folios on global culture. Johannes Gutenberg's 42-line Bible is printed in folio. William Caxton chose to use the folio format for his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English.6 When the Geneva Bible was being printed in English in Geneva, issues which included the whole bible were printed in quarto,7 but when Christopher

Barker in England began issuing it (alone, thanks to his monopoly), he upsized a percentage of those issues to folio without reducing page count very significantly.8 This

3 Ibid., 1-17. 4 ESTC is searchable by format; so are USTC and ISTC. 5 Bland, “Appearance of Text,” 117. 6 STC 15375. 7 See, for example, the 1560 Geneva Bible printed by Rouland Hall, a quarto running to 619 pages (STC 2093). 8 See, for example, the 1576 Geneva Bible printed by Christopher Barker, running to 584 pages—scarcely slimmer than the 1560 quarto (STC 2118).

version proved fairly popular, being reprinted 12 times between 1576 and 1616, though

the quarto edition enjoyed more reprints.9 Several "literary" folios printed in England between 1590 and 1623 effectively inaugurated a literary folio tradition, according to

Steven Galbraith.10 Francis Connor argues that by 1630, this tradition had developed to the extent that it could be satirized, as in the collected works of John Taylor the Water

Poet.11 In this English tradition of the literary folio, too, Humphrey Moseley located his

folio collection of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, a collection which, according to

David Scott Kastan, helped Moseley generate the concept of English literature.12

On the Continent, a variety of works were issued in folio. Most notably, the opera

tradition, which at first collected classical and, later, vernacular writers' works, evolved

early in the lifetime of printing. It grew, I suspect, to have an enormous influence on the

concept of the author as individualized figure. Though opera embraced a wide variety of

forms, the majority of surviving Latin opera—the largest subset of the genre—were

printed in folio.13 And Latin opera were printed across the continent, in relatively equal

numbers across the Holy Roman Empire, the Italian States, and France, with a significant

minority being printed in the Low Countries and the Swiss Confederation.14 The next

largest subset of opera, those printed in Italian, is less than half the size of the corpus of

surviving Latin opera. Apparently, the overwhelming majority of opera printed in Italian

9 By my count, 45 issues between 1579 and 1615. 10 Including a complete works of Spenser, Sidney's Arcadia in folio, Samuel Daniel's Works, Ben Jonson's Workes, and William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Cf. “English Literary Folios,” 47- 48. 11 Literary Folios, 146-158. 12 "The Invention of Literature," esp. 120-124. 13 2236 folios, 2063 octavos, 1139 quartos, 355 duodecimos, 248 sextodecimos, assorted smaller formats. 14 Holy Roman Empire: 1672, France: 1396, Italian States: 1221, Swiss Confederation: 539, Low Countries: 412.

were printed in the Italian States.15 Far fewer folio opera in Italian survive than other opera formats in Italian, suggesting that Italian printers favored smaller formats for opera, and perhaps that consumers of Italian opera used the volumes differently from, say, Latin opera.16 And the opera tradition is only one of a variety of uses to which folios

were put in premodern Europe—the sheer numbers of folios printed in Latin suggests that

texts with religious or jurisprudential content, powerful tools in the hands of hegemonic

social systems like church and empire, were associated primarily with the Latin folio.17

If the folio opera tradition—especially its classically-inflected Latin subset—

works generally to reinforce hegemonic structures, folios were also produced to serve

subversive or progressive ends. While Martin Luther’s works were printed far more

frequently in quarto and octavo than in folio,18 those folios represent a significant share

of the religious-folio population. More folios of Luther’s work survive than folios of any

other print-era religious author.19 In raw numbers, Luther’s surviving folio population is

just as impressive; only Bartolus de Saxoferrato, Aquinas, Justinian I, and Cicero survive

in more folios than Luther, and all of them were dead by the time printing was invented.20

15 Of the 2455 surviving opera printed in Italian, 2368 were, or are believed to have been, printed in what is now Italy. 16 6511 Latin opera survive; 2455 Italian opera survive. Italian opera survive primarily in octavos (1262), with quarto (592) and duodecimo (226) next. Only 83 opera in Italian, printed in folio, survive—3.3% of the total. This is emphatically not to argue, however, that Italian printers categorically shunned folio as a format. The opposite is true: of the 60,669 unique surviving folios catalogued in USTC, 14,967 (24.67%) were printed in the Italian States. 17 34,969 unique folios were printed in Latin before 1623. Of these, USTC classifies 10,724 (30.66%) as “Religious” and 8,989 (25.71%) as “Jurisprudence.” 18 Of 4895 surviving works attributed in USTC to Luther, 2,703 (55.21%) are quartos, 1,477 (30.17%) are octavos, and 440 (8.99%) are folios. 19 In fact, Aquinas is the only religious author with more surviving folio works than Luther, with 528 to Luther’s 422. 20 Survival numbers are as follows. Saxoferrato (d. 1357): 645, Aquinas (d. 1274): 528, Justinian (d. 565): 523, Cicero (d. 43 BC): 515, Luther: 440.

More than any other early modern name, the name of Martin Luther was attached to the

folio format—at least, so the surviving record indicates.

In sum, the European folio before the publication of CHT wielded potent cultural

power. There is some resonance between materiality and cultural weight. That is, both the

built-in dimensional impressiveness and the apparent cultural pervasiveness of the folio

seem uncomplicated, straightforward, and as such easily interpreted. As a book of large

dimensions, it invites stasis; too large to slip into a pocket, even a folio made of the

smallest standard paper would demand handling that was less casual, more labor-

intensive. Even a thin folio demands a certain formality from readers. One might flip

through a quarto; one would have to page through a folio. The generous page dimensions

of the folio would require either spacious margins or masses of text, each of which invites

a separate, certain type of studious or careful reading. As a relatively stable format, with

few possible material permutations, the folio-as-artifact broadcasts a certain type of conservatism.

Then, too, the best-known and perhaps best-preserved folios are often thick as

well as large in dimensions: big books in every sense of the word. These large books

often have content which slots neatly into the conservative cultural space I mention

above. Pure size visually lends a thick folio that monumental quality to which folio

paratexts so frequently allude. If a wide, tall, thin folio resists the informal pocketing

which might befall a smaller-format book, a wide, tall, thick folio will scarcely leave its

resting place, be that library, school, or church. This rootedness does not only result from

inconvenient weight, but also from the investment represented by that much paper.

The folio therefore is ripe for study, not only because format-focused study is now possible, but also because folios occupied a major share of the premodern book market— and, in turn, premodern intellectual attention. The benefits of a sustained examination of the folio format are legion. Though this project began with the question of “why folio” for CHT, it has outgrown Shakespeare’s First Folio; its primary aim is investigation of the premodern folio in late medieval and early modern culture, in order to demonstrate the merit of format-focused study. I return to CHT periodically throughout this dissertation, since it works as a particularly prominent example of, and magnet for, the critical perspectives which I discuss. The lack of format studies in premodern book- history is paralleled in studies of CHT by a lack of evidence-based argumentation about the cultural signification of the folio format in 1623. While this lack is perhaps most visible in modern accounts of CHT, its roots lie further back, in the New Bibliography and the foundation of foliolatry.

B. The Folioness of CHT: A Microcosm of Format Theory Despite how far the fetishization of CHT has permeated Shakespearean criticism, this is a fairly recent development. According to Margreta de Grazia, the practice of vesting authority in CHT’s “first-ness,” its earlyness, dates back to Edmond Malone.

Enlightenment ideals motivated Malone’s quest for objective, factual foundations for the

Shakespearean text, a quest partially realized in his 1790 edition of Shakespeare’s works.

De Grazia argues that Edward Capell’s 1768 edition, which built its copytext word-by- word on early quartos, anticipated Malone’s approach to authenticity and ancient originals. Malone, however, first crafted a coherent, “comprehensive and consistent”

“schema” or “apparatus” for copy-text which reached back to the earliest available copies

7 for authority. To De Grazia, the engine of subsequent editorial practice runs on Malone’s rationalist apparatus, one sparked by rationalism and catalyzed by Malone’s background in law.21 Yet Malone’s reliance upon CHT as the first source for half of the

Shakespearean dramatic oeuvre hardly qualifies as foliolatry or fetishization; when earlier sources for plays existed, Malone used those earlier sources. If anything, Malone fetishized antiquity, as early as possible and the earlier the better.

Though Capell and Malone laid the groundwork for later critical focus on CHT, not until the middle of the twentieth century did that focus begin to develop into the preoccupation we know today, by way of two major events in the history of CHT criticism. In 1955, Sir W. W. Greg published his massive study of The Shakespeare First

Folio, Its Bibliographical and Textual History; while previous efforts of the New

Bibliography had examined CHT, even in some depth, Greg’s nearly 500-page work certainly qualified as the most exhaustive yet. Then, in 1963, Charlton Hinman’s decades of analog labor at the Folger Shakespeare Library finally bore fruit, in the form of the massive, and massively influential, Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of

Shakespeare. Hinman’s work, evidence-laden and drawn from an easily-accessible archive, continues to incite critical response today, more than half a century later.

Between Greg and Hinman, CHT had assumed a place at the center of critical attention— a place it still commands today.

Though Greg’s and Hinman’s books were published within eight years of each other, they approached data from different frames of reference, and it shows in their

21 De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 54-55.

8 work. Printing and Proof-Reading arises from Hinman’s years of painstaking collation in the Folger Shakespeare Library, and elsewhere. The book relies upon Hinman’s data, but it also showcases it; it makes the data available for subsequent scholars to interpret, reinterpret, and wrangle over. His contributions to the study of the compositors of CHT continue to spark conversations today. These contributions, data-driven as they are, differ from Greg’s in a particular way: as Hinman himself summarizes it, “Greg’s primary concern…is with copy,” or (more generally put) with textual questions. Hinman sees his work in Printing and Proof-Reading as primarily bibliographic, but in such a way as to illumine questions textual, historical, poetic, literary, performative, and the like.22

Together, Greg’s and Hinman’s works cover two significant entry-points to study of CHT: its textual importance (as first witness for roughly half of the Shakespearean corpus, among other things) and its rich bibliographic peculiarity (in its collectedness, in its collaborative origins, in the mystery of its genesis, among other things). These two large monographs, taken together, effectively legitimated CHT as an object for individual study. Greg made a case for its monolithic importance to editorial work; Hinman argued, perhaps unwittingly, for the value of criticism of CHT as a material object. In establishing the study of CHT as a viable and generative avenue for critical endeavor, however, Greg and Hinman both shaped the future course of that study—specifically, in how they rhetorically represented the book relative to its contemporaries in folio.

Neither Greg nor Hinman expend much critical energy on CHT’s format. Greg’s textual focus emphasizes what was printed on those folio pages; Hinman’s

22 Hinman, Printing and Proof-Reading, I:4-6.

bibliographical focus emphasizes how those folio pages were printed upon. For Greg, the

choice of folio for printing CHT—whosever choice that was—had an aesthetic effect, if

not an aesthetic intent. Greg refers to CHT as “a handsome volume,”23 “the monument

[Heminges and Condell] were erecting to the memory of their dead friend,”24 “the great

folio collection of plays that issued from Jaggard’s press in 1623,” and “a monument

raised by the piety of [Shakespeare’s] old stage-mates.”25 This monumentalizing and

aestheticizing language bolsters Greg’s case for CHT as a text deserving of individual

study. At the same time, it identifies CHT’s physical dimensions as illustrative as well as

constitutive of its value. CHT is a “great” book in both dimensions and quality, according

to Greg. As a “monument,” it rises at great expense, exists for a memorial purpose, and

involves considerable pains taken. Greg equates size and aesthetic quality. He also

presupposes CHT’s aesthetic quality, later arguing for the craftsmanship evident in its

printing.26 For Greg, if large size both communicates and constitutes aesthetic quality,

and the aesthetic quality of CHT is assumed a priori, then folio format, that largest of

sizes, is the only possible choice for those devout Bardolaters Heminges and Condell.

Thus, in Greg’s paradigm, the printing of CHT in folio responds to a fetishization of the

folio format in early modern English culture—assumed, but never demonstrated, by

Greg. This argument about the meaning of CHT’s folio format therefore carries diverse

implications for study: first, of the material history of Shakespeare’s work and, second, of

early modern English attitudes toward format.

23 Greg, Shakespeare First Folio, 1. 24 Ibid., 17. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Ibid., 464.

In a nutshell, Greg argues that CHT had to be printed in folio, because only folio was fancy enough for the CHT project. Hinman agrees with Greg’s claim, but disagrees somewhat with Greg’s rationale. Conceding that “the publishers [may have] wished to confer upon these works the dignity customarily associated with reproduction ‘in folio’,”

Hinman argues that the projected length of CHT compelled the project’s decision-makers to print in folio. His case merits quotation at length:

Unless these thirty-six plays were to be set forth in a type so small as hardly to be readable, the single volume that was contemplated would have to be a very large one at best. Only the capacious pages of a folio would be at all suitable; and a book of something like 1,800 pages would be required anyway unless double columns as well as pages of maximum size were used. Hence it was decided—and decided, necessarily, before printing began—to set two sixty-seven-line columns per page and so to impose and print these pages as to produce a folio ‘in sixes.’27 This defense of the necessity of the folio format for CHT introduces the material requirements which rendered other formats impractical. The type had to be large enough to read, though no larger. The volume could not be too thick for reasonable binding. The pages had to accommodate as much type as possible, which required the use of double columns and turn-unders, though Hinman does not mention the latter. Neither does he mention paper size; CHT could have been printed on larger paper—yielding a yet slimmer volume—but at greater expense. Hinman’s argument thus turns on both necessity and economy. Balancing the phrase “the capacious pages of a folio” must be

Hinman’s awareness of the great variety of paper sizes. In other words, this narrative implies decision-makers concerned about, and considering, both physics and cost. If the

27 Hinman, Printing and Proof-Reading, I:48.

decision-makers’ sole aim had been creating a structurally stable artifact, with no

consideration for expense, they would have upsized the paper.

Hinman thus claims, in brief, that CHT had to be printed in folio, because only

folio was large enough (while still being relatively affordable) for the CHT project. This

claim anticipates Steven Galbraith’s influential argument about rationales for printing in

folio. Galbraith’s 2010 survey of five early modern English “literary” folios28 compares

sheet counts and use of space between quarto editions and their later, upcycled folio

counterparts. This survey leads Galbraith to delineate between “three different types of

folios”—types not mutually exclusive and, as Galbraith emphasizes, not purely classificatory. I would problematically re-name Galbraith’s “types” of folios as rationales for folio printing. The problem with “rationale” lies in its implication of intention, but intention is rather unavoidable in considerations of printed design. Hinman imagines concrete cost-cutting and practical intentions for the CHT decision-makers in the above

quote; Greg imagines general monumentalizing intentions for Heminges and Condell in

his discussion of format. Galbraith’s data suggests three occasionally-overlapping

rationales, emerging on the page from designers’ intentions and deduced from that on-

the-page evidence from bibliographic codes legible there.29 These rationales are as

follows.

28 Collections of Sidney, Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Jonson, and Shakespeare. 29 I draw the important idea of the bibliographic code from Jerome McGann’s The Textual Condition. I explicate it in more detail below.

• the rationale of economy chooses folio because “the folio format…saves paper by making full use of the large folio page,” which can yield “a folio publication that is significantly less expensive to produce than a quarto publication of the same text.”

• the rationale of luxury uses “the folio page…lavishly…generating an abundance of white space.” “This approach does not save paper,” instead using more than necessary. “Attractiveness,” for a folio of luxury, supersedes thriftiness.

• the rationale of necessity turns to “the folio format…because the amount of text to be printed is so great that no other format could reasonably contain it.”

Galbraith’s evidence demonstrates that these rationales are not mutually exclusive, and some display affinities with each other. Economy and necessity share the drive to compress, to fit more text in less space; predictably, two of the folios in

Galbraith’s data-set (the 1611 Spenser and the 1623 Shakespeare) take shape in response to rationales of economy and necessity.30 Galbraith’s study is of immense value to my own argument, particularly regarding method and heuristic.

Galbraith’s hypothesis about the rationales underpinning the decision by the CHT project’s “onlie begetters” strongly resembles Hinman’s, but has enjoyed far more currency in contemporary discussions of CHT’s format. The difference in evidentiary support between Hinman’s statement of the hypothesis and Galbraith’s may explain this.

Hinman draws upon his immense familiarity with CHT and with early modern English print culture to make common-sensical assertions: “the publishers…can have had no real

30 Galbraith, “English Literary Folios,” 46-67.

choice as to format.”31 By contrast, Galbraith (who cites but does not specifically reference Hinman’s statement of the hypothesis) supports his assertion through sheet counts, white space, and the mathematics of transitioning from quarto to folio.32 In the

age of digital humanities, Galbraith’s evidence may appear more attractive because of its

data-driven methodology. Perhaps the allure of the necessity/economy rationale lies in its

relative freshness, compared to what became and, to a certain extent, remains the

dominant narrative explaining the decision to print CHT in folio: the tale of the

prestigious folio.

Critical narratives are like heresies—there are no new ones, just old ones dressed

up in new clothing. The prestigious folio narrative repeats the substance of Greg’s

argument, usually supported by a mix of implication and explicit claim. It also echoes

Fredson Bowers’ statement that “in general the Elizabethans printed works in folio that

they considered to be of a superior merit or of some permanent value.”33 The tale has

been told by critics including Peter Blayney,34 Margreta de Grazia,35 David Scott

Kastan,36 Gary Taylor,37 and (to some extent) Eric Rasmussen.38 The relatively simple

narrative they unfold runs roughly as follows. At some point before printing began on the

CHT project, its decision-makers became aware of an early modern English cultural

association between the folio format and “important” books. In response to this cultural

31 Hinman, Printing and Proof-Reading, 48. 32 Galbraith, “English Literary Folios,” 63-66. 33 Bibliography and Textual Studies, 76-77. 34 The First Folio of Shakespeare, 1. 35 Shakespeare Verbatim, 32-34. 36 Shakespeare and the Book, 50-52. 37 “Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623,” 62-70. 38 The Shakespeare Thefts, xii-xiv. I qualify this statement because Rasmussen has since ambiguated his position on prestige inherent in the folio format; cf. “Publishing the First Folio,” 26.

association, because they deemed CHT to be “important,” the decision-makers chose to

both assert and signal that “importance” by printing CHT in folio. In other words, the

folio-ness of CHT registers a nonverbal rhetorical claim to cultural significance in early

modern English print culture.

Emma Smith, in her 2016 monograph Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries

of an Iconic Book, grants pride of place in the very title to the image of CHT as a

prestigious book. Smith argues that its “iconic” status has accreted onto it, Smith argues,

through the (increasingly) high regard in which its owners and would-be owners have held it. Early in her introduction, Smith recounts the prestigious folio narrative in detail.

“The significance of the folio format for publishing these plays was twofold,” she begins; the first “significance” draws from Galbraith’s characterization of CHT as a folio of

necessity. She continues,

But more significantly, it also had status implications. The folio format represented a different kind of publication, one associated with more high- status religious, topographical, or historical contents than with the down- market products of the London theatre (here we might think of an exhibition catalogue or photographic ‘coffee table’ book as the modern folio equivalent). This was not the standard format for play publication…39 Most of this is unobjectionable. My quibble with this narrative lies in the absence of data to support the “associations” which Smith postulates; I explicate this below.

Variations on the narrative exist. Gary Taylor (cited by Smith) engages with cultural history, arguing that the aspirational rhetoric implicit in the act of printing plays in folio is also culturally aggressive, confrontational, and transgressive.40 Taylor

39 Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, 5. 40 Smith, Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio, 67-68; Shakespeare’s First Folio, 5-7; Taylor, “Making Meaning,” 64-66.

extrapolates further: consonant with his claim that Edward Blount, one of the named

publishers behind CHT, was the project’s driving force, Blount’s gamble to resist and

redefine cultural mores failed to pay off, ruining him financially in the process. 41 De

Grazia’s and Blayney’s discussions of CHT explicitly claim an association of cultural

elitism with the folio format, by pointing to English printers’ habit of publishing

academic or intellectual books in folio. De Grazia takes Jonson’s 1616 Workes as her

primary analogue, arguing that the resonances between Workes and CHT align them with

each other, but only to a point. The emphasis in CHT’s preliminaries on Shakespeare as

poet of nature (rather than art) limits the gentrifying potential of CHT’s folio format.42

Blayney’s brief discussion of folio books notes their prevalence in “works of reference

(on such subjects as theology, law, history, and heraldry) and…the collected writings of

important authors, both ancient (Homer, Tacitus, Saint Augustine) and modem (Spenser,

Sir Philip Sidney, Bishop Joseph Hall).” Like Taylor and Smith, Blayney sees the choice

to print CHT in folio as counter-cultural, given the “fairly trivial” cultural connotations of

popular drama.43

Others, such as Kastan and Rasmussen, address the impact CHT in folio would

have had on early modern English bookbuyers. Kastan frames his iteration of the

prestigious folio narrative with the dimensional materiality of CHT, which he describes

as “impressive,”44 “physically arresting,”45 and “present[ing] itself as a significant

41 “Making Meaning,” 61-62. 42 Shakespeare Verbatim, 32-48. 43 The First Folio of Shakespeare, 1-2. 44 Shakespeare and the Book, 50. 45 Ibid., 51.

book.”46 The attractiveness of the material artifact, Kastan argues, may be a happy side-

effect of the rationale of necessity. Printing CHT in a smaller format would have yielded

“an unattractively fat volume, substantially wider than it would be tall.”47 But not all folio-books of drama are created equal, in Kastan’s material-aesthetic paradigm: the

“physically arresting” CHT stands in sharp contrast to Sir John Suckling’s Aglaura,

“published in 1638, a tall, thin [folio] of twenty-eight leaves.” For Kastan, Richard

Brome’s “witty” poem “Upon Aglaura printed in Folio,” which condemns both “the

prodigal use of paper” as well as “the eccentricity of the format,” proves that thin folios

enjoyed as little cultural approval as did ugly quarto collections.48 Rasmussen uses

similar adjectives to describe CHT as a material artifact—“magisterial,” “impressive,”

“prestigious.”49 This language bridges the gap between Kastan’s close material focus and

the cultural historicizing in Taylor, Smith, de Grazia, and Blayney. As with Greg’s use of

“great,” “magisterial” transmits an intangible sense of authority and simultaneously

connotes tangible associations with law-books.

Though these critics, as well as many others, slightly vary their telling of the story

of CHT’s decision-makers playing with the prestige of the folio format, they all hit

similar fundamental beats. First, intention undergirds this narrative: whether

memorializing a lost comrade, capitalizing upon an artificially-created niche, or crafting

an aesthetically pleasing book, the decision to print CHT in folio is deliberate. Second,

the association between the folio and the “important” is vague and generalized. No one

46 Ibid., 52. 47 Ibid. 48 Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 51. 49 The Shakespeare Thefts, xii-xv.

17 argues that the folio only always signaled prestige—rather, this happens “in general,”

“usually,” “frequently.” Correlatively, since this is a generalization, critics need not found it upon data, though many do.50 Third, the concept which I have here referred to as

“prestige” goes undefined. “Prestigious,” “monumental,” “important,” “impressive,”

“arresting,” “permanent,” “merit,” “value,” “sturdy,” “serious,” “enduring”—these are some of the words which are applied either to the folio format in general, to CHT particularly, or to both folio and the Folio.

One recent monograph fills in historical context for the printing of early modern

“literary” texts in folio, with a goal similar to mine. Francis X. Connor’s Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England recognizes the key fact that CHT emerged within a material market; it was a commodity, and the attitudes of bookmakers, booksellers, and book-buyers would be shaped by their expectations. These expectations,

Connor points out, would in turn be shaped by what had come before. In his formulation,

“what had come before” refers specifically to collections of literary works by English authors, printed in English, manufactured in England, in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods.51 Limiting his data-set in this manner gives Connor a manageable pool of artifacts with which to work in-depth. He does remarkable work with those artifacts, including a fascinating discussion of the satirical effects of the 1630 collection of works by John Taylor the Water Poet.52 But this choice of data-set also limits the breadth of the

50 Rasmussen references four prestigious folios; de Grazia notes Jonson’s Workes and several other prestigious folios printed by William Stansby, Jonson’s printer; Blayney alludes to specific collections of classical and contemporary authors; Bowers contextualizes via Workes. 51 Literary Folios, passim. 52 Ibid., 146-158.

conclusions that Connor can draw about early modern English culture. Sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century English print emerged as part of an international market. It is

therefore useful to consider books printed outside England along with English products as

the context for CHT; after all, early modern English readers would choose from a

geographically and temporally diverse set of offerings.

C. Replacing “Prestige:” Markers of Intended Permanence As I argue above, most critics who conceive of the folio format as intrinsically

bearing significant cultural weight explain that conception using a particular set of terms,

which I call prestige discourse. This type of discourse springs from a particular set of

material and cultural values, and displays those values pretty obviously, amplified by

their transmission through the cultural fetish of the old book. Prestige discourse,

specifically, builds upon three presupposed value-judgements. First, words like

“impressive,” “arresting,” and “monumental” imply that modern aesthetics of attractiveness obtain, anachronistically, for early modern audiences—that Ron

Burgundy’s boast of “many leather-bound books” would have precisely the same impact, for precisely the same reasons, on early modern audiences as it would on 21st-century

audiences.53 Second, words like “important” “merit,” “value,” and “serious” assume an

early modern system of cultural valuation indistinguishable from ours. In other words,

this language—often applied critically to academic works like law or history—

presupposes that broad swathes of cultural consumers would necessarily have paid

homage to the value intrinsic to intellectual pursuits. Particularly, this type of language

imagines that early modern audiences found “academic” texts as culturally exhilarating

53 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

19 as 21st-century historians find those texts. Finally, words like “enduring,” “permanent,”

“sturdy,” or, in a different sense, “monumental” mistake the simple fact of material thickness for a cultural statement about that which mattered in early modern culture. In other words, physical weight is taken to necessarily imply cultural weight, while the two in fact may be unconnected.

In valorizing cultural weight, significance, or importance, the majority of critics reference the concept of prestige, implicitly or explicitly. But “prestige” as a concept poses similar problems to the problems posed by the collection of vague, potentially anachronistic nouns and adjectives I discuss above. Certain material artifacts possess indubitable cultural weight today, in 2018; it might be said that they impart a certain prestige to their owners. A copy of CHT, for instance, is an “important” item, because of a variety of factors, such as the cultural capital connected to Shakespeare, its monetary value in an open market, and its intellectual value as an object for intense bibliographic study. In a different way, a painting by Mark Rothko imparts prestige to its owner, and is itself a prestigious item, perhaps because of its aesthetic impenetrability, critical approval of its artistic quality, what might be called the Rothko mythos, its singular rarity, and its high monetary value in the art market.54 Now, today, in the second decade of the twenty- first century, these items are culturally prestigious because of these (and other) reasons— but these reasons exist because of, and are imbricated with, our cultural moment. For instance, due to shady business practices by Rothko’s gallery, the market value of his paintings was artificially kept low until years after his death. So, in this example, high

54 “Basquiat sets artist record.”

20 monetary value as a marker of prestige would not signify at the time of Rothko’s death, and yet now, today, it does, nearly half a century later.55

How much more with Shakespeare? A host of fine critical works have examined how the constructed “Shakespeare“ acquired such cultural clout, but nearly all of them begin from the premise that Shakespeare, as a cultural icon, grew from relative cultural obscurity.56 The humble origins of the Shakespeare-construct are mirrored in the changing cost of CHT—from (possibly) 15s to millions of dollars. I argue, in other words, that since assessments of cultural prestige are predicated on ambiguous, shifting criteria, the concept of cultural prestige in and of itself is unreliable as a blanket descriptor for a large data-set like “the folio.”

Instead of asking whether folios, in general, were associated with or imparted cultural prestige, I propose two linked questions as alternatives. First, how did creators of folios volitionally deploy paratextual and bibliographical codes (what I call “markers of intended permanence”) to signal the types and extents of folios’ use? Second, how might non-volitional elements of book design have affected types and extents of folios’ use? In the course of this dissertation, I examine a data-set composed of folios from across

Europe, printed between 1455 and 1623, taking account of volitional markers of intended permanence as well as non-volitional, or “accidental,” details of book design. The purpose of this study is threefold. First, I aim to offer data-sourced modifications to the prestigious folio narrative as it applies to CHT and other culturally weighty folios.

55 Cite https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/14/art1 56C.f., e.g., de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim; Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet; Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions; Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare; Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare & That Shakespeherian Rag.

Second, I aim to accelerate format studies in premodern book history. Third, I aim to

demonstrate the legitimacy of both a medium-data approach to format study and a

materially- and visually-informed analytical praxis.

The term “markers of intended permanence” bears a certain bias toward

permanence. My data-set includes paratextual and bibliographic details which, taken

together, suggest that a book should take up permanent space on a shelf—or, to put it

differently, argue against a discarding of it as ephemeral. I could certainly take an

alternative perspective, looking specifically for markers of ephemerality, but recent

arguments about ephemerality in printing57 and in binding58 indicate that categorical

evaluations of ephemerality should be undertaken very, very carefully, or perhaps not at

all. Throughout this dissertation, I do not assume that the absence of markers of intended

permanence necessarily implies that the books without these markers signaled

ephemerality. However, I do assume that the paratextual and bibliographic codes which I

am calling “markers of intended permanence” causally signal a book’s potential for

permanent or repeated use. I base this assumption, first, on the presence of these codes in

books obviously intended to be permanent, and second, on the very nature of these codes.

So what are these codes? I group them into four types: textual, literal, visual, and

referential. My subset of textual codes I draw from McGann’s formulation of

bibliographic codes as “all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best)

peripheral” to literary study.59 Thus, I measure margin size (fore-edge and gutter); I note

57 Cf. Blayney, “Publication of Playbooks;” Farmer and Lesser, “Popularity of Playbooks Revisited;” Blayney, “Alleged Popularity;” Farmer and Lesser, “Structures of Popularity.” 58 Pratt, “Stab-Stitching,” esp. 309-310. 59 The Textual Condition, 13

font type, generally speaking (black-letter, roman, italic, exotic, or some mix of these); I note font size, in a broad, classificatory way. I also lump some details of page layout into this subset: heading styles, for chapters, librum, and sections are, to a certain extent, textual, as are placement, style, and size of running heads at the heads of pages.

Literal codes, by contrast, are specifically not textual—McGann calls them

“linguistic,” and traces attention to them back to Genette and earlier.60 I use “literal”

instead of “linguistic” because of the academic connotations of the latter. Literal codes

include the mainstays of paratext study: printers’ or publishers’ notes, prefaces, notes “to

the reader,” authors’ or translators’ notes, epistles dedicatory, and all of the thresholding

front matter which frames readers’ perception. Since plenty of brilliant scholars are doing

plenty of brilliant work on the matter, or contents, of paratexts,61 I direct my attention

more towards details of paratextual format: how long are pre-text paratexts? Are they in

the same language as the body of the text? Are they separately signed (and, therefore,

likely printed later)? Basically, I ask how these paratextual elements present themselves

textually.62

As part of my cataloguing of literal codes, I also examine glosses, marginal or

footnoted. I assess them according to a modification of the heuristic outlined by

Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham. Clemens and Graham refer to two types of

manuscript glosses: lexical (which provide “one or more synonyms for difficult words or

phrases in the main text”) and suppletive (which fill in “missing words or phrases omitted

60 Ibid., 11-14. 61 Cf., e.g., Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor or Bart van Es, Shakespeare in Company. 62 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 8.

in the original text through ellipsis”).63 While this binary works well for manuscript

studies, the development of intellectual apparatus by the early modern period requires a more nuanced breakdown of types of gloss. Instead of classifying them, I note their functions, a la Galbraith’s assessment of the work of folio formats: glosses, like folios, can have several simultaneous functions. I have posited the following functions for glosses: summary, citation/reference, explanatory, organizational, and interpretive. For instance, in the 1608 issue of Robert Glover’s Nobilitas Politica vel Ciuilis printed by

William Jaggard and edited by Jaggard’s frequent collaborator Thomas Milles, the

printed glosses are both explanatory and summary. That is, some of them simply distil the

matter in the passage to which they are keyed, while others clarify or simplify the matter

in the keyed passage.

The codes I call “visual” have primarily to do with decoration or illustration. I

categorize as visual elements like decorative borders above chapter-headings, printer’s

ornaments on title pages or scattered throughout text, historiated or floriated initials, and

woodcut or engraved illustrations. To be sure, ornamentation is so widespread that an

undecorated premodern book is something of an outlier. But the presence of content-

specific ornamentation implies a few important conclusions. First, when visual style and

linguistic content resonate, the book-as-object requires readers to decipher arguments across multiple media. When reading practice includes deciphering illustrations or unpacking historiated initials, that reading practice is more complex and thus richer.

Second, when bookmakers had to commission woodcut or engraved illustrations or

63 Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies, 39.

decorations specific to the content of their book, this would have cost them more, adding

to the total overhead of the print run. It stands to reason that bookmakers would not undertake this extra expense, and increase their financial risk, by including purpose-cut

visual elements in a cheap or ephemeral artifact. Finally, as the work of Philip Gaskell

and many others has demonstrated, the reuse of generic visual elements by printers

renders them recognizable to us. The recurrence of printers’ ornaments on title pages,

functioning as an early form of logo or branding, suggests that early modern audiences

might have noticed the reuse of visual elements, as well. The novelty inherent in content-

specific, likely purpose-made visual elements would serve as a powerful draw to buying

readers, enhancing the book’s value as a multimedia artifact and discouraging purchasers

from quickly disposing of said artifact.

This stacking of cognitive processing required by visual codes’ multifarious

modality also presents in my last type of code. Referential codes include such quasi-

paratextual elements as title pages, tables of contents, indices or concordances, as well as

elements more bibliographic in nature, such as line numbering, section-specific running

heads, numbering of sections, and foliation or pagination. Their specific purpose, as well

as the position of the reader they address, differentiates these codes from textual and/or

literal codes. Whereas literal codes fulfil a variety of phatic functions, as Genette

persuasively argues, and textual codes send similar signals (albeit through different, less

explicit channels), referential codes operate primarily within and upon the closed loop of

the book’s system—autopoietically. Referential codes do not primarily reach outward

over any linguistic or bibliographic threshold to draw readers in. Rather, referential codes

assume a reader already engaged with the book as a material artifact. They presuppose

specific readerly behaviors which require a certain set of referential tools for their

operation. Non-linear consultation, rather than sequential reading, characterizes this set of

behaviors.

As defined above, all of these codes are unavoidably interpretive. I call title pages

referential codes, though they also operated to some extent as literal codes—paratexts, in

the more classically Genettian sense. Thus, my classification of some recurring material

elements of my data-set as textual codes, others as literal codes, others as visual codes,

and still others as referential codes flattens out some of their affective texture. In

assessing title pages as referential codes, I to some extent look past their operation as

literal codes. This problem particularly affects my consideration of referential codes,

since I construct these as inward-looking. I intend, with all of this, to emphasize that some referential codes are more phatic than others. Further, to imagine these elements as existing exclusively within the code-classification to which I have assigned them is to limit their affective potential. For example…

In 1608, William Jaggard’s printshop completed the folio editio princeps of

Edward Topsell’s The historie of serpents. This was a follow-up edition to Topsell’s first

encyclopedic The historie of foure-footed beastes. The referential codes in Serpents

resemble those in Foure-footed beastes in significant ways. Both include line numbers in

the gutter margin. Both preface the main body of the book with a paratext which is part

table of contents, part index, and both boast title pages with extremely thorough

descriptions of the book’s contents. Foure-footed beastes reads as follows.

THE HISTORIE OF FOVRE-FOOTED BEASTES. | Describing the true and liuely figure of euery Beast, with a discourse | of their seuerall Names, Conditions, Kindes, Uertues (both naturall and | medicinall) Countries of their breed, their loue and hate to Mankinde, and the | wonderfull worke of God in their Creation, Preseruation, | and Destruction. | Necessary for all Diuines and Students, because the story of euery Beast is amplified with Narrations out of Scrip | tures, Fathers, Phylosophers, Physitians, and Poets: wherein are declared diuers Hyerogliphicks, Emblems, | Epigrams, and other good Histories, Collected out of all the Volumes of CONRADVS GESNER, and all | other Writers to this present day. By EDWARD TOPSELL.64 Serpents reads as follows.

THE HISTORIE OF SERPENTS. OR, The second Booke of liuing Creatures: | Wherein is contained their Diuine, Naturall, and Morall descriptions, with | their liuely Figures, Names, Conditions, Kindes and Natures of all venemous Beasts: | with their seuerall Poysons and Antidotes; their deepe hatred to Mankind, and the | wonderfull worke of GOD in their Creation, and Destruction. | Necessary and profitable to all sortes of Men: Collected out of diuine Scriptures, Fathers, Phylosophers, Physiti | ans, and Poets: amplified with sundry accidentall Histories, Hierogliphicks, Epigrams, Emblems, and Aenig | maticall obseruations. By EDVVARD TOPSELL.65 Both of these title pages are phatic—outward-facing, emphasizing connections

between book and sources as well as book and readers. But in expressing their respective

volume’s contents, each title page situates itself within a long title-page tradition, stretching back to the early days of experimentation with book design. The earliest printed books, mimicking the abruptness of manuscript culture, have no title pages; as print conventions distinguished themselves from manuscript conventions, simple title pages began to come into existence. By the mid-1490s, when the Aldine Press began issuing books, the title page took the form of a relatively unadorned, brief list of short titles of works compiled in the volume. While printers’ ornaments, typographical emphasis, and decorative borders crept in over the next century, the convention of title-

64 STC 24123. 65 STC 24124.

page-as-table-of-contents persisted. In carrying on this tradition, these two title pages

position themselves as reference technologies. They presume pre-existent reference

behaviors by established scholars, indirectly (by using categorizing, scholarly language)

and directly (by proclaiming the contents, and by extension the book, “necessary” for a

variety of intellectuals). In this way they promise a familiar experience mediated through

implied reference technologies like indices or foliation. They also encourage future

referential behaviors; these title pages might prompt buyers to consider the summary list

of contents as a tool for remembering what the vast books in question contain. In both of

these modalities, these title pages do construct a welcoming threshold for readers to enter

the text; but they do so by pointing to their own referentiality. While title pages like these

concern themselves to some extent with welcoming readers in, their essence is referential.

While all of the codes I discuss above imply a certain creativity in design, they do

not imply a singular creative designer. Literal codes have various creative geneses and, thus, various creative generators. Furthermore, the identities of these creators of literal codes are, often, accessible. Aldo Manuzio, for instance, signed many of his printer’s epistles, and his unmistakable style (typographic and literary) shines through even in the unsigned epistles in books he printed.66 Less accessible are the identities of those who

made decisions related to visual design. The specific configurations of textual, visual, and

referential codes all originated with individuals in print shops. It’s much more difficult,

though, to identify those individuals—on whose authority was Relationes quorundam

66 I use the Italian form of Manuzio’s name to remove the classical mask granted by the Latinized “Aldus Manutius.” Though Aldo was a member of the Republic of Letters, a great humanist, a learned scholar, and a thorough intellectual, he was also a Venetian working in very specific political, religious, cultural, and material circumstances. By referring to him as “Aldo Manuzio,” I emphasize his concrete cultural surroundings.

28 casuum selectorum printed primarily in black-letter?67 Who insisted that the 53-page concordance to Manuzio’s massive edition of Perottus’ Cornucopiae would key to both page numbers and line numbers?68 Answers to these questions remain out of reach. In the absence of firm creators’ identity, however, we still have a sense of these codes’ creative effect.

D. Replacing “Prestige:” Non-volitional Paratextual Elements In unpacking the idea of markers of intended permanence, I privilege the volitional facets of books’ materiality—typographical, visual, literal elements over which print-shop agents had some control. But other, more random forms of materiality can affect how books stage themselves. Non-volitional elements of materiality inform my research as significantly as do volitional elements. I look particularly at paper dimensions and book weight. Print-shop agents could not exert absolute control over either of these variables, yet I argue that they had as much potential to condition buyers’ impressions as did volitional elements of book design such as type size, woodcuts, and indices.

Neither Gerard Genette, with his particularly linguistic focus, nor Jerome

McGann, with his primarily bibliographic focus, consider the latent power of book weight or paper size in framing audiences’ expectation. To some extent, this makes logical sense. Printers exerted no significant control over the length of the texts they printed; using technological tricks they could squeeze or stretch text to fit on a sheet or fill one up, but (for instance) there was no serious chance of contracting the text of

67 STC 14901, printed in 1602 by Adam Islip (?) for Thomas Wight. Io. Croke signed an editorial preface; the source of the law-cases in the book, Robert Keilway, had died 21 years previously. 68 HRC: Uzielli 22. Printed 1498.

Jonson’s Workes from its lavish 1,028 pages to a more portable 250. Decreasing font

size, upsizing paper, and doubling columns might be enough to halve the page count. But,

as Galbraith points out, the sheer number of characters to be printed set a minimum limit

on length.69 If page count is plastic but not truly fluid, it follows that the volume’s weight would also be potentially plastic-but-not-fluid.

The same goes for paper size. Research into paper history still has to catch up with research into print history, but we know a few important details for certain. First, due to a practically embryonic English paper industry, English printers imported nearly all of the paper they used.70 Second, this imported paper came in a variety of sizes. While printers had a choice regarding which size they used, their choices were relatively limited, and some extremely large sizes would have been impractically expensive for all but the fanciest editions.71 Third, the raw materials required by papermaking and its

labor-intensive manufacture contributed to a high price point for paper. Paper’s share of

total overhead cost is still hotly debated—Gaskell argues for 75%,72 while Peter Blayney

contends that paper could make up 33% of the production cost for a first edition of a

quarto playbook. As a corollary, larger sizes of paper cost more per sheet than the

smallest size.73 But larger paper did not necessarily imply higher price; as Galbraith

demonstrates, printers could adjust volitional elements like type size in order to

69 Galbraith, 48-49. 70 Bidwell, John, “French Paper in English Books,” 583. 71 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 66-68. 72 Ibid., 175-179. 73 “Publication of Playbooks,” 405-410.

manipulate non-volitional elements like paper size for their own benefit. In Galbraith’s

taxonomy, its more expensive paper permits CHT to be economical.74

While print-shop agents could, to some extent, work around the immutable logic

of paper size and book weight, these were elements to which they had to respond. A

printer or publisher could not be proactive to seriously diminish the weight of a book, or

increase its dimensions beyond a certain point, without cancelling the print job. As such,

I cannot factor book weight or paper dimension into my examination of intended

permanence in the same way as I factor volitional aspects such as typeface, glosses, or

indices. In other words, the material properties of books exist contingent upon the

creative labor of several different manufactory agents—papermaker, textmaker, printer—

and I cannot imagine these three to have worked in union towards singular material

designs. At times, indeed they worked against each other: the turn-unders in CHT

demonstrate how the Jaggards had to fit the long lines left by the dead author into four

columns per sheet-side on the crown paper manufactured by Continental papermakers.

But though these non-volitional material elements cannot be said to have constituted parts

of an unitary creative endeavor, this does not mean that they existed at random or had no

influence on human beings in the real world. Quite the opposite: matters such as paper

dimension and book weight were likely the first material aspects that potential buyers

would have noticed. Before I address this, however, I must address the concept of the

early modern European bookshop, and indeed the fundamental problems with a

singularity of “bookshop concept” given a variety of historical contingencies.

74 “English Literary Folios,” 63-66.

The nature of book retail varied significantly across time and space, to the extent

that any generalization about the behavior of early modern European book-buyers, or the intentions of booksellers, cannot be supported by what evidence exists. The work of Ian

MacLean and Angela Nuovo emphasize the twin challenges of regio-temporal variation

and sparse evidence. Maclean’s book Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned

Book in the Age of Confessions, 1560-1630 examines both retail and, primarily,

wholesale bookselling across Europe; his examination takes into account those areas still

marginal to early modern pan-European culture, such as England, Iberia, Poland, and

Russia. MacLean charts the book’s evolution as a commercial object through what he

refers to as the “age of confessions,” or that period of Lutheran, Catholic, and Calvinist

autopoiesis in the form of confessional self-identification. As such, MacLean’s narrative stretches across a 70-year period, and he argues for significant variance in commercial practice in similar locations across different times. For instance, he builds an argument upon the trends in numbers of Latin titles listed for sale at the well-known Frankfurt book

fair—“steady increase” between 1580 and 1619, followed by “sudden decline” between

1620 and 1639.75 His other source of data, personal letters between merchants who

frequented the Frankfurt fair, bears out this sense of a “rise and fall,” to quote MacLean’s

chapter title. These changes led merchants to approach the tasks of wholesale and retail differently across time, though local culture was relatively constant. In this instance, as in others MacLean describes, wholesale and retail practices varied according to time.

75 Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 221.

Nuovo’s book The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance delimits its geographical focus more narrowly, but also examines a longer stretch of time: approximately 130 years, from the earliest incursions of print into Italy until the end of the sixteenth century. This allows Nuovo to tell a story rather more nuanced than

MacLean’s, although the broader implications of this story for European Renaissance culture and economics are less expansive. Particularly, her scrutiny of records from

Italian bookshops—registers of sales and debts, as well as inventories—yields a complex, textured sense of the vagaries of book retail during the Italian Renaissance, one both temporally linear and geographically complicated.

The conventional, predictable teleological narrative of economic growth linked to technological evolution obtains, of course: unlike MacLean, Nuovo sees a gradual expansion of the book market, in terms of units sold, diversity of stock, and numbers, sophistication, and density of print centers. The straightforwardness of this narrative could be due in part to Nuovo’s decision to end her examination at 1600. While the

Thirty Years’ War did not devastate Italy as thoroughly as it did Germany, its impact on

Continental trade must not be underestimated. By ending her period studied at 1600,

Nuovo elides what may have been a third-act bust of the Italian book trade’s boom period.76

The other strand of Nuovo’s history is less familiar than her narrative of economic growth spurred by technological evolution: she demonstrates significant variance between retail practices in different Italian cities, often at the same time. Various regions

76 Nuovo, Book Trade, 315-385, esp. 315-371.

33 capitalized upon local resources in different ways, so it would make sense that the book trade in Venice would develop along different lines than, say, the book trade in Parma.

The presence of an university in a town, Nuovo argues, would certainly influence that town’s consumption of books and configure its booksellers’ economic capabilities. But even such an apparently stable market force did not guarantee similarity in inventory or retail strategy between one university town and another.77 Simply put, Nuovo argues that generalizations about retail strategy across The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance can only operate very broadly. For instance, based on the evidence Nuovo marshals, it can be argued that most booksellers tended to stock a mile wide and an inch deep—that is, a large variety of titles, with only a few copies of each title. But this cannot operate axiomatically: Nuovo mentions several booksellers in several places who bucked this trend, pointing out that certain socio-economic situations tended to produce a higher copy-to-title ratio.78

Here, again, the restrictions imposed by regional and temporal variance are visible. As does MacLean, Nuovo makes clear that bookselling practices varied from place to place and from time to time. The limitations of sparse data are visible in Nuovo’s work as well. Though her data derive from (putatively) more empirical, less anecdotal sources than do MacLean’s, her sources are far from comprehensive. This paucity displays most in her arguments about fifteenth-century retail practices: she relies heavily on the relatively small set of historical data still extant, in the form of sales registers kept sporadically and surviving infrequently. Nuovo treats these data responsibly,

77 Ibid., 365-371. 78 Ibid., 385-387.

acknowledging how it limits the conclusiveness of her claims. This serves, however, to

underscore the difficulty of historical dogmatism, in the face of incompletely documented

variation across time and space.

It is even difficult to make meaningful generalizations about early modern retail as an economic force. In some areas, at some times, transitory retail outlets like fairs or stalls drove consumer markets;79 in others—and occasionally in these same temporal and geographical locations—local governments regulated transitory retail heavily.80 The

gradual cultural sophistication of late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century England

yielded enough epistolary data that Claire Walsh can map intricate webs of gendered and

classed social relations relative to the act of shopping—but the data do not support extrapolation of these webs back into the sixteenth, or even the early seventeenth, centuries.81 Just because luxury retail worked one way in early modern Siena doesn’t

mean that it worked the same way, or even similarly, in medieval Bruges.82 Book-retail

practices may have shared some broad characteristics across time and geography—such

as the predominance of book-barter over cash exchange—but individual markets were

individual. Customers reacted differently across geographical and temporal markets.

As the foregoing pages demonstrate, generalizations about the layout, culture, and

retail practices of early modern European bookshops are practically unsupportable. With

that in mind, the following proposals can only be conjectural—not presently and perhaps

not ever demonstrable by anything more concrete than logic. Logically, then, it follows

79 Blondé et al., “Retail circuits and practices,” 16-18. 80 Ibid., 14-16. 81 Walsh, “Social relations of shopping,” 333-338. 82 Cf. Nevola, “Botteghe and luxury retail,” and Stabel, “Retail and urban space.”

that books’ non-volitional material aspects, such as weight, dimension, and even cost

(which would be calculated based on factors beyond printers’ and publishers’ control)

would impact different customers in different ways. It also seems clear that booksellers—

printers who had received a portion of the print run as compensation, publishers who kept

retail bookshops, and proprietors of retail bookshops and/or bookstalls—would be aware

of their local markets and tailor their selling strategies according to the needs of that local

market. If, for example, customers in Lyon exhibited a predilection for heavy books of

small dimensions (fat octavos, perhaps), a bookseller might respond to this demand by diversifying their offerings in that subset, and by configuring shop layout in order to give pride of place to thick octavos. Nuovo’s research into Italian bookshops bears this example out.83 This response to demand could, and did, trickle farther up the production

chain, to the agents making decisions about format and layout; Aldo Manuzio famously

relied on bestselling small, portable editions of the classics. My research suggests that he

tended to print editio princeps of classical works in folio before downsizing in reprints to

oblong octavo.84

Accounting for the effects of non-volitional paratextual elements of folio books

prompts a variety of interesting conjectures. For one thing, as I indicate above, these

elements would have a specific impact on customers in a shop. If books were displayed

flat, as a variety of critics have proposed, books with larger page-area (such as folios) would occupy more display space, and thus draw the eye, more than would books with smaller page-areas. This could potentially attract customers, or it could repel those leery

83 Book Trade, 392-400. 84 Needham, “Res papirea,” 130-135.

36 of the cost implied by the larger page-area. As Galbraith argues, format was not necessarily linked to higher cost; that is, a work in folio could be cheaper than the same work in quarto, if the former was a folio of economy.85 But the confluence of large page- area and thickness would certainly signal higher cost to any buyer marginally familiar with pricing trends. This barely-aware buyer need not even understand that paper accounted for a significant part of books’ overhead; they would merely need to remember that longer (thicker) books almost always cost more than shorter (slimmer) books. (The wild-card in cost would involve other elements of overhead, such as expensive copy, specialized illustrations, or labor-intensive design.)

While these non-volitional paratextual elements were, to some extent, intrinsic to the work being produced, they also could have commercial impacts, and that bookmakers and booksellers could capitalize on those commercial impacts. By “intrinsic,” I mean that printing the first three books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in a quarto of less than thirteen sheets—fifty-two leaves, 104 pages—would be difficult, if not impossible; longer works fill more sheets, even in the smallest available type. A printer preparing a longer work like The Faerie Queene for the press would naturally be aware that the resultant printed product would be thick, regardless of format. Thickness and paper size—both non- volitional paratextual elements outside publishers’ and printers’ control—as well as cost and weight, both of which are direct functions of the former two elements, could pose financial challenges. For wholesaling publishers, the non-sale of large books tied up more

85 “English Literary Folios,” 48-49.

paper, and thus more capital, in the warehouse. For retailers, slow sales would mean that

return on the wholesale investment would be accordingly slow.

But the presence of these elements could also offer commercial opportunities.

Branding a large book as conceptually complete could render it indispensable to

consumers of that particular concept. For example, offering a complete Aristotle, as did

Aldo Manuzio’s folio editio princeps in 1495, could ensure purchase by a range of

intellectuals, students, and scientists, notwithstanding what must have been a significant

purchase price. (Altogether, pre-binding, this set of volumes weighs 9.9 kg, and likely weighed more at point of sale, before trimming.) Another potential benefit of weight, or lack thereof, could be the signaling of extravagance or austerity, respectively, though this is conjectural. “Lavish” folios, to use Galbraith’s term, with acres of marginal white space or a single column of verse, would use more paper, weigh more, and (perhaps) suggest to purchasers an equivalence between high cost and high quality. Conversely, a slimmer folio might entice more frugal customers by balancing generous page-area with a lighter weight, promising thoroughness without a hefty price tag. Even thicker folios with a dense mise-en-page, such as CHT itself, communicate a copiousness, a commodity

which maximizes consumers’ readerly return on pecuniary investment.

Thus, non-volitional paratextual elements—primarily page size and thickness, and secondarily cost and weight—worked as external constraints on printers’ and publishers’ textual design schemes. Textual designers could only repurpose these inherited constraints to a certain point. Perhaps some whiff of what we today might call “prestige” did attach to some of these elements, but the simpler explanation is rather more likely:

38 that bookmakers, in general, designed their texts to accelerate wholesale distribution and maximize retail turnover. References to these material elements as communicating prestige does not merely anachronize; it ignores their status as constraints by focusing narrowly on their conjectural cultural cachet. Instead of prestige, then, I propose permanence—staying power—and address how volitional design (discussed above) and non-volitional elements conditioned use.

To conclude this section, before I turn to brief summaries of my methodology, parameters, and project structure, I offer an example of how a variety of book-designs might catalyze different use-patterns. Imagine a notional early modern library—perhaps that of a French woman, literate and financially stable, the widow of a goldsmith gone too soon. In 1570 her collection of books is not large, but fairly wide-ranging, and reflects a range of her interests. She owns at least three folios. One, the Hortus Sanitatis, is very old, she guesses, based on its old-fashioned blackletter type and crude woodcut illustrations. She got this volume from her mother; it is an herbal, and both of them have had occasion to rely upon its botanical information. Another volume she is proud to own came from Venice, printed only a few years ago, containing the new catechism created by the Council of Trent. Yet another folio in her collection is in French, printed in Paris nearly twenty years ago; it is Les memoires of Philippe de Commynes, and it recounts a fraught period of French politico-military history.86

These three books have different material profiles. Both the catechism and the

Commynes run to roughly 350 pages; the herbal is nearly thrice as long. As a result, the

86 USTC 7031.

former two weigh less than the herbal; while none of the three are particularly portable,

the catechism and the Commynes would be easier to transport than the herbal. They also

signal their use differently. The herbal contains a 48-page table of contents, keyed to numbered chapters. The Commynes places a series of sommaires before the main text, follows the text with an eight-page table of contents keyed to folia (which are numbered in-text) and pages (which are not numbered), and includes printed marginal glosses beside the text. The catechism includes neither summaries, table of contents, nor glosses; it presents the plain text fairly simply. As such, the Commynes and the herbal code themselves as reference works, or at least works with content that can (should?) be referenced. The catechism, by contrast, includes none of the bibliographical codes which suggest referentiality, or more broadly the “discontinuous reading” which Peter

Stallybrass traces back to the invention of the codex.87 In terms of content, of course, the

catechism and the herbal resemble each other in claiming universal applicability, while

the Commynes offers a perspective more narrow in applicability and focus.

The point of this thought exercise is to clarify the potential dissimilarity between

folios. The explicit arguments of Gary Taylor and Emma Smith, as well as the arguments

implicit in Peter Blayney’s and David Scott Kastan’s linguistic choices, assume a general

homogeneity in use and in intellectual content between large folios. The specifics of my

imaginary library illustrate the pitfalls of such an assumption. “Large” needs definition—

compared to the herbal, the catechism and the Commynes look relatively slender. The

uses of these volumes, communicated overtly by content and more subtly by

87 “Books and Scrolls,” 42-46.

bibliographical and linguistic paratexts, differ. They even diverge in the flavor and

duration of intellectual engagement they require, ranging from practical consultation (the

Hortus), to ideological engagement (Les memoires), to theological digestion (the

catechism). These three books belong to different folio-types. To lump them together

erases important elements of their material and cultural profiles.

E. Methodology: Mechanics The nature and shape of my methodology arise directly from the exigence for this

dissertation project and build upon the methodologies of previous data-focused studies.

The sample size for this study is significantly larger and more varied than those adopted

for previous studies. The data in the data-set are more diverse—textually, visually, and

materially—than that present in other data-sets from other studies. I analyze these data synthetically, putting heterogenous classes of data in conversation. Somewhere behind this methodology is an historical print-shop function with a definition which I have deduced from folios’ materiality, rather than sketched from paratextual accounts. This is the role of the book-designer; its deduced presence undergirds much of this study.

To date, the only in-depth examinations of the folio which use format as a data-

pool delimiter are Galbraith (2010) and Connor (2014). Both build upon small, carefully

curated data-sets. Galbraith looks at five folios: Sidney’s Arcadia (1593), Samuel

Daniel’s Works (1601), Spenser’s complete works (1611), Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616),

and Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623). Connor looks more

closely, using a different critical lens, at roughly the same set of folios, with a few extras:

Sidney’s Arcadia (1593 & 1598), Daniel’s Works, Jonson’s Workes, Shakespeare’s

Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, John Taylor the Water Poet’s Workes (1630), and

41 the Beaumont & Fletcher folio published by Moseley (1647). All of these folios, by one definition or another, are “literary,” a word which both Galbraith88 and Connor89 use early in their discussions of their data-pools.

This tight focus on those folios they label “literary” yields thorough insights on a specific segment of the English book trade. In effect, this critically constructs the commercial subgenre of {the literary folio}, against which context historically influential works (like Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies or Moseley’s Beaumont &

Fletcher folio) and less-influential works (like All the Workes of John Taylor the Water

Poet) may be fruitfully examined. It also serves to foreground what Connor terms the

“blossom[ing of literature] into a viable and popular trade category.”90 Whether this

“trade category” existed in the minds of early modern book people and reading people, or whether it has been summoned into existence by the active minds of modern critics, remains murky. Nonetheless, a significant body of what we now call “literature” was published in folio between 1590 and 1650. It is useful to consider the historical ramifications of this emergence, even if its discrete boundaries may be anachronistic.

My own methodology builds upon the foundation laid by Galbraith and Connor.

From Galbraith I adopt a skeptical attitude toward the prestigious folio narrative. I leave no critical commonplace unchallenged; if no data exist to support an assertion, that assertion is suspect. From Connor I adopt an inclusivity in terms of data. Where Galbraith addresses uniformly “big-name” folios, Connor’s inclusion of John Taylor the Water Poet

88 “English Literary Folios,” 47. 89 Literary Folios, 2. 90 Ibid., 16.

constitutes an important step toward broad-based contextualization. In examining folios

for this project, I have not limited myself to well-known or critically respected volumes. I

also rely on Connor’s differentiation between the idea of the folio in early modern

English culture and the technical term “folio” in modern bibliography.91 My thinking

about the folio as a function is particularly indebted to Connor’s conclusion of the section

just cited, where he argues that “[f]olio, being a format, is part of the expressive form of a

book.” I agree with Connor, and Galbraith to some extent, that folio-ness communicates

just as surely as does an ornate title-page.

Certain historical postulates underpin my extension of Galbraith’s and Connor’s

methodologies. First, folios logically would last longer than smaller volumes, due to

larger paper mass and perhaps to sturdier (because larger) bindings. This longevity,

coupled with the development of the second-hand book market and retailers’ propensity

for decades-old backstock discussed by MacLean and Nuovo, suggests that new folios

have retailed alongside other folios of a variety of ages. Second, the circulation of books,

both in the second-hand market and via barter-based trade methods,92 suggests that even if specific publishers thought of their investments as running along a specific path, and even if that path was considered to be “literary” (as David Scott Kastan suggests about

Humphrey Moseley’s output),93 retail outlets would not necessarily stock “literary”

books together. Third, the breadth of the Latin trade as outlined by Paul Needham and

others94 suggests that books printed in English could very well be retailed (in England)

91 Literary Folios, 4-9. 92 Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 175-185; Nuovo, Book Trade, 400-408. 93 “The Invention of Literature,” 105-107. 94 Cf. Roberts, “The Latin Trade,” 141, and Needham, “Customs Rolls,” 148-150.

43 beside books printed in French, German, Italian, and Latin. Conversely, books printed in

English like CHT could be retailed on the Continent beside books printed in Continental vernaculars, though English books had less market share on the Continent than did

Continental books in England, as Pettegree95 and Needham96 argue.

Finally, the somewhat international character of the contention between

Protestantism, Lutheranism, and Catholicism affected the market, in that books were printed in theological centers in a variety of different vernaculars. Thus Catholic literature was printed in English in France, to be smuggled into England or for distribution to expatriate English Catholics. Calvinist literature was printed in Geneva in

English for English consumption. CHT could have sat on a bookshop table alongside a

73-year-old copy of John Merbecke’s Concordãce,97 a 62-year-old copy of the Geneva

Bible (with a title-page claiming Genevan printing),98 the 1602 folio edition of the Works of the Puritan preacher William Perkins,99 and the two-part Treasurie of Auncient and

Moderne Times, translated by Thomas Milles and published separately in 1613100 and

1619.101 Since this sort of diversity is entirely possible, I account for it, as opposed to excluding texts unfamiliar (like Merbecke’s) or challenging (like the works of Perkins).

This study thus draws upon a relatively large, fairly diverse data-set. Preceding critical works—like Connor’s monograph, Galbraith’s essay, and Kastan’s discussion of

95 Book in the Renaissance, 123-128. 96 Needham, “Customs Rolls,” 148-150. 97 STC 17300. 98 STC 2095. 99 STC 19647. 100 STC 17936. 101 STC 17936.5.

thick and thin folios—draw upon focused data-sets. For this dissertation, by contrast, I consider many dozens of folios, printed over a span of fifteen decades, hundreds of miles apart. A diverse cast of folios populate this data-set: thick and thin, literary and practical, religious and secular, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern. A common refrain in the pages to follow is that “diversity defines this data-set.” At times this variability is generative, at times confounding—but it is always purposeful. Studies such as Heidi

Brayman’s assessment of the Countess of Bridgewater’s library reveal that eclectic consumption characterized premodern consumption of books. If early modern readers read widely and voraciously, studies of early modern book culture ought to broaden, rather than restrict, the scope of early modern books to be examined.102

This study also addresses a broad range of the material, textual, and visual

characteristics of premodern folios. Most assessments of CHT in light of other folios

focus their attention on the paratexts which precede folio contents—addresses to the

reader, dedications, and so on. Kastan’s discussion of Aglaura exemplifies this habit, as

do Smith’s and de Grazia’s readings of the rhetoric of CHT’s preliminaries. In this study,

I extend the scope of these paratextual readings to include the expressive potential of

inclusions like tables of contents, glosses, headings, and indices. Building on Galbraith’s

work with mise-en-page and expressive materiality, this study also scrutinizes visual

elements, such as ornaments or illustrations, as well as typographical or book-design

elements, such as margin width or letterform design. Folios perform their aspirational

102 Hackel, Reading Material.

45 profiles not solely through conventional verbal semiosis, but also more subtly through mise-en-page, decoration, and “invisible” paratexts like subject headings.

I apply a strict heuristic to every folio I look at. First, to determine its material characteristics, I calculate its mass, then measure its fore-edge length, its head (or foot) length, fore-edge margin width, and gutter margin width. I next note details of type font, type size (estimated, not specific), illustrations, ornaments, and glosses. I describe the title page, index, and table of contents, if present, as well as lineation, pagination (or foliation), section headings, quire format, and lines-per-page.

Perhaps the least conventional material characteristic recorded in my data-set is folios’ mass. More than other methods of communicating volume, measurements of mass can give a visceral, concrete sense of the use-pattern invited by, and possible for, a folio.

In collecting the data for this project, I measured folios’ inertial mass, not their weight; technically the measurement of weight has to do with gravitational force rather than the physical properties of the object being measured. While this differentiation may seem academic, it actually matters in communicating what I measure: specifically, my numbers capture the mass of the book’s paper, ink, accessories such as place-marking ribbons, detritus (usually collected in the gutter), and the binding furniture usually attached to the spine. They never include boards, which are the heaviest element of bindings; since binding is a post-print, post-assembly, and often post-sale addition, binding mass is irrelevant to folios’ retail-shop appearance. The net mass of paper and ink, were a folio disbound, stripped of accessories, and cleaned of furniture, would always be less than I have measured it.

These measurements of mass express the volume of paper in a book with some

degree of instructive accuracy. Mass correlates directly to sheet count and not at all to

format. To demonstrate this, consider The booke of fortune, a folio with a mass of 198g

printed on twenty-three sheets. A quarto printed on twenty-three sheets would have the

same mass, since folding paper does not increase its mass. However, this quarto would be

roughly twice as thick as The booke of fortune, and its leaf-dimensions would also be

smaller. But it would not have more mass. Thickness can to some extent be controlled

and even marshalled for rhetorical effect. But mass, expressing as it can the raw amount

of paper-matter in a book, is less voluntary because paper as a writing support has a non-

negotiable task to accomplish—to support the book’s writing. Short of radical, intrusive

cutting of the text to be printed, printers’ ability to substantively control length (and, thus,

sheet count and mass) declined in indirect correlation with the length of the work.103

All of this means that mass can express the amount of paper used in the creation

of a book in a more tactile way than sheet count, which is more commonly used to

measure paper-volume. Disbound folios-in-sheets are rare; scholars who rely on digital

facsimiles have no point of reference to make sheet count more intelligible than the

conceptual arbitrariness of a quantity can make it. Sheet-count, as a measure, requires mathematical processing in order to be legible: leaves and, especially, pages must necessarily fit more smoothly into modern critical mindsets than sheet-counts. Sheet

103 Despite Sir Brian Vickers’ recent contention that such radical cutting explains the difference between the first quarto (1608) of Shakespeare’s King Lear and the version found in CHT, I am unaware of hard evidence which proves that printers drastically cut texts to fit on a set amount of sheets. For the record, the practice which Vickers proposes differs significantly from the separate, and attested, practice of epitomizing, which flourished throughout the Renaissance period in print and manuscript sources. Cf. Vickers, The One King Lear.

count measure can be translated into leaf-count and page-count, but it takes an extra mental step.

By contrast, mass translates logically, immediately, to an assortment of real-world benchmarks. 1000g, or one kg, roughly equals the mass of a bottle of wine; .5kg, or 500g, equates to a basketball. A paper clip is about 1g. Early modern users would not determine the relative portability of a folio by counting its pages; they would pick it up, heft it, test its bulk. Relative portability matters significantly to critical discourse about folios—both in terms of direct reference to use-patterns for folios and in terms of indirect reference through branding octavos “pocket-sized.” Since portability matters, I measure mass in order to quantify paper through an intuitive consumptive system (the materially-pervasive practice of picking up a book) rather than an artificial critical system (the bibliographically-sourced practice of counting leaves and dividing by two). Except in the matter of paper cost, when sheet count quantifies the raw material required for the book’s existence, mass is a more expressive variable.

All of these factors which make up this dissertation’s data-sets exist in concert with each other. Each folio deploys material, textual, visual, and typographical details to present itself for purchase, reading, and/or use. Thus, my analysis of this data-set avoids considering classes of folio characteristic—incidence of representative illustration, for instance—in isolation. Rather, I consider linguistic content, typographical detail, the placement, appearance, and function of glosses, mass, leaf-dimension, and other characteristics as mutually constitutive. The folio’s place in premodern European reading culture is not shaped by only one or another of these factors; rather, all of them define folio-ness in tandem.

Before being printed, folios underwent a design process—as did every other book.

Some design decisions, such as paper dimension or typographical letterforms, were made collaboratively between artisans and printers, or otherwise printers’ demand conditioned artisans’ production. Others, such as specially-made engravings or woodcuts, were made collaboratively between artists and publishers, or perhaps between artists and particularly involved authors. Still others, such as margin width, title-page case, or signature format, likely emerged from collaboration between printer and publisher, except in the case of design-involved authors. Some design decisions, such as the nature, extent, and content of paratextual inclusions, table of contents, or indices, could have emerged from any number of sources: publisher, printer, author, or any of their associates.

In some instances, perhaps infrequently, book design decisions emanated from a

single authorial or author-adjacent source. In 1591, Richard Field printed Sir John

Harington’s English translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Harington involved himself

intimately in matters of type, apparatus, and illustration; according to Simon Cauchi,

Harington saw these paratextual, material, and visual characteristics as “an expressive

means of communication with his readers, modifying as well as reinforcing the verbal

meanings of the text.” Cauchi hesitates “to call Harington a ‘book-designer’ in his own

right,” but ascribes agency in aesthetic and expressive design to Harington.104 Most folios

in my data-set lacked any unitary figure solely responsible for design decisions, but the

precedent exists.

104 Cauchi, “Harington’s Ariosto,” 138-139.

Regardless of how many different agencies were involved in folio design, the example of Harington demonstrates that design could be, and at times was, a priority in the manufacture of folios. For the most part, my analysis of this study’s data-set refuses to parse the specific agencies involved in folio design: who would be responsible for choosing ink color as opposed to regulating margin width. The dearth of secondary documentation of European day-to-day print operations renders such conjecture largely useless. Instead, this study assumes deliberate design executed by individuals or groups of individuals. In a similar vein to Sonia Massai’s differentiation between the role and the function of perfection in the early modern English print shop, I postulate {designer} as a nebulous function, likely performed at different times by several different individuals in the production-flow of a single folio.105

This concept of the designer-function undergirds the entirety of my methodology.

If folios are crafted artifacts—not mere receptacles for texts, or channels through which textual content may flow—their extra-textual and non-textual characteristics matter.

Similarly, if most folios emerged from various permutations of the author/artisan/publisher/printer matrix, taking a wide sample of folios ought to yield a textured, nuanced look at the ways in which heterogeneously-sourced folio designs differed from and resembled one another. To sketch the breadth of, agencies involved in, and rationales behind folio design, this project samples indiscriminately and widely from early modern folios.

105 Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, 91-135.

F. Project Structure Margreta de Grazia argued throughout the 1990s that a teleological approach to

historiography suffers from the distorting effects of confirmation bias. What we want to

see, we see; what we’re looking for, we find. When scholars set the 1623 publication of

CHT as the end-point of their critical narratives, it becomes more than a stopping place; it

becomes the triumphant conclusion, the crowning evolutionary achievement of a

convolute bibliographic process. According to de Grazia, deliberately non-linear structure

can help avoid this distortion by eliminating pre-coded narrative beats of evolutionary development. Her monograph Shakespeare Verbatim models the anti-teleological power

of nonlinear historical narrative.

I apply this structural argument in my dissertation. By beginning with 1623, I at

once clarify the significant ramifications of my research for the study of CHT and put the

limited and limiting nature of CHT-only study in perspective. I also resist the implied

notion that study of the folio format can or should end with the publication of CHT.106

And by ending with incunabula and 15th-century manuscripts, I emphasize the entanglement of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century print culture with the manuscript culture which preceded and existed within the early modern period. This reverse-chronological order also complicates book-historical perspectives on the temporality of early modern European book trade. Instead of relying on conventional wisdom based on narrowly-defined temporal or geographical contexts, this structure

106 I am indebted for this concept of “The End of Study” to Scott Newstok, John Guillory, and Marjorie Garber’s fascinating panel of that title, convened at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America.

emphasizes the variety of new and old imported stock, as well as old home-made stock, available for purchase along with new, homemade stock.

This dissertation has a nested structure. I divide my data-set into three parts, roughly divided by time period. One includes seventeenth-century folios, printed between

1603 and 1623; the folios in this data-set were printed exclusively in London. Another is composed of folios printed throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. A third encompasses late medieval works, printed throughout Europe between 1455 and 1500.

My analysis of each data-set takes up multiple chapters. I analyze one data-set at a time.

The general structure of this dissertation, therefore, is organized around three discrete time-periods. Though multi-chapter analyses of each time period cross-pollinate with each other, this periodized division individuates my data-sets. In effect, it differentiates between ideas of the late medieval European folio, the sixteenth-century European folio, and the seventeenth-century English folio.

The first three chapters address a set of folios printed in early seventeenth-century

England. These are the most immediate material contexts for CHT. Chapter 1, “Critical

Perceptions of the Early Modern English Folio,” begins by summarizing the specific

critical perspectives which have shaped scholarly conceptions of the seventeenth-century

folio. The seventeenth-century folio, as sketched by historians of the book, was

monumental, copious, incorporate, and complete—words frequently associated with

thickness. The rest of the chapter uses case studies to demonstrate that these descriptors could apply to thin folios as well as more high-profile, thicker folios. As a corollary to the eclectic-folio model constructed in this chapter, I note the paucity of folio editiones

principes in the seventeenth-century data-set. The relative rarity of folio first editions in

seventeenth-century English printing stems from the development of the vernacular

writing tradition, as well as the gradual exhaustion of the pool of classical works

available for first-edition printing.

Chapter 2, “The Rhetoric of Recurring Material Elements,” focuses closely on the

incidence of volitional design elements in seventeenth-century English folios. Volitional

design elements, such as reference technologies, ornaments, and illustration, are those

which a book designer can choose to include—or exclude. Both reference technologies and illustrations might seem logically to show up in thicker, more expensive folios, but the analysis in this chapter demonstrates their frequent incidence in thin folios. It follows

that reference technologies and visual media were not inextricably linked to expensive,

thick folios in seventeenth-century English printing; book designers and customers

considered them to be appropriate inclusions in a wide range of folios, thick and thin

alike.

Where Chapter 2 addresses volitional material elements, Chapter 3 (“The

Scriptive Potential of Non-volitional Material Elements”) wrestles with those aspects of

folio materiality which would have been outside of a book designer’s control.

Specifically, this chapter determines that certain book projects with expansive visual

content would have demanded the large page-dimension intrinsic to the folio format. This

conclusion mirrors, but to some extent diverges from, Galbraith’s discovery that the

copious textual content of some folios made their folio format a verbally-motivated necessity. My construction of book projects “demanding” a certain format resonates with

53 the latter half of this chapter, which explores other ways in which the material characteristics of folios could, and did, script their makers’ and/or users’ physical engagement with them. I draw the concept of things scripting their users’ behavior from the work of performance theorist Robin Bernstein. Applying Bernstein’s model of the

“scriptive thing” to a fortune-telling book and slim folios of music reveals the agency latent in slender seventeenth-century English folios.

Leaving the seventeenth century behind, the next two chapters look at folios printed across Europe in the sixteenth century. Chapter 4, “Flux as a State of Cultural

Being,” states at length the premise from which Chapter 5 argues: that ideological, technological, and political oscillations entangled to render the sixteenth century a period defined by eclectic consumption, restless change, and internecine tension. Though conceiving of the sixteenth century as an era of change is not particularly innovative, my focus rests particularly on the entanglement of religious, technological, and political change. Change within each of these spheres catalyzed and was catalyzed by change within other spheres. In order to make sense of the variegation visible in the sixteenth- century data-set—the focus of Chapter 5—I establish a kaleidoscopic historical frame of reference in Chapter 4.

In turn, Chapter 5 (“Sixteenth-Century Folios on a Spectrum of Mass”) considers a data-set heterogeneous in almost every respect as the material product of sixteenth- century oscillations. Unlike the seventeenth-century data-set (where mass is relatively constant), the sixteenth-century data-set includes folios across a broad spectrum of mass.

To analyze this spectrum, I compare the inclusion of certain volitional and non-volitional

material elements in thinner folios—with a mass less than 1kg—to their inclusion in thicker folios—with a mass greater than 1kg. This differentiation yields a legible narrative, wherein the material inclusions in thinner folios differ from the material inclusions in thicker folios.

But the legibility of this narrative relies on an arbitrary, rather ahistorical division of folios into sub-1kg and supra-1kg subsets. To demonstrate the instability of this arbitrary differentiation, I propose alternative subdivisions; every re-visualization of the spectrum of mass in sixteenth-century folios yields somewhat different results.

Ultimately, my data-set of sixteenth-century folios can support a variety of narratives.

The ambiguity of the data-set as a whole reinforces the variability between individual folios in the data-set. Variation thus characterizes the data-set—a variation which both results from and responds to the entangled cultural, technological, and ideological instability which I postulate in Chapter 4. The sixteenth-century geopolitical mise-en- scene produced the sixteenth-century folio mise-en-page; for the latter to make sense, it must be examined in light of the former.

The third data-set, examined in the final three chapters of this dissertation, contains folios printed across Europe in the incunabular period (approximately 1455-

1500). Chapter 6, composed of “Reflections on the Contingency of Incunabular Data,” lays the foundation for following chapters. Argumentatively, it functions as an extended caveat regarding the tentative nature of the conclusions which can be supported by incunabular evidence. I conclude that generalization about cultural or material norms from specific cases cannot carry conclusive weight. Nevertheless, in the absence of 100%

survival rates, generalization from specific cases is the only epistemological avenue available for the study of late medieval printed folios.

Having thus justified my approach to incunabular data, I turn in Chapter 7 to

explore “Technological Evolution and Its Effects” upon folio incunabula. This chapter

analyzes variations in typography, distribution of ornamentation and decoration, and leaf-

dimension. Like Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates significant divergence between

folio mise-en-page and paratextual profiles. But where Chapter 5 dwells on the

argumentative indeterminacy enforced by a large, variegated data-set, Chapter 7 ascribes

focus to the rather more limited variation visible in the smaller late-medieval data-set.

Specifically, the restrained variation between folios’ appearances and inclusions positions

the late medieval folio as a field for semiotic-aesthetic play. In contrast to their often staid, conventional contents, incunabular folios frequently include unexpected, experimental, or innovative elements—both visual (illustration and decoration), verbal

(paratextual), and material (in text-to-page ratio, for instance).

This characterization of the late medieval folio as a field for play motivates

Chapter 8, “Definitions, Use-Patterns, and the Weight of Tradition,” begins by adopting a playful methodology: modelling the analytical results of different conventional subdivisions of incunabular folios. What happens when the incunabular data-set is sorted by language-tradition, content, or era of origin? The result, as in Chapter 5, is a series of narratives which differ noticeably from each other. This data-set lends itself more to a solution, however: I propose use-type as a legitimate limiter for classifying and sorting incunabular folios. By “use-type,” I mean the kind of intellectual and embodied

consumption suggested (or, in Robin Bernstein’s term from Chapter 3, scripted) by

folios’ materiality, aesthetic, and paratexts. Though this approach has its pitfalls, it does

at least confront the oft-neglected fact that even the thickest folios were designed to be

used by human beings according to concrete patterns. Chapter 8 concludes by gesturing

toward one potential use-pattern seldom considered by critics: the use of printed folio

books in the creation of large-format manuscripts. Caxton’s printing of The book of the

dyctes and notable wyse sayenges of the phylosophers in 1477, followed by the

production of a manuscript version in England of the same text, exemplifies both the

problems posed and the generative potential implied by such an entanglement of print

and manuscript culture. If indeed folio incunabula offered their designers opportunities

for aesthetic and semiotic play, I conclude, the ramifications of such play must be teased

out.

The dissertation concludes with a coda, “Implications for Book History.” The

coda first models the way in which my research can affect book historical methods and

conclusions by applying my discoveries about the nature of the folio to CHT. Thence I

turn to postulate ways in which an awareness of folio history can benefit other book-

historical projects. Specifically, the methodology invites a critical focus on cultural

movements rather than on individual artifacts. The results simultaneously confirm the

value of the methodology, highlight its shortcomings, and offer a roadmap for its future

application. Coupled with institutional support and critical acceptance, medium-data approaches such as that modeled in this book can expand book history’s conclusive potential in exciting and unexpected ways.

Part I

Divergent Material Traditions in Seventeenth-Century Slim Folios

Chapter 1 - Critical Perceptions of the Early Modern English Folio This dissertation project originated with Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies,

Histories, and Tragedies. Specifically, the question “why folio?” guided my early research and reflection. Why the First Folio instead of the Complete Works in Quarto?

As my introduction discusses at length, most scholars who focus on the prehistory and afterlife of CHT have an answer; this answer usually mentions cultural prestige, and almost invariably builds upon anecdotal or highly individual evidence. Some studies cite

Ben Jonson’s 1616 folio Workes as an influence. Others build upon this connection, referencing a tradition populated by those early modern folios printed in England which critics consider to be “literary”—the Workes among them. Of course, these studies have much merit in revealing the immediate generic contexts into which CHT might have emerged and with which CHT might have been grouped. But, let me repeat, CHT did not emerge in a market constituted solely of “literary” works. The individuals who facilitated the business side of its publication published a variety of non-literary books. Though we know precious little about early modern English retail environments, it is by no means radical to conjecture that CHT was displayed alongside works with a variety of material profiles, containing diverse content, designed for a host of different uses.

The dizzying variety of books available for sale in the early modern English retail shop were more than context for CHT; each one was conceived, at some level, as a saleable commodity. This chapter examines a selection of the folios printed in England between 1600 and 1622. A large number of folios were printed in England between 1600 and 1622. Of those, I chose a data-set specifically designed to counterpoint the existing

critical conception of the early modern folio: I deliberately looked only at folios less than

two hundred pages long.

I limit the data-set in this way because few critics engage with slender seventeenth-century folios. In general, the nature and design of the seventeenth-century

folio, as an inclusive whole, remains somewhat understudied. Nevertheless, large,

expensive, often rare folios like CHT, Jonson’s Workes, or Spenser’s Faerie Queene have

been subjected to scrutiny of varying levels of rigor, more perhaps than any other group

of premodern folios. This data-set limitation spotlights some interesting and unexpected books—folios which have hitherto been unnoticed by histories of the early modern book.

In the course of this chapter, I look first at four critical concepts about the early

modern English folio—concepts somewhat at odds with my findings about the nature of

the folio throughout this dissertation project. Thence I turn to describe and qualify the

sort of slender-folio data which populate my data-set. “Slender,” for the purposes of this

argument, means a concrete maximum page-length. Slenderness notwithstanding,

however, various folios claim completeness or wholeness as a component of their size.

While folios of various sizes seem uniformly willing to claim wholeness, progressively

fewer qualify as editiones principes. This chapter concludes with some reflections on

potential reasons for the gradual disappearance of the folio editio princeps and its link to

the meteoric rise of a vernacular print tradition.

A. Critical Springboards My emphasis on slim folios responds directly to four critical descriptors critically

associated with the folio format specifically as a commodity in early modern England:

monumental, copious, incorporate, and complete. The first survives through critical discourse influenced by early modern rhetoric. Francis Connor simultaneously identifies and reifies the monumental status of CHT and Jonson’s Workes in a 2012 essay:

“Jonson’s book is his monument, [while] Shakespeare’s book is part of a living

monument reliant on its contents being embodied onstage.”107 By differentiating between

monumental rhetoric and monumentalizing design, Connor acknowledges the effect

which the former can have and characterizes the form the latter can take.108 Similarly,

Adam Hooks refers to CHT as “a self-consciously monumental object, constructing and

representing the integrity of Shakespeare and his corpus.”109 Famously, the prefatory

poems of CHT characterize the book as a funeral monument for Shakespeare, while the

ornately engraved and highly allusive title page of Jonson’s Workes literally figures

Jonson’s work in the form of a monument, complete with statuary, plinths, and classical

symbols.110 Jennifer Brady extends Richard Newton’s argument for “Jonson’s symbiotic identification with his Folio”111 to chart the “partial fragmentation of the corpus he had

labored to construct.” According to Brady, criticism from Jonson’s Caroline imitators and

poetic heirs labelled Jonson’s later works “superfluous limbs,” “blots on the Folio’s

perfection.”112 Even monuments crumble.

Copious is another descriptor with roots in both critical and historical discourses.

The word itself has Latin roots, tracing kinship to ideas of fecundity, numerical richness,

107 “Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio,” 233. 108 Ibid., 239. 109 “Shakespeare’s Ring,” 345. 110 de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 33-37. 111 “Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book,” 44. 112 “‘Noe Fault, but Life,’” 205.

and abundance. De Grazia links the Latin antecedents of copious to the language of

“copy” in CHT’s preliminary matter, contending that “copying copia” is an “impossible

project” for modern-day editors as it was, technically, for those who prepared CHT for

the press.113 Erasmus’ De Copia and the work of other medieval and renaissance

rhetoricians tied abundance to reproduction, generative repetition, appropriation, hence

the etymology of modern senses of “copy.”114 These divergent senses of “copia,” “copy,”

and “copious” intertwine, then, in their common focus on multiplicity: the wealth of

“copia” presents in the repetitive transmissiveness of “copy” and the numerical bulk of

“copious.” Peter Stallybrass well expresses early modern ideas of being copious in the

terms of database—not the singular noun, but the uncountable concept which, he argues,

organized knowledge-systems like Christianity have relied upon for millennia. “Copia”

requires awareness about and familiarity with pre-existent linguistic corpora, accessible

through (first) analog, written, conceptual database and (eventually) digital databases.115

But “copia” implies more than recall: after memory comes redeployment. Here

“copy” and “copia” co-resonate the most strongly: as de Grazia points out, early modern usages of “copy” “did not at this point carry the same obligation to reproduce [their] precedents with fidelity.”116 The title page of CHT boasts of its preparation “according to

the True Originall Copies;” Heminges and Condell’s address “To the great Variety of

Readers” decries the “stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed,and deformed by the

frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors.” Most critical analysis of these lines takes

113 Shakespeare Verbatim, 90-93. 114 Erasmus, On Copia; OED, “copy,” n. and adj. 115 Cf. Stallybrass, “Against Thinking,” esp. 1583-1584. 116 Shakespeare Verbatim, 90-91.

them in their modern senses. “True Originall Copies” alludes to high-fidelity

reproduction of a precedent. “Stolne, and surreptitious copies” represents irresponsibly or

nefariously inaccurate garbling of a precedent. But de Grazia’s and Stallybrass’s

reflections on copia, remixing, and transmission require an alternate interpretation. These

allusions could refer to reappropriations (whether authorized or not) just as much as they

could refer to reproductions (whether faithful or garbled).

The work of these critics and others, including a recent monograph by Laetitia

Coussement-Boillot on Shakespearean poetics of abundance, as well as multiple recent essays, demonstrates the development of critical interest in Shakespeare as rhetorically and materially copious.117 Specifically, the interplay between the copy as a bibliographic

concept, copiousness as a material descriptor, and copia as rhetorical and creative

practice represents another fascinating parallel between 21st-century critical discourse and

early modern cultural discourse. Linked to this growing critical conversation are ideas of

early modern folios as constitutive of corpora of creative, author-centric writing. Early modern preliminary material for CHT, Jonson’s Workes, and Samuel Daniel’s Works

initiate this trope. Edward Topsell’s dedicatory epistle to his Historie of Fovre-Footed

Beastes (1607) professes the work’s significant debt to Conrad Gesner’s “stories” of

natural history. Ultimately, the dedication ascribes the survival of Gesner’s “praises” to

Topsell’s Historie: “All liuing creatures shall witnesse for him at the last day.” The nature

of this testimony—bodily witness or textual witness?—remains productively

117 Copia et cornucopia. See also Nicholson, “Desiring Increase,” Yu, “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Forsyth, “Wench-Like Words,” and Zysk, “Shakespeare's Rich Ornaments.”.

63 ambiguous.118 The folio text and the author’s body, in early modern English cultural discourse, were inextricably entangled.

Two recent monographs examine this from different perspectives. Peter Kirwan’s

Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha specifically addresses critical rhetorics of textualized bodies, adopting and adapting the critical gambit modelled by Jeffrey

Masten.119 Kirwan focuses on attribution studies, emphasizing how embodied language permeates critical conversations about authorship—see, for instance, discussion of authors’ hands as metonymic of their creative endeavors, or even the literal meaning of corpus in Latin. Kirwan destabilizes the structural integrity of the Shakespearean corpus- canon, the origins of which de Grazia locates in the superficial univocality of CHT. He does so by differentiating between the single organic body of the man Shakespeare and the diffuse textual bodies which have been critically welded into the collective

“Shakespeare’s works.”120

Adam Hooks’ Selling Shakespeare moderates Kirwan’s destabilizing project by operating within the discursive confines of the imbricated author/corpus hybrid whose outlines Kirwan traces. Hooks argues for the existence of a tradition of “bio- bibliography,” in which authors are defined by their material output, and their material outputs can cohere into corpora because of the organizing principle of authorial attribution and investment. This argument refines and sophisticates, rather than opposing, the entanglement of authorial and textual bodies. In Hooks’ formulation, as in de

118 A6r. 119 Cf. Masten, Textual Intercourse. 120 de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 14-48.

Grazia’s, the folio format facilitates the development of the Shakespearean authorial bio-

bibliography, in combining his works into a single material artifact which can mean

singly. As de Grazia points out, CHT did not actually mean univocally, at the textual or

material levels.121 Neither, probably, did other single-author, collective folios like

Jonson’s, Daniel’s, or the Spenser or Sidney folios issued in the early years of the seventeenth century. But Knight’s investigations into the significance of bindings to books’ conceptual cohesion emphasize that individual folios (to copy in the Erasmian sense a phrase from Jonathan Lamb) could and did have specific meanings.122

Perhaps, Kirwan contends, the corporeality of the bound-up folio corpus is an artificial thing. Perhaps, Hooks contends, its physical collectedness expresses its conceptual and thematic cohesion. Either way, the status of the folio-body relative to and as defined by other folio-bodies seems to be essential to their identities. As a counterpoint in photographic negative, some modern scholars have conceived of the early modern book as exclusive in its material essence, as an artifact unto itself. This conception does not quite exist in modern studies of materiality, where for more than two decades scholars have acknowledged books’ contingency post-sale. In Shakespeare Verbatim, for

instance, de Grazia rates the life-expectancy of a short playtext in quarto as “quite short”

“unless bound up as part of a tract-volume.”123 According to Peter W. M. Blayney, who

groups “pamphlets” and “play quartos” together in opposition to “longer” works, “few

purchasers would want [the former] bound individually. Those who bought such books

121 Shakespeare Verbatim, 27-28. 122 Bound to Read. 123 Shakespeare Verbatim, 32.

regularly would wait until they had what they considered to be a suitable number, and

then would have them bound as a single volume.”124 Small formats smack of

ephemerality—particularly, thin books in small formats—and thus survive by agglomeration into thicker sammelbände. Books in folio, redolent of endurance,125 need

not be bound with others; folios are sturdy enough, because thick enough, to live on their

own.

Knight’s research investigates the origins of extant binding practice, and

specifically the characterization of single impressions as volumes unto themselves—as,

for instance, the individuality of Q1 Hamlet or of the slender, oblong folio

Calligraphotechnia or The art of faire writing, which is currently bound and catalogued as

an individual item at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Knight argues that a combination

of commercial book-collecting practices and a materially disintegrationist trend in

nineteenth- and twentieth-century cataloguing contributed to the fracturing of bound-up

collections into their constituent parts, in order to render those parts more saleable and

more findable as individuals. These twin practices, aiming for different goals but

achieving them through similar means, have shaped modern critical conceptions of the

individuality of early modern books. Specifically, in their commercially- and archivally-

imposed discreteness, they resemble books made since the nineteenth century. Since this

anachronistic logic is so pervasive, it overwhelms any lingering dubiety. Folios are not

exempt from this: in part because of its folio format, de Grazia argues that in CHT, “the

consolidating efforts of the language in the preliminaries are reinforced by the physical

124 “The Publication of Playbooks,” 414. 125 This word is de Grazia’s: Shakespeare Verbatim, 32.

dimensions of the book itself.”126 To be fair, academic studies of the materiality of the

early modern book have acknowledged that books in any format could have been, and books in every format were at some point, bound in collection with other books of the same format. Yet the image of the folio as complete to itself persists in cataloguing and, under the surface, in the foliolatrous rhetoric I discuss in my introduction.

All of these descriptors—monumental, copious, incorporate, complete—spring

from a particular misconception about the early modern English folio: that it was thick.

This misconception stems from the relative visibility of the thick folio and the relative

invisibility of the thin folio. Most simply, a thick folio like Topsell’s Historie of Fovre-

footed Beastes occupies more space in the stacks than a thin folio like John Coperario’s

Funeral teares. For the death of the right Honorable the Earle of Deuonshire. Figured in

seauen songes…127 Regardless of whether these folios are boxed for protection, the

former appears more major than the latter, if the latter is even noticed at all. Thicker

folios also tend to be more fêted on the acquisitions market, and as a result of (usually)

higher prices, archives tend to justify their expensive acquisitions with display, publicity,

and a high profile. Any library which owns a copy or even a fragment of Gutenberg’s 42-

line Bible frequently gives that artifact pride of place in archival display collections.

Examples of this include the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery, the

Main Exhibition Hall at the Huntington Library, and the Harry Ransom Center Lobby

126 Ibid., 42. 127 Topsell: STC 24123; Coperario: STC 5679.

67 permanent exhibition. The tangle of public knowledge of folios, rarity, lasting cultural impact, expense, and aesthetic appeal has a way of elevating thicker folios.

Therefore, thinner folios must contain matter of particular interest in order to receive a fraction of the attention lavished on thicker folios. And even when they do contain matter of interest—when they satisfy several of the tangled criteria I list above— they are not guaranteed public interest. The booke of fortune provides an excellent example of this. This book is extremely rare: only one copy survives today, held in the

British Library. Festooned with woodcut portraits, blackletter type of varying size, and extensive charts, its visual design captures the attention of the most casual viewer.

Though it is a relatively slim book, printed on twenty-three sheets, its elaborate design and xylographic title page, purpose-carved for the occasion of the book’s printing, would have elevated the price to some extent. The booke of fortune is far more rare than CHT,

Jonson’s Workes, the 42-line Bible, or Bacon’s Instauratio Magna; it is aesthetically appealing; it would likely command a high price were it ever to hit the open market. Yet it remains locked away in the British Library’s stacks, not even dignified with a

“Permission Required” tag despite its heavy wear and fragile state. This same trend repeats with other thin folios: because book history has not seen them, because book history does not see them, book history assumes that they do not exist. What slender treasures lie hid in the fat shadow of the marquee folio? This chapter seeks to illuminate them.

B. The Nature of Thin Folio Data 1. Definitions and Selection Criteria Before my argument can address the data I gathered, I must clarify my procedure

for gathering those data. My data-set does not include every English folio printed between 1600 and 1623, composed of less than fifty sheets. This is in part because smaller folios tend to be scattered around the globe into odd, unexpected archives.

Rather, this data-set includes a representative grouping of slim folios from two archives: the British Library and the Newberry Library. A few exceptions—folios of more than fifty sheets—provide scale and contrast to the majority of my data-points.

This upper limit of fifty sheets as my upper limit is no mere arbitrary number.

Quantitative data regarding average sheet-counts in early modern quarto and octavo do not exist. Given this gap, I cannot substantiate my general sense that fifty (two hundred leaves/four hundred pages) is a somewhat-above-average sheet-count for a quarto. As format dimensions diminish, their viable physical thickness diminishes correlatively; fifty sheets (eight hundred leaves/sixteen hundred pages) would probably be too many for the shorter spine-length of an octavo to reliably bind, and certainly too many for duodecimos or sextodecimos. If, as has been argued, paper accounted for a significant percentage of overhead in book production costs, it seems logical to conclude that, special circumstances of design or acquisition aside, a fifty-sheet folio and a fifty-sheet quarto would cost roughly similar amounts. 128 Taking, then, the fifty-sheet price point as somewhat above median for quartos and significantly above median for octavos, it follows that a fifty-sheet folio would be on the outer limits of the usual purchasing power

128 Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” 405-410.

of regular buyers of significant quartos and octavos. No quantitative studies suggest that

economic or social forces constrained different early modern European buyers to buy

primarily in certain formats. As such, this argument founds itself on logical conjecture

rather than hard fact. It is better to conjecture from incomplete data (as this dissertation

does) than to guess from no data at all (as, all too often, critics have done).

2. Wholeness in Folio Introducing his study of the literary folio, Francis X. Connor contends that no

matter what modern bibliographers mean by “folio,” the word—familiar to early modern

bookmakers and laypersons alike—denoted “an object of size” rather than either “‘a

number of page-units,’ or…a concept requiring analysis.” Connor draws this formulation

from two early modern deployments of “folio” as an imaginative metaphor indicative at

once of great size and “comprehensiveness:” Sylvester’s 1611 Du Bartas his deuine

weekes and works translated and The new-yeeres gift, printed 1636 and claiming the

authorship of “Microphilus.”129 Indeed, both Sylvester and “Microphilus” use the folio to

communicate senses of voluminous completion. These works both constrain their

audiences: the former, in terms of price-point, through the cost of its 125 sheets, and the latter through its title-page use of unfamiliar inside references to court. Two poetic citations in restricted-audience works do not a cultural trend make; neither, correlatively, does the single reaction to the single slim folio (cited by Kastan) indicate necessarily that early modern English culture thought of folios as necessarily thick.130

129 Sylvester: STC 21651; “Microphilus”: STC 22631 130 Connor, Literary Folios, 5-7. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, 51.

But uses like the ones which Connor cites do fall in line with other contemporary

allusions. By way of example, consider a brief passage of characterizing dialogue from

Lording Barry’s play Ram-Alley: Or Merrie Trickes, printed 1611.131 In a conversation

between Throte, a lawyer who moonlights as a moneylender, and Boutcher, one of the

play’s love interests, the latter comments that Throte is “no trewant in the law, I see.”

Throte responds,

“Faith some hundred bookes in folio I haue Turnd ouer to better my owne knowledge, But that is nothing for a studient,” To which Boutcher ripostes,

“Or a Stationer they turne them ouer too, But not as you doe gentill Maister Throat…”132 In this passage, Throte uses two related variables to amplify his account of his

learning: number and size of books consulted. Some hundred books in octavo would

seem less impressive; so would some five books in folio. Together, the modifiers

poetically imply a plenitude of learning.

The value to this argument of Boutcher’s second speech lies in its linkage of the

folio as a foundation for study with the folio as a vendible commodity.133 Boutcher’s joke

works in his connection of Throte’s claims (of turning over books for the bettering of his

131 Though the title page claims that the play has “Diuers times here-to-fore [been] acted by the Children of the Kings Reuels,” it is likely that those performances were at least two years past by the time of the play’s publication. The Dictionary of National Biography notes that late in 1608 Barry got bailed out of debtor’s prison and went on the run to begin his second career as a pirate in Irish, and eventually Mediterranean and Atlantic, waters. Since he was captured and tried in 1610, and since the Children of the King’s Revels company was defunct by 1610, the play’s date is probably earlier—and thus captures an ever-so-slightly earlier older cultural perception of folios and the book trade. 132 Bb2v. 133 Adam Hooks resuscitates the adjective “vendible”: Selling Shakespeare, 1-35.

own knowledge) to the turnover of books which happens in a stationer’s bookselling

operation.134 Though Boutcher reassures Throte that he means no disrespectful

insinuation of similarities between stationers’ turnover of folios and Throte’s, the

resonance lodges in the minds of attentive readers or spectators. Both lawyers and

booksellers, after all, dispense knowledge for money; both may be expected to make a

high volume of intellectual matter available at a fair price. In other words, Boutcher’s

commercial allusion punctures Throte’s attempts to capitalize on the folio format of his

law-books to enhance his legal reputation. One need not be a fine lawyer, Boutcher

implies, to turn over folios; the booksellers turn them over just fine.

The example of Ram-Alley and its characterization of the folio as at once

capacious and vendible further establishes Connor’s contention—that “folio” connoted

fullness or completion. If indeed early modern English culture conceived of “the folio” as

a category indicative of size, this cultural perception does not wholly match the material

reality, as I discuss below. To this formulation of folio-as-complete, Connor links a separate perception of the folio as “whole and distinct,” which he sources from his quotes from Sylvester and “Microphilus.” This perception Connor terms “misleading in [its] contemporary context,” since plenty of folio impressions were designed to be bound with other impressions—built incomplete, as it were. Both the complete folio and the distinct

folio, Connor argues, emphasize “the distinction between folios, and format in general, as

134 The OED actually attests to the sense of commercial “turnover” in Boutcher’s line, listing this as the first use of such a sense. OED, “turn,” v., “to turn over,” I.2 and I.9.

bibliographical jargon familiar to printers and publishers, and ‘folio’ as popularly

associated with size, as common readers would have understood it.”135

Connor’s caution is well-placed, though his use of the word “size” here raises

some confusion; dimension differs from thickness (which my research quantifies as

mass). Both dimension and thickness can express fullness or volume, though in different

ways. The thickness of William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix, approximately 145 sheets in

quarto, uses its format to argue in favor of the significance of its contents. In folio, this

sheet-count yields 290 leaves and 580 pages—a thick folio, to be sure, but not extraordinarily so. The 580 leaves/1160 pages of Prynne’s book constitute a silent material colonization of the quarto format: the fact that Histrio-mastix, which specifically

takes to task the printing of plays in folio, can inflict such trenchant commentary within

the playbooks’ accustomed format might be seen as a sharp rebuke to a flippant theatrical

tradition.136 Fig. 1 displays the difference in thickness between Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix

and the first quarto of John Marston’s play Histrio-Mastix. Or, The Player Whipt, the first

volley in the turn-of-the-seventeenth-century intra-industry controversy popularly called

“The War of the Theatres.”137 Fig. 2 displays the book’s mise-en-page, which includes

extensive printed marginal glosses, complex typography, citation, and Latin, coding the

volume as learned rather than practical.138 Histrio-mastix exemplifies a non-folio data-

point using thickness, specifically, to argue for its comprehensive range.

135 Connor, Literary Folios, 6. 136 I’m deeply indebted to Adam Hooks for pointing out the expressive potential inherent in the thickness of Prynne’s format-obsessed anti-theatrical manifesto. 137 Marston: STC 13529. 138 This image also displays Prynne’s ironic arrangement of his work into the imperfectly followed dramatic print convention of acts and scenes.

Figure 1-1

Figure 1-2

The bibliographic record does to some extent match the cultural conceptions which Connor identifies. Thick, heavy, folio editions claiming wholeness and completion did exist. CHT collects works within one linguistic medium which have been ascribed to one author, and offers them for purchase and perusal in a single vendible object. So does

Jonson’s Workes, though that folio makes no implicit profession of either completeness or uniformity in medium. Indeed, the 1616 folio collection overseen by Jonson himself includes most of the poetic formats in which Jonson was fluent—poems, plays, masques, and entertainments. It excludes several plays and masques which did not fit with Jonson’s vision for the folio. In a different vein, the Authorized Version appeared in folio and in quarto around the same time: 1610/1611.139 The Authorized Version obviously circumscribes the possibility of addition; the nature and extent of potential additions are strictly limited by political and religious concerns. But within these limitations, the

Authorized Version does exist as a composite of interdependent parts. The first folio edition naturally divides the Old Testament from the New, as well as the Apocrypha from both of these. Further, in a more daring move, John Speed’s The genealogies recorded in the sacred scriptures was issued in formats to match the various issues of the Authorized

Version; it seems that Speed’s paratext, issued with the Bible, was imagined as a necessary part of the Biblical text.140

But my data suggest that slim, lighter folio editions which claimed some level of wholeness and completion were also issued in this period. One example of this is the folio version of The shepheardes kalender issued in 1604—not the Spenserian sequence

139 Folio: STC 2216 and STC 2217; quarto: STC 2210. 140 STC 23039.

of eclogues but a translation of the French Le compost et kalendrier des bergers. The

prologue of this edition dates back at least to 1570, and perhaps earlier.141 It commences

by tracing the history of the book’s publication and correction, claiming it to have been

“firſt corruptly printed in Fraunce”—probably referring to the version printed in 1503 by

Verard in Paris.142 “After that,” the book was “at the cost and charges of Richard Pinſon

newly tranſlated and reprinted, although not ſo faithfully as the originall copy

required.”143,144 This prologue claims that the relative infidelity of previous versions to

“the originall copy” required a new, polished version.145 The first edition which Pynson

printed includes a different prologue, which makes much ado over how Verard’s

Frenchness contributed to the corruption of his edition of Le compost et kalendrier des

bergers. According to this preface, the noble-hearted Pynson, “forby cauſe he ſawe that

men of other countres intermedellyd with that that they cowde no ſkyll in,” “hath made it

into playne englyſſhe to the entente that euery man may underſtonde it.”146 Thus both

versions—Pynson’s 1506 retranslation and Copland’s 1570 re-re-translation—justify

themselves upon the errors of their predecessors.

These two prologues differ, however, in the positive reasons why their novelty is

required—and here the concept of wholeness appears. The 1506 prologue references the

moral value intrinsic to the text. It claims that “thys boke is very profyta=ble both for

141 To my knowledge, the first edition using this standard prologue is STC 22415, translated by Robert Copland, printed by Thomas Este for John Walley, in London in 1570. 142 STC 22407. 143 Pynson printed three editions of this work: in 1506 (STC 22408), in 1510 (STC 22409.3), and in 1517 (STC 22409.7). 144 The text is in blackletter, but the name “Richard Pinſon” is printed in roman. 145 STC 22420, A2r. 146 STC 22408, A2r.

76 clerkes and laye people to cauſe them to haue greate underſtan=dyng and in eſpeſſyall in that we be bounde to lerne and knowe on peyne of auerlaſting deth.” The translation driven by Pynson “and ſhuche as longethe to hym” needs to be made because of the importance of the availability of its teachings.147 The 1570 edition offers a far more pragmatic positive reason for re-processing this text yet again. Given the shortcomings of previous editions, “[t]herefore it is once againe ouerſeene and peruſed, that the ſame may be at length correſpondent to the Authors minde, and very profitable for the reader, because this booke doth teach many things, that we be bound to learne and know on pain of euerlaſt-ing death.”148 In this context, “at length” likely means something like “at last” or “finally,” but the ambiguity of the phrase suggests a resonance with “in length”—that is, Copland’s translation may be of a similar length to the author’s original intention.

Whether or not my interpretation of these words is correct, this promise, following hard on the heels of the condemnations of the Verard and Pynson editions, operates as an assurance of exactitude. Precisely because the 1570 prologue resembles the 1506 prologue so closely, the reference to “the Authors minde,” which only appears in the latter, stands out. The fuller expression of authorial intent present, putatively, in the

Copland translation draws its fullness from its rectitude. The elimination of errors and corruption yield a refined, whole, and complete version. Although the prologue was written in 1570, print-shop professionals read it for meaning at least once before the 1604 printing. I can argue this with certainty because of the introduction of expressive typography in the 1604 prologue: where the 1570 edition sets Pynson’s name in the

147 Ibid. 148 STC 22420, A2r.

77 blackletter used for the rest of the book, the 1604 prologue sets “Richard Pinſon” in roman, which distinguishes those words immediately from the rest of the prologue’s words. Thus, in 1604, a 55-sheet folio appealed to its accurate and complete transmission of an author’s written work in order to recommend it for purchase.

The 1604 Shepheard’s Kalender fits within a microtradition composed of translations of Le compost et kalendrier des bergers, but it also fits within a larger tradition composed of English folio translations in general, whether from classical, medieval, or Renaissance works. The booke of fortune professes to have originally been

“made in Italian, by L. Spirito;” the Tactiks of Ælian notes on its title page that it has been Englished; the title page of Sebastiano Serlio’s First Book of Architecture traces a translation history from Italian to Dutch, and thence to English.149 In all, 25% of the folios in my data-set (eight of thirty-two total) are English translations of works written in a language other than English. Nearly all of these works present their translated finality as whole or complete. The Historie of Justine is the only significant exception. It epitomizes classical history, presenting something like a Readers’ Digest edition of

Pompeius Trogus’ Historiae Philippicae, but makes no mention of its project of abstraction and summary.150

This apparent emphasis on completeness in slim folios was not uniformly present in thicker folios. Perhaps slim folios frequently claimed completeness because they had a better chance of achieving it. Thicker folios, I conjecture, were most likely to be printed

149 Book of Fortune: STC 3306; Tactiks: STC 161; Serlio: STC 22235. 150 STC 24293. Information about the base text translated for this edition comes from ESTC.

in multiple parts. The reason for this trend lies in slow rates of sale in a small market,

coupled with the uncertainty of export possibilities and a relatively small export market.

According to Andrew Pettegree, early seventeenth-century London had begun to catch up

to the advances of French, Italian, and German printing, but still lagged behind because

of the late start and slow development of printing in England.151 Certainly, London’s

print industry produced plenty of large works promising wholeness and completeness.

Yet closer examination of these large works reveals their positioning within social

networks which shaped their evolution within the market. The development of George

Chapman’s translation of Homer demonstrates this nicely.

If one began a study of Chapman’s Homer with the 1616? Whole Works of

Homer, Prince of Poetts, one might imagine that Richard Field and William Jaggard,

printing for Nathaniel Butter, produced the 192 sheets required for this volume (383

leaves/766 pages) all in one go, to produce it.152 In fact, the project exists in multiple

early states. The first stage of the project, Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, appeared in

1611?, printed by Field for Butter.153 Then in 1614?, Field printed Chapman’s translation of the first twelve books of the Odyssey, again for Butter.154 The next stage in the project

required Field to bring Jaggard on board, for the production of Chapman’s translation of

the whole Odyssey, including its last twelve books. Butter also published the resultant

volume, which appeared in 1615?.155 A process of at least five years—perhaps longer—

151 Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 339-342. 152 STC 13624. 153 STC 13634. 154 STC 13636. 155 STC 13637.

was required for The Whole Works of Homer to exist. Far from the unitary book it might

at first appear, it grew from piecemeal production of its constituent parts. Crucially, apart

from its special title page, a copy of the Whole Works printed together and sold-as-

assembled would likely have been largely indistinguishable from a version aggregated

from the constituent parts printed between 1611? and 1615?. In effect, the Whole Works

provides a ready-collected compilatio, similar to one which alert purchasers might have

assembled on their own.156

Another example of the multi-part publication of thick folios, William Jaggard and Thomas Milles’ edition of Pedro Mexía et al, carries the prescriptive authority of the

early modern pre-sale compiler to an extreme. I refer to this as an edition of Mexía et al,

but in reality the project is the prototypical compilatio. It emerged in two parts. In 1613,

Jaggard printed The treasurie of auncient and moderne times· Containing the learned

collections, iudicious readings, and memorable obseruations: not onely diuine, morrall

and phylosophicall. But also poeticall, martiall, politicall, historicall, astrologicall, &c.

The title page attributes The treasurie to “that worthy Spanish gentleman, Pedro Mexio,”

as well as “M. Francesco Sansouino, that famous Italian” and “those honourable

Frenchmen, Anthonie Du Verdier, Lord of Vaupriuaz: Loys Guyon, Sieur de la Nauche,

counsellor vnto the King: Claudius Gruget.” The book is a 236-sheet (472-leaf/944-page)

brick with a mass of 2883g. The lack of a publisher’s name on the title page, as well as

156 The historical information from this section comes from ESTC, which in turn cites the STC as source for conjectural details like print dates and (some of) the involvement of printers; specifically, the ascription of the printing of the 1611? Iliad to Field, the ascription of the co-printing of the 1615? complete Odyssey to Jaggard, and the ascription of the printing of the 1616? Whole Works to Field and Jaggard all come from STC.

Jaggard’s strong working relationship with Milles, suggests that Jaggard may have

underwritten the project.157

The second part appeared in 1619, printed by Jaggard and entitled ΑΡΧΑΙΟ-

ΠΛΟΥΤΟΣ [Archaio-ploutos]. Containing, ten follovving bookes to the former Treasurie

of auncient and moderne times…158 The rest of the title reproduced exactly what had

appeared on the title-page of the 1613 Treasurie; the 1619 volume supplemented the

previous volume. It is also a materially massive artifact: 251 sheets (501 leaves/1002

pages), with a mass of 2737g. The binding into one volume of these two issues would

border on the physically impossible for early modern artisans; unlike the Whole Works of

Homer, Parts I and II of The treasurie would likely stay separate. Each volume contains a

plethora content from multiple authors—the sort of collection which would require from a lay compiler immense work, familiarity with diverse texts, and facility with languages.

The Mexía project offers a compilation pre-collected, pre-digested, pre-translated, pre- ordered. Despite its inconveniently large size, with a price to match, it advertises its intellectual convenience.

A similarly piecemeal publication strategy (for different reasons) comes into

focus in Steven Galbraith’s examination of the first folio of Spenser’s works. Whereas

the various pieces of Chapman’s Homer first appear in spacious, attractive editions

whose generous margins and large type would have inflated paper usage, overhead, and

retail price, the collection of Spenser published by Matthew Lownes in 1611 was “an

157 STC 17936. 158 STC 17936.5

economically produced and bibliographically unstable folio.” These priorities emerged

from Lownes’ desire to “accommodat[e] both bookseller and book buyer,” and yielded a

“‘build-it-yourself’ folio that was more cost-effective for the publisher and provided more buying options for consumers.”159 Galbraith identifies three strategies Lownes used

“to keep production costs down”: avoiding paratexts which conceptualized the volume as

indissoluble (like tables of contents), eschewing “continual signatures, pagination, or

foliation,” and not commissioning volume-specific inclusions which might cost extra

(like portraits, illustrations, or epistles).160 As a result, the Works presents primarily as a

vendible commodity rather than a monumental representation of its author’s greatness.161

Galbraith characterizes the Spenser first folio as requiring its purchasers’

engagement in the compilation of its final form. Similarly, the Whole Works of Homer,

Prince of Poetts project makes compilation after the point of sale optional, though

desirable; the Iliad and the Odyssey can exist by themselves, if so purchasers desire. The

1615? issue (containing all twenty-four books of the Odyssey) does render the 1614?

issue (which contains only the first twelve books) redundant. Nevertheless, Butter’s

Homer project presents compilation as one possible final material form for the project,

rather than the only way to make material sense out of interdependent component parts

(as does the Spenser first folio).

These variant attitudes toward compilation and purchasers’ involvement in the

construction of the material folio reinforce Sonia Massai’s construction of the concept of

159 Galbraith, “Spenser’s First Folio,” 23. 160 Ibid., 30. 161 Ibid., 32-35.

perfectibility. In Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, Massai argues for the existence

of a proto-editorial function within the early modern printshop. This function, which she keys to a discourse of perfectedness which frequently appears on the title-pages of quarto

playbooks, involved careful reading which extended beyond literal proofing. Perfective

reading took the proto-editor within the fictive world of the play, allowing engagement

with, and rectification of that world’s structural integrity. Much of the monograph is

engaged with demonstrating the existence and defining the outlines of this previously

unconsidered editorial function, but its final pages address the historico-theoretical

ramifications of this function. In Massai’s formulation, the perfectibility inherent in early

modern print works disallowed any notion of a final, definitive text. The process of

perfectibility, of eternal availability for revision, improvement, and collaborative

appropriation, was assumed always to be potentially constant. Books did not have final

forms; definitive editions did not exist. No matter how monumental a folio turned out, it

remained a likely candidate for perfection—be it a scrumbled-together Whole Works of

Homer or a build-it-yourself Spenser or an architectural Jonson.

Sometimes that perfection took the form of line-level correction, as in the case of the second, third, and fourth editions of CHT (1632, 1664/5, 1685). Scholars of CHT

have located moments at which each of these editions correct obvious typographical

errors in previous editions, and conversely where each edition betrays its use of preceding

editions as copy-text by blindly reproducing those typographical errors.162 At other

points, perfection involved the addition of previously excluded texts. Thus, as Peter

162 Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, 281-337.

Kirwan, Will Sharpe, and others have traced, CHT grew over its four issues in a half- century, increasing in the third edition by 19.44% (from 36 to 43 plays included).163

Humphrey Moseley published a folio collection of the plays attributed to Francis

Beaumont and John Fletcher in 1647. Its second edition, printed in 1679, expanded by

51.42%, from thirty-five to fifty-three plays.164 This type of perfection arose from the discovery of previously unknown works for inclusion or the reclassification of old works as fitting within the parameters of the collection. Another type of perfection stemmed from authors’ survival after their works were collected. I have already mentioned the tension this caused for Jonson; as Brady argues, Jonson’s continued dramatic output after the publication of his 1616 folio Workes brought to the fore the negative ramifications of an author’s outliving their monument.

Another example of this type of growth occurs with Samuel Daniel’s 1601 folio

Works, frequently and incorrectly pointed out as including the first instance of an English play appearing in folio. This volume itself perfects a preceding issue, claiming on its title page to be “newly augmented.”165 Preceding the 1601 folio was a 1599 quarto containing

“The Poeticall Essayes of Sam. Danyell,” which itself claimed to be “Newly corrected and augmented.”166 The trail of expansion extends still further back into the 1590s; Delia, first printed in 1592 in quarto, was reissued in 1594 in “augmented” form.167 The 1601 folio collection of Daniel’s Works did not serve as a finish-line. In 1618, Nicholas Okes

163 Kirwan, The Idea of Apocrypha, 15-28. 164 1647 edition: Pforzheimer 53. 1679 edition: Pforzheimer 54. 165 STC 6236. 166 STC 6261. 167 Q1: STC 6243.3. Q2: STC 6243.4.

printed the completion of Daniel’s Historie of England in folio. The title-page for this

volume suggests that Daniel himself funded the book’s production: “printed by Nicholas

Okes, dwelling in Foster-lane for the author.”168 This folio collection proved fairly

popular, being reprinted three more times by 1634.169

This process of releasing augmentations of previously-appearing works

characterizes Daniel’s poetic career in the 1590s; even before his original work appeared

in print, sonnets of his appeared in response to the 1591 issue of Sidney’s Astrophel and

Stella, an edition which was suppressed.170 This career expresses the spirit of Erasmian

copia, what Stallybrass and de Grazia characterize as an appropriative, inhabited re-use

and re-purposing of what has come before. In building his early poetic career on the

stellar remains of Sidney, then in spending his later career dilating and expanding his

own corpus, writing first responsively and then additively, Daniel reifies in his poetic

trajectory the early modern dedication to perfectibility which Massai posits.

Early modern English folios thus expressed a wide variety of presentations of

wholeness or completeness. Connor’s position works as an acceptable starting point for

discussing what “whole” or “complete” meant in early modern English book culture. But

these ideas were more complex than a simple binary. The preface to the 1604

Shepheard’s Kalender demonstrates that slim, light folios claimed wholeness or

completeness as confidently as did thick, heavy folios. Some thicker folio indeed

emerged fully-formed from printshops, like Jonson’s, Shakespeare’s, or Daniel’s first

168 STC 6248. The standard title-page formula uses “by” to denote a book’s printer and “for” to denote its underwriting publisher. 169 1621: STC 6250. 1626: STC 6251. 1634: STC 6252. 170 STC 22536. Information about suppression comes from STC.

folios. Quite a few other thick folios, however, emerged in parts: Chapman’s translation

of Homer, the Lownes brothers’ build-a-Spenser, or even Topsell’s set of Historie

reference books, which did, after all, appear in two parts (the Historie of Fovre-Footed

Beastes in 1604 and the Historie of Serpents in 1608). Certain massive works, such as the

Mexío project or Aldo Manuzio’s five-part, six-volume, 10kg Aristotle, all but demanded the multi-part treatment. The folio’s complex relationship to ideas of wholeness or completeness—either of an author’s oeuvre or of a particular work—presents in the

correlated arrays of publication strategies and sizes which differentiate early modern

books.

3. Vernacular Print and the Disappearance of the Folio First Edition One more oddity distinguishes the early modern English folio from its ancestors:

the gradual disappearance of the folio editio princeps. Throughout the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, the folio frequently supported the publication of first editions of a wide variety of works. In the incunabular period, the subset {works never before printed} included practically everything ever written. Between 1454 and 1500, the late medieval emphasis on reproducing classical texts (of which a complex manuscript corpus existed) yielded a sizeable minority of folio editiones principes. However, this practice was by its

nature unsustainable.

The development of vernacular print traditions, along with other cultural and

intellectual factors, fostered the growth of vernacular writing. Unlike classical works, the

early modern composition of vernacular works often responded to urgent exigencies.

Some of these exigencies were primarily rhetorical, arising from ideological division: the

rhetorical tilts between Erasmus and Luther exemplify this type. Another potent catalyst

for composition was the financial imperative; take, for instance, Thomas Nashe’s or

Robert Greene’s pamphlets published in the late sixteenth century. Urgency in turn

accelerated production—if not brevity in textual length, at least a streamlining of the

writing process. This need for speed motivated decisions in both production and

dissemination; McLean argues that the deadlines of fairs like that at Frankfurt

compressed the time available for every step of the book manufacture process, from

writing to printing to shipping.171 While, as Galbraith contends, the folio format could be

gamed to be financially economical, it remained lavish in other ways.172 Spatially, larger

books would pose more challenges in the packing than would smaller books, at least

when in their final book-block form; a sexto-decimo in sheets would be materially

indistinguishable from a folio in sheets, except in terms of sheet count. In composition,

too, the folio format’s potential for the economical squeezing of more text onto fewer

sheets may have drawn longer works to the format, which is roughly Galbraith’s

argument in “English Literary Folios.” The model visible in the print transmission of

Shakespeare’s plays—works first printed in smaller formats, then collected in folio—can

also be seen in the oeuvres of other poetic authors, as Galbraith argues, but also in less

traditionally “literary” oeuvres. The example of one celebrity preacher illustrates this

model and provides interesting texture to straightforward narratives of sublimation from

disparate quarto to unitary folio.

The works of William Perkins, the “moderate Puritan” theologian who mesmerized Cambridge congregations with his “denunciatory” preaching, were printed

171 Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 84-86. 172 Galbraith, “Spencer’s First Folio,” 25-26.

throughout his lifetime, accelerating as he grew older. Both sermons and purpose-written theological works emerged, though the latter dominated. 173 Two years before Perkins’

death, John Legat, the official printer for the University of Cambridge, issued a fat quarto

entitled A golden chaine: or The description of Theologie (in 1600). The volume included

several, but not all, of Perkins’ better-known works. Then in 1602, Legat reissued A

golden chaine, expanded in key regards. One change involved contents: the reissue

contains five more treatises than appear in the previous version. The reissue also upsizes

from quarto to folio; whereas the 1600 version used 139 sheets (550 leaves/1100 pages),

the 1602 version used 247 sheets (493 leaves/985 pages). This upsizing involves some

manipulation of the mise-en-page; whereas Legat printed A golden chaine in a single

column, in a medium roman font, he printed the 1602 folio in double columns, one font-

size smaller than the 1600 quarto. The most remarkable difference between these two

versions, however, lies in Legat’s change to the title of his collection: the folio, issued

shortly after the death of Perkins, is titled THE WORKS OF THAT FAMOVS AND

WORTHIE Miniſter of Chriſt, in the Vniverſitie of CAMBRIDGE, M.W. Perkins. All that

was necessary for the apotheosis of Perkins’ corpus from quarto-collection to folio-works

was the death of the author.

The title page for the 1602 works evinces a multi-pronged advertising strategy. Its

words run as follows: “gathered into one volume, and newly corrected according to his

owne copies. With distinct chapters, and contents of euery booke, and a generall table of

173 The information about Perkins in this paragraph comes from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

the whole.” Then, crucially, follow two biblical epigraphs, whose resonances become

clear upon comparison:

Iſa. 57.1. The righteous periſheth, and no man conſidereth it in heart: mercifull men are taken away, and no man underſtandeth that the righteous is taken away from the euill to come. 2.Pet.1.15. Neuertheleſſe I will endeauour always , that ye alſo may be able to haue remembrance of theſe things after my departing. With relative concision, the title page commends this volume for sale to potential

purchasers. “THE WORKS…gathered into one volume” implies unrestricted access to

the author’s complete corpus. It promises a never-before-seen level of accuracy,

legitimized by the author’s holograph: “newly corrected according to his [that is,

Perkins’] owne copies.” It boasts of the book’s optimization for discontinuous reading,

even detailing the specific reference technologies which will facilitate that discontinuous

reading. Its choice of epigraphs argues implicitly for the apostolic righteousness of a

“mercifull” Perkins, who (the Isaiah passage implies) may have been mistreated in life.

These same epigraphs also code the book as spiritually monumental, enacting and

enforcing remembrance as does Peter’s letter, re-performing the narrative in the 2 Peter

passage as an antidote to the injustice described in the Isaiah passage. The implicit

message runs roughly as follows: “the forgetting of a righteous man is unjust, this book

makes remembrance possible, and to avoid perpetuating injustice you, reader, must

purchase it.” To some extent, this title page plays upon Perkins’ recent death; it emphasizes the cultural perils attendant on the loss of a notable man of God, and it amplifies the fame and worthiness of the deceased.

Perkins died on October 22, 1602, “after suffering intensely for several weeks

from the stone.”174 The folio Works claims a publication date of 1603, which the STC

amends to 1602. A print-job of the Works’ magnitude could almost certainly not have

been planned and executed in the weeks of Perkins’ suffering, given the typographical

and bibliographical shifts required to morph the 1600 quarto into the folio format. Thus it

is likely that the Works were in hand well before Perkins’ death; he may have even

participated in their conception. After his death, the title page was given the task of

clothing the project in a customary suit of solemn mourning, complete with grim, oblique

allusions to Perkins’ decease, the injustice of forgetting him, and “the euill to come.”175

Like the conventional textile prostheses of mourning, the preliminaries—distinct,

separate, likely printed after the bulk of Perkins’ Works was completed—drape like a

somber black veil over the whole, coding the volume as memorial despite the absence of

a memorial identity within its main text.

Indeed, while the title page only gestures broadly at the divine’s passing, an

address from “The Printer to the Reader” plays explicitly on the fact and meaning of

Perkins’ death. “This worthie man of God” makes an early appearance in the address, not

primarily as writer but rather as orator. Regardless of the actual origins of the texts by

Perkins which appear in this volume, Legat claims that they were “firſt deliue-red by

word of mouth vnto his Auditors” and only “afterward” disseminated. According to

Legat, the original medium in which these were published was manuscript, rather than

174 Jinkins, “Perkins, William.” 175 Published as it was mere months before the death of Elizabeth, this passage may echo contemporary politico-religious anxieties about a post-Elizabethan England.

90 print: “…afterward publiſhed by hand-writing vnto all, willing to profite both by tounge and pen…” In mapping the circuitous route by which Perkins’ work has ended up in folio, Legat both establishes its organic bona fides and distances himself, as printer, from any authorizing agency. If we are to believe Legat’s advertisement-heavy address,

Perkins himself (“that bleſſed ſpirit, who now raigneth in blis with the holy ſpirits and

Saynts of God”) both authorized and motivated this project. “[B]y publiſhing theſe his works,” Legat demonstrates that he is truly “deſirous to fulfill the desire” of Perkins.

Given Perkin’s healthy reputation in life and dolorous manner of death, this appeal works in multiple ways: first, by (again) using him as authorizing figure; second, by explicitly citing his vague “deſire” to see his works published; third, by amplifying his holiness and thus the orthodoxy of his works; and fourth, by figuring Legat’s own publication project as memorial rather than pecuniary.

In case any reader remains unconvinced of the rectitude of the publication of the

Works, Legat concludes the address by setting up an euphuistic binary. He configures the

Works, but especially the individual works, as both “long Exemplified by his life” and

“now ſea-led with his death.” The parallelism of these phrases is too exquisite to ignore: each begins with a marker of temporality, followed by a morally-connotative past participle, a connecting preposition, “his,” and opposite states of being. Life and death, in

Legat’s address, collaborate to bring Perkins’ works to their fullest flower of spiritual efficacy. The former extends their rhetorical impact; the latter brings it to a powerful, effective conclusion. In general, Legat communicates the sense that, as deplorable as the fact of Perkins’ death might be, it serves to magnify the instructive potential of his work.

Legat’s issue of Perkins’ Works might even be better because its author is dead.

A clue to the reasons behind Legat’s painstaking establishment of this particular state of affairs hides in the middle part of the address. After a long first sentence extolling the virtues of Perkins, his sermonic delivery, and the beauties of oratory-to-manuscript- to-print textual transmission, Legat turns immediately, almost anxiously, to the existence of “other writings…of his beſides theſe.” He assures readers that when he gets his hands on these other writings, he will not keep them to himself (in an echo of Luke 19:20), but instead make them broadly, widely available (in a verbal echo of Isaiah 30:17).176

Whether or not the Cambridge public had begun to mutter about the works lacking from

Legat’s new folio of Perkins’ Works, Legat believed in the possibility of such muttering, and wanted to forestall it. His anxiety comes into sharper focus a few sentences later. The concern is for the vendibility of the volume at hand: “But ſome perhaps will rather expect the printing of thoſe works yet vnpubliſhed, which I mentioned before, then ſet vpon this as but a Moitie of the whole.” This apprehension has some legitimacy; the culture of perfectibility, which I discuss above, could only survive for so long before purchasers would notice their new editions being superseded with regularity.

The address swiftly moves to neutralize this counterargument: “the printing of thoſe” “works yet vnpubliſhed” “ſhall be nothing preiudicial to the entire-neſſe and abſoluteneſſe of this worke.” In the concrete, this means that “each of them” “ſhall be printed by themſelues nothing euer hereafter added to this.” Translated from lay-rhetoric into printer-speak, Legat plans to issue subsequent unpublished works in such a way as not to be bound with or constituted with the folio Works. This specifically commits to a

176 Cf. the Geneva Bible, STC 2118.

92 publication strategy exactly opposite that which would later guide Lownes’ build-it- yourself Spenser project and the serially-produced Jaggard folios between 1611 and 1620

(Chapman’s translation of Homer and the Pedro Mexía project). In a textual industry where a positive culture of perfectibility could become, apparently or actually, a negative culture of planned obsolescence, Legat reassures the readers and, he hopes, purchasers of this volume of Works that it is actually a final word. He cannot go so far as to claim that his folio encompasses all of Perkins’ works, since some are indeed known to be extant and unpublished. But he commits to never deliberately rendering this volume obsolete by issuing additions to it or by updating it.

This, perversely, benefits Legat’s 1602 edition of the Works. Deliberately or not, this promise privileges the works contained in this folio volume over yet-unpublished works. Though Legat emphasizes the pragmatic concerns that drove the selection process for inclusion in the 1602 folio, he also posits “the entire-neſſe and abſoluteneſſe of this worke,” which no subsequently-discovered or -issued work by Perkins can prejudice. The volume as printed—though “grown already greater then I looked for,” as Legat somewhat plaintively notes—is rhetorically constructed as complete and whole. This rhetoric sits uneasily alongside Legat’s lengthy admission of the existence and import of yet- unpublished works. Torn between commercial opportunism and honesty (perhaps enforced by public knowledge), the title page and printer’s address in Perkin’s Works in folio fluctuate in meaning and in rhetorical effect. Beneath these fluctuations, however, lies a relative certainty in the vendibility of this sort of collected works: the editio princeps survives, though with a diminished profile, in the age of vernacular professional writing.

The early modern English folio primarily operated as a repository for collections of works previously printed in smaller formats. But as the Perkins folio demonstrates, the folio editio princeps did not entirely disappear. Works like Topsell’s Historie of reference books certainly fit the bill, though this example’s acknowledged reliance on Conrad

Gesner’s works of natural history complicate its status as “first edition.” Famously, nearly half of the Shakespearean plays printed in CHT appear there for the first time, but the rest had been previously printed. Perhaps CHT could be called a partial first edition. I suggest above that incunabular and sixteenth-century thoroughness in printing classics helped to prompt the rise of vernacular writing, the exigencies of which yielded shorter works which could be distributed relatively quickly and inexpensively. I argue that books like Perkins’ 1602 Works or those in the Jaggard/Milles Pedro Mexía project, which capitalize on the voluminous affordances of the folio format, represent the dominant use of the early modern English folio: as a potentially large container for frequently extensive and often heterogeneous corpora.

Chapter 2 - The Rhetoric of Recurring Material Elements I contend in the introduction that the material elements which compose premodern books vary in their expressive potential. Expressive material elements, with which this chapter and the next are concerned, include both volitional and non-volitional elements. Volitional material elements are those aspects of books which are and can be deliberately designed by individuals involved in production. Non-volitional material elements are those aspects which follow inexorably and somewhat uncontrollably from other aspects (themselves either volitional or non-volitional). Generally, it appears that as print technologies and skill improve over time, printers find themselves more and more in control of the design of their final product. As time passes, the category of {volitional design elements} expands, while the category of {non-volitional material characteristics} contracts. In the pages to follow, I explore trends in both types of material elements across my data, with reference to specific examples. First, I address the volitional design element of mise-en-page, arguing that referential paratexts and illustration demand for books in folio specific reading practices. Next, I examine the particularly non-volitional material characteristics of dimension and of mass, focusing on the entanglement of the latter with presumed and implied use-patterns.

A. Volitional Design Elements: Reference Technologies

Thirty-one of the thirty-two records which comprise the data-set for this section’s research deploy some sort of reference technology outside and/or within their text.

Reference technologies which appear before the text include tables of contents, indices, and glossaries—any type of finding aid which could be, created, composed, and impressed after the main text had been impressed and arranged into quires. By contrast,

reference technologies which appear within the text include printed glosses, pagination,

and section headings. The former appear somewhat infrequently; the latter appear with

much more frequency. I argue that the reliance on in-text reference technologies visible

in early modern English folios reveals the general reading style for which most of them

were designed; this reliance also suggests one possible cultural conception of the early

modern English folio.

External and internal reference technologies differ from each other not merely in

their placement, but also in their time-stamp relative to the printing of the “body” of the

“text.” Eisenstein, Genette, McGann, and many others, in making the logical transition from descriptive bibliography to textual theory, thoroughly debunked the conception that an idealized text can exist apart from the linguistic and material thresholds which shape the making of meaning.177 Notwithstanding the creative force exercised by post-authorial

book design, however, the fact remains that reference technologies by their very nature

must be created chronologically after the text(s) which they help to explicate. Therefore,

the text as received emerges synthetically from the linguistic, material, and intangible

elements which constitute it—primary text(s), external reference technologies, internal

reference technologies, materialities, and cultural contexts—but those elements retain

their distinguishability. The primary text(s) differ(s) in age from any coappearing

interpretive apparatus, which itself subdivides into divergent constituencies created at

different times.

177 Cf. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Genette, Paratexts; McGann, The Textual Condition and “The Monks and the Giants.”

Internal reference technologies frequently had to be created before external

technologies for two non-exclusive reasons. First, external reference technologies often

keyed to systems of annotation embedded in the text. Page or leaf numbers, in the

seventeenth century as now, integrated efficiently into a variety of external technologies,

such as indices, tables of contents, glossaries, and even title pages. Variable section

headings could also be referenced by external technologies. Variable section headings,

taking the form of numbered chapters or books, descriptions or titles of chapter- or book-

contents, or some combination of these, crop up with special frequency in tables of

contents. One effective configuration pairs a table of contents populated with pithy

section-descriptions keyed to numbered sections; in-text, section headings are only

numbers, since the description is available elsewhere.

The second reason that the creation of internal reference technologies preceded

external technologies follows logically from the first: external technologies could easily

be printed after the text. When external technologies key to internal technologies, the

order of creation is obvious. Even when no such cross-pollination takes place, the ancillary nature of external technologies renders them a logical candidate for final printing. John Legat’s address gestures at this in mentioning how the folio volume was

“grown already greater then I looked for.” While this could mean that the address was created after the size of Perkins’ Works had been determined, but before composition or

impression had begun. More likely, though, Legat wrote the address after the folio was

(mostly) finished; the tone of the rest of the address, which refers to the Works as an

entity already created, supports this conjecture.

However, internal and external reference technologies do not invariably agree with each other. Legat, for one, took a casual attitude toward the agreement of tables of contents with pagination. The table of contents for A Golden Chaine, the first and one of the larger works contained in the Works, keys chapter numbers (followed by brief chapter-titles) to page and column. By contrast, the table of contents for An Exposition of the Symbole or Creede of the Apoſtles, the second text in the volume, merely lists the topics covered in the book, with neither chapter-number nor page-reference—even though continuous pagination runs throughout the book.

A major point of textual variance between copies of CHT provides another, more famous example. CHT foregrounds its commitment to reference. The engraved portrait references the author’s humanity, physicality, and individuality; Jonson’s poem, on the facing page, keys inversely to the portrait in telling readers to “looke / not on his Picture,” which glares from the opposite recto. The dedicatory poems and the various addresses enact a similar looking back-and-forth, from Shakespeare to his performed plays to his social networks to his book. The page-length “CATALOGVE of the ſeuerall Comedies,

Hiſtories, and Tra-gedies contained in this Volume” keys discrete works to specific pages. At the same time the page performs an interpretive separation of the plays by genre, enforcing this in the form of twice-restarted pagination at the beginning of new generic sections. The inclusion of “The names of the Principall Actors in all theſe plays” also operates to prompt mental cross-reference between material text and remembered performance.

Yet the liminal existence of Troilus and Cressida outside of the controlling reach of the volume’s reference technologies complicates this laser-like focus on consistent reference. Critics believe that issues with rights to this play prevented the Jaggards from printing it until very late in the production process. Some copies were sold without it. It bears obvious signs of being shoehorned in at the last minute, most visibly a lack of pagination. Neither does the play appear in the volume’s table of contents.178

From these clues, we can deduce a certain pragmatic laxity on the part of CHT’s publishing syndicate, specifically in relation to the consistency of internal reference technologies. Paginating Troilus and Cressida would require repaginating eleven tragedies—either hand-correcting an impossible number of sheets, or re-impressing them.

These courses of action would waste both time and money, both tightly budgeted for this volume. Cataloguing Troilus and Cressida in the table of contents would require either paginating the play or drawing attention to its unpaginated state; the latter course of action would actively destabilize the organizational rhetoric of the volume’s interlinked reference technologies. So, ever realists, the decision-makers behind CHT chose to leave

Troilus and Cressida inconspicuously unpaginated and uncatalogued. CHT, like Perkins’

Works, demonstrates how tangled the timeline of creation and impression for primary texts, internal reference technologies, and external reference technologies could be.

Unlike these two examples, most seventeenth-century English folios I examined relied slightly more on internal than external reference technologies. I classify as

“external reference technologies” indices and tables of contents. Other reference

178 Arden Troilus and Cressida, 436-437.

99 technologies, such as glossaries, exist externally to folios’ primary texts, but the table of contents and the index are the two primary modes of organizing contained information for reference.179 The table of contents primarily arranges reference content according to chronological placement in the book; the index primarily arranges reference content according to, often, an alphabetical scheme. Most early modern English folios I examined do not include external reference technologies, as Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 demonstrate.

Fig. 1: Distribution of Indices

6, 19%

26, 81%

No index Index or equivalent

Figure 2-1

179 Though title pages can invite referential consumption, title pages exist for a variety of rhetorical purposes, including advertisement. I do not consider them to be designed solely for reference technology in the same way that indices or tables of contents are.

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Fig. 2: Distribution of Tables of Contents

11, 34%

21, 66%

No TOC TOC or equivalent

Figure 2-2

Most of the folios in this data-set are made up of less than fifty sheets. From one perspective, the presence of reference technologies at all in these slim books is counterintuitive; flipping through a 150-page folio in order to locate a specific section is a proportionally faster process than flipping through a 650-page folio. Less predictable still is the general distribution of external reference technologies across the data-set, represented in Fig. 3.

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Fig. 3: Distribution of All External Reference Technologies

2, 6%

13, 41% 17, 53%

Neither TOC nor index either TOC or index both TOC and index

Figure 2-3

As this chart clarifies, nearly half of the folios included some sort of external reference technology. By contrast, more than half of the folios in this data-set included internal reference technologies, those set during the setting of the primary text. These include printed marginal glosses, variable headings, and pagination or foliation. These technologies operate within different referential paradigms. Headings frequently key to external reference technologies; chapter titles which are catalogued in a table of contents exemplifies this. In the folios which do not include external reference technologies, headings can still key to simple, logical, implied reference systems. An example of this is numbered chapters which, in the absence of a table of contents, still communicate the separateness and sequentiality of sections for the purposes of future reference).

Pagination or foliation can exist independently of external technologies. Though the presence of a page-keyed table of contents or an index keyed to folium and column can enhance the value of pagination or foliation, they communicate their meaning and use

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perfectly well without the prosthesis of external technologies. In the pages to follow, I

use the umbrella term “sequential reference numbering” to refer to pagination and

foliation.

Glosses work differently from either of these two. Because of their textual

content, glosses most likely have been studied more, and more systematically, than either

headings or sequential reference numbering. Works like Evelyn Tribble’s Margins and

Marginality focus exclusively on the authorship, meaning, and theoretical ramifications

of printed marginalia, both for early modern readers and modern critics. Neither do these

studies confine themselves to early modern England; marginal text, printed and

(primarily) manuscript, motivates and informs a number of studies of premodern

readership.180 The uniqueness of glossary reference lies in its frequent outward orientation—inter-book reference as opposed to intra-book reference. While printed glosses can and do point to earlier or later moments within the book in which they appear, the glosses in the folios which I examined also key to other authorities. An example of this sort of intertextuality is visible in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes

Calender, which famously includes a complex system of marginal notes and end-notes.

Wendy Wall argues that this system “place[s Spenser’s work] firmly within a carefully

designed literary canon.” E.K.’s notes claim descent from manuscript coterie tradition,

distancing the Calender from the very medium which gave it shape.181 Wall’s

characterization of the Calender’s glosses can, I argue, extend to printed glosses in

180 Cf., e.g., Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, Hackel, Reading Material, Duggan, “Reading Liturgical Books,” Jensen, “Printing the Bible.” 181 Imprint of Gender, 233-242.

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general: they situate the work being glossed within a canon, designed with different

levels of care. As such, glosses may be more independent of text-specific external reference tools than headings and sequential reference numbering. Glosses can illuminate the primary text to which they attach, reference the authority of other texts within a canon, or direct readers backward or forward within a section, work, or volume. These functions can be accomplished independently of external reference technologies; often they are.

Fig. 4, Fig. 5, and Fig. 6 represent the presence of internal reference technologies in my early modern English folio data-set.

Fig. 4: Distribution of Printed Glosses

15, 47% 17, 53%

no glosses glosses

Figure 2-4

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Fig. 5: Distribution of Section Heads

30, 94% 2, 6%

variable none or invariable

Figure 2-5

Fig. 6: Distribution of Sequential Reference Numbering

11, 35%

16, 52%

4, 13%

paginated foliated none

Figure 2-6

Though none of these reference technologies presents in 100% of the data-set, they do predominate, as Fig. 7 demonstrates. In order, section heads are the most ubiquitous internal reference technology, followed by sequential reference numbering and glosses. The two folios in my data-set which lack section headings both fall into what

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I characterize below as textual scripts: The Schoole of Mvsicke and Calligraphotechnia.

The latter does include another form of internal reference technology: certain of its single-plate-engraved pages include engraved foliation (the epitome of internal reference technologies being impressed at the same time as the primary text).182 The former includes no reference technologies at all, neither internal nor external.183 A data-point totally devoid of reference technology is therefore anomalous. A comparison of Fig. 3 to

Fig. 7 reveals that fewer folios exclude internal tools than external tools.

182 STC 11803. 183 STC 21128.

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Fig. 7: Configurations of Internal Reference Technologies 16

0 glosses, sequential glosses, headings headings sequential none sequential reference reference reference numbering, numbering numbering, headings headings

Figure 2-7

These data demonstrate a few small-scale postulates, which lead to a few large- scale conclusions. At the micro-level, they indicates that early modern English folios more frequently included internal than external reference technologies. The added paper cost of external technologies likely contributed to their relative scarcity; they did, after all, constitute a separate, smaller printing job, to be impressed after and appended to the

“text proper.” In addition, the labor cost of external technologies might negatively affect printers’ interest in including them. Before tables of contents and indices could be included, they had to be created. This creation required either natural or artificial familiarity with the work in question. The former would proceed from an individual previously familiar with the text—for instance, an author or an early reader in

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manuscript—and would require relatively desultory creative work. The latter would

proceed from an individual who had to learn the text in question; this would require

relatively intensive reading and creation.

This divergence in creation-streams for external reference technologies arises

directly from the general difference in nature between external and internal technologies

in print. Internal technologies like headings had to be created at some point before the printing process for the “text proper” began, and would be set simultaneously with the setting of the “text proper.” External technologies could not be created until after the text and its internal technologies had been created, set, and impressed. In other words, both

internal and external technologies required extra work in the printshop, but the inclusion

of internal technologies fit more naturally in conventional production workflow, and

required less financial risk, than did the inclusion of external technologies. This partially

explains why more early modern English folios include technologies like sequential

reference numbering, section headings, and glosses than technologies like indices or

tables of contents.

As a corollary to this postulate, most early modern English folios included

internal reference technologies, as I note above. Variable section headings, in particular,

are practically ubiquitous. Figure 7 illustrates this fact powerfully: the early modern

English or contintental bookbuyer would likely have expected to find some sort of

organizational reference technology incorporated into the text of any folio they picked

up. This expectation may have been explicit, if they were self-aware readers or had what

might today be termed a bibliographical consciousness: upon opening a book, they might

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look specifically for headings. More likely, readers’ expectation of internal technologies

might have been unconscious, proceeding from a broad experience shaped organically

and never quite definable: upon opening a non-foliated book, they might vaguely sense something to be missing. Either way, whether bookbuyers knew it or not, their experience of folios had likely conditioned them to anticipate internal reference technologies in the new folios they picked up. The extent of this conditioning directly correlated to the extent of their exposure to folios.

These corollary postulates (that early modern English folios frequently included internal reference technologies, and that internal technologies occurred more frequently than external reference technologies) lead naturally to my first macro-level conclusion: the relative distributions of external and internal reference technologies in early modern

English folios reveals the secularization and democratization of referential use-patterns.

These data demonstrate the triumph in the early modern era of a new mode of reading. As

Tribble points out, the reference technologies whose presence I chart throughout early modern English folios originated with, and were originally restricted to, Biblical codices and other texts of a religious nature.184 Between those early codices and the printing of

CHT, several key historical developments led to the wide availability of reference

technology. The codex triumphed over the scroll. Secular and, later, vernacular

manuscript traditions arose and earned cultural acceptance. A manuscript manufacturing

industry developed, increasing the raw numbers of books in the world. Print amplified the

rate of production still further and, gradually, reduced cost. Print technology evolved to

184 Tribble, Margins and Marginality, 11-56.

109 produce widely variable visual profiles, in terms of font, type size, spacing, and justification. Politico-religious heterodoxy germinated and took root across Europe. Other factors influenced the democratization and secularization of reference technology, but these I have listed were a primary influence.

The sea-change brought about by innovations in codicological, manuscript, and print technologies involved the spread of an initially unorthodox reading method. As

Peter Stallybrass has argued, the move from scroll to codex allowed for readers to flip back and forth between sections, to start in the middle, or to read selectively. Stallybrass’ term, which I have already used above in reference to John Legat’s 1602 Works of

William Perkins, is discontinuous reading. In his construction of the concept, Stallybrass does not tie the practice exclusively to the presence of printed reference technologies.

This restraint is wise; although reference technologies like indices or section headings can stimulate, suggest, even demand discontinuous reading, it can happen in the absence of reference tools.185

Further, the absence of printed reference technologies by no means equates to the absence of reference technologies—rather, print and manuscript can exist in symbiosis, or manuscript can supply a printed lack. For example, the copy of Robert Glover’s

Nobilitas politica vel ciuilis (printed by William Jaggard in 1608) now in the British

Library includes both print and manuscript glosses. At times the glosses follow similar tracks; at times the manuscript glosses interact with the printed glosses, either supporting

185 Cf. Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” 42-46.

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or contending with them.186 Alternatively, the copy of Francis Markham’s Fiue decades

of epistles of vvarre (printed by Augustine Matthews in 1622) now in the Newberry

Library, includes blank marginal space, enclosed in printed rules, a space whose design

invites the reader to fill in their own marginal glosses.187 Other reference technologies

have been supplied in manuscript by enterprising users; hand-written pagination or

foliation occur more frequently than any other type of user-supplied reference tools.

Printed reference technology may have invited discontinuous reading, and (crucially to my argument) signaled its presence, but discontinuous reading existed in the absence of printed section headings, glosses, and sequential reference numbering.

The distribution of reference technologies in these early modern English folios, one which indicates the application of discontinuous reading to them, also leads to my second major conclusion. Namely, early modern English folios deployed reference technologies for a variety of reasons, not solely as a byproduct from or generator of associations with intellectualism, literariness, or prestige. Reference technologies both invited and indicated discontinuous reading practices. As paratexts, they made all sorts of claims about the texts to which those apparatuses were attached. But they did not necessarily or exclusively signal high-culture connotations like monumental, copious, incorporate, or complete. This builds upon my conclusion about the secularization and democratization of reference technologies. But it also severs the historical links between those traditionally high-culture texts which shaped discontinuous reading throughout the premodern period (such as the Bible) and the diverse assortment of early modern texts

186 STC 11922. 187 STC 17332.

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which were subjected to discontinuous use (such as Glover’s Nobilitas politica vel

civilis). Thus, the headings and pagination of Alfonso Ferrabosco’s Lessons for 1.2. and

3. viols (printed in 1609 by Thomas Snodham for John Browne) or the intermittent

printed glosses, consistent pagination, headings, and table-of-contents-like title page for

Michael Drayton’s Poems (printed in 1619 by William Stansby for John Smethwick)

suggest a certain use-pattern; but they did not necessarily code those volumes as high- culture, prestigious, artistic, or literary.

Each type of reference technology carries a pair, at least, of significations—one

denotative, one connotative, both connected. As Figure 3 and Figure 7 demonstrate, most

books in my data-set include either multiple internal reference technologies, multiple external reference technologies, or some combination of the two. Given this preponderance of referentiality, many books blent the denoted and connoted significations emanating from internal and external technologies which composed the reference apparatus. Occasionally, these significations clashed, most likely; but such clashing is difficult to pinpoint. Synthesis proves much more noticeable. The pairs of

denoted and connoted significations are as follows.

An index denotes a specific type of copiousness which has to do with diversity. It

denotes breadth of topics covered, and it emphasizes nonlinearity of any connections

which exist between content-sections. Connotatively, an index codes its text as one in

which a wide variety of different content-sections may be discerned. At the same time, it

connotes either that differentiation between content-sections is not immediately obvious

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(hence the need for an external tool to accomplish this differentiation), or that the text’s

system of conceptual arrangement is not entirely logical.

Like the index, a table of contents denotes copiousness, but in a quantitative

rather than a qualitative sense. The table of contents, in displaying both the number and

order of topics covered, emphasizes linear connections between content-sections, connections whose complexity correlates directly to the number of discrete content- sections listed. Its connotations code its text as one in which a limited number of content- sections, and particularly the distinctions between those content-sections, are readily apparent. In contrast to the index, the table of contents casts the text’s system of conceptual arrangement as both linear and orderly, each trait depending upon the other.

Compared to the previous two, the gloss denotes straightforwardly: it signals a

passage or group of passages which require additional, external explication. Its

connotation, however, spins a web of interdependent contradictions. As Wall argues vis-

à-vis The Shepheardes Calender, glosses serve to bolster a text’s credibility, by situating

it among equals in a canon—poetic, in the case of Spenser’s poem, and in other cases

philosophical, legal, religious or musical. In the same moment of propping-up, however,

glosses subversively destabilize their text’s authority, pointing to the necessity of their

bolstering project. Glosses code a text as insufficiently individual to stand on its own,

positioned within, supported by, and dependent upon a critical network to create

meaning.

Sequential reference numbering—pagination or foliation—seem to denote more

simply than any other reference technology. They literally put a number on copiousness,

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equating “voluminous” with “copious.” They can also denotatively signal content-

sections; Legat’s 1602 folio of Perkins’ Works uses discontinuous numbering to

distinguish between the titular, constitutive works. But sequential reference numbering

subtly codes its text as one in which the relative position of content-sections matters to

the cohesion and coherence of the whole. Continuously-numbered sections connote

discrete wholeness, as well as the innate sequentiality of constituent sections and their

linear connectedness. Sequential reference numbering points in one direction only:

forward. When continuous, it enforces a logic of linear sequentiality, simultaneously with

offering a highly efficient system of reference points.

The variable section heading denotes divisions between content-sections; further,

it defines the existence of the content-section as a discrete entity. In giving a local habitation and a name to more or less related clumps of concepts, it argues for the legitimacy and the relative autonomy of those clumps. Connotatively, the section heading does the opposite of sequential reference numbering: instead of characterizing its text as a coherent whole, the section heading foregrounds the composite nature of its text’s ideas.

Rather than being single, linear, and unified in purpose, a text with subject headings has a lot of moving parts, complexity, and the potential for ambiguity or internal contradiction.

The section heading, in separating content-sections from each other, offers them up for abstraction or easy digestion; it also enforces their potential conceptual independence from one another. Where sequential reference numbering connotatively can bind a work together, the variable section heading connotatively fractures it.

114

Volumes with apparatus constructed of various combinations of these reference

technologies thus advertise their individual cultural connotations. Andreas Ornithoparcus

his Micrologus, or Introduction: containing the art of singing, printed in 1609 by Thomas

Snodham for Thomas Adams, includes a table of contents arranged by chapters, placed

somewhat unconventionally at the end of the volume, as well as pagination and variable

section headings.188 The denotative and connotative image projected by these reference

technologies differs from that projected by The observations of Sir Richard Havvkins

Knight, in his voiage into the South Sea. That book, printed in 1622 by John Dawson for

John Jaggard, includes a five-page index arranged alphabetically and keyed to page

number, pagination, glosses, and section headings.189 The former’s deployment of

pagination and headings conceives of its users’ navigation of the book as discontinuous

to some extent, but the “Preface vpon the Diuision of the Worke” makes clear the

codependent nature of the sections.190 As a folio, the Micrologus, or Introduction presents

itself as a discrete whole to be initially used as a whole, before subsequent, potentially

discontinuous consumptions. The latter, whose status as a travel-narrative might invite continuous or linear reading, defies that impulse by including a thorough index which positions the volume as a reference work. Reference apparatus thus works with and against folio books’ contents to shape users’ interpretive processes.

In addition to broadcasting the individual, specific cultural connotations of folios’

intended use-patterns, reference technologies simultaneously destabilize and shore up

188 STC 18853. 189 STC 12962. 190 B2r.

115 folios’ authority in what I will call prosthetic ways. Theories of the prosthesis, as Sarah

Jain argues, have a long and tangled history. In a 1999 essay, Jain defines prosthesis in terms of “discursive frameworks, as well as material artifacts.”191 Jain’s focus rests primarily on embodiment and the entanglement—whether discursive or material—of human and machine. She argues that prosthetic attachments, whether artificial legs or automobiles, “supply a deficiency” in both meanings of that phrase. They fill a gap, solve a problem, compensate for an extant emptiness. In the same moment, however, prostheses draw attention to that gap, emphasize the previously-unsolved nature of that problem, conceptually hollow out the emptiness which they then fill. To use a deliberately simplistic example: if glasses did not exist, and if correction of weak eyesight were unthought-of, there would be no need for glasses. By its very existence, vision-corrective prosthesis positions 20/60 vision as “disabled” or “insufficient,” requiring its deployment.

While Jain emphasizes disability, the human/machine interface, and embodiment in her discussion of prosthesis, the concept productively applies to the textual corpus as well. Within those contexts which never use reference technologies, like babies’ board books, the footnote and the index are functionally nonexistent. The conventions of the academic monograph, by contrast, demand referential prosthesis. These modern genres differ from each other, to the extent that the respective presence and absence of reference technologies in monographs and board books invite no remark. The early modern English folio, however, enjoyed no such straightforward differentiation. Notwithstanding the

191 Jain, “Prosthetic Imagination,” 32.

116 secular democratization of reference throughout the lifespan of the codex, the folio by

1623 knew no absolutely necessary conventions. Every one of the graphs above demonstrates this equivocality; not even section headings are conventional to the point of ubiquity. The absence of pagination would not necessarily diminish a folio’s perceived quality or value, because pagination was not format-standard. Paradoxically, however, the presence of pagination would likely enhance a folio’s perceived quality or value; its existence within the context of that individual folio enforced the necessity of its inclusion.

This paradox renders the case of Markham’s Fiue decades of epistles of vvarre more acutely problematic. By including ruled space for glosses—and that marginal space appears to be reserved for glosses, as Fig. 8 illustrates—Markham (or Matthewes or whoever made the mise-en-page decisions for this volume) entertains the possibility of printed glossing. Within the context of this folio, the gloss exists as a potential prosthetic attachment: by leaving space for the gloss, the book hollows out the deficiency which the gloss-as-prosthesis will supply. But in not printing glosses, the book denies the necessity of those printed glosses which the ruled margin-spaces conjure into existence. Instead, it shifts the onus for glossing onto the user, proclaiming the need for glosses but abdicating the critical responsibility of supplying them.

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Figure 2-8

The appearance of Markham’s work neatly expresses the rhetorical ambiguity inherent in the inclusion of referential prostheses in early modern English folios. Perhaps the folio’s large dimensions inspired an anxiety about interpretation—perhaps a sense existed that the folio as a format required external apparatus for it to make sense. In this prosthetic mindset, the existence of reference technology necessitated that folios include it, so as to amplify their authority and permanence. Alternatively, as the blank spaces in

Markham’s work imply, the rhetoric of reference technology simply perpetuates, by

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appropriation, manuscript traditions of user-generated reference technology. In this

model, reference technology does not operate within an extant though fluid print

tradition, but rather builds upon older models of interpretive circumscription. In shifting

the origin of referential authority from users to producers—a shift made visible in

negative by Markham’s blank margins—the print folio simultaneously ensures the survival and blunts the dangerous subversive potential of early modern reference technologies.

B. Volitional Design Elements: Illustration and Decoration

The relationship of illustration and text closely resembles the relationship between reference technologies and primary text. As with reference technologies and other paratextual and bibliographical elements, the visual and the verbal are imbricated. To conceive of the text as separate from the visual is to define that text as primarily verbal, as independent of the visual. I define the visual as, effectively, non-verbal semiosis, excluding factors, such as weight, smell, and feel, which are not accessible through the sense of sight. Letterforms, white space, font size all are visual; incomplete impressions or especially black, thorough impressions are visual192; ornament and illustration are, of

course, visual. But verbal and visual, though distinct, are not independent. Verbal

transmission is fundamentally contingent upon visual elements—even apparently obscure

aspects of mise-en-page, such as incomplete impressions. As well, volitional visual

elements both support and depend upon verbal transmission of meaning. In the pages to

follow, I test this hypothesis.

192 To the extent of their appearance, not their interference with or contribution to legibility.

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This section examines the distribution and nature of visual elements—primarily illustration and ornamentation—in my early modern English folio data-set, with some reference to other folios not in my data-set but nevertheless pertinent to my discussion. I define “illustration” broadly, including diagrams and tables as well as more standard representational images. The reason for this generous definition lies in the rhetorical function of diagrams and tables. The example of Aaron Rathborne’s The surueyor in foure books, printed in 1616 by William Stansby for William Burre, is salutary here.193

Rathborne was by occupation a surveyor himself; part of The surueyor occupies itself with describing surveying tools, some already in use, some invented by Rathborne.194

Woodcut illustrations frequently accompany the more convoluted descriptions—a conventional verbal-visual relationship. Elsewhere, however, non-representative illustrations give shape to the concepts which Rathborne verbally expresses, whether they be geometrical relations195 or mathematical proportions.196 The relationship of a woodcut illustration of a surveying tool to Rathborne’s verbal description of that tool mirrors the relationship of a geometrical sketch to Rathborne’s verbal explication of the geometrical relation in question. Both mirror the relationship of a ruled, carefully-ordered table of numerical proportions to Rathborne’s verbal description of those proportions. The etymological root of “illustration” lies in the shedding of light; since sketches and tables shed visual light on verbal description, I group them with representative images as illustrations.

193 STC 20748. 194 Cf. Bendall, “Rathborne, Aaron.” 195 C6v (p. 24). 196 M4v (p. 128).

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In taking up illustrations, writ large, as well as more generic ornamental elements like borders and initials, this examination illumines the effect extra visual decoration had on the nature of the early modern English folio, at the same time troubling critical commonplaces about the folio. The word “lavish,” for instance, often attaches to folios with a large quantity of representational illustrations, or even a smaller quantity of especially large representational illustrations. This section punctures the viability of

“lavish” as a descriptor for heavily-illustrated folios, arguing rather for the pragmatic, economical attitude which underlies so many design decisions in the printing of early modern English folios, according to Steven Galbraith.197

Fig. 9 represents the combinations of media which compose illustrations in early modern English folios, emphasizing the unsustainability of a simple binary between illustrated and non-illustrated. I group geometrical sketches and tables under the umbrella of type-media illustrations. This is because, with some exceptions, both geometrical sketches and tables could be and were set up using semistandard type—rather than woodcut blocks or engraved plates, these illustrations relied primarily upon the creative arrangement of rule-type.

197 “English Literary Folios,” 48-49.

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Fig. 9: Distribution of Illustration Media woodcut woodcut, type 13% engraving none 47% type engraving, woodcuts 9%

none

woodcut woodcut, type 13%

engraving, type engraving woodcuts 9% 9%

Figure 2-9

The large minority of unillustrated books stands out the most in this visualization.

These data-points source from a wide variety of genres and traditions, but several stand out particularly: creative writing, didacticism, and music. The first, including Samuel

Daniel’s Panegyrike congratulatorie198 and the 1618 collection of his Historie of

England,199 Lady Mary Wroth’s Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania,200 and the aforementioned Observations of Sir Richard Havvkins Knight, encompass a variety of subgenres of what might today be called literary writing, inviting comparison to other well-known folios of poetic or imaginative writing like CHT or Jonson’s Workes. None of these, except perhaps the Observations, particularly lend themselves to representative illustration, or even to the reifying work of the table or the sketch. I use “didacticism” to

198 STC 6258. 199 STC 6248. 200 STC 26051.

122 refer to the data-bin containing such disparate works as Barnabe Barnes’ Foure Bookes of

Offices,201 a reprint of the 1598 translation of Wawrzyniec Goślicki’s De optimo senatore,202 Andrew Willet’s Ecclesia Triumphans,203 and a folio reprint of the 1583 quarto of Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton’s Defensatiue against the poyson of supposed prophecies.204 Dealing as they do with conceptual, rather than practical, abstraction, these works similarly resist representation or visual explication.

The same is true for books of music. This subgroup includes instructional volumes, such as Alfonso Ferrabosco’s aforementioned Lessons for 1.2. and 3. viols, as well as scores, such as Tobias Hume’s Captaine Humes poeticall musicke205 and John

Coperario’s Funeral teares. For the death of the Right Honorable the Earle of

Deuonshire.206 Musical notation is technically nonverbal, which would seem to qualify it as visual according to my above definition, but the semiosis facilitated by music sets it somewhat apart from ornamentation or illustration. Thus, the examples from this latter subset include neither tables of musical theory nor sketches of tonal relation (both illustration-types which appear in other, illustrated books of music). Though {not illustrated} is a fairly simple subset, its constituents and their reasons for omitting illustration are multifarious.

Fig. 9 reproduces combinations of media, since approximately 22% of my data- points rely upon multiple media. While these combinations complicate the narrative of

201 STC 1468. 202 STC 12373. 203 STC 25677. 204 STC 13859. 205 STC 13957. 206 STC 5679.

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my data, their relative frequency must be accounted for. Thus, only 9% of the folios I

examined deployed only type-media illustrations, but type-media appear in another 13%

of folios, alongside woodcuts; thus, type-media illustrations appear in nearly a quarter of

my data-set. Similarly, folios only deploying engravings seem rare (9% of the data-set).

But adding the 9% of folios which deploy both engravings and woodcuts reveals that

within my data-set, folios were more likely to include engravings than to only include

woodcuts. And woodcuts are the unquestioned medium of choice: 35%, or more than a

third, of my data-set, includes woodcut illustrations, more than any other illustrative

medium.

The folios which contain woodcuts emerge from a wide and rather jumbled

variety of generic contexts. There are several works of architecture, a few musical books,

and one each of the following: an astrological text, an almanac, a professional manual-

cum-textbook, an epitome of classical history, a collection of poetry, and a guide to

military tactics. While this data-set may at first seem utterly random, inspection of the

nature of the illustrations reveals a hidden thread connecting these disparate folios: the

need for an inexpensive multimedia profile. Most of these books use representational

illustrations as an essential ingredient in the making of meaning. A few use them as

optional supplements to an aesthetic experience.

Most of these books require specially-created representative illustrations in order to be rhetorically effective. The architectural works in this data-set exemplify this to varying extents. According to the STC, precision in the woodcut illustrations in

Sebastiano Serlio’s Five Books of Architecture was so essential that C. Claeszoon in the

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early seventeenth century impressed them on blank sheets and then exported those sheets

to (at least) Basel and London, where respective vernacular translations of Serlio’s work

were impressed upon them.207 The booke of fiue collumnes of architecture advertises on

its title-page that the shapes of the columnar models in question were “drawne and

counterfeited” from actual masonry; the book’s woodcuts—diverse, multitudinous, and

finely detailed—support this claim.208 Similarly, The tactiks of Ælian, which includes an

engraved title page and a few engraved images, nevertheless uses woodcut blocks for

many of its frequent and highly-detailed illustrations of troop formations, fortifications,

and weaponry. These books, as well as Rathborne’s aforementioned Surueyor, rely on

visual representation carefully tuned to reproduce the work’s verbal contents; this

multimedia approach yields valuable opportunities for practitioners to compare their real-

world efforts to follow verbal guidelines with an idealized visual interpretation of those

guidelines—a tangible model against which to compare.

Other folios deploy woodcut illustrations to add to their work’s overall aesthetic

effect; one such is The teares or lamentacions of a sorovvfull soule. On the verso of the

title page of this book, a woodcut ring of names encircles a wreath of notation; the names list several composers whose songs are included in Teares or lamentacions (cf. Fig. 10).

This information, valuable though it is, need not be imparted in this way; it could appear

in tabular or listed format, perhaps resembling the table of contents in Coperario’s

Funeral teares. The decision to render the list of contributors in stylized fashion must

necessarily have been a decision to commission a creator for this illustration—which

207 STC 22235. Information about illustrations from ESTC’s entry on this volume. 208 STC 3162.

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would have been a deliberate decision to increase production costs. Perhaps Sir William

Leighton, credited by the title page as the one who “Set foorth” the book’s music, commissioned the woodcut; perhaps Stansby himself, whose “establishment was probably the second largest press in London after the royal printing house,” made this decision.209 Either way, the inclusion of this woodcut is absolutely unnecessary for the

book’s production of meaning, so the expenditure associated with the woodcut may be

considered volitional in the purest sense. The image contributes a gratuitous supplement

to the book’s aspirations to political and aesthetic rhetoric.

In general, then, woodcut illustrations, whether representative, geometrical

sketch, or table, tend to do referential work. Like most of the reference technologies I

discuss above, they operate primarily intra-book rather than inter-book. Often more than mere decoration, illustrations in most folios play crucial roles in the creation of meaning.

Even in cases when illustrations work as aesthetic supplements—like Teares or

lamentacions or the Historie of Justine, which includes debatably customized portraits of

Roman emperors—the visual responds to, improves upon, or clarifies the verbal. Most

cases in my data-set, however, lean heavily upon the visual to explicate the verbal, in turn

explicitly or implicitly framing the visual with the verbal.

Image omitted for copyright reasons

Figure 2-10

209 Bland, “Stansby, William.”

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If such concrete reasons motivated the inclusion of illustration in early modern

English folios, this argues against a one-to-one association of illustration with richness, lavishness, high quality, or prestige. Particularly, most illustrations serve specific, pragmatic purposes, far from the vague cultural aspirations which some critics ascribe to the inclusion of illustrations. The inclusion of illustrations would increase a folio’s price.

But book historians agree that printers worked on the edge of razor-thin profit margins;

risky design innovation for the sake of a higher sticker price would have been a

dangerous business practice for those in the book trade.210 Publishers and printers would

likely have added illustrations only if they were necessary—demanded and paid for by a

wealthy or influential author, or required by the nature of the folio’s contents.

The conception of illustration as a marker of extravagant design may be in part

due to an anachronistic appreciation for the quaintness or, conversely, fine quality of

early modern illustration. A conception of illustration as purely or even primarily

decorative, and as such a marker of extravagance, has no basis in the evidence as laid out

above. Modes of visual decoration exist in early modern English folios separate from

representative or explicative illustration, but they do not align with narratives of

decorative extravagance, either. In this vein of deliberate decoration, I turn now briefly to

floriated initials, ornaments, and borders, discussing their incidence throughout my data-

set. I demonstrate their relative ubiquity, arguing thence for their status as print

convention.

210 Cf. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” and Farmer and Lesser, “Structures of Popularity.” On the slenderness of profit margins, see Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 100-118.

127

Fig. 11 represents the number of data-points which include each type of

decorative element. This presentation of the data reveals how frequently certain types of

decoration appear, especially floriated initials and borders. Yet it obscures several

important qualities of the data, as well. For instance, this chart simply notes how many

folio data-points included at least one of each element, with no reference to how

frequently those elements appear throughout each data-point. Further, most data-points

include both floriated initials and one other decorative element; this chart does not represent the various permutations and combinations of decorative elements which are present across my data. I note these shortcomings in order to emphasize the variety of decorative strategies. As data-points, both La perspective211 and Ecclesiae Anglicanæ

politeia212 deploy decorative initials. As concrete artifacts, the decorative design of La

perspective, with its frequent use of initials with apparently random historiations and its

dependence on the space-filling qualities of ornaments, differs sharply from the

sparseness of Ecclesiae Anglicanæ politeia’s single decorative initial at its beginning. Just

as folios deploy illustrations for text-specific reasons, so too are decorative strategies

specific, if not unique, to the folios which they adorn. The use of visual media in

seventeenth-century English folios is far more complex and diversely-motivated than a

mere aspiration to high culture.

211 STC 4869. 212 STC 5824.

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Fig. 11: Incidence of Decorative Elements 35 30 30

25 20 20

15 9 10

5 2

0 initials borders ornaments none

Figure 2-11

129

Chapter 3 - The Scriptive Potential of Non-volitional Material Elements A. Nonvolitional Material Characteristics: Dimension As print technology evolved, premodern designers of books gradually exerted

more control over the materiality of the codex. Despite this, bookmakers still operated

within certain material limits, imposed by technology rather than by culture. This chapter

is organized around those material limits—specifically, leaf size and mass. First, I sketch

the distribution of design power between the paper manufacture industry, writers, and

printers; then, I discuss how the codependent demands of legibility and economy

interacted with the inflexible correlation between book-mass and work-length.

The structure of the paper industry dictated relatively invariable dimensions to book-designers. Regarding these dimensions, Philip Gaskell states the received wisdom, that “there were normally no more than about half a dozen main groups of sizes in use at any given time by hand-press printers.”213 Tempering Gaskell’s definitive tone, Paul

Needham emphasizes the difficulty in differentiation between sheets cut before

impression (which would technically yield impression on half-sheets) and sheets cut after

impression—the standard method. Needham provides examples of this ambiguity,

cautioning against the habits of unsupported generalization that can arise from

overconfidence in printers’ lack of imagination.214 To synthesize the two, then, it would

seem that printers, publishers, or whoever decided upon the paper size to be used for the

printing of a premodern book had a few standard paper-size options available, but that

213 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 67. 214 Needham, “Res Papirea,” 130.

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printers (or, conceivably, other book-design agents) at times customized those sizes in limited ways.

Print-house customization of paper could only really take place through cutting, though. The print industry’s narrow profit margins enforced caution upon print-house experimentation. If, as multiple print historians have argued, paper constituted the majority of overhead, its status as the most valuable material component required special caution.215 Cutting sheets into half-sheets would be sometimes necessary, especially if

single leaves had to be inserted in folio, double leaves in quarto, and so on. But any less

pragmatic customization based on cutting, particularly anything along the lines of

trimming, would almost certainly constitute waste.

Further, the major paper-size options fell along a spectrum. Few printers, therefore, would have required such specificity in non-standard dimensions that they would have felt the need to downsize a number of too-large sheets. Such customizing trimming, whether or not it occurred at all, would have been a time-consuming and

expensive task. Take, for example, Thomas Milles’ The custumers apology, a very slim

folio printed in 1599. This volume seems to have been printed in a small run specially for

Milles, either as a favor or on commission; William Sherman and Heather Wolfe have

suggested that others of Milles’ works, most of which were printed in folio, also

conformed to this model.216 The custumers apology runs to 8 sheets (16 leaves/32 pages).

Spread over the print run of 50 which the STC assigns to it, this project would require

215 Cf. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” 405-410. 216 Sherman and Wolfe, “Department of Hybrid Books.”

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200 sheets.217 The opportunity cost alone of custom-trimming 200 sheets before they could be printed on would be significant.

Then there is the matter of financial outlay. The paper for the whole run of The

custumers apologie would cost significantly less than the paper required for a single copy

of The catalogue of honor or Tresury of true nobility, the heraldic folio printed by

William Jaggard in 1610, which Milles helped to prepare for the press.218 A single copy

of The catalogue of honor used 299½ sheets (592 leaves/1198 pages). For comparison’s

sake, a single copy of CHT itself ran to more than 200 sheets, and its retail price is

known—approximately £1. So Milles’ investment in the 200 sheets required for the

boutique printing of The custumers apology would have been noticeably less than the

retail price of a thick folio.

The cost of paper would not have been Milles’ only expenditure for this

publication. James Roberts probably charged Milles for labor costs, since no record exists

of a professional relationship between Roberts and Milles. Later in Milles’ writing career,

his name appears frequently on Jaggard’s publications; this suggests a closer business

relationship between those two. Jaggard printed several of Milles’ later works, and (given

their professional relationship) may have either comped Milles the labor or worked out a

labor-trade arrangement. But in 1599, for the printing of The custumers apology, Milles

would likely have had to pay at least for labor and for paper.

217 STC 17928. The conjecture about the low print run comes from ESTC. 218 STC 17926.

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I belabor this early bespoke edition because surviving copies of Milles’ books—

both The custumers apology and other, later works—display his meticulous, recursive,

perfecting hand. Milles concerned himself greatly with the mise-en-page of his works, as well as with their linguistic paratexts. Sherman and Wolfe note instances where he has twice emended an explanatory gloss, a gloss initially written by himself, a gloss printed marginally in the process of the work’s first impression.219 His emendations can take the

form of printed slips to be pasted beside, beneath, above, and occasionally over those

printed glosses which Milles deemed at some point imperfect.220 The point is that few

book designers seemed to care about precisely engineering sheet size. If anyone would,

Thomas Milles would. He did not: his slim folio books all roughly conform to predictable

dimensions for what Paul Needham refers to as “half-median” (with a sheet 250mm tall and 350mm broad).221

The possibility certainly exists that a more fastidious book-designer than Milles

lived and worked and spared no expense to engineer precise dimensions, in order to

overcome the external limitation on available dimensions imposed by the rough

standardization of sheet-size in paper manufacture. Being realistic, however, I take Milles as the extant extreme of materially-concerned book designers. If Milles could accept and work with the paper dimensions which were readily available, most early modern

219 Sherman and Wolfe, “Department of Hybrid Books,” 462. 220 We know that Milles’ was the slip-pasting hand because he also emended the initially-printed glosses, and sometimes the pasted-in emendation slips, in a very recognizable manuscript hand, in which Milles also signed his name on multiple title-pages of his books. Cf. Sherman and Wolfe, “Department of Hybrid Books,” 461. 221 Needham’s differentiation of sheet-sizes builds upon dimension data drawn from fifteenth-century books. However, if technology for the manufacture of paper did not change significantly during the premodern period, as Roberts argues, then Needham’s late medieval data still pertain to early modern folio manufacture.

133 decisionmakers about book design could as well. Crucially, too, the customization of paper-size could reasonably only diminish sheet dimensions, by cutting; increased dimensions, achieved by pasting sheets together, would be highly impractical. This matters because large dimensions are an unavoidable necessity, an absolute requirement for the effective transmission of their content, for many of the folios in my data-set, as well as important folios outside my data-set which I have discussed already.

One of Galbraith’s chief breakthroughs is his introduction of the model of the

“folio of necessity.” Concerned as he is with primarily “literary” folios, for which copious verbosity is the largest dimension, Galbraith’s model relies upon the exigence of bulk related to the physical limits of binding. For volumes containing Spenser’s or

Shakespeare’s complete works, Galbraith demonstrates that the quarto format could not accommodate that amount of type in a single, realistically bindable volume. For “literary” folios, length-of-work naturally dictated dimension; for the practical, heterogeneous seventeenth-century folios I am examining, visual elements dictate dimension. His construction of “necessity” thus differs somewhat from mine.

The thick, verbally copious folios which Galbraith cites do indeed demonstrate that high volume of words to be printed could and did necessitate the use of the folio format. But slender folios like La perspective, Thomas Morley’s A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke,222 and Calligraphotechnia, as well as thicker folios like The catalogue of honor or Topsell’s two folios of natural Historie, require the possibility for large page-size inherent in the folio format, in order to sufficiently

222 Printed in 1608 by Humphrey Lownes. STC 18134.

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reproduce their illustrations, sketches, and visual scripts. Full-page illustrations (either representative, sketch, or table, as discussed in the previous chapter) appear frequently in my data-set of early modern English folios; 11 of 17 (64.7%) illustrated folios include at least one illustration the length or the width of a full page. In addition to this, at least three of the non-illustrated folios in my data-set include musical notation, which

significantly benefits from but does not precisely require the folio format.223 Many of

these texts entangle representative illustration with verbal description in order to create

multi-media meaning. In other words, their illustrative strategy shaped their material

requirements, rather than material requirements shaping illustrative strategy.

In concrete terms, the detail required for the representative illustrations in

Topsell’s Historie of Serpents can be fully displayed only at the size of a full folio page—

half the width of a sheet. Take, for instance, the beautifully executed coiled sea-serpent

on A3v (Fig. 1), which resembles what we know today to be an eel. The evenly-spaced

teeth, the naturalistic spacing of the eye relative to the gill-flap, the suggestion of a dorsal

fin running the length of the body, the depth and shadow visible towards the tip of the

tail, the elegant but organic curves suggesting the shape of a question mark—none of

these could be as carefully executed in woodcut at a smaller scale. This work is designed

for proto-scientific reference: naturalism and precise detail, where possible, are desirable,

so the work demands the folio format.

Other cases, such as the illustrative diagram of the arrangement of Parliament in

The catalogue of honor, had to use a whole page because of the size of its subject (cf. Fig.

223 I examine the use-patterns associated with and implied by folio music books below.

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2). This image bears out my argument nicely, because even at page-size, it is extremely compressed. Were this image any smaller, it would become largely illegible. The labels on various parts of the room emphasize the importance of legibility for this image; the

Catalogue includes it not solely or even primarily for its aesthetic appeal, but for its value in transmitting meaning. Were it illegible, completely or in part, the Catalogue’s meaning—and therefore its ideological rhetoric—would suffer. As it stands, it represents

Parliamentary structure as ordered, sensible, contained, and deliberative; this is thanks to the folio page.

136

Figure 3-1

137

Figure 3-2

138

Both The historie of serpents and The catalogue of honor are thick folios: the

former using 84 sheets, the latter using nearly 300. Slimmer folios from my data-set also

make the most of the large dimensions of the folio format. La perspective, in particular,

creatively exploits large folio-leaf dimensions, as the anamorphic peephole pictured in

Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 demonstrates. The production of this fascinating material element relied

on a complex collaboration between artist, designer, publisher (John Norton), and printers

(Richard Field and J. Mommart). The artist, who may have conceived this construction,

created the image so that, viewed at a normal reading angle, it would be warped and

largely incomprehensible, but viewed from a particular perspective, it would be legible.

They had to trust that subsequent agents in the design process would accurately manufacture and place subsequent material elements to bring the image to material fruition.

This trust was well-placed. The engraver had to reproduce exactly what the initial

artist had created, and since the peephole works, they seem to have executed this well.

Next, someone, probably Norton, had to choose paper large enough to support the

anamorphic experience required by the image. As Fig. 4 reveals, the final distorted

engraving could conceivably fit by itself on a quarto page. But someone—likely the

original designer—insisted upon including in the same engraved plate the blank

perspective-lines, perhaps as a traceable model, as well as an enlarged version, legible at

a normal reading angle, of the distorted version. The width and height of this plate thus

demand a folio page. The printers, Field and Mommart, apparently divided between them

various parts of the impression of the book; Mommart seems to have handled the trickiest

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work.224 He, probably, took responsibility for properly orienting the engraved plates in

the press, as well as manufacturing and pasting-in the peephole-flap. Again, if the copy in the British Library indicates the quality of Mommart’s and Field’s work, the collaborative production of this pop-up exercise in perspective seems to have gone as well as could be expected.

La perspective also fills folio pages with illustrations in more conventional

fashion; the book includes throughout full-page architectural elevations, which could

conceivably have been used as models by aspiring draughtspersons. This reason for full-

page size resembles the rationale behind the scale of the image of Parliament in The

catalogue of honor: highly detailed images need a large writing support, or they become

too densely crammed to be legible. Legibility is just as important here as in The catalogue

of honor, but for a different reason. Whereas the legibility of the image of Parliament

supported the ideological aims of Milles’ book, the legibility of the architectural models

in La perspective enables them to be pedagogically and practically effective.

Compressing the image of Parliament could metaphorically obscure the working of the

government—the opposite of what The catalogue of honor attempts to do. Compressing

the architectural engravings in La perspective would obscure the relations of angle,

dimension, and perspective, relations which are key to the book’s project. Only at folio-

page scale do these illustrations work. And, setting aside the fragile and time-consuming

alternative of tipped-in fold-outs, only in the folio format are large-dimension pages

available.

224 This information about the division of labor comes from the STC via ESTC.

140

Figure 3-3

Figure 3-4

141

I argue, then, that some books were printed in the folio format out of necessity— not because of their verbosity, but because of the large scale required by their visual contents. The large dimension inherent in the folio format is for these books a benefit rather than a liability. Printing books like The historie of serpents or La perspective in

smaller formats would likely rob them of their unique value. Another class of books

exploits the large dimensions of folio pages for visual benefit: music books. Unlike the

folios I have just examined, these do not strictly require the folio format in order to be

effective.

Certain music books are primarily pedagogical, such as the aforementioned

Ferrabosco’s Lessons and Morley’s A plaine and easie introduction to practicall

musicke—which is an even more basic introduction than Ferrabosco’s. Morley divides

his introduction into three parts: one “teaching to ſing,”225 one “treating of Deſcant,”226

one “treating of compoſing or ſetting of Songs.”227 Morley’s book requires the folio

format in two ways. First, the volume does include multiple full-page tables, like the

folios of visual necessity discussed above. But it primarily exploits the folio format for

the large volume of music which can fit on a folio page. Particularly in the first part,

pages upon pages of musical notation fill out the book, emphasizing its practical value for

pedagogical purposes. While music does not constitute the entirety of Morley’s book,

there is enough notation that the folio format seems the only logical option.

225 B2r. 226 K4r. 227 Q3v.

142

A plaine and easie introduction merits particular attention because of how it samples indiscriminately from music-book conventions—both from the pedagogical tradition and from the score tradition. One of the latter inclusions is the presence of specially-oriented musical parts in the final pages of Morley’s book. Fig. 5 displays an opening near the end of the Plaine and easie introduction, on which is printed a misericordium for four voices. The immediately apparent quality of this opening, the printing of “Cantus.” and “Tenor.” upside-down and “Altus.” and “Baſis.” right side up, recurs throughout many early modern musical scores, extending back to medieval exempla. This design of specially-oriented notation demands the folio format even more stringently than does the volume of musical notation in A plaine and easie introduction.

If, indeed, some seventeenth-century books were printed in folio especially because of the possibilities afforded by the format’s inherently large dimensions, what are the ramifications of such a postulation? For one, the lack of portability inherent to most folios would not have outweighed the benefits of the large page-size. Regardless of mass, folio may be the least portable format. The extended dimensions of even a slim folio render it difficult to carry simply in the hand. Archival experiences bear this out.

The British Library, for instance, requires folios to be placed on a cart when moved from the circulation desk to readers’ desks; the Harry Ransom Center has a similar requirement. Dimension alone requires the use of a tool—bag, box, or cart—to move the folio from one place to another.

143

Figure 3-5

Even were folios easily portable, few of the folios in my data-set, and fewer still larger folios, invited their readers to lug them about. Most of the slender folios I examined position themselves to one extent or another as reference books—materially speaking, as artifacts to be consulted. The predominance of reference technology, as well as the semiotic entanglement of verbal description with visual representation, figures most of these volumes as valuable repositories of practically-useful information, about

144

architecture, church hierarchy, war, music, the form of making bishops, or even,

incredibly, the things Sir Richard Hawkins, Knight learned about alterity during his 1593

voyage. The folio book of reference, as a material tool, served spatially as a

comprehensive destination, a physically and conceptually discrete localization of

information. Data could be found in the folio, if one went to the folio.

A book owner’s binding philosophy fundamentally influenced the discreteness of

a folio’s physical localization, as Jeffrey Todd Knight argues. Similarly, as Tribble, Wall,

and Brayman separately argue, the discreteness of a folio’s conceptual localization

depended at least in part on the manuscript marginalia added by generations of owners

and the printed glosses generated by an authorized (though not necessarily authorial)

hand. But the non-portability enforced by dimension taken together with dimensionally-

enabled potential for unique visual or verbal copia argues for the folio as a mostly

discrete, primarily stationary resource to be attended. In other words, one brought one’s

ignorance to the folio, wherever it stayed.

This image of a mostly stationary folio sits uneasily with the apparent

ephemerality of the thin folios in my data-set, especially compared with both well-known and lesser-known thick folios. The thick folio is an obvious candidate for being stationary. Beyond the sensational trope of the chained library, thick folios demanded a sedentary lifestyle in their cost, their material profile, and their irreplaceability. Every book had overhead associated with it; but while labor and licensing costs could be spread out over a whole print run, to some extent, paper cost was static per copy. If sheet cost = x, and a single copy of volume y required z sheets, where print run = a and total

145

labor/licensing cost = b, the first equation expresses total paper overhead, the second

equation expresses paper overhead for one copy, and the third equation expresses total

overhead for one copy.

y = ([xz]a)

yn = (xz)

yn = ([xz] + [b/a])

The operation xz, or {sheet cost multiplied by sheet count}, remains constant throughout all three equations: this operation largely determines the wholesale price of a book and, thus, its retail price as well. When z is a large number, the result of operation xz

will be proportionally larger as well. Thick folios thus located much of their value within

the raw materials of their production. Now, the intrinsic value of paper that had been

printed upon was lower than blank paper, since the act of printing depreciated the resale

and opportunity value of the writing support. But the evidence of extensive manuscript

marginalia using those blank spaces for matters unrelated to books’ contents

demonstrates that even printed-upon, retailed paper still carried some opportunity value, not to mention the relative value of books’ meanings. All this to say: thick folios by their very nature had a relatively high cost, and owners would likely take good care of high- cost purchases.

The thick folio, requiring as it does energy, physical capability, and careful attention in order to be moved, would recommend a stationary existence in its materiality.

Unless it was chained down, an early modern English folio of, for example, 250 sheets

146

(500 leaves/1000 pages) could be moved from cabinet to desk, from room to room, from shop to home, or from city to country. But it had none of the easy portability of, say, the oblong Aldine octavo. Rather, thick folios were likely moved as little as possible, given the trouble such movement would entail. In addition, because of the always-already imbricated factors of high price and significant material footprint, thick folios would have had an aura of durability, of longevity, of irreplaceability. I draw this conclusion not merely from conjecture, but from the example of William Jaggard and Thomas Milles’ two-part edition of Pedro Mexía et al, to which I now turn in detail.

For the purposes of this argument, I consider Jaggard’s publication of the Milles- translated Pedro Mexía works as two parts of a whole. This follows the title page of

ΑΡΧΑΙΟ-ΠΛΟΥΤΟΣ, the subtitle of which explicitly codes ΑΡΧΑΙΟ-ΠΛΟΥΤΟΣ as a continuation of The treasurie of auncient and modern times, which Jaggard printed in

1613. Rhetorical gestures to this continuity also appear in the first part, differently figured, in an epistle dedicatory addressed “TO THE RIGHT VVORSHIP-full, Learned, and moſt Iudicious Gentle-man, Sir THOMAS BRVDENELL, Ba-ronet.” The incompleteness of Milles’ project makes a fleeting but nonetheless unmistakable appearance: he describes “this VVorke” as “long ſince promiſed, and novv (after much Paine, Coſt, and deare Expence of time) in part perfected.”228 The reference to pain, cost, and time recalls

Legat’s bemoaning of how Perkins’ works had “grown already greater then I looked for,” suggesting an epistolary convention of regret at the length of the thick folio to accompany the conventional self-deprecating adulation of the dedicatee. More intriguing is how

228 A3r.

147

Milles qualifies his engagement (in this case, translation and arrangement) of this text: it

has been “in part perfected.” “Perfect” in seventeenth-century English could denote

completion, so in one oxymoronic reading of Milles’ phrase, The treasurie of auncient

and moderne times has been incompletely completed.229 Fleeting though it may be, this

reference to the incompleteness of The treasurie has a specific rhetorical valence: a

delicate, subtle gesture towards the possibility of further treasuries, if the current treasurie

is well-received.

If indeed the Pedro Mexía et al project constitutes two parts of a coherent whole, the six-year gap between the issuing of its constituent volumes invites scrutiny. As we have seen, Jaggard assisted Richard Field somewhat in printing Chapman’s shorter

Homer for Nathaniel Butter. Field and Jaggard managed to issue the entirety of this work,

made up of four separate volumes, between 1611? and 1616?. The six-year gap of silence

between the publication of The treasurie of auncient and moderne times and ΑΡΧΑΙΟ-

ΠΛΟΥΤΟΣ suggests a confidence on Jaggard’s part that purchasers would hold on to the

first volume. The title-page rhetoric of the latter implies that six years after the issue of

the first part, the folio-buying public would still have enough interest in the project to

purchase another thick, expensive part. In 1619, the Jaggards were still taking risks:

Thomas Pavier had employed them to print what have become known as the Pavier

Quartos, a project which involved less paper but potentially more business risk than

ΑΡΧΑΙΟ-ΠΛΟΥΤΟΣ. We may never know the extent to which the Jaggards saw

229 OED, “perfect,” v., 1.a.

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ΑΡΧΑΙΟ-ΠΛΟΥΤΟΣ as a risk or a sure thing; we can safely conjecture, however, that they believed enough in its potential vendibility to take on its risk by themselves.230

Whether or not William Jaggard, Thomas Milles, and eventually Isaac Jaggard thought of the Pedro Mexía et al project as definitive or irreplaceable, the two parts represented a major investment, demanded serious physical attention from readers, and likely traveled infrequently and not far. By contrast, the slender folios in my data-set beg to be grabbed, bagged, toted, stacked, slid, and otherwise manhandled, especially when viewed in comparison to massive tomes like CHT, Perkins’ Works, or the Pedro Mexía et al project. The resistance to movement for which I argue above exists uneasily with the hyper-tactile use-pattern I posit here—but the latter is often stationary, albeit strenuous.

But strenuous use-patterns do not equate with ephemerality, as a cluster of recent studies have demonstrated.

Traditionally, discourses of ephemerality have been applied to slim, inexpensive books imagined to have been seen as perishable or designed to come apart—most famously, early quarto and octavo issues of the drama of Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, and others. To some extent, this conception has merit: the production of certain early modern English printed artifacts prioritized quick, cheap availability over material permanence. But generalization too easily extends the umbrella of “ephemeral” over anything relatively inexpensive. Recent studies by Aaron Pratt and Alan Farmer trouble the critical ramifications of this generalization. The former disconnects stab-stitching, a cheap preliminary binding method, from its previous association with ephemerality; the

230 Wells, “Jaggard, William.”

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latter attacks the idea of the ephemeral playbook head-on, comparing survival rates for

small-format playbooks with other genres to demonstrate the relative health of the

former’s survival rates.231 It seems now that the classification of thin books—either the more common slender quartos and octavos, or the less common but nevertheless extant slim folios—as “ephemeral” or “perishable” is critically unsupportable.

The replaceability of the thin folio, purely in terms of price, proves rather more

resistant to contradiction. Lower sheet-count translates directly to a lower retail price-

point, which nullifies one primary reason for protecting folios by keeping them in one

place. If a replacement is readily available for a reasonable price, why would an owner

bother to preserve or protect such an easily replaced artifact? Sheet count is only part of

the cost formula above; the cost of the pre-printed and imported sheets for La perspective

would hike that book’s cost, as would the labor cost of creating the engravings and

woodcuts which fill the Tactiks of Ælian (even were that cost distributed across a large

print run). Thus, the specialized thin folios in my data-set would probably be more

expensive to produce and therefore to purchase than their sheet count might initially

suggest. These folios might also not be readily available for retail sale. Many of the folios

in my data-set were only printed once, or at least only one edition survives. In sum,

replacing the thin folio might be more challenging than it might at first appear—which

suggests some measure of ownerly care for them.

Scholars of reprint rates have argued that frequent reprints signal popularity—that

demand led to print runs selling out, and that publishers opportunistically commissioned

231 Cf. Pratt, “Stab-Stitching” and Farmer, “Question of Ephemerality.”

150

reprints to capitalize on such popularity.232 The negative, that books only surviving in

one edition were unpopular, is more difficult to prove with logic alone. The dearth of

centralized or consistent records of wholesale or retail book markets means that we

cannot know for certain whether books like The tactiks of Ælian were never actually

reprinted, or whether age has withered the infinite variety of subsequent impressions. The

sparse material profile of thin folios renders this latter possibility more viable. Thin folios

would have been more susceptible to wear-based loss and fragmentation than thick folios, particularly if left unbound for any length of time, as I argue below was the case with music books. In the case of thin folios, the absence of reprints could just as easily mean that the entire second-issue print run of a popular volume was used to death as that an unpopular folio never achieved commercial success.

Whether used to death or never reprinted, or both, thin folios could not escape

their material fragility. While this might be taken to imply a hyper-stationary situation—

the archival preservation of the practically valuable, hard-to-find, all-too-brittle slender folio—the concrete nature of most of these folios demanded their use, which in turn implies some movement. The critical assertion that all folios necessarily visually bespoke the prestige of their owners is, in general, evidentially suspect, but it particularly has no bearing on the subclass of thin folios. None of the thin folios in my data-set contain such bland and useless content that their primary value resides in their static appearance.

Though similar practical factors limited the movement of slim and thick folios, including

232 Cf. Farmer and Lesser, “Structures of Popularity.”

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dimension, price, replaceability, and opportunity cost of fragility, I contend that use- and

specifically movement-patterns for slim folios differed from those of thick folios.

B. Slim Folios, Scriptive Things

The booke of fortune is a particularly idiosyncratic slim folio. Together with

several books of music, it constitutes a special subclass of high-use slim folios. Drawing

from performance studies a theory of the interplay between things, users, and

performance, I argue in the pages to follow that each folio in this subclass demands an

embodied, performative use-pattern specific to its particular material profile. The

physical design of the high-use scriptive thing folio directs its users to use it in a

particular way, and resists or controls attempts to read against the grain of its design. I

conclude this section by reflecting on the physical toll which these carefully

circumscribed use-patterns take on the physical texts, and thence the unique value of

these folios as data-points.

So much about The booke of fortune mystifies that the ambiguity of its survival is

really no more than a minor oddity, but its low survival pertains to the concerns of this

section. Only one copy survives: that in the British Library, formerly owned by Sion

College Library.233 This low survival rate strengthens my case that The booke of fortune

is a book designed to be used to death. I build this case upon the wear-patterns in that

233 The ESTC claims that two copies are extant: one at the British Library and one in Sion College Library (housed at Lambeth Palace Library). In a private communication, Ken Gibb, Rare Books Librarian for Lambeth Palace Library, informs me that the Sion College Library sold their copy to the British Library in 1977. The British Library catalogue only turns up one copy, and that copy is stamped “SION COLLEGE LIBRARY” on the first recto, the title page apparently not having survived. Further, the wear-patterns visible in the digital facsimile available in EEBO (labeled therein as a “[r]eproduction of the original in the Sion College. Library.”) matches wear on the copy I examined in the British Library. Ockham’s razor suggests that the inaccuracy of the ESTC is more likely in this instance than its accuracy.

152

British Library copy. The fore-edge, head, and foot of every page has been worn thin and

ragged. It is not the raggedness of rough, infrequent use or of brief interludes of careless

storage or handling; it is the frail friability of a page turned thousands of times. Those

fragile pages are also astonishingly dirty. This may be in part because the copy in the

British Library was never deemed hardy or valuable enough to be washed, as so many

late medieval and early modern folios were.234 Whatever the reason, the paper in The

booke of fortune show up the grubby fingerprint-ghosts of countless fingers telling the

pages over. Unsurprisingly, the dirt concentrates on leaf-edges, though the rest of each

page seems to have gotten its fair share of tactile use.235 Finally, in addition to its being

the only copy to survive, its ragged and crumbling leaf-edges, and its grimy dirt-marks of wear, this volume is missing its title page, if it had one; more likely, the simple paper wrapper which secured it vanished long ago. Its survival is bare survival.

The use to which The book of fortune was put seems immediately apparent from

the book’s design and contents. Astrological signs, tables, obscure prophesies, and

woodcuts of kings, astronomers, and intelligentsia from myth and legend proclaim the

astrological antecedents of this book. Had the main body of the text alone survived, it

might appear to be a linear tool for laypersons to find zodiacal answers to their simple

questions—“¶ In what manner thou ſhalt dye,” “¶ If thy Land will giue much fruit and

ſeede,” ““¶ If the people loue thee or not,” or ““¶ If a Wench be a pure Maiden or not,” to

name a few.236 Plenty of astrological books were available in early modern London, such

234 Several French translations of the same work became collectors’ items. 235 This is unsurprising given the nature of the book, of which more below. 236 A2r.

153 as George Hartgill’s GENERALL CALENDERS or, Most eaſie Aſtronomicall Tables, printed in 1594 by John Windet for Andrew Maunsell. The text alone of The booke of fortune appears to be a cousin to Hartgill’s zodiacal book of tables.

Much as with The observations of Sir Richard Havvkins Knight, however, the book’s paratext refigures the text in unpredictable ways. Overshadowing and stabilizing the margins of the preface loops an ornate capital F. But the preface’s rhetoric is far more precarious than it might materially appear. It wavers between claiming an astrological and divinatory value for the arrangement of the book and denying astrology any legitimacy whatsoever. It begins with the latter tack, putting forward the human need for diversion from weighty intellectual labor, “by the which the mind may be refreſhed and

[re]voked from fantaſies.”237 As one might expect, “this preſent booke hath a prerogative before other” potential diversions, because of its “ſpeciall ver-tues” of “being marvellous delectable, and profi-table.” At this point the rhetoric begins, imperceptibly, to turn: not only is the book figured in affective terms (“marvellous” and “delectable,” which context clarifies are to be considered separately) but also in vaguely moral terms (“profitable”).

The explanation of these virtues further clarifies the rhetorical shift from passive emotional mitigation to active moral instruction: the book is marvelous for its ingenious design, and delectable for the diversity and honesty of its representations of humanity, but “profitable, as in vnderſtanding: for if a man ponder ſome ſayings well he ſhall find great fruit therein.” Palliation has given way to pedagogy.

237 All quotations from the preface, except the transcription below, come from A1r.

154

“It is named the Booke of Fortune, as com-prehending things that lye under chance, deſtiny, or lot, ansſwering and declaring twenty queſtions following, after the manner of Aſtronomie,” the preface continues.238 Astronomy was the original word for the abstract philosophy we now subsume into “astrology.”239 The volatile politico- religious atmosphere of early seventeenth-century England likely gave this claim a subversive edge. The coy admission in the preceding paragraph that “[t]his Booke was firſt drawne and made in Italian” amplifies the subversive potential of the astrological admission, beyond even the minimizing effect of a disingenuous anglicization of the author’s Italian name (Lorenzo Spirito becomes “a noble and ioyous knight, Laurence

Spirit”). A similar anglicization may occur in the book’s typography. In using blackletter throughout—a typeface which by 1618 would have seemed decidedly old-fashioned240— the book typographically references the sixteenth century, what may have seemed a simpler time of uncomplicated Protestant fervor.

To blunt this edge, the anonymous preface-writer swings their rhetoric anxiously back in the other direction, to emphasize the book’s entertainment value: “it is no

Aſtronomie, Necromancy, nor Witch-craft, but rather a Conceipt ſcorning priuily them that follow ſuch falſe illuſions: And as I ſaid before, made for recreation of the mind.”

Much of the rest of the preface adopts this same anxious tone, adjuring readers to

“[b]eleeue ſtedfaſtly in God alone” and insisting that “this Booke was made for them that

238 The majority of The booke of fortune is set in blackletter type. The words I italicize in this quote and throughout are set in roman type. 239 Cf. OED, “astronomy, n.”, 1. Cf. also ibid., “astrology, n.” Astrology was originally primarily the practical interpretation, while astronomy provided conceptual operating principles. By 1603, the two were roughly, though not entirely, synonymous. 240 Cf. Bland, “Appearance of the Text,” 116-118.

155 would faine bee merry and can take ſport.” The closest modern equivalent to this uneasy equivocation might be user discourse related to Ouija boards: “it’s not real, it’s just for fun, we’re just seeing what happens…”

A chorus of anxieties haunts this volume. Instead of a straightforward astronomological tool, The booke of fortune (thanks to its preface) becomes a potentially inflammatory text, seemingly one high-profile misinterpretation away from promulgating dangerous papally-flavored heresy. Beneath the preface’s solicitous affirmation of political and, especially, religious orthodoxy runs a contrary anxiety that the book not be dismissed as mere fluff. As I note above, weighty matters of wealth, political power, and

“knowledge of cunning or liberall Science and other things” occupy the author’s mind from the beginning of the preface, and they present the book as a solution to those weighty matters—though primarily as a diversion rather than as a pedagogical resource.

Whether those users of The booke of fortune who avidly thumbed the last surviving copy believed in its ability to tell truth or thought it nothing more than an amusing distraction, however, the author was most anxious that the book be used.

“Whatever you do, buy and use,” they might have written, foreshadowing the famous line in CHT’s preliminaries. To this end, turning finally from endless ideological equivocation, the preface scripts concrete instructions for its users. I use the verb

“scripts” intentionally, for reasons that become clear below. The materially detailed nature of these instructions requires their transcription here in full.

¶ But now let us go to the perfect knowledge of this Worke. Whoſoeuer thou be that deſireſt to know thy deſtiny, chance, or lot, comprehend-

156

ded under any of the twenty queſtions following: behold the wheele of Fortune, then chooſe what queſtions thou wilt haue of the twenty, written in the foure quarters of the ſaid wheele: and under /page break the [qu]eſtion ſhalt thou finde a kings name writ- [ten f]or whom thou muſt turne the Booke till t[h]ou finde him set out in picture, with his name written underneath. This king, diſcharging himſelfe, will aſſigne thee to a Philoſopher by name following. The Philoſopher found, take three Dice in thy hand and caſt them forth vpon the ſame ſide of the Booke wherein the Phi- loſopher ſtandeth. This done, marke the chance of thy caſt, and ſearch out in the ſame ſide where it is Imprinted, and under that Chance is a Writing that will direct thee to one of the ſea- ven Planets, or elſe one of the twelue Signes Celeſtiall, and to the name of the Spirit clo- ſed in the ſaide Planet or Signe; the which alſo thou muſt needs ſearch out. But firſt it is to bee noted, that in euery Planet and Signe bee two round Circles, wherein the names of Spirits be written. That is to ſay, one in the vttermoſt Circle, another in the middle Circle. ¶ Alſo where yee find in any place a whole Croſſe, the Spirit is in the firſt and vtter- moſt circle: and where halfe a Croſſe is made, the Spirit is in the middle Circle. At laſt, the names of the Spirits found shall ſend thee to the Aſtronomer, and to the Chapter of the ſame Aſtro- nomer, by the which thou ſhalt know the For- tune, Chance, Deſtiny, or Lot, and whether it be good or bad.241 The theoretical ramifications of this detailed physical direction are dizzying. In terms of anxiety, the preface’s conclusion transcribed above expresses as much concern about users’ physical attitude as the first half expresses about users’ emotional and ideological attitude. This preoccupation with details of physical spatiality and physicality

241 A1r-A1v.

157

suggests that one can certainly use this book in the wrong way. Plenty of paratexts

express concern about readers’ misusing the book’s intellectual contents; the paragraph

immediately before my transcription lists people who ought not to use The book of

fortune (including “them that bee angry, wayward, haſty, enuious, proud or malicious,

nor hypocrites, or others that bee wont to leape at a blocke, or ſtumble at a ſtraw.”) This is

rare: few books make their concern about readers’ misuse of the material artifact so

explicit. But at least one other group of thin folios requires specific physical orientations:

musical scores.

Music-books comprise 18.75% of my data-set—a healthy minority. Every one of

those folios contains some amount of musical notation; even those which are primarily

pedagogical in nature include some songs, for purposes of practice and illustration.

Others are simply collections of scores, including very little text beyond epistles and

prefaces. These books assume widely divergent skill levels, instruments, and group size

in their respective users, but most share at least one commonality: table-oriented parts.

All but one of them print various parts oriented so that players could stand around the book, laid flat on the table, and their part would appear right-side up. Fig. 5, above, illustrates an example of this, in the concreteness of Thomas Morley’s A plaine and easie

introduction. Fig. 6 illustrates the way a music-book printed this way would have looked

laid flat on a table.

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Figure 3-6

Musicians—singers, lutenists, viola players—would stand adjacent to the part they would play, so it would appear normally oriented to them. Examples of this table-

oriented musical notation appears in John Coperario’s Fvneral teares (1606), Tobias

Hume’s Captaine Humes Poeticall Muſicke (1607), Thomas Morley’s A plaine and easie

introduction (1608), Alfonso Ferrabosco’s Lessons (1609), and Sir William Leighton’s

Teares or lamentacions (1614).242 Three-part music appears most frequently, but four-,

five, and six-part arrangements also appear. The title-pages of several of these folios

specify the number of instruments or voices for which the music is arranged. Captaine

Humes Poeticall Muſicke is especially thorough: the music is “[p]rincipally made for two

Baſſe Uiols,” but the book is “ſo contriued, that it may be plaied 8. ſeuerall waies vpon

ſundrie inſtruments.” The title page then lists those eight ways.243 Based on these title-

242 I have mentioned several of these folios already, but for the sake of thoroughness: Coperario: STC 5679, Hume: STC 13957, Morley: STC 18134, Ferrabosco: STC 10828, Leighton: STC 15434. 243 G1r.

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page advertisements, it seems that, to some extent, book-designers saw part-based (and

therefore table-oriented) variety as a selling point for folios of music.

These books, like The booke of fortune, establish for themselves a materially

correct method of use; it follows that they thus also establish incorrect usages, by

exclusion. Unlike The booke of fortune, however, these folios use materiality, rather than

paratexts, to code proper use. Whereas The booke of fortune uses language to define and

insist upon proper usage methods, these music folios subtly, in the orientation of their

notation, communicate the right way to use them. Their paratextual silence on the spatial

mechanics of table orientation may stem from musicians’ pre-existent familiarity with table-oriented part notation. Printed examples of table-oriented parts occur in sixteenth- century books, and the practice may date back to the late medieval period or earlier. If indeed table-oriented parts were a standard convention of printed and manuscript musical notation, there would be no need for explanation. Conventional or not, table orientation is an intuitive system. Yet, as a system, it demands a certain mode of interpretive use, and resists nonstandard usage. Fig. 6 above reveals that standing in position 1 and attempting to play part 4 might be technically, musically, and physically possible, but the music played would be tonal gibberish.

These books thus circumscribe and direct the physical behavior of those using

them. A productive lens for considering this entanglement of interpellation and materiality comes from twentieth-century critical race studies. Robin Bernstein uses the

concept of the scriptive thing in her monograph Racial Innocence to analyze two racially-

charged artifacts designed for children’s leisure use in twentieth-century America.

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Bernstein describes one, E. W. Kemble’s A Coon Alphabet, as “a ferociously violent

alphabet book in which African American characters are scalded, stung by bees, bitten by

alligators, pummeled and battered.” Kemble’s book, she contends, “ridicules African

Americans’ education and connects their learning and by extension their social

advancement to violence.”244 In Bernstein’s reading, the book performs violence upon

the black bodies it ridicules. Furthermore, crucially, it catalyzes that performance through

the turning of its pages by the complicit hand of the reader.245 The book-as-thing thus is the agent which circumscribes and directs this enactment of violence. It is an object with

agency.

Bernstein’s analysis of the scriptive thing concentrates primarily, however, on the

second artifact: the topsy-turvy doll. This toy is “two dolls in one…a black torso and a

white one fuse at the waist, where a shared skirt fences the races. To play with the black

half-doll, one flips the skirt over the head of the white half-doll, and vice versa.”246 While

Kemble’s racist alphabet book scripts a performance of racial violence, the topsy-turvy doll requires racial binarity—what Bernstein calls “determined estrangement” between white and black halves. But in its reversibility, it also codes an implied invitation to users to flip the skirts, to change the doll’s race. Further, Bernstein argues that its softness invites cuddling and use in intimate spaces—“the home, the bed”—in order to perform a

subversive, undetected, and even invited invasion by black bodies of white space.247 In

244 Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 75. 245 Ibid., 75-77. 246 Ibid., 81. 247 Ibid., 87-91.

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this reading, the materiality and the design of both Kemble’s alphabet book and the

topsy-turvy doll together require a specific “ritual” for effective use.

Scriptive things even anticipate resistant users, and contain their effect by

subsuming transgressive behaviors into “secondary script[s] within a thing’s range of

prompts.” Bernstein uses this example to draw a crucial distinction between

performances scripted by things and responses intended by creators of things. At times,

she contends, things script performances contrary to their creators’ intentions, as in the

well-documented phenomenon of audiences laughing at melodramatic moments in

theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe never intended her

abolitionist tale to provoke hilarity, but such a response was scripted by its sentimental,

sensational nineteenth-century staging. The interpellation and scripting enacted by things

emerges from the things themselves; it does not transmit from creators through things. 248

Folios like The booke of fortune and the music books with table-oriented notation

work as scriptive things, by inviting specific material engagements, and in carefully

controlling those engagements. The uncertain creative origins of these folios’ materiality

actually simplifies this equation. It may be difficult to disentangle creator’s intention

from thing’s agency in the case of artifacts like Kemble’s racist alphabet, particularly as

it seems that Kemble himself participated in the material design—verbal and visual—of his book. Though all of the folios discussed above have named authors, the origins of their material designs are somewhat murkier. As a result, I can more certainly ascribe scriptive agency to thing rather than thing-maker.

248 Ibid., 79.

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Taking as a postulate, then, the nature of these folios as scriptive things, what

ritual performances did they determine, and what ritual performances did they imply?

This question relies on a critical differentiation which Bernstein draws, between the

physical engagement demanded by things’ material design (determined behavior) and the

intellectual or affective response prompted by things’ material and textual makeup

(implied behavior).249 The music folios and The booke of fortune script similar

determined behaviors, differing in their interpellation of userly engagement in interesting

but not crucial ways. By contrast, the implied behaviors scripted by the music folios

differ sharply from those scripted by The booke of fortune, in the socialized nature of

their affect as well as in the stability of the scripts themselves.

Bernstein defines “determined actions” as those which “are necessary for the

thing to function.” In discussing the folios of music, I consider specifically the behaviors

scripted by table-oriented notation. Music for one voice or instrument requires for

sensical use some, but not all, of the behaviors I list below. Multi-part music, then, whether for voices or instruments, requires the book to be laid flat on a surface which can support it. This surface must be low enough that the shortest musician can effectively see their part. It must be a flat surface; a tilted modern-day music stand would not work for more than two parts, since musicians must stand at right angles to one another. This standing-at-right-angles is another determined action: the orientation demands that

musicians be positioned before their part, and the demands of many (not all) instruments

suggest standing rather than sitting. (Standing becomes even more necessary if multiple

249 Ibid., 74-81.

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musicians play a part together.) The physical design of the music-folios in my data-set—

specifically, the relatively small size of the printed notes—requires careful, focused

consultation. Even given musicians’ literacy in early modern mensural notation, the size

and density of both score and lyrics (when present) would require close scrutiny to be

read.

The booke of fortune scripts a similar, though not identical, set of determined

actions. First, it requires close attention to textual and visual difference: pages of Kings,

Astronomers, and Philosophers all boast somewhat different mise-en-page, perform different roles in the game-design of The booke of fortune, and themselves script various

determined behaviors. The Philosopher-pages require dice-rolling and dice-reading. The

King- and Astronomer-pages require page-turning and, more broadly, discontinuous consultation: the user holding in their mind what they are to consult and the locating of that on a cited, later page. These, I argue, are the extents of the determined behaviors scripted by the book as a thing; as I note above, things’ scripts do not always align with creators’ intentions. Thus, while the preface attempts to script certain behaviors, both determinatively and by implication—such as rolling dice directly onto the pertinent

Philosopher-page—those linguistic scripts do not fall into the same category, nor have the same weight, as explicit determined behaviors scripted by things’ design. Here are echoes of Jerome McGann’s useful differentiation between linguistic and bibliographic codes: Bernsteinian determined behaviors stem primarily from bibliographic, rather than linguistic, codes.250

250 McGann, The Textual Condition, 12-16.

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In Racial Innocence, Bernstein defines the concept of “implied behaviors” rather

less concretely than “determined behaviors.” This ambiguity arises in part from the

subjective nature (in both senses of that adjective) of scripted implications. The

difference between the two begins in historical context: determined behaviors exist apart

from historical, cultural, and ideological context, while implied behaviors exist as a result

of these frames of conceptual reference.251 The historical context which conditioned the

scriptive potential of the music folios deserves complex elucidation—in the rapid

development of traditions of secular music, in its technologically-induced growing pains correlative to the evolution of print, in the long and varied history of manuscript music, and so on. For the sake of space, however, I will only highlight here the affective power of music and the intricacy of the final printed artifact, both of which are on display in the design of these folios of music.

The title-pages of these folios, and frequently the titles themselves, make their

affective weight clear. Leighton’s collection emphasizes the sorrowful nature of its songs.

Coperario’s book prescribes an affective response, nestling that prescription within, and

coding it as a response to, a very specific historical context. Morley refers to his book,

part-pedagogy and part-score, as “plaine and easie,” reassuring novice musicians of the

simplicity of the book’s instructive level. Even the relatively value-free title-page of

Captaine Humes Poeticall Musicke is gendered, and its hidden value-statements brought

out, by Hume’s address “to the Reader,” which confesses “Musicke” to be the Captain’s

“onely effeminate part.”252 Similarly, the paratexts in these music books emphasize the

251 Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 77. 252 G1v.

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desirability of complexity—both musical complexity, as in the case of Hume’s multiple

different instrumentations of the same piece of music, and the material complexity of the

artifact’s printed actuality. Thus, the implied actions scripted by the folios of music I

have examined include sympathetic affective displays, figured perhaps in soulful musical

performance, and a more distanced, critical appreciation of effective arrangement—both

musical and printed.

These implied actions exist within a relatively congenial historical context.

Certainly, more radical voices in early modern English culture would condemn secular

lamentations, but few serious detractors would condemn performances of sympathetic

participation in musical affect or discriminating appreciation of musical and material

design. The complicated place of astrology vis-à-vis Calvinist orthodoxy and English political hegemony gives The booke of fortune rather a more uncertain ideological place.

This folio’s design and preface emphasize its complex design, which allows for a

significant number of different “endings” based on dice-rolls. In turn, this complexity scripts userly performances of critical delight—perhaps even more intense than those scripted by the music-folios. But, as the preface all-too-clearly betrays, readers’ affective response would vary based on their own ideological contexts. This variation gives rise to the anxiety which presents forcefully in the preface.

Astrology had a fraught place in early modern English culture. Patrick Curry

builds the argument of his monograph Prophecy and Power upon a relatively

unproblematized sense of the currency and cultural ubiquity of zodiac-based divination in early modern England. In order for his narrative of the dubious death and radical rebirth

166 of astrological prophecy to work, it has to emerge from a place of astrological dominance. Curry argues that the Interregnum, between the execution of Charles I for treason and the Restoration of his son Charles II to the English throne, were “halcyon days for English astrology.” Before the Interregnum’s disruption of print monopolies, as

Curry constructs it, the “mistrust” of the Stationers’ Company “extended to every form of native or imported printed matter,” which “clearly included astrology.” In this formulation, then, cultural authorities judged astrology to be equally dangerous with other printed matter—which was to say, quite dangerous indeed.253

This distrust extended, it seems, from the upper echelons of punitive cultural authority to those prominent manufacturers of culture, the English intelligentsia. The prevalence of rhetorical disapproval of astrology may be deduced from the energy astrologers expended in answering objections. Lauren Kassell quotes a letter from Simon

Forman, one of London’s most colorful celebrity astrologers, to his student and collaborator Richard Napier, a man of the cloth in Buckinghamshire: “Therefore I pray forget not your promise for the answering of all invectives againste our profession that youe may have yt redy with expedition in the English tongu for all the wordle to vewe.”

Napier’s promised “answering of all invectives” survives in manuscript in the form of “A treatise touching the defenc of astrologie.” Never printed, the treatise “challenged the standard objections to” astrology, according to Kassell. Napier’s work participated in the tradition of Sir Christopher Heydon’s 1603 A defense of judicial astrology and a follow- up by the same author, though Napier’s “defenc” was completed before Heydon’s A

253 Prophecy and Power, 2, 19-21.

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defense was published. Despite how established the astrological apologetic was as a

subgenre, Kassell conjectures that the Napier/Forman collaboration was never published

because “[p]erhaps it was too expensive to print or too controversial a subject to be

licensed for the press.”254

In general, per Ann Geneva, “the astrologers’ main battle was not to prove that

their art was scientific, but…that it was not incompatible with Christianity.”255 Geneva’s

figuring the controversy as a battle echoes the strife in the preface to The booke of

fortune, in which two readings of divination—“it’s harmless fun” and “it’s useful

knowledge”—mask a deeper division between anti- and pro-astrological mindsets.

Bernstein’s model proposes that most scriptive things also script a secondary set of transgressive behaviors; The booke of fortune refuses to choose one set of implied

behaviors as primary/dominant and the other as secondary/transgressive. Both laughter

and belief are invited, legitimate reactive performances; both laughter and belief are

discouraged, transgressive reactive performances. These two are mutually exclusive: one

must overwhelm the other. The fluctuation between earnest belief and scornful mirth

must trend in one direction…

Here the music folios fully diverge from The booke of fortune. Notwithstanding

the similarity in the determined performances they script, these two subsets differ sharply

in the implied performances they script. The folios of music invite a conventional,

communal performance of collaborative certitude. The uniformity of the affects they

254 Medicine and Magic, 60-71. 255 Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind, 9.

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invite and of the wonderment they prompt welds into something monolithic, something

culturally orthodox, something relatively unobjectionable. By contrast, even looking at

The booke of fortune to marvel in a detached way at its clever design could invite

censure. Using The booke of fortune is a solitary endeavor. Rather than presupposing its

users’ collaborative consumption in a communal environment, it equivocates anxiously

about how its individual use might be considered or received. Where the music folios

ensconce themselves in the mainstream, The booke of fortune marginalizes itself; its

nature seemingly cannot sit comfortably with the culture in which it exists.

These differences are unavoidable. But all of these high-use scriptive-thing slim

folios do unite in inviting their own hard use—apparently in despite of their cost and their

fragility. To conclude this section, I calculate the paper-cost of the slim folios I examine

here, then use that data supported by binding-history conjectures to propose that certain slim folios scripted themselves out of existence. That is, the determined performances scripted, directed, and required by these folios were materially rough enough to destroy them.

To estimate paper prices, Peter Blayney draws from early modern accounts.

“Writing in 1622, the Cambridge printer Cantrell Legge claimed that the price of printing paper used in London varied from 3s. 4d. a ream for ‘the lowest’ to 5s. 6d. a ream for ‘the finest’,” Blayney recounts.256 Blayney assumes that in an industry with paper-thin profit

margins, opportunities to minimize overhead were taken more often than not, so a

standard ream-price is 3s. 4d., or 40 pence. Blayney estimates 450 usable sheets per

256 “The Publication of Playbooks,” 408.

169 ream, so each sheet would have cost .0889p. In Blayney’s cost-model, paper accounts for only 40% of overhead. Paper cost for these volumes is thus less than half of their overhead cost; given the standard 50% wholesale markup which Blayney cites from

Stationers’ Company regulations, wholesale prices would have been even higher than overhead.257 Based on Blayney’s estimates, I propose the following approximate per- copy paper/overhead/wholesale costs for the scriptive-thing folios addressed above.

The booke of fortune: .0889p*23 sheets = 2.0447p paper (5.1118p total overhead/8p wholesale) Funerall Teares: .0889p*5 sheets = 0.4445p paper (1.1113p total overhead/2.5p wholesale) Lessons for 1.2. and 3. viols: .0889p*12 sheets = 1.0668p paper (2.667p total overhead/4p wholesale) Captaine Humes Poeticall Musicke: .0889p*7 sheets = .6223p paper (1.5558p total overhead/2.5p wholesale) The teares or lamentacions: .0889p*30 sheets = 2.667p paper (6.6675p total overhead/11p wholesale) A plaine and easie introduction: .0889p*56 sheets = 4.9784p paper (12.446p totaloverhead/19p wholesale) Most of these numbers are highly contingent; Ferrabosco’s Lessons did not necessarily, absolutely, cost less than half a shilling wholesale. Rather, these figures display the rough proportions between paper cost, overhead, and wholesale price, and to illustrate the cost represented by single copies of these books. Four pence for a book of viol music is not much, but neither is it negligible. Nearly two shillings for A plaine and easie introduction certainly represents more than an impulse buy; it would likely not inspire carelessness or rough treatment, as an investment.

257 Ibid., 408-410.

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And yet these books script a regimen of relatively rough handling. This roughness would have been exacerbated by the probable binding history of these folios. Books as slender as these were probably rarely bound by themselves. If indeed they were to be laid flat for musical or divination purposes, they could not be bound with any degree of tightness. They may have been stab-stitched, though I have no evidence to confirm or deny this. Unbound, usually opened all the way and crushed flat, without much in the way of paper-block support—is it any wonder that only one copy of The booke of fortune survives?

The practice of planned obsolescence in modern technology has received harsh criticism from consumer advocacy groups and news media.258 Early modern book designers likely did not consciously design books to wear out. But, inasmuch as these things script users’ physical interactions with their materiality, the folios I have been examining above are not designed to weather for long the patterns of physical use to which they were put. This is, perhaps, as far from prestigious as a folio can be—not ephemeral, but fleeting, expected to break down and facilitating that breakdown.

C. Conclusions

Chapter 1, above, begins with a discussion of critical conceptions of the early modern English folio. While these conceptions often apply to folios printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they often apply to discussion of one specific seventeenth-century folio: Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and

Tragedies. Chapter 1 aims to problematize these critical formulations, especially the

258 Cf., e.g., Wiens, “Shady World,” and Hadhazy, “Here’s the truth.”

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general application of adjectives like monumental, copious, incorporate, and complete to

all seventeenth-century folios. To different extents, these adjectives connote thickness in

their critical contexts.

The predominantly slim seventeenth-century English folios in this data-set test the

validity of these adjectives, both relatively and generally. Responding to Francis X.

Connor’s implicit characterization of “folio” as communicating wholeness and

completeness (and, therefore, thickness), I demonstrate that while thick folios did

communicate wholeness and completeness, as Connor argues, slim folios could and did transmit these senses as well. In fact, slim folios may have been as likely to capture wholeness in one volume as thick folios, because several thick-folio projects claiming completeness or wholeness had to be broken up into multiple volumes. These include

Chapman’s Homer, the Jaggards’ Pedro Mexía project, and the Edmund Spenser folio.

This conception of completeness as something to be attained by customer-side compilation mirrors Sonia Massai’s discussion of early modern attitudes toward the perfectibility of printed books. An example of this is the various forms taken by Samuel

Daniel’s works, many of which advertise their perfectedness again and again.

Chapter 1 concludes with an account of the gradual and partial disappearance of

the folio editio princeps. While late medieval printers often chose the folio format to

express the first editions of classical or medieval works, this trend has reversed by the

seventeenth century. This reverse is due in part to the growth of vernacular writing traditions, and toward writing as a quasi-viable profession. As the market for vernacular

print grew, first editions emerged in response to different exigencies. Frequently, these

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exigencies pushed authors and publishers in the direction of smaller, faster-printing,

possibly more economical formats. With the rise of the slim folio and the disappearance

of the folio editio princeps, the seventeenth-century English folios extant in archives around the globe are by no means all monumental, copious, incorporate, or complete.

Chapter 2 builds upon and responds to the problematizing work done in Chapter

1. This chapter aims to shine a light on pertinent, unexpected trends and points in my data-set, in order to make a positive argument for the material diversity of the seventeenth-century slim folio. Materiality undergirds this chapter, which focuses on those elements which could be included or excluded at book-designers’ discretion (such as reference technologies and illustration).

Reference technologies are diverse and widespread in early modern English folios. Chapter 2 discusses them at length, differentiating between those reference technologies internal to the text and those external to the text. Internal reference technologies are those which likely were composed and printed along with the main text—page numbers, section headings, and glosses. External reference technologies are those which likely had to be created, composed, and printed after the main text— primarily indices and tables of contents. My data indicate that while a significant minority of slim folios included external technologies, the overwhelming majority included internal technologies. The different types of the latter work quite differently from one another, and certain types (like variable section headings) are more prevalent than others.

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From these data, I draw some major conclusions about the presence of reference

technologies in seventeenth-century slim folios. First, reference technology had by 1600

had spread throughout secular and religious texts, thanks to the growth of the practice of

discontinuous reading. Second, reference technology did not necessarily or exclusively

signal high-culture or intellectual aspirations. Different reference technologies connoted

differently, and (since most slim folios included more than one type of reference

technology), the various permutations of these reference technologies led to a variety of

composite cultural connotations. Third, the concept of the prosthesis is valuable for

thinking about reference technologies’ relationships to folios. Specifically, the way that

reference technologies simultaneously create and fill a need for themselves classifies

them, in my view, as paratextual prostheses.

From reference technologies Chapter 2 turns to illustration and decoration,

discussing first the diverse and frequently unexpected contents which pair with

illustrations. I define “illustration” to include diagrams and charts, not merely woodcut or

engraved representative illustrations. Various types of illustrations present across genres.

Each illustrated folio uses illustration for a slightly different purpose, to fit its own

specific semiotic needs. Ornamentation, by contrast, seems by this point to be pure

convention, expected and appearing in almost every folio in my data-set. I marshal this evidence to destabilize the association of “lavishness” with the illustrated folio format; neither illustration (which usually answered necessity) nor ornamentation (which was a print convention) were extraneous or lavish. They may have inflated folios’ cost, but they were never completely unnecessary.

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Chapter 3 addresses certain elements of folios’ appearance which were, to some

extent, out of the hands of designers: dimension and mass. First, both large dimension

and variable mass encouraged stationary, static folios. Because folios were too large to

easily carry about, and usually either too heavy or too fragile, their materiality restricted

their movement. Though book-designers technically could customize folios’ final

dimensions, mostly through cutting and trimming, this cost too much both in paper and in

labor to be a widespread, economically sustainable practice. Dimension thus was a non-

volitional material characteristic of the seventeenth-century folio, an aspect over which designers had little practical control. Nevertheless, designers of the slim folios in my data-set frequently made the most of the large dimensions of folio leaves, using them to great effect in the reproduction of visual elements.

Chapter 3 closes by focusing on a certain subset of my slim-folio data-set: the high-use slim folio. After describing the data-points in this subset, including books of musical scores and The booke of fortune, I summarize Robin Bernstein’s formulation of

the scriptive thing. This is an artifact which, in its material design and conceptual content,

scripts the physical and affective interactions which users perform to activate it. Thinking

of high-use slim folios as scriptive things allows for a differentiation between the

relatively similar physical performances and the crucially divergent affective responses

scripted by these folios. This differentiation further diversifies {the slim folio} as a

conceptual container. This chapter concludes by considering the material ramifications of

the physical performances scripted by slim folios. Relatively low deduced price-points

suggests that something akin to planned obsolescence was intrinsic to these slim folios.

Slim, practical, designed to be used to death, these folios exist at the far end of the

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spectrum from the critical conceptions with which I began this section, of folios as

monumental, copious, incorporate, complete.

This tangled skein of data, argumentation, and conclusion yields several general strands of conclusion. First, most simply, short works were printed in folio; slim folio

collections of works existed. Any discussion of the folio in England in the early modern

period must take note of this incontrovertible fact. Second, these works exist within and

respond to, a dense network of material and cultural influences. Most slim folios in my

data-set share some material characteristics—reference technologies, illustrations, or

large dimensions—with the more critically-well-known thick folios. Most also share these same characteristics with each other. They also share characteristics with works,

slim and thick, in other formats; I have examined this not at all, but the distribution of

reference technologies and illustration in quartos, octavos, duodecimos, and so on

absolutely must be studied.

Third, slim folios would of necessity have been cheaper than thick folios. Their

slight material profile would disqualify them from being used primarily for display by

themselves. (Slim folios bound together might complicate the story in interesting ways.)

Their retail price-point, lower than that of thick folios, would make them economically

accessible to larger segments of the book-buying populace: the paper-cost of a twenty- sheet folio would be the same as that of a twenty-sheet octavo, and other overhead would likely be roughly the same. In other words, the price of a two hundred-sheet folio might be out of the financial reach of a moderately prosperous London saddlemaker, but the price of a twenty-sheet folio, octavo, or sextodecimo might be very doable. (For the sake

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of thickness-reference, twenty sheets in folio would be 40 leaves/80 pages, in octavo 160

leaves/320 pages, and in sextodecimo 320 leaves/640 pages—the latter probably

unmanageably thick.) The price of a reasonably thick octavo would likely be similar to

the price of a slim folio.

Fourth, resonant with my third conclusion, slim folios have a strong association

with concrete usefulness. Textbooks, manuals, scores, handwriting models, books for

military reference, definitions of religious ritual, and other highly practical volumes—and precious few abstract or esoteric ones—make up my data-set. Further, several of these folios are designed for frequent material use. None of the books in my data-set were designed to be never opened, to accumulate dust, to look pretty, to impress visitors with their imposing materiality, to construct their owner’s recondite ethos. No. The early modern folios I examined—which constitute a significant part of the context into which

CHT emerged—are textual tools. They were designed efficiently. They were constructed

to specifications. They were made to be used.

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Part II

Variegation and Material Patterns in Sixteenth-Century Folios

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Chapter 4 - Flux as a State of Cultural Being A. Introduction Chapters 4 and 5 of this dissertation take the entire sixteenth century as a time-

period limiter. The scope of the historical narrative constructed in this dissertation

requires an appropriate level of scale. Addressing the sixteenth century as a whole

emphasizes larger narratives without erasing or ignoring the individuality of key

moments. Rather than aiming for complete temporal or spatial coverage, Chapters 4 and

5 progress in broad strokes supported by specific data and examples. This argumentative

style answers William Sherman’s call for a move away from hyper-individual case

studies and toward general conclusions about historico-cultural trends.259

By examining the century as a whole, these chapters grant a birds-eye view of a relatively large data-set of diverse folios. I take these folios together, not sequenced chronologically; when I sort by mass, for example, I group a bulky book printed in 1555 along with one printed in 1501, or a slender folio printed in 1509 with a similarly slender folio printed in 1598. While this practice may seem at first ahistorical, it actually arises from the historical fact of folio survival. Books remained in wholesale and retail shops’ inventories long after their printing, and also made their way into second-hand markets;260 provenance clues like ownership marks illustrate how extensively folios

traveled after being sold.261 I argue that folios were more likely to survive, and likely to

survive longer, than smaller formats, because of a proportional relationship between

259 Used Books, xi. 260 Regarding inventories, cf. Nuovo, Book Trade, 347-388, and Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 171-194; regarding second-hand sale, cf. Nuovo, Book Trade, 400-409. 261 A particularly rich manuscript example is Newberry MS 37, a compilation of texts of continental philosophy which was apparently made in 1480, then had at least three different, apparently unrelated owners, in various parts of England, before 1600.

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paper dimension and binding sturdiness; secondarily, thicker folios, with larger paper-

blocks, were more likely to survive to some extent than thinner folios, since thicker

paper-blocks could lose more external sheets of paper before completely disappearing. If

the materially-inherent lifespan of folio books was longer than that of smaller formats,

my juxtaposition of folios printed decades apart seems an historically justified practice.

To frame this large-scale discussion of the folio in the sixteenth century, Chapter

4 argues that entangled cultural change shaped this era’s technology, religion, and politics. Building upon this characterization of the sixteenth century as a period of diversity and fluctuation, I describe my data-set, delineating and justifying its delimitations, then characterize its contents as a whole. Chapter 5 takes mass as a primary sortation principle; I separate my data-set into two primary subsets (less than

1000g and greater than 1000g), examine the distribution of textual and bibliographical characteristics in each section, then compare those distributions between subsets. This comparison determines the textual and bibliographical characteristics associated with various material profiles. This practice, in turn, demonstrates the ambiguity inherent in the subsets of data formulated in Chapters 4 and 5. As a result of the entangled evolution

I discuss in Chapter 4, the diverse folios in Chapter 5 resist simplistic classification.

Chapter 5 closes with some reflections on the correlations between temporal cultural shifts and atemporal material shifts.

B. Flux as a State of Cultural Being According to Marvin Becker, sixteenth-century cultural interactions changed at a largely imperceptible rate, but with dramatic results. His monograph on Civility and

Society in Western Europe, 1300-1600 characterizes shifts specifically in social relations

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during that era as “the painfully slow surrender…of great expanses of quotidian social

behavior.” Becker’s book scrutinizes what he calls “the almost glacial-like victory of the mores of civility in Western Europe.”262 But despite Becker’s glum, generalizing

assessment of the rates of the cultural change he examines, the shift which he chronicles

fluctuated in velocity. At times, changes in European structures of human relations took

place quite slowly; at other times, those changes took place with startling rapidity. For

example, by Becker’s own admission, the growth of the humanist tradition took place

quickly: “[h]umanism, energetically and sometimes rudely, intruded itself into” “the

fourteenth-century Italian city-states,” a claim which Becker supports by pointing to the

disintegration of feudal political systems and the substitution of royal bureaucracy in their

place.263 The general histories of the book, such as Martin and Febvre’s, Johns’, and

Pettegree’s, agree that cultural acceptance of print technology spread rapidly and took

root deeply. It took such root such that by 1603, print had caught up to or perhaps

surpassed manuscript as the preferred medium for the transmission of public

knowledge.264 In other arenas, as well, the sixteenth century was defined by flux—

sometimes imperceptible, but frequently dramatic.

Chapter 4 does provide specific examples of the arenas in which rapid cultural

change would have affected the development of the folio, describe the cultural change

occurring in those arenas, and move on. This focus on sixteenth-century entangled

change neither privileges nor ignores powerful forces of ideological or social

262 Becker, Civility and Society, 1-2. 263 Ibid., 38-39. 264 Martin, History and Power of Writing, 233-282.

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conservatism. An example of such a conservative mindset is Johannus Trithemius, Abbot

of Sponheim, whose late-fifteenth-century De laude scriptorum argued against the

vitiating effects of print technology. Commitment to the status quo permeated print

technology, religion, and politics, and indeed other entangled arenas which this chapter

does not address. As Becker makes clear, cultural change in Europe occurred as a result

of, not in the absence of, cultural conservatism.265

These chapters do not conceive of change as binary: dynamic versus static,

momentum opposing inertia. Rather, these cultural changes were non-binary, in

geography, in ideology, in chronology, and are therefore considered as such. Ian

Maclean’s discussion of the multiplicity of early modern confessional positions undergirds my synopsis of religious change. Similarly, my description of the evolution of print technology forgoes linear narratives in favor of a geographically and temporally diffracted model. My circumspect discussion of political uproar in the sixteenth century highlights causative and correlative linkages between regional developments. In each of these contexts, dispersed causation trumps linear causation, and multiplicity rather than

binarity organizes development.

1. Religious Flux In religious circles, long-simmering dissatisfactions with Roman Catholicism came to a head in the sixteenth century. The prehistory of those dissatisfactions included

Waldensian objections in Italy—the oldest proto-Protestant movement—as well as, later,

Lollardy and the teaching of John Wyclif in England, and the firestorm of the Hussite

265 One of the most valuable characteristics of Becker’s book is his consideration of the obstacles to every micro-shift he discusses; conservatism is a chronic obstacle.

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revolts in central Europe. Each of these forerunners to the Reformation emerged from

slightly different contexts. The Waldenses and their French associates the Albigenses

emerged from within orthodox Catholicism.266 Lollardy, though resonant with

Waldensian dissatisfaction with Church corruption, seems to have germinated independently from Continental dissidence, in the popular sphere as well as in the academic milieu of Oxford.267 The Hussite wars occurred due to a complex web of

political, economic, and religious factors specific to Bohemia in the fifteenth century,

according to František Michálek Bartoš.268 No modern narrative of the proto-

Reformation imagines these three distinct movements to be part of a single multinational

development. Given their historical situatedness, such a narrative would be ludicrous.

Narratives which conceive of the Protestant Reformation as Catholic vs. anti-

Catholic, or Reformation vs. Counter-Reformation, are scarcely more credible. For one thing, as Ian Maclean usefully points out, three distinct confessional traditions existed in

Europe by the middle of the sixteenth century: Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism.

Though Lutheranism and Calvinism agreed that Catholic confessionalists were incorrect

on salient points of doctrine, philosophy, and practice, the two non-Catholic traditions

diverged sharply from one another on key theological issues. These differences

manifested in practice, as well as in rhetoric. To imagine, therefore, a general umbrella of

“Protestantism” is to ignore the deep divisions between Lutheran-influenced and

Calvinist-influenced doctrine and confession. Maclean argues that the growth of

266 Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition, 96-129. 267 McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, 139-145. 268 Bartoš, The Hussite Revolution.

183 confessional identity, which he calls a process of “confessionalisation,” led to “a hardening of attitudes” within confessional groups, and therefore greater division between confessional groups.269

Even within confessional circles, orthodox unanimity seldom occurred. In

Lutheranism, the tradition experienced significant growing pains after the death of its eponymous, bombastic leader. Maclean notes the three separate confessions—two during

Luther’s life, one, more systematic, after his death—which sought to institutionalize

Lutheran belief systems.270 Peter Marshall’s monograph 1517: Martin Luther and the

Invention of the Reformation considers afresh the historical evidence surrounding

Luther’s mythic (in multiple senses of that word) posting of his Ninety-Five Theses; its relevance lies in its discussion of subsequent responses to and appropriations of the

Luther-myth. Simultaneous with Luther’s canonization in all but name (made possible by

Lutheran rhetoric), Lutheranism moderated and evolved some of his more radical beliefs.271 Calvinism, by contrast, seems to have been more geographically diffuse and ideologically available for variation. This promiscuity resonates with the multinationality exemplified in Jehan Cauvin’s French background and education and expatriate Genevan adulthood. Thus, as Maclean points out, separate German, Dutch, and English Calvinist- adjacent confessional groups sprang up—organized around the Belgic Confession, the

Canons of Dordt, and the Thirty-Nine Articles, respectively. Even the Catholic tradition,

269 Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 6-8. 270 Ibid., 7. 271 Marshall, 1517, 50-81.

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apparently more unitary than any of the others, saw a need for a confessional statement of

orthodoxy, which was duly produced by the Council of Trent.272

In 1501, one established religious tradition dominated Europe: Roman

Catholicism. Dissent bubbled just under the surface, and had at times boiled over into

direct confrontation; this dissent had been localized, composed of eruptions largely

independent of each other. By 1603, not one but two distinct macro-traditions had arisen

in addition to a diminished but still potent Catholic tradition. Lutheranism and Calvinism

contained within themselves some division; doctrinal independence had moved from rare

and dangerous to common and slightly less dangerous. The evolutionary spread of

interpretive autonomy which accompanied the growth of Lutheranism and Calvinism

both mirrors and influences developments in specific subsets of folios printed in the

sixteenth century.

2. Evolutions in Print Technology As religious heterodoxy spread, both organically and by force, its chosen medium

developed accordingly. The relationship of print to the ideological and military

revolutions sparked by sixteenth-century religious change has been ably examined by

plenty of other scholars, including Eisenstein, Martin and Febvre, and Maclean. I will

only postulate that the relationship between these two types of change was generative in

its symbiotic configuration. Heterodoxy and print grew similarly; they grew at similar

rates; each fostered the growth of the other. As print evolved, religious controversy

272 Incidentally, an early collection of Tridentine decrees in folio (1566) forms part of my data-set for this section.

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flourished. In turn, print benefited from the urgency and prolific creativity sparked by

religious controversy.

Throughout the sixteenth century, print technology developed and evolved, both

in its material components and in its place in the world. This evolution proceeded in paths

which were not always constructive or productive. This section explores those paths. Its

purpose is twofold. First, it lends a concrete texture to my characterization of the

sixteenth century as defined by change. Second, it contextualizes key constituencies of

my data-set. The following section, therefore, provides a conspectus of sixteenth-century developments in print technology and cultural situation.

The most basic ingredients of the printed word, paper and ink, morphed throughout the century, but did not fundamentally change. Philip Gaskell states that in the main, paper-making procedures remained stable between 1500 and 1800,273 though he

also pinpoints minor developments such as the beginnings of a shift in the signification of

watermarks, from signaling individual printers to signaling quality or size.274 The most

important development in the realm of paper seems to have been one of volume: as print

spread and diversified, more paper was used, and, to a significant extent, the

papermaking industry kept pace, expanding its supply to fill demand.

Ink’s narrative is similar; while no notably innovative recipes were developed in

the sixteenth century, Gaskell notes that during this period inkmaking became a separate

industry for the first time.275 C. H. Bloy’s exhaustive A History of Printing Ink, Balls,

273 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 57-58. 274 Ibid., 61-63. 275 Ibid., 126.

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and Rollers: 1440-1850 expands upon this narrative: “[t]he first independent ink-maker

of whom we have records was a certain Guillaume de Launay in Paris in 1522.” Others

eventually joined de Launay: Noel Guyton in Rheims in 1540 and Jehan Odet in Lyon in

1554. Bloy conjectures that de Launay, Guyton, Odet, and others unnamed originally

worked for major print shops mixing ink in-house, then “decided to set up business on

their own account.” As with paper, ink’s availability increased while its price probably

decreased somewhat, though formulae and thus appearance seem to have changed very

little.276

The last section of this dissertation explores typography at length, arguing that the

fifteenth century was a period of pervasive typographical innovation and play. Though

this experimentation continued throughout the sixteenth century, type families were

largely set, both in appearance and in the works to which they would be applied. The age

of the great typographers would not begin in earnest until the seventeenth century.

Certain works, of primarily Teutonic and English origin, were printed nigh-exclusively in

blackletter; many, even most works printed in roman and italic originated in Italy, Spain,

and France. These delineations are not hard-and-fast, yet they held largely true throughout the sixteenth century—except in England. Gaskell has characterized English printing as insular and backward from its inception until the eighteenth century;277

Andrew Pettegree concurs, mostly, with this assessment.278 But Mark Bland has argued

that English printing took a major step forward around 1591, in moving from primarily

276 Bloy, Ink, Balls, and Rollers, 66-67. 277 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 171. 278 Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 218-219.

187 using blackletter type to primarily using roman type. According to Bland, though the reason for this shift remains ambiguous, roman type took English printing by storm, such that by 1603 blackletter type was considered to be old-fashioned.279 In England, at least, the sixteenth century contained a moment of dramatic, unexpected typographical change, one with echoes of developments in English national identity.

The whole realm of the visual is one area of print technology which certainly, measurably, and significantly evolved during this period. A pair of excellent studies,

Evelyn Lincoln’s Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome and

Christopher L. C. E. Whitcomb’s Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome, approach evolutions in printmaking, illustration, and visual media in the same major print market from different angles. While developments which took place in print centers such as

Rome, Paris, Lyon, Frankfurt, and Venice took longer to reach smaller markets,

Lincoln’s and Whitcomb’s conclusions neatly express the developing capabilities of print technology. Lincoln argues, in general, that both the technology of visual printing and its potential for signification became more sophisticated throughout the sixteenth century. In other words, she charts a change not only in practices of production, but also in habits of consumption.280 Whitcomb focuses more narrowly on the production-side in order to map the convoluted networks—sometimes beneficial, sometimes rancorous—which conditioned the production of prints in Rome during the sixteenth century.281 In both constructions, however, the visual occupies a significant market share; historically, it

279 Bland, “Appearance of the Text,” 116-118. 280 Cf., especially, 1-25 & 211-235. 281 Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome, 5-14 & 107-222.

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constituted a force to be reckoned with in the production of printed materials, and it

offered novel semiotic opportunities both in stand-alone formats (as in the production of

prints, upon which Whitcomb focuses) and in textual contexts (as in the illustrative mode,

per Lincoln’s survey). This emphasis on the printed image sharply distinguishes the sixteenth from the fifteenth century. Whereas the latter still relied primarily upon manually-created, individual illustration—manuscript illumination—the former came to rely primarily upon rapidly reproducible and innately iterable printed images.

Simultaneously with these large- and small-scale developments, print gradually adopted a new place in culture throughout the sixteenth century. First, as Diana Robin demonstrates, women came to be considered legitimately agential in print. Like so many key works of early modern book history, Robin’s monograph focuses exclusively on

Italian culture, but the evidence of other works of book history with similarly narrow foci directed at other cultures (such as, for instance, Heidi Brayman’s consideration of early seventeenth-century gender and reading in England) reveals that by the end of the sixteenth century, women’s agency relative to print was considered viable.282 Neither

Robin nor Brayman argue that women’s access to print, both as producers and

consumers, was unmitigated or free during and even after this period. Rather, women

could be conceptualized as interacting with print as well as men—as authors, producers,

readers, and, somewhat less frequently, printers.283 To be sure, women engaged with

print before the sixteenth century; one of the chief examples in Chapters 6-8, St.

Catherine of Siena, had a significant posthumous impact on religion and politics in print.

282 Hackel, Reading Material, 196-255. 283 Robin, Publishing Women, xvii-xxvi.

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But the sixteenth century ushered in a cultural moment of unprecedented women’s access to and influence upon print.

Women and men in print both existed under male upper-class hegemony, in the form of professional organizations. By the middle of the sixteenth century, printing had ensconced itself far enough within culture to need, or believe it needed, external oversight. Gaskell notes three guilds in major print centers which incorporated within twenty-two years of each other: Venice (1548), London (1557), and Paris (~1570).

Though, as Gaskell notes, the guilds claimed to work for the well-being of all of their members, their primary purpose was to protect the financial well-being of “master tradesmen who, in return for monopolistic privileges, co-operated with the government in its censorship of the press.” To actively protect their own interests, less privileged print workmen “organized their own associations within individual shops…part trade union, part friendly society, and part social club.” Thus, at the same time as women worked to eliminate restrictions separating themselves from print, more intrusive and more complex hierarchical networks enforced further structured control upon the print industry.284

The establishment of printers’ or booksellers’ guilds was far from a completely negative cultural development. In protecting certain rights, and in regulating misdeeds, the guilds served an important civic function. But the dangers they posed represent, in microcosm, what Marc Fumaroli describes as the “new problems, unprecedented dangers, and unexpected threats” provoked by printing. Fumaroli’s book on the Republic of

Letters takes as axiomatic the double-edged nature of print’s cultural impact: at once a

284 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 174-175.

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boon and a peril. He argues that humanism had to account for print’s potentially

treacherous duality. In developing the quasi-formal Respublica litteraria, humanists “did what was needed to preserve the integrity of the mind as much as was possible” from the

“destructive side effects” ushered in by/with print. In Fumaroli’s construction, humanism warred with divisive sectarianism and its agents for control of the technically neutral, intensely powerful, easily misused printing press.285

The dangers posed by the sixteenth-century evolution of the printing press were

not confined to the level of esoteric, metaphysical wars for the soul of Europe. For many

within the book-making and -selling industries, the growth of print threatened the

sustainability of its own existence—and, therefore, theirs. Throughout the confessional

age, as Maclean defines it, and because of the hardening of inter-tradition differences, established channels for textual and material exchange slowly decomposed. According to

Maclean, the fair system, which was essential throughout the sixteenth century as a primary means of intellectual and material dissemination, had entered a slow decline as early as the 1590s. Drawing both upon data and individual anecdotes, Maclean suggests that by the time the Jaggards advertised CHT at the book fair in Frankfurt, the age of fair

dominance had already passed.286 The progression is cruelly inexorable: print spreads,

sectarianism spreads, sectarian print traditions develop, markets close off from one

another, print suffers—and so do manufacturers of bookmaking materials and

technology, publishers, printers, and post-purchase book professionals (such as colorists

285 Fumaroli, Republic of Letters, 2-9. 286 Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 211-234.

191 or binders). Some changes in the century of change were regressive rather than progressive.

3. Political Shifts In these summaries of religious and technological shift, the multifarious nation- states of sixteenth-century Europe have lurked just out of sight. Political factors shaped the confessional and developmental divisions which separated sectarian and geographical groups. To carry forward the emphasis on multiplicity rather than binarity: the political shifts discussed below occurred at different rates, at different points in the sixteenth century, in different ways, through different means. I examine the political situations in various regions separately, considering disastrous French attempts at reform, Teutonic religio-political upheaval, the subjugation of Italy, the reinvention of English national identity, and escalating strife between the Low Countries and Spain. Taken out of context, with regions considered as separate theatres, the changes which took place in these nation-states throughout the sixteenth century might seem routine premodern kerfuffles. Taken together, though, they reveal their fundamental interconnectedness, both with each other and with changes in print technology and religion.

Change in French culture and politics followed an apparently unique pattern.

Economic growth and (relatively) peaceful reform characterized the first six decades of the sixteenth century, followed by forty years of turmoil, bloodshed, and division. David

Potter back-dates the beginning of the period of peace to 1460, neatly providing a century-long lull between the Hundred Years’ War and the confessional conflicts which

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broke out around 1560.287 Of course, as Potter and W. Scott Haine point out, French

political actions and identities still organized themselves around a central monarchic

figure. As a result, efforts at reform were measured, emerging from a select few originary

points and focused on a relatively limited area of effect.288 One primary driver of reform

was the Church, which undertook both cosmetic and structural reform during this

period.289

Deliberate shaping of secular culture—specifically in the realms of intellectualism

and art—also took place during this period. In 1539, the ordonnance of Villers-Cotterêts began to institute linguistic uniformity, a “process by which the dominance of French in law and administration gradually recruited the social elites…to the French language.”290

This “provision,” to borrow Potter’s term, was only one of several attempts by Francis I

to weld the diverse inhabitants of French territory into something like an unified whole.

Other initiatives included the introduction of Italian Renaissance aesthetics into art and

architecture, and the creation of new institutes of higher education along with the

revitalization (and control) of older universities.291 These systematic developments—

what might be called “forced evolution”—proceeded alongside an unexpected population

boom, inexplicable to historians, to elevate the French star to a place of apparent stability

in the late 1540s and early 1550s. Then, of course, it all came apart.

287 Potter, A History of France, 1-28. 288 Ibid., vii-ix; Haine, The History of France, 45-49. 289 Diefendorf and Reinburg, “Catholic reform,” 176-201. 290 Potter, A History of France, 6. 291 Haine, The History of France, 48-49; Dewald, “Social groups,” 48-52.

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The dramatic impact of the Wars of Religion, which ravaged France from about

1560 through the end of the century, can scarcely be exaggerated. Haine notes that

climatic factors increased tension as well: the Little Ice Age disrupted French agrarian

production, which in turn magnified the tax burden, which in turn led to unrest in the

working classes.292 The ideologically revolutionary tenets of Calvinism surely did their

part to destabilize French culture. But Haine and Potter agree with Philip Benedict’s

conclusion that the precarity of the French monarchy did more than religious divisions

could to permit, even encourage, the Wars of Religion.293 Confessional differences, ever

more pronounced as the Council of Trent wound down, provided handy pretexts for

conflict to those noble factions predisposed to war. Middle- and lower-class subcultures

were unsettled by the gradual radicalization of religious practice. As Catholics closed

ranks against the novelty of Calvinism, Huguenots reacted sharply against what they saw

as idolatry. Combined with the power vacuum caused by the death of the first two sons of

Henry II and anti-Italian sentiment furthered by Catherine de Medici’s nationality, the inflammatory religious atmosphere was particularly congenial to civil war.

France thus began the sixteenth century with relative stability and closed it with

cultural and political upheaval. Potter argues that by the end of the century the French

nation-state had come to exist, diverse territories welded into a vaguely unitary whole.294

The progression in Teutonia, Italy, and the Low Countries could scarcely have been more

different. In Germany, an ostensibly unified part of the Holy Roman Empire, regional

292 Haine, The History of France, 49. 293 Ibid., 49-50; Potter, A History of France, 284-290; Benedict, “Wars of religion,” 147-175. 294 Potter, A History of France, 284-290.

194 differences defined the political climate. Eleanor Turk has termed Charles V, Emperor from 1519 to 1555, “a medieval rather than a modern ruler.”295 Similarly, Mary Fulbrook attributes his “nomina[l]” authority to “an overstretching of political and financial resources, a constant indebtedness (particularly to the Fugger), and a failure to secure real power.”296 Charles was something more than a figurehead; Turk makes it clear that he conceived of himself and his position as centralized and legitimate, but he wielded much less “real power” than he imagined or desired. In the absence of singular monarchical power, as was present in France for the first six decades of the sixteenth century, strong regional governments wielded authority. Composed of these powerful territorial political entities, larger than city-states but not quite as large as the nation-state France was becoming, sixteenth-century Germany underwent its two-headed religio-political revolution.

Sixteenth-century Teutonic political attitudes and actions emerged in light of

Luther and the Reformation. Perhaps even more than in France, German religious reformation and political shifts fueled each other’s symbiotic growth. Peter Wende argues that even before Luther’s academic disputations in 1517 sparked practical religious upheaval, German culture trended in the direction of independence. Wende points to a nascent “intellectual patriotism” which sought to distinguish German cultural identity and intellectual heritage from the hegemony of the Italianate culture-factory. To Wende, the

Reformation’s success can be traced to German receptivity to radicalism; Luther’s fierceness resonated and spread because the German public was ready to resist Italian

295 The History of Germany, 49. 296 Concise History of Germany, 34-35.

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cultural dominance. Openness to political resistance antedated, then stimulated religious

rebellion.297

Between 1517 and 1530, Lutheranism took hold; by 1530, it was fairly clear that

this new creed had some permanence, but the Holy Roman Empire did not give up quite

yet. No fewer than three distinct micro-wars broke out between 1530, when the

Lutherans’ Augsburg Confession configured them as a discrete confessional body, and

1552, when an “[e]xhausted” Charles V officially “recogniz[ed] the Protestants” as confessionally independent and (just as important) politically agential.298 After this

turning point, Wende argues, religious hierarchy “became an organ of state governance,”

since “the new Protestantism offered new opportunities for…rulers to expand their power

and to establish their sovereignty.”299 This new status quo seemed promising, but both

Catholics and Protestants viewed the 63 years of German nonaggression after 1552 as a temporary truce rather than a lasting armistice. “[B]oth sides still aimed at total victory…the conflict was building up slowly but steadily.”300 (Wende’s reference to “the

conflict” foreshadows the Thirty Years’ War.) Thus, while France degenerated from

early-century stability into late-century civil war, the Germanic lands produced an uneasy

late-century détente from early-century strife.

Wende argues that, despite its many positive effects, the Reformation further

fragmented German cultural unity;301 Fulbrook concurs, but emphasizes ideological

297 A History of Germany, 32-34. 298 The History of Germany, 48-49. 299 A History of Germany, 39. 300 Ibid., 45. 301 Ibid., 43.

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fissures which were widened and deepened by confessionalization.302 Despite some

population growth, the Germanic areas of Europe were politically weaker at the end of

the sixteenth century than at the beginning, thanks to divisive retrenchments of politico-

religious sovereignty and resultant internal disputes. This trend mirrors, to some extent,

the late-sixteenth-century fragmentation of French political power; it also presents,

somewhat differently, in sixteenth-century Italian political history. Just as in France and

the Germanic States, political impotence characterized the last decades of the sixteenth

century in Italy.

Unlike France and Germany, however, most of the Italian states did not

experience any period of political effectiveness. Before the century even began, French

armies invaded the Italian peninsula in 1494, starting a decades-long intermittent conflict

which had far-reaching impacts on the political landscape of the rest of the continent. For

most of Italy, “the military campaigns that drove armies of aggressive European

monarchies into Italy before 1500 ended in Spanish victory.”303 The pre-war Renaissance milieu relied upon individual, independent states, apparently “the most modern of their time because of their economic and cultural vitality,” but at the same time “weak and separated,” and “politically disunited,” in Claudia Baldoli’s phrasing.304 Historians agree

that external conquest of Italy was a foregone conclusion. Unlike the Germanic states,

whose unity was debatable preceding and, especially, throughout the reign of Charles V,

302 A Concise History of Germany, 46-49. 303 Killinger, The History of Italy, 83-85. 304 A History of Italy, 97.

197 the Italian states functioned independently of one another. Their subjugation is hardly surprising.

After the end of the Italian Wars, with Spanish political authority firmly entrenched, two remarkable cultural shifts occurred, prompted by and responding to these political shifts. First, Baldoli argues that “foreign political control” did not equate to

“foreign dominance.” Italian culture survived fairly distinct; “local institutions” as well as

“cultural achievements and way of life” remained “singularly Italian,” and Baldoli even proposes that the imported Spanish ruling class became “largely Italianized by the mid- fifteenth century.305 Killinger disagrees; framing the sixteenth-century shifts in Italian culture as a “general deterioration,” he places blame upon “Spanish cultural influences” such as “conservative customs that emphasized ceremony, chivalry, and piety.”306 Both of these hypotheses carry weight. The growth in Catholic power which Killinger cites cannot be denied, and his argument neatly explains that growth. Yet the continued vitality of Italian culture, particularly in the flourishing of the Italian language, equally demands attention. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. As with many conqueror/conquered systems of relation, the subjugate Italians adopted perforce certain

Spanish cultural and ideological trends, and the dominant Spanish evolved to fit their new

Italian cultural surroundings.

The second cultural shift incites less dispute but meshes more directly with the considerations of this section of my dissertation: an Italian reassessment of the pragmatic

305 Ibid., 101. 306 The History of Italy, 84.

198 value of humanism. The stream of the humanistic tradition ran sometimes parallel to, frequently with, and occasionally against both the evolution of religious doctrine and the spread of print, shifts I discuss above. The abstract power of the intellectual networks of the Respublica litteraria directly bolstered the spread of print, and humanism’s renewed scrutiny of personal individuality finds religious expression first in Lutheranism and more fully in Calvinism. Despite these apparent successes, Alison Brown argues, repeated invasions in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries shook Italian intellectuals’ faith in the power of humanism: “these political upheavals clearly triggered an ubiquitous crisis of confidence in the humanist culture that had created and nourished the distinctive identities of the independent city-states.”307 In Brown’s persuasive formulation, Italian intellectualism equated humanist ideology with humanist practice, as well as humanist-concurrent practice. Whether or not every city-state ultimately overrun by France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain had founded their autonomy upon humanist principles, the fact of their autonomy connected them to humanism. By the transitive property, their defeat was the defeat of humanism, or at least a reproof to its universalizing aspirations. Brown documents a partial cultural rejection of humanism in its practical form, a shift which must be considered as a factor in the complexity of post- conquest Italian cultural development.308

By this point, the complexity of the sixteenth-century political web has come into focus. None of the nation-states which I have discussed and which I discuss below existed in political or cultural vacuums. As one shifted, so did the others. With the partial

307 “Rethinking the Renaissance,” 247. 308 Ibid., 246-250.

199 exception of insular England, this pattern plays out throughout the rest of Europe.

Sixteenth-century political shifts in the Low Countries—particularly the northern

Netherlands—counterpoints Italy’s political and debatably cultural subjugation to Spain.

In 1500, as much of Italy enjoyed its last few years before centuries of foreign subjection, the areas which are today Belgium and the Netherlands were under the control of Spain— more specifically, of the Habsburgs. Indeed, one narrative of sixteenth-century change in the Low Countries maps regional prosperity and peace onto shifts in the Habsburg dynasty. This narrative does not fully account for a variety of other necessary factors which contributed to the dramatic differences between 1499 Holland and Belgium and

1603 Holland and Belgium. It does, however, give a legible shape to those changes. I draw the following narrative primarily from Jonathan Israel’s magisterial history The

Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806, with some reference to Herman

Van der Wee’s The Low Countries in the Early Modern World.

Israel plots the beginning of his Habsburg-centric narrative at the death of Charles the Bold, which sparked the Dutch revolt of 1477. The governmental response to that revolt fluctuated from harsh to conciliatory, but by 1493 some measure of stability had been regained. 1493 marked a major regime change, as the newly-crowned Holy Roman

Emperor Maximilian I (who had up until then ruled the Netherlands) appointed his teenage son Philip I to take his place. Israel characterizes as “a period of exceptional stability and relative harmony” the time from the accession of Philip I until the end of the first regency of Margaret of Austria (1493-1516).309 After this, however, at the accession

309 Israel, The Dutch Republic, 33.

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of Charles V—who also sparred with Luther and orchestrated the 1527 sack of Rome—

Dutch attitudes toward their absentee monarchs began to cool. This coolness persisted throughout the reign of Charles, gradually morphing into hostility toward and rebellion against the demands and ruling style of Philip II of Spain, who was granted the Low

Countries when Charles V divided his empire among his sons in 1555. The foreigners to whom Philip II delegated authority never fully commanded the trust of the Dutch nobles.

Philip’s alarm over the growth of Protestantism in the Netherlands and Belgium prompted him to “admonish the magnates to combat heresy, champion the [Catholic]

Church, and attend mass daily.”310 Rebellious Dutch attitudes and increasing Spanish

anxiety tightened tensions until, eventually, the Revolt of 1572 occurred. Despite

governmental attempts to crush it, the insurrection persisted, grew, and turned into a full-

fledged revolution. By the end of the sixteenth century, according to Israel, the Dutch

Republic had “conquered its internal difficulties” and “forg[ed] an orderly, efficient

federal state.” External political decisions permitted this emergence: Philip II shifted his

primary focus to France, and Elizabeth I of England scaled back her intervention in

Dutch politics. By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the Dutch Republic functionally

existed—a shocking turn of events from its dependent situation a century previously.311

As hints in the foregoing paragraph should suggest, the advent of the Dutch

Republic did not occur due to exclusively political reasons. Israel acknowledges this,

recognizing that both the general growth of the Netherlands’ economy and much more

localized poverty throughout the sixteenth century motivated many of the political

310 Ibid., 139. 311 Cf. Israel, The Dutch Republic, 9-40, 55-73, 129-235.

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decisions and capabilities involved in Habsburg governance and native revolt.312 Hans

Van der Wee, from the perspective of economic history, takes this argument further: the

emergence of the Low Countries as economically powerful began in the late medieval

period, fueling not only the Revolt of 1572 but also the startlingly brisk growth of the

Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.313 In addition, the twin impulses of religious reformation and print-fueled humanism were in play as well; so were the political developments occurring throughout the rest of the Continent. The Dutch Republic emerged from the sixteenth century on an upward trajectory, unlike so many other nation-

states—but the changing sixteenth-century fortunes of those other nation-states were

crucial influences in the unexpected success of the Dutch Republic.

No other major European politico-cultural entity had as promising a century as

did the Low Countries. England, from its continentally marginal place across the

Channel, largely avoided extended military involvement in European wars, but the fact

that the country was technically at peace for so much of the sixteenth century should not

suggest that its political climate was peaceful. At best, English politics were debatably

stable. Some of the stability stemmed from the long reigns of monarchs in whom power

was centralized: Henry VIII and Elizabeth I combined for nearly 80 of the century’s

regnal years. Another reason for stability may have been the way in which religious

reformation occurred. Whereas Dutch, German, and French reformations started with

commoners and quickly gathered momentum in the ruling bodies, England’s ideological

turn away from Rome and toward idiosyncratic insular Protestantism was motivated,

312 Ibid., 106-128. 313 Cf. The Low Countries in the Early Modern World, 47-68, 145-166, 264-278,

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made possible by, and served the needs of the monarchy. The relative unity of political

power, which Henry VIII had consolidated in the decades before his politically-motivated break with the Pope, meant that religiously-motivated rebellion effectively constituted treason.314 Finally, England’s relative geographical isolation likely contributed to the

measure of political stability it enjoyed throughout the sixteenth century. Unlike most

continental nation-states, travel to and from England required a potentially dangerous sea crossing. This reduced the risk of foreign incursions, but it also increased the cost of importation and slowed the rate of cultural exchange. More than any European state I

have considered in this section, England experienced the century of change as a series of

relatively subtle, undramatic movements.

To be sure, Henry VIII’s attempted invasions of France, military involvement in

Holland, and the threat of the Armada constituted major political events. But England’s

political climate changed during the sixteenth century in a move from turmoil to

statecraft. Fresh off decades of fifteenth-century king-swapping, the general dictum to

“talk first, fight second” which characterized the reigns of Henry VIII and, particularly,

Elizabeth amounts to a significant political evolution.315 Even the war with Spain in

which Elizabeth found herself embroiled in the last third of her reign had curiously

intermittent and proxied qualities, not much like the repeated, direct, and extended

campaigns which raged on the Continent throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries.316 In general, governmental (that is, monarchical) activity in the sixteenth

314 Cf. McEntegart, “Henry VIII and Lutheran Germany,” 76-86. 315 Cf. Trim, “Seeking a Protestant Alliance,” 139-177. 316 Cf. Hammer, “Crucible of War,” 235-242.

203 century redefined the political valence of England. This redefinition broadcast itself at home and abroad, incorporating a strong politico-religious streak. As a result, England in

1603 was on a more equal footing with other Continental nations—not quite caught up from its self-imposed slow development, but making progress hand over fist.

I begin this chapter by positing the sixteenth century as defined by rapid, dramatic change in Europe. This involved, most visibly, a shift from singular religious hegemony to multiple religious options contingent on governmental approval. At once caused by and causing this ideological change, print evolved from an incidental, ad-hoc artisanal production model into a full-fledged, regulated, selectively inclusive industry. And, shaped by and shaping the evolutions of religion and print, widespread political turmoil sapped the secular authority of the papacy, gave birth to a Dutch nation-state, facilitated the subjugation of Italy, and dramatically altered political culture in England, France, and the Germanic states. All of these trajectories of change, I argue, affected the development of the folio throughout the sixteenth century. Religion as an accelerant of the print explosion prompted a reconsideration of what could be printed in folio, and what could be printed at all. Technological experimentations in print sparked commercially-limited experimentation in the form and function of the printed folio. Political developments stimulated print production in some areas at some points and suppressed it elsewhere, elsewhen. The folio as a type of printed book flexed and swayed with these changes, responding to stimulation and suppression, to attitudes experimental and conservative.

This yields a corpus of sixteenth-century folios as defined by variation and change as is the century which produced them. In the next chapter, I describe, defend, and explain the material variations in my data-set.

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Chapter 5 - Sixteenth-Century Folios on a Spectrum of Mass A. Folios from the Sixteenth Century: A Data-set Description The first three chapters of this dissertation focus on a relatively small data-set of

thin folios printed in London in the early seventeenth century. The final three chapters of

this dissertation examine a similarly small data-set: folios printed in Europe between the

mid-1450s advent of printing in the West and 1501.317 In part because of the limiters

imposed on my data-sets for those two sections, the data-points within those sets demonstrate strong uniformity. The simplicity of the charts and graphs in those sections graphically illustrates this uniformity. Several of the charts in Chapters 1-3 depict distributions of two, three, or four subsets. Similarly, several of the charts in Chapters 6-8

depict binary distributions of two subsets. These data-sets do display a measure of

diversity; the examples of The booke of fortune, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, The tactiks

of Ælian, and the Epistole Devotissime of St. Catherine of Siena exemplify

experimentation. But the uniformity in the general material profiles of the fifteenth- and seventeenth- data-sets also presents in the homogeneity of their specific data.

By contrast, diversity of content and size defines the data-set for this section. It

includes a Sarum-rite antiphonary of massive dimensions (7864g), a five-volume first edition of Galen’s complete works, and multiple weighty dictionaries. It also includes slender books of songs, aristocratic civility, and political theory (such as the 484g edition of Guglielmo de Saliceto’s Salute Corporis).318 This variegation in my data springs

specifically from the inclusive nature of this data-set, which samples from a variety of

317 This is the date chosen by scholars as the end of the incunabular period. Like most periodizations, the rationale behind separating books printed in 1500 from books printed in 1501 is murky. 318 Antiphonary: STC 15790. Salute Corporis: STC 12512.

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traditions. My first and third sections, for better or for worse, place like folios with like, a

methodology which points up fascinating and unforeseen material and textual trends. For

this section, my data-set samples from a variety of intellectual, cultural, religious, and

material traditions. Juxtaposing these traditions with each other eliminates the noise

created by tradition-specific material and textual conventions. An example of this noise is

uneven foliation conventions in liturgical folios (missals, antiphonaries, breviaries).

Rather, the diversity of my data-points illustrates both general folio conventions and,

elsewhere, the lack of determinable folio conventions.

Another crucial element which contributes to the diversity of this section, the

broad range of locations in which these folios were manufactured, enhances this cross-

section differently. My first section confines itself, purposefully, to London as an

originary location, and my archival access populated the data-set in my third section

predominantly with Venetian folios. By contrast, this section includes folios from across

Europe. Again, most of these books were produced in Venice and London, but there are

also data-points produced in France or with links to French, specifically Parisian,

publishing, the Low Countries, and non-Venetian Italy. As Pettegree makes clear, print

technology—both its sophistication and its availability—advanced at varying rates in

different regions.319 This comparison of folios from a broad range of originary locations

benefiting from diverse print milieux performs the same noise-filtering function performed by size diversity: in comparing geographically diverse folios with each other, the locality of some conventions and the generality of others becomes clear.

319 Pettegree. Book in the Renaissance, 65-67.

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While none of my data-sets explicitly or intentionally limit by genre or tradition,

the other limiters I place upon them at times inadvertently restrict them to certain genres.

For instance, limiting my seventeenth-century data-set to folios of roughly fifty sheets or

less totally excludes certain data-points: no dictionaries appear in that data-set, and

precious few religious books. In my third section, archival exigencies led to the

predominance of Aldine incunabula. Aldo Manuzio had a well-documented predilection

for classical texts, and apparently an interest in folio first editions of texts of antiquity. In

practice, these cram my fifteenth-century data-set with Aldo’s favorites (abstract

philosophy, natural philosophy, philology, and other intellectual books) instead of the

more practical folios which populate my first-section data-set. My sixteenth-century data-

set, which samples from a variety of conventions and originary locations, includes folios

in a broad array of genres. These do include genres present in other sections: music-

books, philosophical works, various practical pedagogical folios augmented with

illustrations, diagrams, or reference technologies. But they also include less-common folio genres: a collection of poetry and drama, a French-printed English translation of Ars moriendi, Tridentine canons, Andrew Maunsell’s Catalogue of English printed books,

and a vernacular Bible.320 These inclusions contribute to my overall project in this

dissertation of demonstrating the historical diversity of the folio format, revealing the

breadth of works actually printed in folio.

As a whole, the data-set from which I draw my conclusions in this second section

is the largest of any section in this dissertation, for a few related reasons. First, this data-

320 Poetry/drama: STC 6236; Ars moriendi: USTC 180097; Tridentine canons: USTC 820577; Maunsell: STC 17669; Bible: STC 2066.

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set includes folios printed within a 102-year span: from 1501 until 1603. I defend this periodization below. As such, it stands to reason that this data-set would be larger than

that attached to the first section (covering 46 years, from 1454 to 1500) or the second

section (covering twenty years, from 1603 to 1623). But the size of this data-set is also

due to the spread and industrialization of print, a shift which, as I argue above, is

significant in its own right as well as related to watershed religious and political

developments in the sixteenth century. When data-set size is juxtaposed with time period-

length, my sixteenth-century data-set shows a higher data-point-per-year ratio (1.1078)

than the fifteenth-century data-set (.5217), but a lower ratio than the seventeenth-century

data-set (1.6). While the sizes of my data-set are exceedingly contingent, this mirrors

what I suspect to be a trend of accelerated folio production increasing steadily from the

fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. On the other hand, the contingencies of these data-

set-sizes, particularly their fundamental reliance upon survival, limits their ability to

demonstrate certain conclusions about acceleration of production rates or industrial

growth. As I hint above, simultaneously with the stimulation of print’s dominance

enacted by religious upheaval, industrial suppression and material loss likely stemmed

from political turmoil. Were it not for the dampers applied by the French Wars of

Religion, the Dutch Revolt, and incessant wars in Italy, print would have spread in the

sixteenth century even faster and further than it did.

Variation in material profile also defines this data-set. Some of these folios are

remarkably slender, like the 1562 Aldine collection of Marcus Antonius Natta, which has

208 a mass of 328g; as a matter of fact, this is the slimmest non-English folio I examined.321

Others are quite thick, such as the aforementioned Sarum-rite antiphonary which has a mass of 7864g and is bound, impossibly, as a single volume. The leaf dimensions of these folios vary sharply as well. The most dimensionally imposing folio in this data-set, a copy of the 1536 Aldine edition of Eustratius on the Nicomachean Ethics, measures

429.5mm tall by 278 mm wide.322 The smallest-dimensioned folio in this data-set, a copy of Richard Arnold’s “Chronicle” printed in 1503 in Antwerp, is shorter than the

Eustratius is wide, at 237mm tall by 184 mm wide.323 This data-set includes long works and short works, as well as short works printed in large type and long works reduced or epitomized for brevity’s sake. It also includes books printed on the smallest (and therefore the cheapest) size of paper, as well as books which demanded, for a variety of reasons, larger, more expensive paper-sizes.324 The diverse material profiles of these folios thus betrays a diversity in the material exigencies which governed their final shapes.325

321 USTC 844312. 322 USTC 828525. The copy I examined, to which these measurements are specific, was in the Harry Ransom Center. 323 STC 782. The copy I examined, to which these measurements are specific, was in the British Library. 324 I draw this assessment of the proportional connection between paper cost and paper size from Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks.” Since Blayney refers specifically to English paper prices, which would have been higher than continental prices, large-paper copies printed on the Continent would generally have been less expensive than those printed in England. Though gross cost would have been lower closer to continental manufacturing centers, I operate from the postulate that the ratio of cost difference between sizes would have remained proportionally the same. 325 These folios also derive from diverse origins. 73 were printed in Venice, 30 in London, and smaller minorities were printed elsewhere: Antwerp, Rouen, Paris, Rome, Bologna. Though certain elements of mise-en-page still mark out this folio as produced in Germany and that one as French, sixteenth-century books traveled well enough that they could not be too regionally specific. Cf. Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 65-67; Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 207-210.

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One more definitive facet of this data-set deserves attention: its wide sampling of

use-patterns. The concept of the use-pattern is central to my assessment of folio bibliography and materiality. By “use-pattern,” I refer to a sustained trend of physical engagement running with or against the grain of a book’s paratextual or material instructions for use. Use-patterns often, but not always, leave traces from which their shape can be deduced. The worn pages of The booke of fortune exemplifies the sort of

traces which may be left by use-patterns. Use-patterns provide a handle on materiality which is tenuous at best and conjectural at worst. Their frequent origin in critical deduction contests their reliability. Yet most books were used, individually, in similar ways, repeatedly; maps of those trends of usage, and narratives of moments of resistance to use-patterns, deserve scholarly scrutiny.

The first three chapters of this dissertation draw a cautious connection between

slender material profiles and intended use-patterns characterized by practicality and

concretion. The final three chapters argue for co-occurrence of thickness in folio and a

related cloud of abstract use-patterns, intellectual and pedagogical in nature. The data-set

for this section, rooted in diversity as it is, includes both slim and thick folios; I have

charted a range of use-patterns for those folios, from the extremely practical to the

radically esoteric. Particularly interesting is the presence of multiple varieties of music-

book in this data-set, those different varieties demanding different use-patterns. Toward

the end of the period, several London-printed folios of music make their appearance.

These are of a type with most of the music-books in my seventeenth-century data-set:

slim, secular, primarily scores, probably popular, flavored with some musical pedagogy.

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To all intents and purposes, these inaugurate the slim-music-folio tradition carried on by the likes of Leighton, Coperario, and Captain Hume.

Another type of music folio also populates this data-set: the book of liturgy, which almost always includes some music. These provide structure and content for

Catholic worship, either daily or for more intermittent gathering. With one London- printed exception, they were printed in France.326 They were all printed before Henry

VIII’s final break with Rome; the latest, a Salisbury-rite breviary printed in Paris, emerged in 1531.327 All are fairly massive, ranging from the London-printed missal

(999g), which I discuss further below,328 to the aforementioned Sarum-rite antiphonary

(7864g). While these books of liturgy include some music, they obviously include it for

different performance than that invited by the popular music books.

They also present that music differently. Folios of popular music are

predominantly slender, for a few reasons. First, slenderness allowed them to be crushed

flat on a table, so their table-oriented notation would be legible. Second, since popular

music was largely printed speculatively, slenderness meant low sheet count, which in turn meant lower overhead and less financial risk. As a result, folios of popular music tend to make the most of each page, filling up white space and printing small (cf. Fig. 1). By contrast, the mise-en-page of liturgical music revels in large print and lavish white space,

for both music and text. While decorative capitals seldom adorn the first lines of songs or

music pieces in the slender popular folios, they frequently appear in liturgical folios (cf.

326 These are the only French-printed books in this data-set. 327 STC 15830. 328 STC 16190.

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Fig. 2). Apparently, liturgical folios had to have a specific visual impact, one which

differs from the conventions of the secular popular-music folio.

Figure 5-1

Image omitted for copyright reasons Figure 5-2

I thus characterize the diversity of my data-set in a few specific ways. It is large: it contains multitudes, critical chart-toppers, deep cuts, and everything in between. It is materially inclusive: it includes folios of great and little mass, and (crucially) constructs a

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continuum of mass between those two extremes. It is geographically diverse: data-points

originate across Europe, from Antwerp to Rome, with a few especially well-represented printing locales included. It is representative rather than exhaustive: since complete coverage is nigh-impossible, the scattershot nature of this data-set seeks rather to epitomize European trends. Finally, it is inclusive of diverse use-patterns: in order to destabilize dominant, prestige-laden narratives about thick, high-culture tomes, it includes folios which were cheap, practically useful, and even somewhat disposable.

The terminus ad quem for this variegated data-set falls in 1603. This was a most remarkable point in history, not merely because the data-set for my first section picks up there. Elizabeth I died that year, ending the third-longest (at that point) reign of any

English monarch, and the longest since the fourteenth-century reign of Edward III.

France continued to find its political feet after the accession of Henry IV; Protestantism enjoyed its most widespread political acceptance ever. The Dutch Republic, similarly, continued its ascendancy, though religious divide and political discontent had begun to precipitate the whole continent toward the Thirty Years’ War. With the accession of

James I to the English throne, and particularly with the unification of the Scottish and

English crowns, the three metrics I discuss above (politics, religion, print technology) began another sea-change. So, in 1603, I end my slightly elongated sixteenth-century data-set. It is full enough, as it is.

B. Folios on a Spectrum of Mass The pages to follow analyze my data-set, using the central thread of a broad continuum of folio mass to shed light on the variety of folios in my data-set. This analysis yields specific conclusions about the cultural and material valence of the folio in the

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sixteenth century. I situate these conclusions in the historical context offered by this

dissertation. That is, I conceive of the sixteenth-century folio as descendant from the

incunabular folio (examined in the final three chapters) and ancestor to the seventeenth-

century folio (examined in the first three chapters). The folio as constructed here emerges

from, nestles within, and helps to produce the generative historical-cultural milieux

which, themselves, shape it.

Before ordering and reordering my data-set, I must first establish the relationships

between non-volitional material elements, volitional design elements, and content. Except

in very specific circumstances, the relationships between these three variables are

correlative, rather than causative or necessary. Certain distributions of non-volitional or

volitional material elements, or concurrences of those distributions with specific

configurations of content, do resemble each other. But these distributions do not necessarily cause or, conversely, emerge from others. For example, in discussing non- illustrated, non-paginated, high-mass dictionaries, I simply note the frequency of the co-

occurrence of these traits. This is not to argue that dictionaries could not be paginated,

that illustrations and high-mass folios never went together, or that pagination could only

co-occur with illustration. Even when variables co-occur often, such as the common occurrence of large type in liturgical folios, I neither can nor do suggest either liturgical folios only/always used large type or that large type signifies the liturgical folio. Such suggestions are illogical and unsupported by the evidence of my data-set.

These resonances do, however, imply correlation—the frequent resonances between certain variables. Correlation offers less potential for critical drama, but it also

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poses less risk to the credibility of my conclusions. Only in very definite circumstances

does one variable influence another. For instance, the nature of an antiphonary’s content

would necessitate a high-mass material profile. Or large type and wide margins yield

higher page-count than smaller type and narrower margins—and thence, again, high

mass. Such clear-cut lines of causation are few and far between, however; I mostly build

my conclusions upon correlative, rather than causative, relations.

1. Sub-1kg Folios Fig. 3 reflects the range of mass measurements associated with the folios in this

data-set. A few points about this graph deserve explicative emphasis. First, the x-axis

(horizontal) divides this data-set into bins 250g in size, sorted in order of ascending mass;

that is, the second bin means that my data-set contains fourteen data-points with a mass

between 250g and 500g, and so on. The first bin on the chart, labeled “≤ 250,” includes

every data-point with a mass less than 250g; the last bin, labeled “> 3000,” includes every data-point with a mass greater than 3000g. While grouping all seven of these folios to some extent erases their individuality, this visualization technique does render the differences between the majority of my data-set more legible. That is, I sacrifice the

individual material legibility of a small number of folios in the interest of the collective

material legibility of a large number of folios. In a similar vein, Fig. 3 expresses the

entirety of my data-set, write large in a manner which simplifies its shape. As such, the

visual impact of this data-set highlights broad strokes and generality rather than

specificity. Fig. 4, by contrast, expresses roughly half of the data-set (53 out of 110, or

48.18%): those folios which have a mass of less than a kilogram, a subset on which the

next section of this dissertation will focus.

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Figure 5-3

Figure 5-4

Nearly half of the volumes in this data-set have a mass less than a kilogram. The majority (38 out of 53, 71.69%) have a mass between 500g and 1000g, and a sizeable minority (15 out of 53, 28.31%) have a mass less than 500g. These are not, in other

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words, bulky tomes. Rather, based upon my personal material interaction with them in

the archive, most of these folios could easily be bound with other slim folios without

endangering the structural integrity of the resultant book-block.329 As a result—

somewhat arbitrarily—I define folios with a mass of less than 1kg as relatively slender,

and folios with a mass greater than 1kg as relatively bulky. Slenderness does not equate

to portability, however. Fig. 5 expresses leaf dimensions, with a trendline to indicate

median dimensions. Nearly all of the data-points in this subset measure ten inches on the

fore-edge or more; folio dimensions are not easily portable dimensions. No matter how

low a folio’s mass might be, these standard leaf dimensions preclude frequent and

sustained travel.

329 As my introduction notes, in calculating folio mass, I subtract board mass from total mass to arrive at net (book) mass. Leather on boards will of necessity have greater mass than limp vellum wrappers, and I do not wish to taint my results with anachronistic post-printing variables like binding.

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Fig. 5: leaf dimensions in sub-1kg folios 400 395 390 385 380 375 370 365 360 355 350 345 340 335 330 325 320 315 310 305 300 295 290 285 280 275 270 265 260 255 250 245 240 235 230 225 220 215 210 205 200 195 190 185 180 175 170 165 160 155 150 150 155 160 165 170 175 180 185 190 195 200 205 210 215 220 225 230 235 240 245

Figure 5-5

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Though the material profile of these folios precludes their regular movement, they

were movable in the sense of their vendibility. The end of Chapter 3 discusses the

potential impact of paper cost on total overhead, wholesale price, and retail price: in

terms of paper, price decreases in direct correlation to decreases in mass.330 Put differently, both affordability and, thence, the size of the potential buying public, increase inversely proportionate to mass. As mass decreases, so does price; as price and mass decrease, folios become both more affordable (in terms of real price) and more widely affordable (in terms of the purchasing publics capable of acquiring them). Thus, the low mass of this subset means that its population would have been relatively more accessible, and likely therefore more vendible, than the folios in the higher-mass subset.

These folios usually use fewer than 125 sheets; the thickest in this subset, the

Sarum-rite missal, runs to 122 sheets (244 leaves/488 pages), with a mass of 999g. This is

fairly bulky, with roughly the same sheet-count (and almost precisely the same mass) as

William Prynne’s 1000g 1633 Histrio-Mastix, that uncommonly thick anti-theatrical

quarto, whose format and thickness may be rhetorical.331 If quartos, octavos, duodecimos,

and smaller formats are coded as broadly affordable, and the thickest quarto is

approximately 1kg, then a mass of 1kg is the outer limit of what might be conceivably

deemed broadly affordable. All of the folios in this subset thus fall within the definition

of “broadly affordable.” As a caveat, though, I must mention that more than half of these

330 This is why I scale folio size on a spectrum of mass: mass operates as a noncountable expression of number of sheets used. 331 As I note above, I am indebted to Adam Hooks for sharing this insight in private communication.

219 folios have a mass greater than 700g, so the majority of this subset would land decidedly on the expensive end of broadly affordable.

Another curious facet of this subset is its population with early modern authors, as opposed to authors from the medieval or classical periods, or even from antiquity. For the sake of this section, I define the early modern as beginning in 1500, the medieval beginning in 500, the classical as beginning around 100 BC, and antiquity as anything before then. Figure 6 expresses the temporal origins of the texts in this subset of slim folios. The large minority of folios with early modern content demands immediate attention: nearly double the size of any other subset, this classification renders visible the frequency with which folios printed material written in the early modern period. This trend becomes even more remarkable when considered in relation to the incidence of early modern composition or authorship in folios with mass greater than 1kg, which is expressed in Fig. 15. Recently written, relatively short early modern texts were frequently printed in the folio format; slim folios were more likely to include texts written in the early modern period than texts written in any other era.

In addition, the slimmer the folio, the greater its likelihood of including early modern texts. Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 display the relative incidences of era between the slimmest folios (with a mass less than or equal to 500g) and the thicker folios in this data- set (with a mass greater than 500g and less than or equal to 1kg). Early modern folios put on a strong showing in Fig. 7, further demonstrating early modern texts’ dominance of the slim-folio market. But classical texts appear more frequently than do early modern texts in folios with a mass of 500g-1kg. This implies that extremely slender folios might

220 have been associated primarily with texts created in the early modern period. At the same time, the likelihood of originary diversity increased in direct correlation to the thickness of the folio; thicker folios were more likely to include a text originating before the early modern period. Put differently, the likelihood of an early modern temporal origin increased inversely proportionate to the thickness of the folio; slimmer folios were more likely to contain early modern works.

Fig. 6: Era of Composition

4, 8%

14, 26% 24, 45%

11, 21%

Early Modern Medieval Classical Antiquity

Figure 5-6

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Fig. 7: era of composition in sub-500g folios

Antiquity

Classical

Medieval

Early Modern

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

Figure 5-7

Fig. 8: era of composition in 500g-1000g folios

Antiquity

Classical

Medieval

Early Modern

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

Figure 5-8

These slim folios are relatively unlikely to include illustration, though more likely to be illustrated than the thicker folios which I discuss below (see Fig. 9). This may be due to the concentration of early modern authorship and the accompanying relative scarcity of texts from the classical period and antiquity. These latter texts, more than the former, tend to be organized as, and to present themselves as, reference texts. The symbiotic ties between reference and illustration affect their coöccurrence; data-sets with small populations of reference texts tend to also present smaller incidence of illustration, as is the case with this data-set.

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Though illustration is somewhat uncommon, ornamentation appears to be

standard throughout this subset. Its frequent deployment across formats suggests that

sixteenth-century print in general gravitated toward ornamentation as an industry

standard.332 Only one folio in the entire data-set, inclusive of thin and thick folios, had

neither historiated initials, decorative borders, nor ornaments: a 380g folio printed by

(for?) the Venetian Academy in 1559, entitled NOVA EXPLANATIO TOPICORUM

ARISTOTELIS, which seems to have been printed for primarily utilitarian purposes.333

Every other folio in this data-set either includes decorations or leaves space in which decorative initials may be printed later or hand-rubricated. Both the folios with printed ornamentation and those which leave space for manuscript embellishment thus account for incidental ornamentation as an intrinsic part of the book.

Fig. 9: incidence of illustration in sub- and supra-1kg folios

none

engraving

woodcut

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52

Supra-1kg Sub-1kg

Figure 5-9

332 This is technically conjecture; I have no specific data to support it. 333 USTC 862350.

223

Though most of the folios in the sub-1kg subset do not work primarily as reference texts, they include plenty of reference technologies, presupposing some degree of discontinuous reading. Fig. 10 expresses the distribution of different types of reference technologies. This chart shows how many records each technology appears in, such that headings appear in 51 folios, while only two folios include indices. Certain specialized technologies like glossaries, lineation, and indices make appearances here, foreshadowing their gradual acceptance throughout the seventeenth and especially eighteenth centuries.

Most common, however, are variable section headings, sequential reference numbering

(most often foliation, but with a healthy showing of pagination as well), and tables of contents. The pervasiveness of variable section headings, especially, demonstrates that this model of thinking about textual organization took hold throughout the sixteenth century. Their incidence specifically in thin folios demonstrates that early modern bookmakers thought of variable section headings as broadly applicable regardless of a text’s length.

224

Fig. 10: incidence of reference technologies

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54

Glossary Lineation Headings Pagination Index Contents

Figure 5-10

In sum, then, sixteenth-century folios which could be considered slender—those with a mass less than 1000g—were characterized by a diverse set of specific material and textual traits. Most slim folios were not too slim; many fell between 501g and 1000g. The smallest folios (250g-500g) were most likely to contain texts written in the early modern period. Thicker slender folios (501g-1000g) were about as likely to contain early modern texts as they were to contain classical or medieval texts. Though 1kg is a portable weight, the generous leaf dimensions of these folios precluded common or frequent portability. In general, sub-1kg folios were somewhat unlikely to include illustrations, but almost certain either to deploy or to invite the deployment of a superfluous decorative scheme.

They were also almost certain to include some type of reference technology, inviting discontinuous reading. In fact, only one folio in this entire subset wholly omits reference technology. Overall, the slim sixteenth-century folio included elements predictable and

225

unpredictable to book historians—but it functions effectively as its own subset. In the

sixteenth-century book trade, slimness and folioness coexisted.

2. Supra-1kg Folios “The conventional image of the folio defines it by its thickness.” So runs the

refrain of this dissertation. The sixteenth-century folios which I label {supra-1kg} demonstrate the partial legitimacy, and the origin, of this critical and popular convention.

More than half of the data-set is comprised of folios which I (again, arbitrarily) label

“bulky,” or having a mass greater than 1kg: 57 out of 110 records, or 51.81%, fit this description. Fig. 11 expresses in detail the distribution of mass in this data-set. Because it covers more than 2000g of mass variation, this visualization groups data-points into

200g-wide bins, as opposed to the 100g-wide bins used for the equivalent chart above

(Fig. 4). Unlike Fig. 4, Fig. 11 demonstrates the relative frequency in this data-set of thinner (though not quite absolutely thin) folios: more than half of the folios in this subset have a mass between 1kg and 2kg (35 out of 57, or 61.4%). A different detail-view of

Fig. 3 reveals that more than half of the whole data-set (56 out of 110, or 50.9%) falls within a 1000g-range, between 500g and 1500g. A large majority have a mass less than

2000g. The conventionally chunky folio, extremely large and incredibly thick, makes an appearance in this data-set, but in cameo rather than in a starring role.

226

Figure 5-11

These thick folios invite use-patterns which are, generally, static; even a folio of

1500g is difficult to carry about, regardless of the large dimensions of its leaves. But

different folios code different channels of static use, what might be called “stationarities.”

Consider, for instance, the stationarity of the 1531 Paris-printed Salisbury-rite breviary in my data-set; it has a mass of 5602g.334 At first glance, it may seem similar to the 1555

Livy printed by the Aldine Press, which has a mass of 4125g.335 Both are massive books.

Both would have been expensive. Both are designed for discontinuous consultation. Both

contain similar paratextual materials, including title pages and decorative initials. The

bulk of both prohibits their portability. Yet the breviary’s red and black ink, capacious

leaf dimensions, large font, and broad gutter margins code its stationarity as public. It sits

334 STC 15830. 335 USTC 838298.

227

still out before the gaze of many, as much an object to be seen as a text to be decoded. It

relies on visual as well as verbal rhetoric. By contrast, the small type and dense text-

block of the Livy, as well as the nature of its extensive scholia (by Carolus Sigonius) and

its complex not-quite-lineation schema codes the stationarity of this volume as

specifically private, or at least individual. The copy I examined includes scholarly

manuscript marginalia, which indicate that this is a text which has been studied carefully;

its authority and its value lodge in its words, not its appearance.336 Where the breviary

might be ceremonially carried or permanently chained to a rostrum, the Livy would live

on a bookshelf or perhaps on a desk. In other words, while most thick folios led

stationary lives, the nature of those stationarities would have differed.

Correlative with these diverse stationarities, the thick folios in this subset would

naturally have been less affordable than the thinner folios I examine above. Unlike their

stationarity, however, the reason for this relative expense is unitary: their paper usage. As

evidenced by Fig. 9, few include purpose-made illustrations, which would have constituted the largest extraneous cost for production. The paper cost of these thick folios would have dwarfed the paper cost incurred by any quarto or octavo project. Given their textual length, thick folios would also incur a proportionally large in-shop overhead: the labor cost of preparing copy, composition, and any correction which took place. The magnitude of the labor cost makes logical sense. It takes longer to compose 300 formes than to compose 150 formes, so printers and/or publishers would have to compensate workers in proportion to their labor. Even the practice of spreading per-issue overhead

336 The copy I examined is at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.

228

costs thin over a large print run could not overcome the sheer volume of paper required

for a single copy of a 300-sheet folio.337 Using Blayney’s figures (.0889p/sheet), paper

cost alone for this notional bulky folio would be 26.67p, or more than two shillings.338

I imagine a relatively continuous, although contingent, line of influence between

retail outlets and printshops. Printing, publishing, and bookselling were often distinct

functions, and frequently discharged by different agents—though not always. Given the

extraordinary financial risks involved in printing thick folios, publishers probably only

underwrote thick folios which they believed would sell wholesale. Given the entangled

nature of agency in the book trade, publishers would have had a sense of what would sell

wholesale, and therefore, indirectly, what would sell in the retail market. As such, it

seems fairly certain that at some point in the prehistories of the folios in my data-set, a

publisher believed each one was a worthwhile investment, and that its vendible potential

outweighed the financial risk it represented.339

These folios’ title pages tend to emphasize their contents’ discrete, definitive

necessity. This trend may seek to forestall complaints or anxieties about these folios’

value by emphasizing their comprehensiveness, by promising their definitive nature,

and/or by arguing for the individual value of each folio. Not every title page makes all of

337 Anyway, as Farmer and Lesser point out, some print-governance organizations set an upper limit for print runs; cf. “Popularity of Playbooks Revisited, 15-16. 338 Cf. the end of Chapter 3. 339 Scholars have investigated (primarily European) publishers’ attitudes toward the vendibility of their books—examples include Nuovo, Book Trade, Stevens and Gehl, “Cheap print,” and Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius.

229 these arguments at once, so each of the following examples display only one of these emphases in isolation.

The title page of Eustratius (Fig. 12) promises that its contents are both comprehensive and voluminous.340 The relation between these two traits highlights their different shades of meaning. First, et aliorum insignium promises a broad range of authoritative commentators, supplementary to the reflections of the medieval Orthodox bishop Eustratius of Nicaea. It also reassures potential purchasers that its contents include more than Eustratius’ responses to the Nicomachean Ethics. Since this is not the editio princeps of Eustratius’ commentary, readers may have known the relatively limited extent of his engagement with Aristotle. This comprehension resonates with, but does not causally influence, the length of the text (in libros decem). Comprehensiveness and capacity thus recommend this text separately, and in slightly different ways.

340 USTC 828525.

230

Figure 5-12

231

The title page of the 1548 amplified reissue of Sir Thomas Elyot’s Bibliotheca

Eliotæ = Eliotis librarie (Fig. 13) claims to be indispensable as well as voluminous.341

Whereas earlier editions of this dictionary boasted a continentally spare title page,342 this edition expresses a complex tangle of rhetorical points: this new version is “augmented and inriched,” its pages are crammed full with more than 33,000 entries, and it is “very nedefull” for those studying Latin. (It also, incidentally, apologizes for what may have been a minor scholarly scandal—errors introduced through excessive reliance on a single source.) The frequency with which Elyot’s dictionaries were reprinted and augmented implies that this is simply one entry in a long line of editions, and as such a reliable seller.343 The anxiety on the title page may respond rather to the inflated length (and thus

paper-cost) of this folio—nearly twice as long as the previous edition. The second edition

advertises its necessity, rectitude, and comprehension because it must; without such

protestations, this version might not sell as well as its predecessors.

341 STC 7661. 342 STC 7660. 343 Four editions in ten years indicates a popular brand: 1538 (STC 7659), 1542 (STC 7659.5), 1545, 1548.

232

Figure 5-13

233

The title page of Prouinciale seu constitutions Anglie (1501) positions this book

as definitive because of its accuracy (Fig. 14).344 Words like iustis annotationibus,

honestis characteribus, and accuratione signal the title page’s emphasis on precision.

Language in the colophon demonstrates that this concern with accuracy and definitive

value extended to the printing: it praises the accuracy of its printer in annotationibus.

This emphasis may have emerged from the geographical (and, therefore, potentially political) disjunction between the book’s authorship, printing and preparation, and ultimate market. Though it was digested and annotated by the Englishman William

Lyndwood, the Fleming Josse Bade edited it (scant years before he opened his own printshop), and the French Andreas Bocard published it, all for sale and use in England.

The paratextual emphasis on reliable accuracy and, thence, definitivity, serve indeed to positively amplify the text’s usefulness and value. They may also preëmptively neutralize any nationalistically- or politically-motivated devaluation of its authority.

Figure 5-14

344 STC 17107.

234

The urgency of this title-page rhetoric may also stem in part from the non-

immediacy of the texts in question. Fig. 15 expresses the compositional origins of the

folios in this subset, while Fig. 16 and Fig. 17 further detail originary distribution

between the more slender folios and the truly massive folios in this subset. The most

obvious divergence between this subset and the sub-1kg group I discuss above lies in the

population of folios of early modern origin. Whereas the content of the slim folios I

examine above is most likely to originate in the early modern period, early modern

origins account for only a quarter of the thick-folio subset. Classical and medieval

origins, by contrast, account for more than half (58%) of the whole. Thus, in general,

folios with mass of greater than 1kg were less likely to include content created in the

early modern period, and much more likely to include earlier material.345

345 A major point of ambiguity lurks in my periodization of certain folios’ composition. When folios included a well-known medieval text with high-profile early modern commentary, the primary value of that folio is unclear: is it a classical folio or an early modern one? In general, I class folios by their “base text,” which is the raison d’etre for commentary—no matter how high-profile or desirable that commentary might be. This is a suspect practice, however, and deserves further investigation.

235

Fig. 15: Era of Composition

10, 17% 15, 25%

18, 30%

17, 28%

Early Modern Medieval Classical Antiquity

Figure 5-15

Much of this imbalance may be due to the relative youth and, thus, small size of the early modern corpus at large. Thick folios almost always include either a vast number of smaller writings or a smaller number of longer writings. By 1500 the medieval corpus was more or less complete, as were corpora of texts from the classical period and from antiquity. Early modern writing, by contrast, had had less than a century to mature. Part of the reason for the small number of extremely thick folios of early modern texts lies in the fact that, compared to medieval or classical corpora, relatively few early modern works ran to a length which would fill hundreds of sheets.

Both the legitimacy of this caveat and its limitations are borne out by the makeup of this subset. Fig. 16 expresses originary populations in folios which are feasibly movable—that is, not necessarily chained or permanently immobile. I postulate two kilograms as the outside limit for feasible movability. Fig. 17 expresses originary populations in folios whose mass is greater than this threshold. Since folios with less

236 mass contain shorter works, the predominance of early modern origins in Fig. 16 is fairly predictable, as is their relative rarity in Fig. 17. This fits, to a certain extent, the shape of the caveat I discuss above: thinner folios are generally more likely to contain early modern works, and conversely thicker folios are less likely to contain early modern works. But this trend is more complex: the balance between all four originary periods

(with a total deviation of 4) in Fig. 16 mirrors the relative balance between classical, medieval, and early modern origins (with a total deviation of 3) in Fig. 8. The alternative visualization in Fig. 18 demonstrates this resonance further. In a subset of folios with a mass of greater than 500g and less than 2000g, a subset which comprises more than two thirds of the data-set as a whole (73 out of 110, or 66.36%), early modern texts occur precisely as often as classical texts, and medieval texts occur about 33% less frequently than do each of those types. The frequent occurrence of classical texts cannot be explained by my hypothesis about the relative youth of the early modern corpus. Rather, there seems to be some resonance between the folio format and the type of work which occurs in that format. I define that resonance further below, but turn first to incidence of illustration and of reference technology.

Fig. 16: era of composition in 1001g-2000g folios

Antiquity

Classical

Medieval

Early Modern

0 2 4 6 8 10 12

Figure 5-16

237

Fig. 17: era of composition in >2000g folios

Antiquity Classical Medieval Early Modern

0 2 4 6 8 10 12

Figure 5-17

Fig. 18: era of composition in 500g-2000g folios

11, 15%

24, 32%

16, 21%

Early Modern Medieval Classical Antiquity

Figure 5-18

The divide between respective incidences of illustration and ornamentation in sixteenth-century thick folios is even more stark than the same divide in thin folios. In my data-set, as Fig. 9 expresses, thicker folios are less likely to include illustration than their thin-folio counterparts. Some of this may be due to the presence of books of music and mathematics in the thin-folio subset; as in earlier chapters, my expansive definition of illustration here includes diagrams and tables. In general, though, these data suggest that

238 thick books were more likely to restrict themselves to text. In contrast, programs of ornamentation occur even more frequently than in the thin-folio subset: not one of the folios in the supra-1kg subset excludes ornamentation or the suggestion of it.

To be fair, the ornamental strategy present in many of these folios consists of no more than space left in the printing for the insertion, in manuscript or woodblock, of historiated initials. Yet the nature of this particular strategy speaks volumes about printerly conceptions of extraneous ornamentation. These blanks position ornamentation as necessary, to the extent that compositors would be instructed to indent enough lines to leave a space, yet set a guide letter in the (usually exact) center of the space made. This constitutes extra work, and would certainly slow down even an experienced compositor, because of the need to either create that blank piecemeal from type blanks or to set a prefabricated spacer with a square, sort-sized hole into which the guide letter could be set. But printers’ conception of ornamentation as necessary pairs, somewhat uneasily, with an apparent lack of concern about its ultimate appearance. Several folios in the fifteenth-century data-set demonstrate that these blanks could be filled either with manuscript rubrication or with printed woodblock initials. Even the presence of guide letters does not require manual rubrication; examples exist in which woodblock initials have been imposed over previously printed guide letters. This design program mandates the presence, but not the nature, of ornamentation.

When printers include ornamentation (rather than simply leaving space for it) they tend to draw upon generic woodblock or type-ornament stock. Visual design seldom mirrors verbal content. At least one folio does not fit this trend, however: the Vita di

239

Cosimo de’ Medici, authored (as its title page claims) by Aldo Manuzio Junior and

printed in Bologna in 1586, deploys woodcut initials so ornate, and so specific to their

content-context, that they recall the involved illustrative decoration current in the

fifteenth century. Fig. 19 provides one such example: its detail, its large size, and its

specificity mean it must have been a significant investment of time (on the part of its

creator) and money (on the part of Manuzio, or whoever commissioned it). The

lavishness of this example exemplifies the common rationale which likely underlies both

the infrequency of illustration and the generic nature of ornamentation in folios: the need

to keep cost down. Even a relatively low print run of a 300-sheet folio would constitute a

major financial investment which might not garner returns for years.346 The commissioning of illustrations would entail a one-time cost which could be spread out over the whole of the print run of a single edition, or even over multiple editions.

Nonetheless, woodblocks deteriorated; in general, printers would likely strive to keep superfluous costs to a minimum. The Vita di Cosimo de’ Medici, which has a relatively

low sheet count, seems to have been a lavish production, based on its large-type, set in

widely-spaced lines. As such, its blended illustration/ornamentation scheme constitutes an exception to the rule: thicker folios tended to include as little visual media as possible.

346 Cf. Nuovo, Book Trade, 348-351, regarding slow sales in sixteenth-century Italy, and MacLean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 171-210, regarding slow sales in sixteenth-century Europe.

240

Figure 5-19

241

Although, as I suggest, printers of thick folios saw illustrations as extraneous, and

thus excluded them whenever possible, other labor- and cost-intensive paratextual elements such as reference technologies received more judicious treatment. Every folio in the supra-1kg subset includes some form of reference technology, as defined in Chapter

2. Less than one in ten (5 out of 56, or 8.93%) include only one type of reference technology; all five of these make do with variable section headings. The vast majority of the folios in this subset include multiple types of reference technology (51 out of 56, or

91.07%). To some extent, these distributions mirror the distributions of reference technologies in sub-1kg folios. Variable section headings are the most popular reference technology in this subset, appearing in every single record; sequential reference numbering (foliation or pagination) occurs with similar frequency. In other regards, these distributions diverge significantly from those expressed in Fig. 10. Unlike that data-set,

lineation appears relatively frequently, thanks in part to the presence in this subset of

Perottus’ lineated Cornucopiae and the quasi-lineated five-volume complete Galen,

issued by the Aldine Press. In addition, thicker folios are much more likely to include

indices in addition to tables of contents; folios with a mass greater than 1000g and less

than 2000g were more likely to include indices than tables of contents.

242

Fig. 20: distribution of reference technologies in folios >1000g

lineation headings sequential reference numbering index contents

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36

>2000g 1000g-2000g

Figure 5-20

The distributions of reference technologies expressed in Fig. 20 do not express the preponderance of these paratexts as clearly as they could, because the two subsets displayed (1000g-2000g folios and >2000g folios) contain different numbers of records.

Thus, Fig. 21 expresses the proportion of records containing reference technologies as percentages of whole subsets. This points up the divergences between mid-range thick folios and more massive folios in terms of their paratextual inclusions. For instance, this visualization emphasizes the relative preponderance of lineation in folios with mass greater than 2000g: nearly one in three folios in this subset includes lineation. Similarly, most folios with mass between 1000g and 2000g include sequential reference numbering, while sequential reference numbering occurs in less than two-thirds of folios with mass greater than 2000g. The incidence of tables of contents invites most remark: while in Fig.

20, the similar raw distributions of tables of contents suggest a balance, the percentage- model in Fig. 21 reveals that the majority of supra-2000g folios include tables of contents, while a minority of sub-2000g folios include tables of contents.

243

The diversity of these results makes generalization about their meanings

contingent, but a few conclusions seem clear. First, folios with mass greater than 1000g

were much more likely to include reference technologies than folios with mass less than

1000g. As a corollary, the types of reference technologies included in thick folios occur

in more balanced proportions than they do in slender folios. Both slim and thick folios

include variable section headings practically across the board. Indices are much more

common in thick folios than in thin folios, but tables of contents occur in roughly the

same rates in thin folios as in thick folios. The thicker the folio, the more likely it is to

include lineation. No other reference technology, however, displays specifically

proportional relationships to thickness. In general, thicker folios tend to include more,

and more diverse, reference technologies. This may be because the difficulty of

discontinuous reading increases proportionally with folios’ thicknesses. The thicker the

folio, the more it might invite discontinuous reading, and the more difficult that

discontinuous reading would be.347 Thicker folios thus require reference technologies

with an urgency unmatched by thinner folios.

347 This postulation ignores the very real material usefulness of prosthetic aids to discontinuous reading— for instance, practices of dog-earing, the use of removable book-marks, or post-print and post-binding modification (along the lines of inserting content-keyed tabs on folios’ fore-edge).

244

Fig. 21: frequency of reference technology incidence in folios >1000g

32% lineation 18% 100% headings 100% 64% sequential reference numbering 88% 36% index 47% 64% contents 44% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

>2000g 1000g-2000g

Figure 5-21

C. Conclusions The sixteenth century was an era of interlinked change, in the political, religious,

and print-technological arenas. No major political power escaped the century unchanged:

English monarchic power consolidated, the Dutch carved out a measure of independence,

France tore itself apart with religious infighting, divisions between the Germanic states

hardened, the fragile independent multiplicity of the Italian city-state model shattered in

the face of repeated foreign invasions, and Spanish political sway swung from northern to

southern Europe. In many of these political situations, confessional divergence was the

force swinging the pendulum. Catholicism, under internal and external threat, closed

ranks and commenced the Counter-Reformation. Anti-Catholic dissent took multiple shapes, which in turn quickly coalesced into multiple confessional stances. Calvinism diverged in significant ways from Lutheranism; by the end of the sixteenth century, three influential confessional positions existed where only one had existed at the beginning of the century. Fueling and being fueled by these ideological and political (r)evolutions,

245 print technology underwent subtle but significant changes. The most important of these was a shift in production methods from a more artisanal model to something more closely resembling mass production—not merely of books but also of paper, ink, and type. The materiality of books also changed; for example, blackletter retreated throughout the century to the confines of the Germanic states, italic became widely imitated and copied, and roman type reigned supreme.

These changes happened over time. Temporal variation is also apparent in the folios in my sixteenth-century data-set; somewhat counterintuitively, I plot this data-set’s variation atemporally—across a spectrum of mass rather than over a range of time. Yet the material variations between these folios do mirror the temporal variations taking place in the time period in which they emerged. Both temporal and material variation sit between dramatic extremes. I express these extremes for the former in the above paragraph: for the latter, this constitutes the difference between the scrawniness of a 231g rhetorical compilation and the impossible bulk of the oft-mentioned Sarum-rite antiphonary (7864g).348 While the material variations discussed throughout this chapter resonate with the temporal variations present in sixteenth century politics, religion, and print culture, I detect no generalizable causative relationship between the two. The variability of the sixteenth-century folio evokes the transformation of political, ideological, and technological culture in the sixteenth century, but neither one directly or simply causes the other. Rather, temporal and material variation exist in correlation to each other.

348 Rhetoric: USTC 832268. Antiphon: STC 15790.

246

But a common thread links them: a sixteenth-century attitude of eclectic consumption. Living in sixteenth-century Europe required an awareness of difference, and some level of acceptance of its persistence. I do not argue that early modern

Europeans were models of tolerance; indeed, the most prominent sixteenth-century politico-religious clashes demonstrate a marked lack of tolerant restraint (such as, for instance, like the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, the 1527 sack of Rome, and the repeated massacres of German peasants during their revolts in 1524-1525). Rather, awareness of sixteenth century European culture entailed an understanding, if not acceptance, of the absence of univocality within continental, and even more tightly- controlled regional, social relations. The folio format encompassed multitudes in sixteenth-century textual culture. Likewise, political and ideological difference, fed by technological evolution, first introduced then cemented ubiquity of variance. By the end of the sixteenth century, ideological and material diversity were inescapable.

Inescapable, perhaps, but few accepted it as a viable state of political and ideological being. The upheaval summarized in Chapter 4 resulted in large part from attempts to impose uniformity upon resistant cultures. Gradual trends toward further difference reveals the eventual futility of such attempts. Technologically, it seems, many producers and consumers of print embraced flux for its generative potential. The material and textual shifts discussed in Chapter 5 reveal printerly willingness to adjust to fit the rapidly-diversifying tastes of consumers. To be sure, print’s technological evolution had its detractors: though neither wrote in the sixteenth century, the bitterness exhibited by both Johannes Trithemius and William Prynne demonstrates that bibliographical conservatism pre- and post-dated the sixteenth century, and likely pervaded it as well.

247

Yet, as in the case of political and ideological evolutions, technological experimentation

continued to occur, smothering if not silencing conservative detraction.

These chapters advance a familiar premise in order to argue a novel conclusion.

That premise is a definition of the sixteenth century as an era of interconnected political,

religious, and technological transformation over time. Upon this canvas of mutability, I

sketch the sixteenth-century folio as a material classification containing a host of intrinsic

and extrinsic variations. The folio in the sixteenth century resists simplification into

single, generalized narratives. Rather, its definitional instability mirrors the temporal

instability present in early modern culture. This ambiguity directly lays the foundation for

the developments discussed in Chapters 1-3. Specifically, the existence of recognizable

slim-folio conventions directly influences the proliferation of seventeenth-century slim

folios. In addition, the fluid structure of the sixteenth-century folio foreshadows the

experimentation with illustration, reference technology, and mise-en-page which I argue takes place in seventeenth-century slim folios.

The variability present in this data-set owes its existence to incunabular experimentation. The final chapters of this dissertation propose that an eagerness for particularly visual innovation characterizes late incunabular folios. This same experimental spirit permeates the sixteenth-century data-set. Divergent attitudes among consumers can explain the prevalence of certain developments—such as the evolution of the title page. Yet those attitudes had to be first shaped by book designers’ experimental risks. The final chapters of this dissertation explore experimentation present in incunabular folios, attitudes which birthed sixteenth-century evolutionary processes.

248

Without those incunabular forerunners, the sixteenth-century folio would have been drab

indeed. Instead, it comprises a dazzling array of materialities, stationarities, mise-en- page, and paratextual frames—hardly the ponderous, dusty, chained-up, rarely-opened monolith of critical tradition.

249

Part III Aesthetic Play in Folio Incunabula

250

Chapter 6 - Reflections on the Contingency of Incunabular Data Probably the most famous folio, even more so than CHT, is Gutenberg’s 42-line bible. Expensive, attractive, mythical, massive, it holds a totemic place in studies of the history of the book. It anchors collections, like the Harry Ransom Center’s Carl A.

Pforzheimer Library. Indeed, the Pforzheimer catalogue explicitly calls the Pforzheimer

42-line Bible “the keystone of any collection of books,” bolstering this claim with nested anecdotes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century secular reverence. The cultural weight of this volume tends to overshadow many other achievements of print culture between 1455 and 1500.

I use the phrase “print culture” advisedly, following Alexandra Gillespie’s distrust of the phrase. Gillespie, Adrian Johns and David McKitterick interrogate older models of print’s dominance, particularly the influential model promulgated by Elizabeth

Eisenstein. These older models conceive of the coming of print as a sea-change, in which the textual replaces the oral and new technology ushers out old manual labor. For

Eisenstein and others of her persuasion, print replaced manuscript.349 By contrast, in

Gillespie’s late-medieval, early-Renaissance periodization, older manuscript tradition mingles with, influences, and is influenced by newer mechanical printing conventions.

This model, though more complex, offers greater generative potential than the teleological view which previously held sway. Ultimately, Gillespie employs the phrase

349 Eisenstein, Agent of Change, 43-70.

251

“print culture” “to suggest the scope of [her] study,” not to presuppose a sharp periodized division between the era of the manuscript and the era of the printed book.350

Though the final three chapters of this dissertation do not address manuscript habits as thoroughly as does Gillespie, they do consider print between 1455 and 1500 as existing in a symbiotic, though not always peaceful, relationship with manuscript. By

“print” and “manuscript,” I mean not only manufactured products but also manufactory processes: the items gifted, sold, and traded as well as the methods by which those items were made. Given this broad definition, the cultural importance of the 42-line Bible causes its materiality to overshadow, to some extent, that of many other important folios created between 1455 and 1500. Though the 42-line Bible’s importance is undeniable, and the reasons why it casts such a shadow fairly clear, the effects of its cultural dominance ought to be interrogated.

Chapters 6-8 foreground non-Gutenberg folios in order to destabilize the conception of the late medieval printed folio as organized around early Bibles. These chapters do this destabilization in multiple ways. First, emphasizing the contingency of late medieval folio data neutralizes the threat of positivism. The period’s paradoxically conservative attitude toward technological evolution highlights the contradictions lodged deep in the heart of late medieval book culture. Second, constructing and then deconstructing classifications for these books, and particularly troubling the concept of

“use-value” of late-medieval folios, demonstrates the irreducible individuality of my

350 Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, 9. Cf. also Johns, The Nature of the Book, and McKitterick, Search for Order.

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data-points. The conclusion, a comparative analysis of manuscript and print mise-en-

page, brings this discussion full circle to Gutenberg. Accentuating the feedback loop of

influence between manuscript and print challenges conceptions of “invention” in print

technology and design. Much may be gained by a multivalent image of the late medieval

folio, as opposed to the current monolith constructed around Gutenberg. The

heterogeneity of the fifteenth-century data-set which undergirds these chapters yields an

unsatisfying, yet inescapable conclusion: that folios served as sites of material play for

innovative book-designers.

In size and diversity, the fifteenth-century data-set does not perfectly represent the

extant population of incunabular folios. But incunabula pose particular challenges to

data-focused study, above and beyond the difficulties native to data-based analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books. Incunabula resist representativity, in terms of production, material profile, and survival rates, ratios, and rationales. “Representativity” here refers to an artifact’s status as prototype for other, less-accessible artifacts. It is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to draw general conclusions about incunabula based on historical records of their production, their surviving material profiles, or their survival today.

As a concrete example of this ambiguity, consider that the USTC records that 7%

more folios were published in 1475 than in 1500. The work of Angela Nuovo, Andrew

Pettegree, and Ian MacLean clarify that the growth of printing never did run smooth: the

market contracted and expanded in ways and areas, and at rates, unexpected either by

consumers or bookmakers. Overall, though, net growth defines the incunabular book

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trade--notwithstanding the high number of surviving folios produced in 1475. That word

“surviving” is operative. Taking industrial growth through diversification and market

penetration for granted (based on corroborating evidence), two possible explanations for

this strange statistic—7% more folios printed in 1475 than in 1500—pertain. Either

survival rates for 1500-printed folios are abnormally low, or survival rates for 1475-

printed folios are abnormally high.

Data, in order to be data, require interpretation; interpretation should draw upon contextual clues. In this case, external witnesses direct us toward either of these options, or a balance of them. Until those survival-rates can be quantified, and (in a likely

connected study) explained, we are left with three certainties: the insufficiency of solitary

census numbers, the relative indeterminacy of survival rates, and the general contingency

of data pertaining to incunabula.

That second certainty, the ambiguity of survival rate, deserves further scrutiny.

Perhaps the most concrete contributor to folios’ survival is their bulk. Given similar

wear-patterns, the central leaf of a fifty-leaf octavo is less likely to survive than the

central leaf of a three hundred-leaf folio. The mass of paper used to manufacture the

artifact would work something like a damage sink, absorbing wear, the paper-seeker’s predatory penknife, and the vagaries of time. In addition, gradually expanding preliminaries and post-text paratexts throughout the incunabular period would have further shielded texts at folios’ cores from accidental damage—damage external to the book.

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Furthermore, folios likely had a better chance of being bound at some point early

in their material lives than smaller formats. The logic runs as follows: a purchaser

investing capital in a volume with large dimensions could be expected to protect that

investment by commissioning a binding, or even purchasing a pre-bound copy. While the

conventional narrative runs that books were sold unbound, and that binding was at the

financial initiative of the purchaser, recent scholars have suggested that retail bookshops

stocked some simply-bound copies of bestsellers in addition to the larger stock of

unbound, wrapped books.351 Either way, binding did tend to congeal books, although this

effect could theoretically be reversed. Studies of the makeup of sammelbände (bound-up

collections of several individually printed texts, usually of the same format) have raised

the possibility that purchasers of books waited until they had several volumes suitable for

binding together before commissioning that binding.352 While sammelbände are often

composed of smaller-format texts, like quartos or octavos, Jeffrey Todd Knight’s

examination of archival practices vis-à-vis early bindings makes it clear that any format, including folios, could be and were bound together. Slimmer folios thus likely lived within bindings with other slimmer folios, even if they were bound up together fairly soon after purchase.353

A few conclusions follow on from this possibility. For one thing, binding closed

off a text—or a group of texts welded into one megatext—at least temporarily. When an

owner invested in a binding, the act and the material binding limited the book or books’

351 For the conventional narrative, cf. Blayney, “Publication of Play-books.” More recent conclusions include Pratt, “Stab-stitching,” Gillespie, “Bookbinding,” and Nuovo, Book Trade, esp. 392-408. 352 Cf. Gillespie, “Early English Sammelbände,” 203-204; Knight, “Organizing,” 77. 353 Knight, Bound To Read, 21-53.

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expansive potential. Second, the conclusiveness of binding requires that the book(s) to be

bound had previously been collected. Before binding could congeal a text, or group of

texts, that group had to be conceived of, aggregated, and arranged as a group. The text or group of texts had to have some pre-existing organizing principle, be it as simple as

“books owned by X.” As a result of these trends, bound status became a material endpoint, making unbound books liminal, in transit between production and fruition.

The urgency of this evolutionary process would have been amplified for larger, more expensive folios. One reason would be physical impossibility. No binding technology extant in 1498 could have feasibly welded the 9.9kg of Aldo Manuzio’s five- part Aristotle editio princeps into one volume. Even were such an impossibility accomplished, the resultant textual artifact would be impractical for use. Another reason for the urgency of binding has do with economies of use. Whether the large folio in question were bought for display, for pedagogical reference, for humanistic study, or for use in the home, it could not remain in the liminality of the unbound state long. If bought for display, a book would require binding as soon as possible, given how much a book’s cover could then, and can still, tell. If bought for pedagogical, intellectual, or domestic use, a book would require the protection and structure granted by leather, sewing, and boards. The importance of protection recalls another key reason to bind: binding preserved financial investment.

Conjecture drives the foregoing discussion of how purchasers’ high valuation of folios would necessarily have led to binding. Logic and the historical materiality of incunabular bindings motivates this conjecture; yet it is conjecture nonetheless. This in

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turn points up the difficulty of assigning pecuniary value and use-value to incunabula.

Some data exist, and some has been deduced, regarding the retail value of incunabular folios. Nuovo’s study reproduces what few records survive from 15th-century Italy;

MacLean’s book, though focused on a later period, sketches under-studied barter systems in early modern continental book markets which must certainly have pre-dated the period he studies. Then, too, common sense dictates that the aforementioned five-part Aristotle would have been quite expensive, if only because of the enormous overhead constituted of paper and labor.354 But the modern scholar cannot recover precise values for

incunabular folios, due to incomplete records and the labyrinth of late medieval currency

exchange rates.

Another factor clouding modern assessments of incunabular value, assessments

which could lead to clearer understandings of survival rates, is the lurking influence of

aesthetic and monetary anachronism. Many incunabula are beautiful books by today’s

standards. The woodcuts in the Hortus Sanitatis are crude, yet well-executed for their

time. The rotunda-influenced blackletter font Koberger used for his 1473 Consolatione

Philosophiae is pleasing, refreshingly regular and readable compared to the spiky gothic

blackletter present in the Ortus Vocabulorum. These value-judgements are likely

motivated by subconscious cultural associations between monetary and aesthetic value.

The Western mind has been trained to ascribe aesthetic value to that which we know to

be rare, expensive, and ancient. Whether or not scholars explicitly allow anachronistic

354 Cf. Chapters 3 and 5 for further discussions of paper-cost, overhead, and wholesale prices.

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values to influence their conclusions, the possibility is always there, at the back of the

mind: “of course this survived! Just look at it.”

This discussion of survival rates and rationales has referred generally to total

survival or loss—the question of whether book X exists today, or not. But, like much incunabular data, survival is not binary. Survival is not a question of “there or not-there;” some collectors’ habit of marginal trimming in particular seriously ambiguates material data. Consider a book that has been heavily trimmed: can it be said to have survived as completely as a large-paper copy, or one catalogued as “mostly untrimmed?” For that matter, has it survived more completely than a half-page fragment?

Trimming is sometimes easy to spot. In general, later collectors would trim books

for a variety of reasons, from the needs of shelf space to a distaste for manuscript

annotation. The practice itself involved slicing off ribbons of “excess” marginal paper on

the head, foot, and fore-edge; gutters almost always survived, because trimming the fold

would render binding more difficult and less effective. Heavy trimming and incomplete

trimming are most noticeable. The former occurs in the Ortus Vocabulorum. The British

Library’s restrictions on handling this volume prohibited me from precisely measuring its

fore-edge margin, but I estimate it to be no more than 20mm. This is less than half the average fore-edge margin width in the books I examined (46.16mm). No manuscript annotations survive in the British Library’s copy of the Ortus Vocabulorum, which is

somewhat unusual given the frequency with which folio dictionaries contain marginal

annotations. The tight, regular margins in this book, combined with the lack of

manuscript marginalia, suggests to me that any marginalia may have been trimmed out.

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The copy of the Hortus Sanitatis now at the Harry Ransom Center provides

another example of obvious trimming. It shows signs of heavy use including worn fore-

edges as well as significant and diverse soilage. It also preserves manuscript marginalia

which have been sliced in half by the trimmer’s knife. At some point in the book’s life, it

had wider margins, in which one or more enterprising reader jotted notes. Then, at some

point later, a subsequent purchaser wanted to reduce the book’s dimensions. Either the

new owner or their agents somewhat sloppily cut down the margins to their current width

of 21.5mm, leaving in enough of the earlier annotations to provide incontrovertible

evidence of trimming.

More frequently, the evidence is quite controvertible, as in Aldo Manuzio’s 1500

impression of the Epistole Devotissime of St. Catherine of Siena, which exists in two

states at the Harry Ransom Center. One, in a debatably 19th-century binding, has margins

33mm wide, and no annotations; this is number 32 in the collection catalogue.355 The other, from the Uzielli collection, has wider margins, manuscript annotations, and a 16th-

century vellum-on-boards binding. It is number 32a in the collection catalogue.356 If the

catalogue’s dating of the former’s binding to the 19th century is correct, this indicates that

32 underwent material reconfiguration at a time when collectors and archivists fetishized

original materiality rather less than they do today.357 This, in addition to the fact that the

margins are somewhat more narrow than average, and the fact that no manuscript

355 Shelfmark q/BX/4700/C4/A28/1500/HRC/ALDINE. Binding information from Kallendorf and Wells, Aldine Press Books. 356 Shelfmark Uzielli 25. Binding information from Kallendorf and Wells, Aldine Press Books. The inexactitude of “wider margins” is due to my inability to measure the fore-edge margin of this book, but I estimate measurements between 40mm and 45mm. 357 Cf., e.g., Knight, Bound to Read, 180-188, on the impact of 18th- and 19th-century archival practices on incunabula.

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annotations survive, suggests that 32 was trimmed. But fore-edge margins of 33mm are less divergent from the 46.16mm average than other books, and in the absence of marginalia obviously curtailed by trimming, confidence in this conclusion must be accordingly lower. And what of Colonnus’ Hypnerotomachia or Aristophanes’

Comoediae? Both have fore-edge margins 42mm wide, more than 4mm less than the

average, and the latter includes manuscript annotations which do not seem to have been

curtailed by trimming. Perhaps they were trimmed, perhaps not.

Trimming thus poses a twofold challenge to the possibility of straightforward

incunabular data—in the indeterminacy of its historical occurrence, and in the

irrecoverable ambiguity of its extent. These two problems obscure the argumentative

potential of incunabular data in similar ways. Apart from obvious instances of trimming,

like the Hortus Sanitatis and the Ortus Vocabularum, it’s difficult to say whether the

practice actually occurred. The alternative, of course, is paper size. Historical research

has argued that papermakers manufactured in line with a concrete, static standard. This

should help determine whether trimming happened, especially when those standards

survive. The Bologna stone remains as one such standard. It might stand to reason that if

a book’s sheet dimensions fall in line with papermaking standards, then it has not been

trimmed.

But this solution does not account for shrinkage due to washing, another standard

procedure in 19th- and early 20th-century archival and (particularly) collecting practice.

Neither does it account for the fact that certain standard sizes differ in dimension only slightly. Here the example of the Bologna stone obtrudes: the variance in sheet length—

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the long side—between the second-smallest and the smallest sheet sizes available in the

stone (labeled Meçane and Reçute, respectively) is approximately 65mm. This difference

should be divided in two, since the width-dimension of a leaf equals half of the sheet

which is folded in half. The result is that a leaf of Median (Meçane) paper would be

roughly 257mm from gutter-fold to fore-edge, while a leaf of Chancery (Reçute) paper

would be roughly 225mm from gutter-fold to fore-edge, with a differential of 32mm.358

By way of reminder, the differential between the average margin-width (46.16mm) and

my narrowest precise margin-measurement (Hortus Sanitatis, 21.5mm) is 24.66—fairly

close to the paper-size differential. In other words, narrow margins might imply

trimming, but they also might imply a particularly wide text-block impressed on the

smallest paper size.

The existence of the Bologna stone pertains to this discussion of contingent data

in more ways than one. Not only does it display the complicating variance between paper

sizes, but it also prescribes habits specifically for the local manufacturing economy.359

The stone serves as more than an optional guide; it renders visible and concrete the force

of the governmental edict standardizing paper size. It serves as a prosthetic technology,

designed to reify state control. But the apparent ossification of dimension vis-à-vis

governmental edict present in the example of the Bologna stone begins to fracture as our

focus widens to include other Italian states, or even the continent as a whole. Incunabular

printing began a major reconfiguration of knowledge-production, which different cultures sought to control in different ways. As MacLean argues, for example, French regulation

358 Cf. “The Shape of Paper.” 359 Needham, “Res papirea,” 125-127; cf. also Fletcher III, New Aldine Studies, 89-90.

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of printing followed an uneasily-balanced politico-religious path, dissimilar from the more dispersed, laissez-faire regulatory mechanisms in proto-Germany and the Italian

states.360 Strictures on late medieval printing certainly varied from nation-state to nation-

state, and even at times within nation-states.

These differences arose not merely from the individuality of regional cultures and religious practices, but also from the uneven spread of print technology in the late medieval period. Unlike the plague, which crescendoed inexorably from originary points to cover the Continent, printing grew slowly, uncertainly, by fits and starts, with steps backward tempering steps forward. Famously, Gutenberg’s partner Johann Fust forced

Gutenberg out of business “[a]s soon as the Bible was published.”361 Pettegree’s account

of the early years of print in Germany, France, and particularly Italy includes victories

and failures. The most enlightening of the latter is the Italian crash of 1473, a year in

which the Roman printers, Sweynheym and Pannartz, closed down, 66% of Venice’s

printshops shut their doors, and the last Florentine press was shuttered. Far from the

sweeping viral spread present in romantic accounts, print struggled mightily at times to retain its early footholds.362

The slow expansion of print’s market share contributes to the contingency of

incunabular data in that uncertainty in production yields uncertainty in product. Pettegree

argues that so many presses struggled so mightily because demand had not yet adjusted to

supply.363 Nuovo’s survey of retail inventories confirms this, as does MacLean’s

360 Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 134-170. 361 Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 29. Cf. also Janet Ing, Johann Gutenberg and his Bible. 362 Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 50-55. 363 Ibid., 51.

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discussion of retail barter systems well into the seventeenth century: booksellers held on

to backstock for years, even decades, and some of those editions, once superseded, would

certainly be used for other material purposes. Survival, in whole or in part, depended not

merely on purchasers but also on producers and sellers. The choices made by creators and

distributors, in response to external pressures from the market, as well as from political

and religious authorities at the local, regional, and national levels, certainly affected the

nature and extent of incunabular survival.

In addition, print technology was still very much in flux. Typography exemplifies

this neatly. The two font families most in use today, in parts of the world which use the

Latin alphabet, are roman and italic. Roman type did not appear until 1470, more than

fifteen years after the 42-line Bible was printed; italic tarried until 1495, when Aldo

Manuzio opened his press in Venice. To be sure, typecutters were often highly skilled

and experienced, attaining a high degree of uniformity. Yet every piece of press

technology—the press itself, formes, sticks, matrices, molds, type cases, even technology

for hanging sheets to dry—was crafted by hand. Paper, too, strained towards a standard

which it never attained perfectly. Ultimately, true standardization remained impossible

until the advent of automated printing.364

However, printers saw the variability of artisanal mass-production, imposed by

hand-crafted technology, as full of creative potential. Balancing anxiety about error

(which Pettegree argues increased during this time) with opportunities for customization,

364 At the ontological level, absolute standardization is still impossible, but that’s a dissertation for another day.

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book designers took advantage of those opportunities.365 To return to the Harry Ransom

Center’s two copies of Epistole Devotissime: 32 is printed on “normal” paper, which was

either trimmed, shrunken, a smaller size, or some combination of the three,366 and the

other, 32a, is printed on “thick paper.”367 The latter has slightly larger margins than the

former, as well as an older binding, and may possibly have been a presentation copy. If

so, Manuzio recognized that the hands-on nature of his printing process allowed for such variation, and realized that he could use that variation to craft an artifact with the enhanced tactile profile inherent in thick paper. Alternatively, the printshop might conceivably have run out of standard paper (used to print 32?), and substituted some stray

thick paper in the printing of 32a. Or perhaps some narrative I have not imagined

explains this variation. Given the simple fact of technological multiformity, any

generalized conclusion from very specific data is fundamentally unsettled.

In sum, incunabular data are contingent on a variety of economic, politico-

religious, cultural, and historical factors. This contingency gives my conclusions

throughout this chapter a conjectural cast. Ultimately, any data-based assessment of late medieval culture can only argue as far as the data available can support that argument. It is an unfortunate, though somehow exhilarating, fact of such scholarship that my conclusions are just as contingent as are matters of survival rate and extent.

365 Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 50-51. 366 Shelfmark q/BX/4700/C4/A28/1500/HRC/ALDINE. 367 Shelfmark Uzielli 25. The description is from the catalogue’s “notes” about the item. It’s difficult to quantify, but having handled both, I can confirm that the paper in Uzielli 25 is thicker than the paper in the other copy.

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Chapter 7 - Technological Evolution and Its Effects A. Technological Evolution: Typography Chapter 6 argues that printing’s state of technological flux during the incunabular period contributed to major variation between cultural printing traditions as well as minor variations within cultural printing traditions. The premise of this claim deserves further examination, however: to what extent did printing technology evolve during the incunabular period? How did that evolution contribute to the development of the folio as a recognizable cultural artifact? And, most importantly, how did technological innovation affect folios’ scripting of their own use-patterns?

The fact of technological evolution may perhaps be most clearly seen in the rapid typographical shifts which took place between 1454 and 1500. Never since that time has so much sweeping, lasting creativity been on display. Typographical experimentations with roman fonts occurred courtesy of the highly motivated Nicolas Jenson.368 Lost in

critical, and particularly typographical, applause of Jenson’s roman font is the fact that he

retreated to the safety of blackletter shortly after introducing roman type.369 Aldo

Manuzio’s new italic type caught on faster. Though his early folios were exclusively in

the Greek type in which he had invested, he insisted on printing his trademark Aldine

prefaces in italic. These advertised the intellectual project of the Aldine Press, as well as

endowing the classical texts to follow with the imprimatur of a respected humanist

scholar. They also showcased Aldine italic—a display which, almost exclusively, took

place on the verso of Aldo’s simple title pages. These two fonts effectively instituted two

separate systems of regularized letterforms. While both drew to differing extents on

368 Jenson’s innovations in market strategy may have been equally originary but are far less interesting. 369 Cf. Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 57.

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extant manuscript hands, the rendering of those hands into sensational, and highly

influential, typeface made them concrete. Jenson in the early 1470s, and Manuzio in the

mid-1490s, froze the fluidity of manuscript letterform tradition into concrete, though

negotiable, typographical norms. They set the baseline from which subsequent

typographers would operate, consciously or unconsciously.

If Aldo’s typographizing of Italian humanist script into italic type font had the

effect of stabilizing those letterforms, no such process took place with the blackletter font

family. Just like italic and roman, blackletter mimicked the shape of a manuscript hand:

textura. But while Jenson’s roman and Manuzio’s italic assumed recognizable shapes

early in their lives, blackletter shape-shifted between printers, cities, and cultures. The

blackletter type used by William Caxton, England’s first printer, differs noticeably in

shape from that used by Anton Koberger, Nuremberg’s first printer. In Koberger’s

influential Nuremberg Chronicle, he uses a font more in common with manuscript

rotunda than manuscript textura. Caxton’s blackletter incorporates some of the roundness

visible in Koberger’s font, but its most recognizable characteristic is its wealth of

flamboyant serifs. As Philip Gaskell observes, blackletter really is an entire font-family, despite its frequent metonymic use to refer to textura. As a font family, blackletter continued to transform throughout the incunabular period and on into the 16th century.370

The impact of the artisanal nature of hand-press technology is nowhere as

pronounced as in the centralized cutting of punches. Naturally enough, early

metalworkers—engravers, goldsmiths, and the like—took on the task of sculpting the

370 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 17-19.

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hard-metal punch which would leave a letter-shaped depression in softer copper (the

matrix), into which still softer type-metal would be poured to cast type. Print-shops needed ever-increasing volumes of type, but only a few punches could fill the same shop’s needs—since punches were used far less frequently than the copper matrices in the type-molds. Though punch-cutting must have been a time-consuming, gingerly process, the skill and experience of goldsmiths like Koberger would have rendered it just another precise artistic endeavor. In contrast to the chaotic variance in dimension and paper size which printers confronted, punch-cutting offered plenty of creative potential with more manageable levels of variation.

As a result, the shape of punches, and the resultant shape of fonts, represents some of the purest artistic innovation of the incunabular period. Whereas nearly every other aspect of incunabular book design—and, in general, book design in the hand-press period—responded to complex market forces, details of font design enjoyed some immunity to these market forces. As a result, the discriminating reader, a member of the early Republic of Letters371 would expect a certain typographical variation between the

blackletters in which the books in their library were printed.

No account of incunabular typography can ignore the advent of Greek type, which

Gaskell classes among the “exotic languages” family of fonts, along with Hebrew,

Cyrillic, and Arabic.372 Aldo Manuzio relied heavily on Greek type in branding his

incunabular folios. Sixteen out of the eighteen Aldine folios in this data-set (88.89%) use

371 Maclean dates the Republic of Letters to the early-sixteenth century (Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 6); Nuovo dates it to the mid-fifteenth century (Book Trade, 5). Fumaroli dates it to the mid-fourteenth century (Republic of Letters, 13-25). 372 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 16.

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Greek type in paratexts, main text, or marginalia; eleven of those sixteen (61.11%) are

printed primarily in Greek type, using roman in printed marginalia and paratexts. Only

two out of eighteen (11.11%) are printed entirely in roman. One of these two is the

aforementioned Epistole Devotissime, written in Latin by the medieval mystic St.

Catherine of Siena and thus an obvious choice to be printed in roman. The other is De

Mysteriis Aegyptiorum, written in Greek and thus an unlikely choice to be printed in

roman.373 Notwithstanding these outliers, obvious or unlikely, Aldo’s early folios used

Greek type heavily. This choice is largely due to Aldo’s well-attested emphasis on printing works of classical learning, a corpus surviving largely in Greek and characterized by its Hellenism. Given the necessary difficulty of printing in Greek type,

Aldo’s reliance on Greek constituted a deliberate visual choice, one which had an impact on the baggage, and the intended permanence, of his folio incunabula.

In 1494, when Aldo began publishing operations in Venice, hand-press printing

was still a precarious endeavor. Italian cities had begun regulating material production,

book production, and book-selling operations, as demonstrated by the Bologna stone and

other evidence.374 Yet print-centric commercial governance had not yet been instituted.

As a result, print in the incunabular period might be described as incidental or artisanal,

rather than industrial.375 This meant that systems for training new personnel, particularly

compositors, had not been set up to the extent that they would later enjoy. By 1494

printing in Venice had developed further than it had in other cities, Italian and otherwise;

373 This work is attributed to Iamblichus, but the attribution is dubious; in the pages to follow, I signal this ambiguity by referring to him as Iamblichus?. 374 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 66-75; Nuovo, Book Trade, 195-257. 375 As Chapter 4 discusses, printers’ guilds did not come into existence until the mid-sixteenth century.

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the success of Nicolas Jenson, some of whose equipment came to be used by the Aldine

Press, bears witness to this.376 It follows that Venice would have boasted a pre-existing pool of qualified pressworkers. Aldo and his business partners no doubt vetted their workers; in turn, working for the Aldine Press provided hands-on training in new compositional challenges like working with the new types Aldo was introducing. Aldo and his associates likely employed workers with some measure of printing expertise.

But composition in new types must have posed special challenges. I conjecture that Aldo’s compositors had some level of literacy—at least in Italian, and likely in Latin as well, given the preponderance of Latin printing well into the 16th century. It is less

likely that compositors at the Aldine Press could read Greek. If they could not, they

would have begun by matching letter-forms on their copy to letter-forms in their cases—a time-consuming process at first. Eventually, they likely would have developed learned associations, a form of meaning-free semiosis, between copy letter-forms and type letterforms. Since the Aldine Press dominated the use of Greek type in late-medieval

Venice,377 Aldo’s decision to focus on Greek would have necessitated serious demands

on both his type-cutters and his compositors. They would have had minimal experience in

creating and using type in a non-Latin alphabet. Getting them up to speed, literally,

would have been a serious undertaking.

Yet Aldo chose to print a series of early folios using Greek type—at least sixteen

volumes over the course of six years, or nearly four per year. Aldo’s humanist project is

376 Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 55-57; Lowry, Nicholas Jenson, 76-106. 377 Cf. Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius, 88-90.

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well-attested, in his communications and in his scholarly prefaces.378 But his decision to

print the classics in Greek, using Greek type, notwithstanding the extra expense and time

required for such an endeavor, signals a strong desire to present works of classical Greek

learning within very specific material parameters. To some extent, the availability of

works of classical learning, manufactured to benefit from the intrinsic durability of the

folio format, carefully printed in newly-cut Greek type, targets a market with a wealth of predispositions and capabilities; call them Market A. These works might also appeal to different group of purchasers, a market eager to attain certain dispositions and capabilities; call them Market B.

Purchasers in Market A might already be familiar with the classical works Aldo was printing. They likely would have been able to read Greek well—not merely transliterated into the Latin alphabet, but rather in the Greek alphabet, primarily. Based on their exposure to manuscript libraries, their experiences of works of classical learning would vary; but purchasers in Market A would have some history with classical texts.

They would also understand the importance of classical texts, and appreciate the emergence of printed instances of texts central to abstract philosophy, medicine, or natural philosophy. They might even be aware of the gaps in classical-intellectual discourse, and how Aldo’s printed versions filled those gaps by resurrecting long-lost or long-missing works. Crucially, purchasers in Market A would have the desire and the capability to purchase Aldine printed versions of classical texts as upgrades to their libraries, whether those libraries took material, manuscript form, or existed in the

378 Ibid., 180-216.

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capacious halls of memory. To modern scholars, the idea of a memorial library may seem

fantastical, but Mary Carruthers has demonstrated the capacity of medieval memory to

store information—perhaps not whole works verbatim, but certainly sufficient amounts

of content to constitute the majority of works.379 For purchasers in Market A, Aldo’s

Greek-type folio incunabula functioned as library supplements, no matter what form

those libraries took.

Market B would be constituted of a different sort of intellectual, who used Aldine

folio incunabula to constitute, rather than upgrade, their material and memorial libraries;

they might be called new intelligentsia. They might appreciate the pedagogical

opportunities afforded by the regularity of Greek type (as opposed to less regular, more

obscure manuscript Greek). Elizabeth Eisenstein argues for the radical democratizing

influence of print; in her formulation, print’s relatively large production volumes,

reduction of production costs, and broad post-production dissemination led to general

increases in literacy, political awareness, and cultural engagement.380 There is value in

Eisenstein’s feedback-loop model of print and literacy, where print increased intellectual

literacy and intellectual literacy drove the economic appreciation of print’s cultural value.

Where print enlarged the libraries of purchasers in Market A, it established the libraries

of purchasers in Market B.

The matter of cost, vis-à-vis Market B, remains knotty. Critics agree on the influence of Aldo’s oblong octavo editiones minor, which granted a wide variety of

379 Book of Memory, 99-152. 380 Cf. Eisenstein, Agent of Change, esp. 520-574.

271 purchasers across economic strata unprecedented access to essential classical works.381

But these octavos, which Aldo called enchiridion, did not appear until after 1500. Aldo’s folio incunabula vied in pre-1500 retail markets with his thick quartos, which may have used marginally less paper, but not so much less that they would have been significantly less expensive. The earliest-dated surviving product of the Aldine Press, the 1494-5 quarto Lascaris, used 41.5 sheets; the earliest-dated surviving Aldine folio, the 1495

Theodorus Gaza, used 49.5 sheets, for a differential of 16.16%. Even if the Gaza would have cost 17% more than the Lascaris, a 17% price differential is hardly enough to divide between economic strata. Thus purchasers from Market A and Market B would likely hail from similar economic strata, since Aldo did not produce a “down-market” or “cheap” imprint until later. Although purchasers in Market A might differ from those in Market B in the nature or purpose of their purchases, they would probably share economic situations, if not social strata.

If Aldo’s use of costly, labor-intensive Greek type constituted part of a deliberate attempt to market his classical folio incunabula to two distinct but linked markets, he was not alone in this attitude toward typographical innovation. Throughout the incunabular period, typography contributed to bookmakers’ marketing strategies and affected purchasers’ decisions, as is evidenced (for instance) by critics’ frequent comparison of incunabular fonts to scripts, not only in letterform but also in aesthetic.382 Purchasers of

381 Needham, “Res Papirea,” 130-135. 382 Ing, Johann Gutenberg and his Bible, 79-81; cf. also Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius, 72-108; Martin, History and Power, 222-224.

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books—both the retailing owners of bookshops and individual purchasers from retail

bookshops—could expect typographical novelty and experimentation.

This experimentation could buck the blackletter trend by drawing upon earlier,

readable scripts, as did Nicolas Jenson’s roman and Aldo Manuzio’s italic. Alternatively,

it could modify expectations of blackletter, as did Anton Koberger’s Schwabacher or

Caxton’s serifaceous rounded textura. Based on the breadth and continuity of

typographical variance chronicled above, I argue that typography in the incunabular

period involved the setting and resetting of design norms, as opposed to a straightforward

linear model of influence. This means that late medieval folios presented diverse visual

profiles to users. No one font would have been associated with the folio format. Even if

many early folios were printed in fonts belonging to the blackletter family, the variance

between Gutenberg’s DK type and Koberger’s Schwabacher is so significant as to trouble

the family resemblance. The corollary holds true as well: printers saw the folio as a

legitimate field for typographical experimentation. Sometimes, as in the case of Aldo’s

Greek-type folios, that experimentation was radical and risky. And even in

typographically conservative folios, other technological evolutions—in illustration and

decoration—coded folios as particularly fertile fields for negotiation of print’s potential.

B. Technological Evolution: Ornament The practice of hand-painting in books did not disappear the moment Gutenberg attempted rubricated printing.383 Folios in all three data-sets—from 1454 to 1623—

contain hand-colored woodcut illustrations. Nevertheless, as print technology continued

383 Freeman, 98-99; she also notes that Gutenberg quickly rejected duotone printing as too much trouble.

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to develop past the incunabular period, and as more practices subsidiary to book-making

(e.g. type-founding, paper-making, etc.) became mechanized, if not automated, manual

decoration gradually retreated to the rarefied and protective custody of boutique

customization. This retreat occurred predictably as a result of the spread of mechanical

decorative modes. This spread was characterized by mutually constitutive forces of

accelerated mechanical production, lower costs, and degrading quality. These

evolutionary forces presented in folios as an unease. Early incunabula in my data-set

attempt to capitalize more completely on the white-space potentialities of large format,

while later data-points, particularly in Aldo’s Greek-type folios, eschew visual semiosis

in favor of textual semiosis. A few books, at the very end of the incunabular period, hint

at the beginnings of a divergence between the multimodal folio and the monomodal folio,

a divergence which accelerated throughout the 16th century and matured in the 17th

century, as we have seen. Simultaneously developing with this curve (from visual-heavy

to visual-light, then diverging into two strands), I argue for an evolution of the

temporality of manual decoration, with a corollary change in its nature. Manual

decoration morphs from being part of the book-creation process to happening after book

creation, and accordingly loses its place as necessary part of the book, becoming instead

an optional prosthesis.

The earliest folios in the fifteenth-century data-set include a 1473 Boethius printed in Nürnberg by Anton Koberger, Cicero’s De Officiis et al. printed in Venice by

Jacobus de Fivizzano (1477), Caxton’s 1480 epitome of Higden’s Polycronicon, printed

in Westminster, a 1485 Boethius with Commentary printed in Ghent by Arend de

Keysere, and the 1491 Hortus Sanitatis (its first edition) printed in Mainz by Jacob

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Meydenbach. Every one of these volumes of these include extensive manual decoration,

but each incorporates this decoration somewhat differently.

Both the Koberger and the Keysere Boethii include extensive rubrication,

particularly to mark beginnings of sentences. Koberger’s uses exclusively red ink;

Keysere’s uses a different ink, which now appears darker than the red which also appears

in this volume. I conjecture that this darker ink, which has a tarnished, metallic dark

grey/brown appearance, may once have been silver.384 All five of these examples include

rubricated initials; their specific decorative profiles have been shaped by the books’ early

variant material circumstances. Caxton printed the Polycronicon with guide letters the

same size as the body of the text, and rubrication took place subsequently. Based on the

relatively small size of the book’s rubricated initials, and their incomplete, sometimes

sloppy fill, this rubrication job may have been done quickly, cheaply, or by an inexpert

hand. By contrast, the initials in Fivizzano’s Cicero are incredibly ornate, drawn and

painted in multiple colors to twine up the fore-edge and trickle down the gutter. The

Keysere Boethius alternates between red- and blue-inked initials; due to the composition of the ink used, the former have survived, while the latter have disintegrated and powdered off, leaving scarcely a bluish wrack behind. The Hortus Sanitatis, unlike the

Polycronicon and the Cicero, but like the two Boethii, was printed with guide letters,

which are still clearly visible beneath the simple, competent, unremarkable single-color

rubrication which occurs throughout the book.

384 Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies, 33-34.

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Neither the Koberger Boethius, the Polycronicon, nor the Cicero include

illustrations, manually illuminated or woodcut; the Keysere Boethius and the Hortus

Sanitatis include woodcuts. In the copies I examined, these woodcuts have been colored.

Despite this general similarity, the woodcuts’ respective decorative natures could scarcely differ further. The woodcuts in the Hortus Sanitatis are mostly small; the

majority of them fill a few inches of a column, rarely more than a quarter of a page. They

represent the specific content of the entry over which they are placed, and they seem to offer a visual re-presentation of the verbal expression of natural philosophy to which the woodcuts are keyed. Importantly, these woodcuts do not include context; griffins, dolphins, cedars, dandelions occur on white backgrounds, divorced from the native habitats in which they might be found.

The woodcuts in the Boethius are large, taking up half the page or more. They

key to the text of De Consolatione Philosophiae in that they represent key moments of its

frame narrative. But since there are only five of them, scattered widely throughout the

text, they cannot fulfil the same representative function which we have seen in the Hortus

Sanitatis. Instead, the woodcuts in Keysere’s Boethius act like signposts, intermittent

redirections to the matter at hand. In a key divergence from the Hortus Sanitatis, the

Boethian illustrations are contextualized: each one sets its central human characters

within an obsessively realized visual-representative landscape. This difference illuminates the fundamental difference between the respective semiotic modes of these two types of illustration. The Hortus Sanitatis uses idealized images for reference

purposes, in order to communicate specific information about generalized natural

phenomena. By contrast, Keysere’s Boethius uses grounded, proto-naturalistic images for

276 imaginative purposes, in order to transmit general impressions about specific Boethian narrative moments.

The divergent purposes of these books heighten the peculiarity of this juxtaposition. The Hortus Sanitatis is designed for practical, concrete consultation, yet deploys a generalized, decontextualized visual rhetoric. By contrast, the nature of the

Boethius is general, in that it offers an abstracted solution (philosophical reflection) to a wide range of real-world problems. Yet it’s the Boethius, not the Hortus, which insists upon concretion in its visual style and rhetoric.

These data-points, as well as Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii (printed by

Aldo in 1499), represent one end of the decorative spectrum, a position characterized by coherent visual strategies which construct symbiosis between word and decoration. The other end of the spectrum can be seen in the plain, straightforward works of Aldo

Manuzio, folios printed between 1495 and 1500. The Aldine folio incunabula do not completely eschew decoration, but their visual rhetoric might be called modern, or at least early modern, rather than late medieval. The Aldine shift from the medieval to the early modern appears in these books’ development of title page design, dependence on woodcut initials, and selective deployment of illustrations.

Various historians date the development of the title page to “around 1500”385 or

“the end of the fifteenth century”.386 What counts as a title page may be debated; for the sake of argument, I define the term as a page separate from and preceding the main text,

385 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 52. 386 Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 35-36.

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which includes at the bare minimum words summarizing the general contents of that

main text. These summary-words, which Gaskell calls “a short-title,”387 might not

actually constitute the work’s title, since the concept of a work being deliberately titled is,

I suspect, a product of title-page technology. So, frequently, the title-pages of Aldo’s earliest folios took a tone more expository than summary. The 1495 Theodorus Gaza includes nothing more on its title page than a list (in Latin) of the works included in the volume—works printed, incidentally, in Greek type. Later that year, the title page for the

Theocritus adds Greek type to the title page, repeating the standard Latin list in Greek.

The 1496 Thesaurus Cornucopiae introduces yet another layer of complexity: a list, in

Latin and repeated in Greek, of the volume’s contributors and sources. This innovation,

groundbreaking though it was, did not stick as fast as the mirrored Latin/Greek list of

contents; only one more Aldine folio incunable, the 1497 Iamblichus?, would reproduce

it. Between 1495 and 1500, the complexity and ornateness of title pages in Aldine folios

fluctuated. On one end is the spartan simplicity of the 1498 Politian, which reads as

follows:

OMNIA OPERA ANGELI Politiani, et alia quædam lectu digna,quorum nomina in ſe/ quenti indice uidere licet. Only the case varies: size and font are constant. Only one language is used. No decorative

elements whatsoever enliven the page. The words are center-justified, about a third of the

way down the page. It is a purely utilitarian title page.

387 New Introduction to Bibliography, 52.

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On the other end of the spectrum, consider the inverted pyramid of spangly

asterisks beneath the exhaustive title-page/table of contents which preceded the 1499

Cornucopiae Linguae Latinae. It’s not clear why Aldo, or (if Gaskell is correct) a

compositor for the Aldine Press chose to include this completely decorative, meaning-

less visual element.388 Random Cloud has demonstrated that if formes needed to be filled

out for sturdiness’ sake, bearing type would serve this purpose just as well, perhaps

better, than type set regularly.389 Whoever designed the title page of the Cornucopiae

probably included those asterisks as decoration, rather than for any reason of necessity.

This is the first instance of additive decoration on the title page of an Aldine folio

incunable. Aldo had used typographical choice and layout for aesthetic effect before, in

the 1498 Aristophanes; yet here for the first time decoration exists separately from the

title-page’s transmission of content. It is, in a word, extraneous.

Woodcut initials appear to be similarly extraneous. Eleven of the eighteen Aldine

folio incunables I examined (61.11%) include extant floriated woodcut initials beginning

sections, chapters, and books.390 A few even key different sizes of woodcut initial to

different levels of heading—leaving more space for larger blocks at book-headings, but

less space for smaller blocks at section-headings.391 Almost invariably, guide letters were

printed in the blocks reserved for woodcut initials, and those initials were impressed over

the guide-letters, after the initial printing impression. This means that in setting up the

388 Ibid. 389 “Where Angels Fear to read,” 189-190. 390 Gaza, Theocritus, Aristotle I-V, Aristophanes, Colonna, St. Catherine of Siena. 391 Theocritus, Aristotle II, Scriptores Astronimici Veteres.

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page, the area to be reserved for a woodcut initial was filled with bearing type

surrounding the guide letter.

The seven books (38.89%) without woodcut initials are more interesting. They,

too, leave various amounts of space into which woodcut initials may be impressed. The

presence of guide letters in the blank initial-space, in both these books without initials and in books with woodcut initials, indicates that standard procedure at the Aldine Press required the impression of woodcut initials subsequent to typographical impression. This contradicts Gaskell’s statement that woodcut blocks were set into formes for printing;392

it also complicates the retail model for Aldine folios. Gillespie’s and Nuovo’s research

suggests that some books were retailed pre-bound, though most were sold unbound.393 It

is possible that early Aldine folios were sold without woodcut initials—that this type of

decorative upgrade was available to buyers for an extra cost. Here again we see the

potential of decorative extraneity.

Compared to initials and title pages, illustrative woodcuts may be the least

frequent decorative technology visible in late medieval Aldine folios. Only four of the

eighteen I examined (22.22%) included any mechanically imposed illustrations at all. The

first volume (printed 1495) of Aldo’s massive multi-part Aristotle included a single

woodcut, which was either so damaged or so poorly inked that its diagrammatic lines are

broken and patchy. After this early instance, the next woodcut illustration appeared in

1499, in the two-part Scriptores Astronimici Veteres, a pre-made thematic collection of

392 New Introduction to Bibliography, 155-156. 393 Gillespie, “Bookbinding,” and Nuovo, Book Trade, esp. 392-408.

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classical texts relating to astronomy, natural philosophy, and (mostly) astrology. These

illustrations are not distributed equally across the whole book; for instance, thirty-nine of the book’s sixty woodcuts (65%) cluster in Germanicus’ translation of Aratus’

Phenomena. Some of these woodcuts are diagrams, while others are more representative.

Either way, they operate in similar channels to the woodcuts in the Hortus Sanitatis;

particularly those in the Phenomena supplement the text, visual and linguistic meaning

communicated symbiotically.

The case of Francisco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and its illustrations is

a particularly difficult one. Aldo seems to have printed the work on commission, not

speculatively. Martin Lowry cites M. Billanovich’s research into the authorship of the

Poliphili to argue that Leonardo Crasso, “a well-connected Veronese gentleman,”

bankrolled the printing of Poliphili.394 The illustrator remains unknown to modern

scholars—a major gap, given the scope and nature of the woodcuts, not to mention the

skill displayed by their creator. But Lowry argues that, given the close connection

between the edition’s multitudinous illustrations and the labyrinthine yet highly

descriptive text, the illustrator would almost certainly have been known to Aldo.395 How

else could such resonance between the visual and the linguistic be achieved?

Whether or not Aldo or agents of the Aldine Press worked in-person with the

artist for Poliphili, the book’s woodcuts represent a new benchmark in Aldine folios in

thorough, consistent, specific illustration of a text. The close congress between word and

394 The World of Aldus Manutius, 170, n. 38. 395 Ibid., 118-125.

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image pushes back, in fact, at the decorative extraneity visible in initial conventions. The

unknown illustrator’s visual interpretations weave so tightly into Colonna’s surreal verbal

descriptions that neither is thinkable without the other. An imageless Poliphili ceases to

be itself; those images, without their verbal frames, are attractive but ultimately

meaningless. In this specially commissioned volume, according to Lowry, “the

illustrator…carries the interdependence of word and picture into a new dimension.” I

differ with Lowry only in that I argue that the hybridity of this triumph represents, in

microcosm, the success of Aldo’s collaboration with the illustrator. As printer’s and

illustrator’s tasks melded into something rich and strange, so in turn do print and

illustration produce a tour-de-force of multimodal semiosis.

The case of Poliphili is difficult, though, because of its nature as a commission,

which upends the entire customer-driven, market-sensitive design model key to this chapter. Aldo created Poliphili in response to very specific, individual requirements from

a small number of commissioners (perhaps only one). Since he earned the commission

up-front, Aldo would have been pressed by no particular need to fit the desires of

customers. It had a relatively high print run; between 250 and 265 separate copies survive

in various states, housed in 222 institutions around the world. Since some copies will

necessarily have been lost, a large-sized print run makes logical sense, though its relatively high price of a ducat would have prompted purchasers to take care of the volume.396 As such, Poliphili—though a technical masterpiece, an important incunable,

396 The price, and the judgement of a ducat as expensive, comes from Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, 125.

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and an innovative material object—cannot serve as a bellwether for decorative trends in

late-medieval folio printing.

The very next folio Aldo printed, the Epistole Devotissime of St. Catherine of

Siena, also innovates decoratively; it also happens to be admissible as a speculative

publication, and thus more indicative of Aldo’s sense of the Italian and Continental book-

buying markets. The innovation is simple, but fits with Lowry’s characterization of the

volume as Aldo’s attempt to “display his orthodoxy and moral soundness,” particularly if

(as Lowry suggests) Poliphili was considered to be somewhat scurrilous.397 As well as

attaching moralizing preliminaries to an already-orthodox collection, Aldo included a full-page, full-length, carefully-executed woodcut portrait of the saint, icon-style, just

before the beginning of the text proper (cf. Fig. 1). The flower in her right hand is her

traditional lily; in her left hand she holds a sacred heart. The illustration is beautifully

designed; the folds of St. Catherine’s robe have a particularly Hellenic cast which calls to

mind the antique aesthetic present in Poliphili’s illustrations. The shadow of the saint’s

outer garment, neatly expressed in close-laid lines, seems almost of the fine quality made

possible by later developments in engraving. Aldo likely commissioned this woodcut

block specifically for this publication, given its lack of wear and its high technical merit.

It is a brilliant illustration; it is also completely unnecessary.

397 Ibid., 124-126.

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Figure 7-1

284

In calling it “unnecessary,” I do not argue that this woodcut of St. Catherine of

Siena does no rhetorical work or has no semiotic weight. It does, and it has: in a

devotional work like the Epistole Devotissime, the presence of a quasi-iconic image for

readers to meditate on, focus with, and even adore would be powerfully effective. But in

terms of pure linguistic transmission, this image is not actually necessary. Unlike

Poliphili, Epistole Devotissime could exist as a solely textual artifact. It would still

communicate the same meaning and inspire the same devotional affect. The addition of

the illustration of the saint amplifies the book’s affective possibilities; it does not

diversify or supplement them.

This lengthy exploration has charted something like a bell curve, with the

expected outliers. Earlier incunabula, strongly influenced by medieval decorative

tradition, emphasize the inextricable hybridity of print manufacture and manual

embellishment. Many of Aldo’s late-medieval incunabular folios reveal an urge to

simplicity, mechanization (as in the use of pre-made woodcut initials), and streamlining.

At the very end of the incunabular period, just before Aldo consolidated his power in the

Venetian book market, there are hints of a turn back toward the inclusion of decoration as beneficial and extraneous, rather than intrinsic to texts’ meaning and being. My last two

Aldine folio data-points aim at more rarefied markets (Poliphili by its high price, Epistole

Devotissime in its extensive and painstaking preliminaries); this fact suggests a

stratification of Aldo’s production plan. This stratification becomes even more readily

apparent at Aldo’s early sixteenth-century launch of the line of editiones minores. The

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trend seems clear, even without examining any of the five other Venetian printers whom

Lowry identifies as Aldo’s competition.398

The contingent nature of incunabular data sows significant doubt here as well.

Very possibly these books—particularly the decorated books—survived because of their

decorations. Andrew Pettegree argues that Gutenberg printed a textbook by Aelius

Donatus before printing the 42-line Bible, but none of these survive in their original state.

Why have (relatively) many copies of the 42-line Bible survived, while the Donatus only

survives as binding waste?399 Maclean suggests that certain types of books—pedagogical

books among them—were designed for ephemerality;400 it follows that others, like the

42-line Bible and many of the books I have considered in the foregoing pages, were

intended to be somewhat permanent. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili stands as an extreme

example of this possibility; its remarkable survival rate indicates that for a variety of

reasons (the novelty of its contents, the technical triumph of its printing, the design of its

woodcuts, its high price), this book practically begged to be preserved.

The potential importance of decoration cannot be understated. Once a volume was

customized, its chances of survival likely increased dramatically. Proof of such an

historical trend would be nigh-impossible to achieve. Yet it follows logically: especially

if books with pre-printed decorations (like the portrait of St. Catherine of Siena) invited

careful handling and preservation, as well as an appreciation of value in resale markets,

how much more books with unique customizations like hand-rubricated initials or hand-

398 The World of Aldus Manutius, 125-128. 399 Freeman, Johann Gutenberg and His Bible, 63; Pettegree, Book in the Renaissance, 22-23. 400 Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 60.

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painted pictures? The high incidence of manual decoration (painting, hand-rubrication, and the like) bears out this conjecture to some extent. Seven out of twenty-four folios

(29.17%) include manual decoration. If indeed woodcut initials were available as a post- printing customization, and thus technically part of customer-side production, that number jumps to eighteen out of twenty-four data-points (75%).

Much like bookbinding, manual decoration was frequently done professionally.

Unlike bookbinding, however, decoration—particularly rubrication of initials, red-ruling, and red-marking of text—could be and was done by owners. Consider, for example, the rubrication of the beginnings of sentences in Koberger’s Boethius. This could have been executed by a professional scribe or decorator shortly after the book’s publication, on spec, but this possibility is unlikely. More probably this copy of the Boethius was professionally decorated at some point after its purchase; perhaps, too, a technically proficient owner decorated it, at some point after its purchase. The evidence of Newberry

MS 36, a collection of philosophical texts in manuscript, bears this latter possibility out; the rubrication in that volume starts out competently enough, but declines into rubricated doodling and what seems to be amateur work toward the end of the volume. Were multiple rubricators with varying levels of experience involved? Did the work of one rubricator fall off dramatically as the rubrication project progressed? Answers elude.

While ink shade and brightness can date illuminations within a few decades, precise to-the-year dating remains difficult. This mostly precludes the dating of an illumination scheme to shortly before or shortly after a book’s printing. If, as Nuovo and

Pettegree argue, books could languish in booksellers’ stock for years, even decades, the

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beautifully-decorated Cicero printed by Fivizzano might not have been purchased until

1485, eight years after its printing.401 Once bought, a book might receive decorative

upgrades immediately, if its owner had wealth or leisure enough, or it might wait until its

owner could afford the time or money to decorate it. Initial owners might not even

decorate at all; a book could conceivably make its way, undecorated, onto resale markets,

and subsequent owners might take responsibility for ornamentation. Despite art

historians’ ability to generally date colors, styles of initial rubrication, or decorative

motifs, specificity as to year of illuminative production is not yet possible.

In general, then, the nature of decoration in late-medieval folios shifted over the course of the incunabular period. Decoration begins this period as something like an integral part of the book, an attitude familiar from manuscript traditions. Between 1455 and 1500, decoration is removed from its place of privilege, a removal most obvious in

Aldo’s mid-1490s Greek-type folios. Towards the end of this period, decoration shows signs of life, once more valuable to folios’ affective projects, though optional rather than necessary by this point. This process transforms the folio as a concept, in parallel.

Whereas early folios communicate meaning and derive value from the attractiveness and

desirability of their design—which, more often than not, mimics one or another

manuscript tradition—later folios, like Aldo’s, stand on the merit of their contents. Aldo

may not have been the first to minimize decoration in favor of carefully-printed linguistic

excellence, but the consistency of this late-1490s project must have had a significant impact. By the end of the century, Aldo’s folios were known more for typographical and

401 Nuovo, Book Trade, 347-387; Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 81.

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linguistic excellence than for ornamentation or ornamentability. The folio was becoming

a repository for content more than a display-case for beauty.

C. Technological Evolution: Fluid Dimensions I argue above that the very fixity of certain standards for paper manufacturing produces greater ambiguity in modern historical conceptions of books’ dimensions. This ambiguity challenges historical positivism by highlighting the contingency of incunabular data. Another perspective fits with the arguments in the foregoing pages of this chapter, which position the late medieval folio as a field for experimental play. Variable dimensions—of fore-edge, gutter, leaf width, and text block height—yield a corpus

which is not visually uniform. The size and shape of the text block, and its relation to the

width and position of the margins, combine to create a text-space/white-space ratio,

incomprehensible in a numeric expression but nevertheless bearing a visual signification.

The ideas in this section swirl and mix in sometimes-staggering combinations; they include paper size (which was variable), forme size (which we must deduce), margin width (which was usually affected to some extent by trimming), line count (mercifully determinable), and font size (which had not yet settled). In concert, they produce mise-en-

page, plural, whose meanings are clearly significant but lack significant clarity.

To begin with paper dimension: most of my data-points fall within 50 mm of each other, in any direction. Only two, Koberger’s Boethius and Keysere’s Boethius, fall outside of this cluster. Fig. 2 indicates that purchasers might have expected incunabular folios to measure somewhere between 275mm and 325mm tall, and 175mm to 225mm

289

wide—according to Needham, paper of the Chancery size.402 In a standard folio, then,

page area would likely have been between 48125mm2 and 73125mm2. For the sake of

comprehensibility, that equals a range of 4813cm2 to 7313cm2. The problem with this

standardization lies in the uncertainty of incunabular data. Given the possibility of trimming, these data-points probably, though not demonstrably, skew toward smaller size.

Generalizing in this way also erases the individuality of the point at (218, 320), an

important book in its own right: Aldo’s 1498 Aristophanes, his first collection of plays in

folio, a volume which uses typographical variation for specific expressive effect, one

with average margin width but a well-developed printed commentary apparatus which

might eliminate readers’ need or desire to annotate on their own. Generalizing has the

same effect on the point at (186, 300): the Epistole Devotissime, almost exactly average

in its height but with noticeably below-average width. This, too, is a remarkable book, possibly ideological, certainly innovative in its deployment of illustration.

402 “Res papirea,” 125.

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Fig. 2: a scatter plot of paper dimensions 230

220

210

200

190

180

170

160

150 250 260 270 280 290 300 310 320 330

A further theoretical issue with the sort of standardization visible in Fig. 2 lies in the thoroughly hand-crafted nature of late-medieval and early modern manufacturing equipment. In this design economy, one which required the setting of norms in order for those norms later to be broken, the technological options available to many printers were limited. The majority of bookmakers worked with roughly the same technology; type differed regionally and temporally, but the machinery of printing remained relatively stable.403 This may stem from the longevity of individual press equipment, which was complex (and therefore valuable) enough to be bequeathed upon its owner’s death, forfeited for payment of debt, or sold. Johann Fust took Gutenberg’s press with its

403 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 5-8.

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furniture when Gutenberg could not pay his debts.404 Andrea Torresani bought Nicolas

Jenson’s printing equipment, which Aldo Manuzio then used.405 According to Nuovo, the

sale of a press could involve the transfer of its brand, its location, its market share, its

manufactory equipment, or any combination of these.406 Yet although bookmakers

worked with similar equipment, that equipment was not mass-produced; pressworkers familiar enough with the technology could, and did, modify it to fit their needs. Even beyond the ever-present evolution of typography, the foundational technology of the forme allowed for remarkable variation of text block, and as such, of mise-en-page.

The books in the fifteenth-century data-set, though similar in dimension, use their

page-space in subtly (and sometimes radically) different ways. In general, font size

correlates indirectly to line count. It is simple logic, after all, that given a text block with

constant dimensions, larger fonts will require fewer lines to fill those dimensions, while

smaller fonts can fit more lines into those dimensions. So, for instance, Aldo’s 1497

Dictionarium Graecum employs a medium-sized font—smaller than the larger size

regularly appearing in Aldo’s editio princeps of philosophy. As a result of this font-size

decision, the text block’s line count hovers just around 42 (±2). By contrast, Aldo’s 1495

Theocritus employs a largish font—a font size he continues to use for folios of

philosophy well into the sixteenth century. As a result of this font-size decision, the text

block consistently contains 30 lines of type. There are outliers, as well: Aldo’s 1499

Dioscorides uses small type but only musters 40 lines per page. Aldo’s 1499 Perottus

404 Ing, Johann Gutenberg and His Bible, 30-31. 405 Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius, 77. 406 Nuovo, Book Trade, 409-411.

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uses medium type but manages to fit 59 lines of type on most pages. Aldo’s 1498 Politian

uses largish type and fits 38 lines into each page’s text block.

Margin width complicates these dimensional contortions. Here common sense

disappears, replaced by the boding specter of trimming and a measure of irrational

puzzlement. One would expect that text-block profiles characterized by relatively low

line count and small font size (such as the Dioscorides) would boast margins of

unprecedented width or leaves of extraordinary dimensions. Similarly, one would expect

that text-block profiles characterized by unexpectedly large type (such as the Politian) paired with high line-counts would crowd into the margins, squeezing them to a thinness.

But this is not necessarily the case. While the Dioscorides does leave margins of above-

average width (52mm, as opposed to the average of 46.16mm), its leaves are not

particularly wide (213mm, as opposed to the average of 211mm). Yet its text-block measures only 5mm narrower than the average of my results (136mm, as opposed to

141.12mm). In this case, it would make sense for large margins to shrink the text-block significantly, yielding a mise-en-page with abundant white space and a rather narrow, small text-block. Instead, the Dioscorides’ text-block varies only minimally from norms.

This book balances larger-than-average margins, small font size, low line count (for the font size), and a roughly average-sized text block, in ways that defy rational explanation.

The dimensions of the Politian makes more logical sense. Given its larger type size, this folio’s 38 lines per page is relatively high—particularly given Aldo’s disposition toward lower line-counts (usually 30) when using this size of type. Its fore- edge margins fall roughly on-average (43mm, as opposed to 46.16mm). Its gutter

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margins, though, are the largest in any book I examined for this chapter’s data: 43mm,

almost double the average of 22.73mm. The Politian’s leaves are actually 11mm

narrower than the average (200mm, as opposed to 211mm). Wide margins, coupled with

average page-width, would suggest a narrow text-block. And, as expected, the text block

for the Politian is quite skinny: 114mm, the narrowest text block in any folio in the

fifteenth-century data-set, and 19.21% narrower than the average of 141.12mm.

Unlike the Dioscorides, then, the Politian’s interlocking formula of text-block size, margin width, line count, font size, and paper dimensions make logical, mathematical sense.407 The question of why Aldo settled on this peculiar mise-en-page— particularly those acres of gutter-margin—is more fraught. Lowry recounts how this project to print the collected Opera of Angelo Poliziano “dropped suddenly and

unexpectedly in Aldus’ lap,” arguing that Aldo “took every means of giving the edition

that eventually appeared his personal and programmatic touch.” But, characteristically for

Lowry, this assessment of Aldo’s printerly decisions rests on Genettian linguistic

paratexts, subordinating bibliographic codes. As such, Lowry provides no explanation for

the extensive marginal space and concomitant narrow text-block in this edition.408

Neither does a common-sense explanation present itself, unbidden. It is unlikely

that Aldo inherited a dictum for wide gutter margins as part of the whole publishing project. Perhaps, given Poliziano’s stature among Continental academics, the margins interpellate readers to a program of extensive marginal annotation; yet other, comparable

407 In my discussion of this book and its author, I refer to the book using the Latin form of the author’s name (Politian), since the book refers to him that way; I refer to the author by the Italianate form of his name, as with Aldo Manuzio. 408 The World of Aldus Manutius, 118.

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texts, which might also benefit from such a program, display the conventional 20-25mm

gutter margins.409 Certainly, the way that wider margins squeeze the text block yields a

longer (and therefore more expensive, because consuming more paper) edition. But this is

already a hefty book, not straddling the edge of “too-thin.” As Lowry notes, Aldo had not yet achieved market dominance in Venice in 1497; he likely would not have deliberately inflated the price of the Politian by stretching it longer. The simplest explanation might be experimentation.

Innovation permeated the late-medieval printing of folios. Norms existed to be broken. Coupled with the contingency of incunabular data which occupies Chapter 6, this yields a field of signification in which aberration might be attributable to fragmentary data, or to designers’ experimentation, or to some combination of the two. Nevertheless, innovation does seem to cluster around historical hinge-points, as Mark Bland contends.

In an essay about the shift in prevalence from blackletter to roman fonts in early modern

English typography, Bland locates the introduction of industry-changing technological innovations at moments of industrial transition. Between 1580 and 1590, eight established English printers ceased operations; this, according to Bland, “permitted a number of new entrants to the rank of master printer.” This influx of new blood helped to prompt an industry-wide shift away from blackletter and toward roman as the most commonly used font family.410 Something similar probably happened in continental

printing between 1485 and 1500. As the first generation of printers died out or conferred

409 Cf., e.g., Iamblichus (1497). My sense of Poliziano’s academic stature derives from Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, 53-54. 410 Bland, “The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England,” 96-98.

295 their presses on younger strengths, and as wholesale and retail models adjusted and settled toward a state of healthy stability, experimentation became less financially risky and, correlatively, less necessary for differentiation of presses’ products from each other.

If indeed the folio was a prime site for this experimentation—with typography, with mise-en-page, with layout, and with ornamentation—it also constituted a rhetorical statement, purposefully or not. As a large-dimensioned, often expensive, frequently time- consuming undertaking, the folio’s positioning as a site for experimentation argued powerfully for equality between formats as well as the necessity of experimentation.

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Chapter 8 - Entangled Definitions, Use-Patterns, and the Weight of Tradition A. Subdividing Incunabular Folios Most scholars of incunabula use some kind of classificatory system to make sense

of the frequently haphazard mass of surviving late-medieval books. These various

systems organize around any number of central principles: date of publication, date of

composition, language, intellectual tradition, or use-type. Certain of these systems can coexist. For instance, Lowry’s critical narrative progresses in a linear fashion, but he also groups the printed works appearing in Venice during Aldo’s professional lifetime according to the tradition into which they emerged. These systems provide clarity, but they can also be limiting. For example, referring to and thinking of De Mysteriis

Aegyptiorum as a philosophical text might benefit from thinking of other of Aldo’s

printings which could be classified as “philosophical”—like the five-part Aristotle or the

Dioscorides. Yet at the same time, in thinking of De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum as a

philosophical book, a critic might not consider the potential of its similarities to the

Hortus Sanitatis or the Polycronicon. Employing classificatory systems is a double-edged

sword, particularly when those systems are too narrowly conceived, or too exclusively

used.

This chapter sidesteps this danger by presenting several different reconfigurations

according to several different classificatory models. This practice of dividing and re-

dividing my data on folios in order to experiment with the challenges and possibilities of

classificatory systems produces two effects. The first, positively, exposes the value of

setting Aristotle next to Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, troubling the reductive impulse to

rigid characterization. The second effect, negatively, deconstructs the very idea of

297 critically-imposed classification by illustrating the flexibility and ease with which these folios can be reclassified. This deconstruction does not deny the benefit of experimental classification. It does, however, reveal the fundamental instability inherent in the nature and implementation of historical classificatory systems, emphasizing the importance of having multiple systems operating simultaneously, with some level of independence from each other.

Many of these systems operate at the linguistic level. So ingrained in critical mindsets are they that their implementation is second-nature. The widespread practice of critical periodization differentiates “Renaissance” from “medieval” from “classical”— that last period sometimes being termed “late antiquity” to differentiate from “antiquity,” those truly venerable texts hailing from the abysm of ignorance before Hellenistic rationality (or, alternatively, the rise of Christianity). In the following exercise, I subdivide the fifteenth-century data-set into three eras of composition: the Renaissance

(from the Plague years through 1500), the medieval period (from the splintering of the

Roman empire through the early 14th century AD), and the classical period (from the rise of identifiable Hellenic culture to, roughly, the end of the 5th century AD).

Applying this periodization to this data-set immediately reveals two trends. First, folios were considerably more likely to contain works written in the classical and

Renaissance periods than works written in the medieval period (cf. Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: Era of Composition

4, 18%

11, 50%

7, 32%

Medieval Renaissance Classical

Figure 8-1 The market share of medieval-written texts in folio diminishes even further upon consideration that, of the four folio medieval works in this data-set, two are different

German iterations of the same text (Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae). Further,

the date of this work—early in the 6th century, and only barely “medieval” at all—renders

it even more of an outlier. The “Renaissance” piece of this pie is composed of debatable

data, as well. Certain texts obviously emerged after the genesis of the Italian Renaissance,

such as the Theodorus Gaza (Aldo’s first folio), or the major Opera of Poliziano. The

dating of others is more fraught, however. Though the Hortus Sanitatis has a well-attested

publishing history, stretching from its first German publication in the mid-1480s,411 it is

an unattributed work. In all likelihood, Jacob Meydenbach, printer of its first three

editions, got his copy-text from a fifteenth-century colleague, but this is not certain.

411 Arber, Herbals, 25.

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Even those putatively straightforward texts which profess to translate or transcribe classical texts into modern Greek or Latin cannot avoid the whiff of collaboration. The extensive commentary in the Koberger Boethius offers a salutary example. Not only does this version alternate sections of the primary text in its original Latin with German translations of those sections, but the latter portions of the book are devoted exclusively to commentary attributed to Thomas Aquinas. Other volumes include critical responses, or even multiple quasi-independent works, in the same impression. For instance, Aldo’s

1495 Theocritus also includes works by Theognis, Pythagoras, Phocylides, Cato, and

Hesiod—all fitting within the umbrella-era of the classical, but flourishing across a span of nearly a millennium (conjecturally, with Hesiod as the earliest and the “Aurea

Carmina” of Pythagoras [?] as the latest).412 To what extent can this collection even be reduced to the singular generality of a “classical” classification? Not only do the categories of “Renaissance,” “medieval,” and “classical” constantly shift, but certain texts refuse to stay in their proper data-bins.

The second trend that materializes, when we classify folio books based on when their textual contents were written, is a process of gradual homogenization. Organized by date of printing, the first twelve bits of my data—the first half—include six works from the classical era, three from the medieval era, and three from Renaissance writers. The latter half of my data includes the same proportion—50%—of classical works, but only one medieval work, compared to five Renaissance works. The corpus gradually develops toward polarization between noticeably contemporary and quite ancient work. While

412Joost-Gaugier, Measuring Heaven, p. 60.

300 works in the medieval data-bin continued to be produced in folio throughout the early years of printing, I conjecture that this polarization developed at large throughout the incunabular period.

This exercise in classification leaves the model in shambles. Incunabular standards of attribution, coupled with premodern attitudes toward authorship and collaboration, make assigning unitary dates to texts quite difficult. The data also suggest a growing focus, at least in Aldo’s work, on the printing in folio of classical and renaissance works. Put another way, in the incunabular period, Aldo did not print in folio any works written between the 6th century and the 13th century. In addition, any classification of this or that book to one period or another is confounded by the anthologizing impulse. Because Aldo had wide access to texts from the classical period, and because he was interested in filling up his folio volumes, he frequently issued pre- collected collections.

These had much in common with the medieval model of the compilatio, but these were curated and prepared by a printer or publisher rather than agglomerated by a reader or purchaser. Several studies of English books have described readers’ critical and material work in compiling shorter works into larger, collected volumes, most notably by

Gillespie and Knight.413 Texts like Aldo’s Theocritus remind us that collections could be assembled before, as well as after, the point of sale. (This impulse presents in increasingly sophisticated ways throughout subsequent centuries of folios; see, for example, the Jaggards’ Treasurie collection discussed in Chapter 3.) Given this, then—

413 Gillespie, “Early English Sammelbände,” and Knight, “Organizing Manuscript and Print.”

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and given the sometimes disparate parts collected together in these anthology volumes—

the task of sorting this folio into the Renaissance period, that into the classical, those into

the medieval era seems nigh-impossible.

Another very common way to classify folios uses their language. The fifteenth-

century data-set yields a polarization even more dramatic than that detailed above, when

analyzed this way (cf. Fig. 2). Lowry clarifies Aldo’s attitude toward vernacular

publishing: “[d]uring this first period of his printing career, Aldus published only two

editions in Italian, both appearing within a single year.”414 Again, just as the texts of

Boethius skewed the results of Fig. 1, so do Aldo’s first two vernacular folios. The

productivity of majority-vernacular printers like Caxton and, eventually, Wynken de

Worde in England, for example, demonstrates that the numbers in Fig. 2 are low. But the

real complexity of language in folios is that few, if any, of the folios in the fifteenth-

century data-set contain works in only one language. Nearly all of these books are

polyglot in some way. The two Boethii contain similar amounts of German and Latin.

The Theodorus Gaza contains Latin and Greek; the Politian contains Latin, Greek, and

“the first Hebrew characters printed in Venice;”415 the Ortus Vocabulorum contains Latin

and English. Single-language folios constitute a miniscule minority of my data-set.416

414 Lowry, World of Aldus Manutius, 118. 415 Kallendorf and Wells, 64. 416 I would include a visualization for just how small this minority is, but (foolishly) I neglected to record specifics of language-usage when I was conducting my research for this chapter. I have confirmed the facts I cite in this paragraph via digital facsimiles, but that medium can take me only so far.

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Fig. 2: Primary Language 3 13%

10 44%

10 43%

Greek Latin Vernacular

Figure 8-2 The ramifications of this classification-test resemble those of my test of periodization, but differ in key ways. Like periodization, the data are polarized, rather than balanced. Unlike that former test, the imbalance favors antiquity (“dead” languages like Classical Greek and Latin) rather than contemporaneity (vernacular languages). As a corollary, though most of this data-set falls into one of two categories, as with the periodization-test, those two categories are more balanced with each other. In the former test, the largest subset, “classical works,” was 50% larger than the next largest subset,

“Renaissance works.” Here, the largest subset (Latin) is only 10% larger than the next largest subset (Greek).

This test also confirms and amplifies my previous findings regarding the instability of critically-imposed data-bins. Though determining the language in which a work is written ought to be easy, objective even, the predominance of polyglot writing styles in these folios—coupled with the anthologizing impulse—renders language-

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classifications reductively simple. The title of Fig. 2 demonstrates this: “Primary

Language” implies the existence of secondary, even tertiary languages. An accurate

representation of the linguistic diversity present in those books would no longer even

qualify as a chart. Instead, the detail necessary to differentiate between, say, the

juxtaposition of Latin and Greek in the 1497 Crastonus and the juxtaposition of Latin and

English in the Ortus Vocabulorum would demand a thorough textual description—no

longer visual. “Primary Language” also betrays the imposition of my critical will on these data. This classification of the Koberger Boethius as primarily Latin rather than primarily

German enacts a critical rewriting of that text. That is, one of the text’s effects (the amplification of Boethius’ ideas by translation into the vernacular) is subordinated to another of its effects (the validation of Latinate Boethianism through transmission in

Latin). The same thing happens if Crastonus’ Dictionarum Graecum is classified as a

primarily Greek-language text, subordinating that folio’s considerable Latin content in

favor of its somewhat more voluminous Greek. Despite the caveat implied by the word

“Primary,” this system of classification rests upon a critically instituted hierarchy,

prioritizing Latinity over vernacularity (in Koberger’s Boethius and in the Ortus

Vocabulorum) or Greekness over Latinity (in the Crastonus).

Yet another general system for classifying folios keys to the tradition into which

their contents fall: philosophical (encompassing political, natural, and abstract

philosophy), religious, and literary. This last category requires further explanation. While

I firmly believe that referring to folios as “literary” operates from anachronistic

definitions, it here operates specifically and narrowly as an adjectival referent to early

senses of “literature.” The OED attests a c1450 English usage of “literature,” with the

304 following meaning: “Familiarity with letters or books; knowledge acquired from reading or studying books, esp. the principal classical texts associated with humane learning…literary culture; learning, scholarship. Also: this as a branch of study.”417 I only apply the category {literary} to specifically those incunabular folios which participate in the pedagogical projects of the republic of letters.

Upon sorting my data into these bins, a familiar image emerges (see Fig. 3). As with date- and language-related systems, two larger categories overwhelm one smaller category, though to be fair this chart more resembles Fig. 1 (Date of Composition) than

Fig. 2 (Primary Language). Fig. 3 most immediately clarifies the relative rarity of religious folios. Given that Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible sometimes operates as an avatar for the incunabular folio—and even incunabula in general—this works as a valuable corrective to the imagined dominance of religion in printing. The preponderance of philosophy is less surprising: given the dominant critical narratives of Aldo’s humanistic project, a high volume of texts of a broadly philosophical bent fits that brand. In this exercise, even more than in the preceding two, my critical involvement in constructing these bins and tagging the data shapes my conclusions.

417 OED, “literature,” n. 1.

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Fig. 3: Tradition of Textual Content

7, 33%

12, 57%

2, 10%

Literary Religious Philosophical

Figure 8-3 Instability characterizes all three of these categories, though to different extents.

Though philosophy may be the simplest of my data-bins, the necessity of grouping natural, political, and moral philosophy together renders the bounds of this bin so wide as to tremble on the brink of meaninglessness. The same problem plagues the somewhat artificial category of the literary, but to a more dramatic extent. The various tracks of political, natural, and moral thought all qualified as philosophical, broadly conceived, in late medieval intellectual culture. By contrast, no late-medieval intellectual models would group works like Colonna’s surreal, classically-informed vision-quest-narrative

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili with the 1496 Thesaurus Cornucopiae, which tends toward the grammatical. If both of these, as well as the 1498 collection of Aristophanes’ plays, qualify as literary—pertaining to the pedagogical development of the life of the mind— what does not qualify as literary? The category of “religion” offends worst, because with one exception it might be profitably absorbed by other categories. The Epistole

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Devotissime of St. Catherine of Siena meet every requirement of a religious book. But the De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum of Iamblichus?, with its critical dialectic response to

Porphyry’s ideas about theurgy, could just as easily work as a pedagogical text—or, given its intellectually generative nature, might qualify as philosophical. More than those in any other system yet surveyed, these classificatory bins cannot hold their shape.

The questions I pose above regarding the tagging of various data-points—is De

Officiis philosophical or secular-religious?—reveal further instability. The primary issue is the erasure of specific detail necessitated by the generalizing influence of classification. Periodizing the Theocritus as classical (despite the millennium-long stretch of time between its earliest and latest inclusions) erases its individual texture. In the same way, identifying Koberger’s and Keysere’s Boethii as primarily Latin (despite their heavy inclusion of vernacular translation) hamstrings their rhetorical effectiveness. So too does referring to the Iamblichus? as religious or the Boethii as philosophical privilege one reading of their rhetorical and ideological projects over others.

Sometimes the prioritizing inherent in classification can suppress texts’ generative ambiguity. Part of the appeal of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which Lowry calls “a linguistic and literary debauch, choked with recondite imagery, erudite periphrases, and exotic verbiage,”418 and whose imagery Febvre and Martin term “in line with classical feeling,”419 lies in its inscrutability. The interplay between verbal and visual imagery appears to attain levels of entanglement previously unachieved in a printed text. As a

418 The World of Aldus Manutius, 120. 419 The Coming of the Book, 98.

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media object, Poliphili resists dissection, just as its imagery, textual and visual, resists

positive decryption.

Lowry’s and Febvre and Martin’s assessments of Poliphili indicate its reliance on

multiple traditions. In appropriating classical aesthetics and iconography, it resembles

Aldo’s career-long project of midwifing the re-naissance of the classical milieu through

the diplomatic reproduction of ancient texts. In describing and depicting arcane, mystical

religious ritual—Hellenic, Egyptian, or otherwise—it emphasizes the aestheticized

syncretism present in Renaissance painting and sculpture. In shoring the intellectual and aesthetic fragments of classical antiquity against its ruins, Poliphili participates in the

“literary” project defined above. One particular value of this work lies in the interrelation

of these three influencing traditions: religious, classical, and philosophical feed into each

other, producing an effect greater than the sum of its inextricable parts. Tagging Poliphili

“L” for “literary” reduced this work to one of its parts; making it a data-point denies its

individuality.

In this exercise of processing and visualizing data according to popular systems of

classification, the trend has been from definitional instability toward greater definitional

instability, directly correlated to the increase of my interpretive input. My unstable

classifications according to intellectual tradition yield a chronological trend of their own,

from philosophical stability toward intellectual diversity. This shift mimics in

photographic negative the general homogenization of eras being printed, discussed above.

Of the chronological first half of the fifteenth-century data-set, dated 1473-1497, nine

(75%) primarily participate in a philosophical tradition; three (25%) primarily participate

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in literary traditions, and none primarily participate in any religious tradition. The

chronological second half of this data-set (the twelve latest folios, dated 1497-1500), is

remarkably more diverse: four (33.34%) primarily participate in a philosophical tradition,

three (25%) primarily participate in a religious tradition, and five (41.67%) primarily participate in literary traditions. The development of this balance is remarkable, and hints at the further diffraction chronicled in Chapters 2, 3, and 5.

I will apply one more system of classification to these data—the most egregiously subjective system yet, and perhaps the one most widely applied by book historians.

Scholars from Febvre to Pettegree speak of folios as academic, learned, intellectual, and/or esoteric in nature—as opposed to smaller formats, which are considered to be

“practical.” This position draws upon potentially erroneous assumptions about the portability imagined to be inherent to smaller formats, which lead logically to potentially erroneous assumptions about the folio format as inherently cumbersome. In this simple binary model, there are books which are used regularly—usually small formats—and books which are consulted selectively—usually folios. We have already seen this complicated by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century folios, but its origins lie here.

The application of this binary classification scheme to incunabular folios demands a delimitation of data-bins. Most foundationally, the qualities of “practical” and

“academic” each presuppose use, to different extents. This word “use” has capitalistic overtones, as if books are commodities to be consumed, but I deploy it deliberately, drawing upon William H. Sherman’s well-defended choice in Used Books.420 Though the

420 xiii-xv.

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rate and type of use differ, the fact of the folio as a tool remains constant. A folio created

for practical use invites specific employment in concrete activities. A folio created for

academic use enables non-specific employment in abstract activities. Folios classified as

practical are concrete tools; folios classified as academic are abstract tools.

To classify a folio as {practical} does not erase its intellectual content or

requirements. Frequently, practical folios assisted in concrete works of intellectual or

academic endeavor. Each work in Aldo’s 1496 Thesaurus Cornucopiae (an anthology of

grammatical and linguistic pedagogical texts assembled by the printer) blends practical

and abstract reflections on language and grammar to different extents. Aldo’s decision to

print them together gives them an overarching practical thrust. So, too, does Aldo’s

epistle, occurring immediately after the title page and list of contributors, explicitly

figuring the Thesaurus as valuable for litterarum studiosi.421 The Thesaurus thus exists as

a practical tool to aid in a concrete activity: the understanding of Greek.

In addition, folios which I label {academic} do not exist merely in the academy.

Late-medieval intellectual culture, particularly in Italy, was fueled by but not shackled to

university culture; Angela Nuovo’s research into the similarities and differences between

book retail in university towns and book retail in non-university towns bears this out. In

labeling a folio {academic}, I draw upon the word’s connotation of “abstract,

nonconcrete, separate from the demands of practicality” rather than its denotation of “of

421 I avoid emphasizing epistolary evidence as communicative of books’ projects, for three reasons. First, book people’s early adoption of the preliminary epistle as field for commercial manipulation renders its factual legitimacy suspect. Second, the preliminary location of epistles to the reader or epistles dedicatory does not necessitate that purchasers read them; particularly in unbound books, preliminaries would be especially likely to wear away. Third, I have small Latin and less Greek, and epistles (particularly Aldine epistles) are frequently written in Latin.

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or having to do with the academy.” As such, a book like Ranulf Higden’s Polycronicon,

printed by Caxton in 1480, offers a tool for readers to apply primarily in the abstract, to

the world at large. Its preliminary paragraph offers political and philosophical rationales

for its printing: neither is Albion/Britain’s description widely available, nor is its

“noblenesse and worthinesse…knowen.”422 Using Polycronicon allows readers to better

understand the world by filling the Albion/Britain-shaped gap in their world-picture.

Fig. 4 expresses these fraught, contingent data-bins. The primary significance of

this visualization lies in the large market share occupied by folios tagged as practical. In

addition to tagging folios practical, I name explicitly the concrete, practical activity they

supported, visible in Table 1. As always, certain books straddle the line between the

practical and the academic; see, for instance, Perottus’ Cornucopiae, a philosophico-

literary commentary on Martial which foregrounds its value as a reference text so openly

that the latter use, not the former, becomes its defining characteristic. On the other side,

Aldo’s collection of Aristophanes from 1498 presents the text surrounded by printed

glossary marginalia in smaller type, reproducing the well-known biblical mise-en-page. It could well be argued that, separately, the primary (dramatic) texts and the secondary

(scholarly) texts serve practical purposes. In Aldo’s 1498 folio impression, these two combine into an entry into the unofficial series of Great Books which Aldo printed in folio between 1495 and 1500, which also includes the five-part Aristotle, the Theocritus, and the Iamblichus.

422 STC 13440a; f[1]v.

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Fig. 4: Implied Use-Patterns

9, 39%

14, 61%

Academic Practical

Figure 8-4

Short Title Date Printer Concrete Activity Supported

Hortus Sanitatis 1491 Jacob Identification and use of natural

Meydenbach ingredients

Theodorus Gaza 1495 Aldo Manuzio Language pedagogy

Thesaurus 1496 Aldo Manuzio Language pedagogy

Cornucopiae

Dictionarum 1497 Aldo Manuzio Language reference

Graecum

Politian 1498 Aldo Manuzio Language pedagogy and reference

Scriptores 1499 Aldo Manuzio Astrological reference

Astronimici

Veteres

Dioscorides 1499 Aldo Manuzio Medical pedagogy and reference

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Perottus 1499 Aldo Manuzio Reference/commentary on Martial

St. Catherine of 1500 Aldo Manuzio Devotional exercises

Siena

Ortus 1500 Wynkyn de Language reference

Vocabulorum Worde

Table 8-1 The preponderance of paratextual materials in the above subset of data bears out my argument that they are, at some level, designed for use. Reference technologies, including tables of contents, indices, glossaries, and occasionally title pages, often significantly lengthen preliminary paratexts. The ten folios I identify as designed for practical use include, on average, paratextual material 18.6 pages long. Another way to present these data reveals more of its importance: only two of these ten folios (20%) include a minimum of paratextual apparatus (a half-sheet with title on the recto and an epistle on the verso). The fourteen folios I identify as designed for academic use include, on average, paratextual material 10.62 pages long; this figure drops to 6.17 pages when we except Aldo’s second volume of Aristotle, printed in 1497 and containing 64 pages of paratextual matter. Still more telling, eight of these fourteen folios (57.14%) include a minimum of paratextual apparatus.

In comparison, then, the folios I identify as practical include an average of three

times as much paratextual material as the folios I identify as academic. In addition, the

folios I identify as academic are almost three times more likely to include minimal

paratexts as are the folios I identify as practical. It does not necessarily follow that longer

paratext defines or confirms practical use-patterns, or that a folio designed for practical

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use would demand longer paratext. Causality is indeterminable, but correlation is clear:

practical folios tend to include longer paratextual materials, often lengthened by reference

technologies, while academic folios tend to include shorter paratextual materials,

infrequently affected by reference technologies. The innate practicality of reference

technologies strengthens this link; indices and tables of contents render explicit, even

invite, the discontinuous reading practices which Peter Stallybrass argues are implicit in

the form of the codex.423

So what, in the final analysis, results from this series of categorizations—this

endless tagging and binning, re-tagging and re-binning of the same everlasting data-set?

A few macro-trends emerge. First, most classificatory systems have a small subset: folios religious, medieval, and/or vernacular are rarer in this data-set. Second, a shift may take place in Aldo’s output between 1495-1497 and 1498-1500; while the former period seems to emphasize conservatism and the conventional, the latter period sees him innovating more. Third, era of composition, tradition of content, and language often map onto each other, but do not do so exclusively. Several Greek-language, philosophical-

tradition, classical texts exist, but these traits are each visible separate from each other, as

well.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the five-part Aristotle which Aldo published in six volumes significantly tilts his early catalogue of folios toward Greek-

language abstract philosophy from the classical period. This project was a serious

undertaking: the first volume appeared in 1495, the last in 1498. Thousands of pages,

423 “Books and Scrolls,” 42-46.

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millions of sorts, almost ten kg of printed paper, this editio princeps looms large over

other incunabular Aldine projects. Because it was issued in so many volumes—six, since

the fourth part was printed in two pieces—and because each volume is technically an

individual impression, I count each as a separate book. This seriously distorts the data;

subtracting six data-points from the {Greek-language}, {classical-era}, {philosophical- tradition}, and {academic} bins would yield very different pie charts. But Aldo did print this massive set of philosophical folios, which signals his commitment of finances, time, and effort to the production of the first printed edition of Aristotle. Though the axiom that folios were reserved for major academic works may not be completely true, the data do bear it out in part.

B. False Binaries Between Use-Types, and How to Handle Them The last system of classification which I test in the preceding section, use-type based on implied use-patterns, requires further examination. In contemporary critical discourse about the place of books in late medieval and early modern culture, the idea of use crops up again and again. Indeed, scholars may use it more consistently than any

other classificatory system to differentiate between formats’ cultural resonances.

Precisely because so much scholarship rests upon casual distinctions between practical

and academic, those distinctions must be examined.

In addition, the idea of use often implies a binary, as it does above; this binary is

ripe for deconstruction, because either/or is always too simple. In the pages to follow, I

propose a variety of distinct inflections of practical and academic use, challenging the

independence of these distinctions from each other, introducing potential new use-

patterns for folios, and dwelling on those folios which straddle various classificatory

315 divides. Classifying folios according to their use may be somewhat extraneous. The idea of material permanence, with its corollary of cultural permanence, ought to replace the idea of material and/or cultural prestige in the critical discourse of the history of the premodern book. Whether or not intention of permanence is a given for most—not all— folios, the idea of use as differentiating smaller formats from larger formats, or some folios from other folios, becomes somewhat superfluous. That is, if most folios are folios because of the material affordances of their format, the question of how they were used, or how they were designed to be used, is to some extent irrelevant to the decisions regarding their material creation. This third reason does not invalidate discussions of use- patterns; instead, it troubles their dominance. The question becomes: if the folio format can endow a level of material permanence to the work it contains, for what reason is

Folio X intended to be permanent? What does its permanence yield? Why must it be permanent?

As I discuss above, several of these folios are built for practical use to accomplish specific, commonplace, even mundane tasks. The Hortus Sanitatis, which Agnes Arber considers one of the three fundamental texts of the printed-herbal tradition, fits this description.424 According to Arber, whose monograph on herbals remains standard, the

Hortus differs both in detail and in scope from the printed herbals which had preceded it.

Previous herbals, like the quarto Latin Herbarius (1484) and the folio Herbarius zu

Teutsch (1485), both printed by Peter Schöffer in Mainz, confine themselves primarily to botanical subjects and their ramifications.425 Arber argues that the Hortus Sanitatis adapts

424 Herbals, 13-14. 425 Ibid., 16-19.

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and develops from the Herbarius zu Teutsch, expanding the latter’s botanical descriptions

as well as including for the first time zoological, ichthyological, geological, and

ornithological sections.426 It becomes, in other words, a reference text of remarkably

broad remit, covering those subjects necessary for self-sufficiency in the late fifteenth century. It does adapt the work of an assortment of unnamed medieval and classical natural philosophers.427 But the Hortus Sanitatis figures its contents specifically in

practical terms, addressing the ways in which beneficial and detrimental nature could

affect, or be used to affect, quality of life.

The Ortus Vocabulorum, printed in Westminster by Wynkyn de Worde in 1500,

resembles the Hortus Sanitatis in more than title. Both are massive books; the copies I

examined of both bear signs of heavy use, such as smudging, soil, and that peculiar worn-

down thinness at fore-edge head and foot corners which suggests frequent thumbing.

Both are printed in blackletter, the font family then dominant in the respective countries

in which they were first made available. Both claim encyclopedic authority in their uses

of organizational technologies, their length, and the thoroughness of their treatment of

their subject matter. Though both are written in Latin, they each gesture in different ways

toward the needs of less-literate readers, or at least to the parallel existence of readers

literate in Latin and readers illiterate in Latin. The Hortus Sanitatis pairs Latin

descriptions of plants, animals, and nature with frequent woodcut illustrations; the Ortus

Vocabulorum occasionally defines Latin words in English. Both of these folios pitch

themselves as broadly valuable for concrete, non-abstract tasks; the Ortus Vocabulorum

426 Ibid., 25. 427 Ibid., 16.

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could even be used as a reference text for deciphering the Hortus Sanitatis. The use

implied by the design and contents of these folios is decidedly practical and mundane.

But practicality can also serve academic or abstract purposes. This same Ortus

Vocabulorum, much like the Thesaurus Cornucopiae or Crastonus’ Dictionarium

Graecum (both printed by Aldo), could be, and likely was, employed in concrete ways to

serve abstract ends. These reference texts facilitate a pedagogy—whether communally

didactic or autodidactic—of literature.428 As such, these folios themselves, despite their

divergent content, all operate as practical supplements to abstract intellectual projects.

Given their different content, they work differently, and they address different

intellectual communities. For instance, the presence of vernacular (English) definitions in

the Ortus Vocabulorum restricts its usership to Latin- and English-literate individuals

who wished to better understand Latin. The makeup of the Thesaurus Cornucopiae, with

its nigh-exclusive use of Greek and its learned commentaries on Greek grammar, requires

a different type of user: Greek-literate, familiar with the basics of Greek grammar,

requiring a fuller understanding of mechanical and grammatical minutiae. Crastonus’

Dictionarium Graecum is yet another matter. A popular text, by 1497 it had been printed

five times already: twice in quarto,429 once in octavo,430 and twice in folio.431 The two

columns of Aldo’s edition, which the Venetian may have pioneered, lists Greek words

and phrases first on each line, followed by either a Latin synonym or a brief definition in

428 See above for my narrow, historically contextualized definition of the study of literature as it was understood in the late medieval period. 429 Vicenza, Dionysius Bertochus, 1483; Reggio Emilia, Dionysius Bertochus and Marcus Antonius de Bazaleriis, 1497. 430 Milan, Bonus Accursius, 1480. 431 Milan, Bonus Accursius, 1478; Vicenza, Dionysius Bertochus, 1483.

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Latin. Thus, this volume bridges the gap between the Thesaurus Cornucopiae, which

hones the specialized grammatical skills of Greek-literate scholars, and the Ortus

Vocabulorum, which develops the general language skills of scholars who knew some

Latin but were not fluent. These three volumes all may qualify as practical, but their

practicality primarily serves a different purpose from that primarily served by the Hortus

Sanitatis.

In contrast to these supplementary folios stand the major, imposing works in the

conventional classical canon—like Cicero’s De Officiis432 or Aldo’s editio princeps of

Aristotle. This sort of folio fits the critical stereotype of folios as expressive of Great

Books: weighty in content and in material profile, abstruse because conceptually dense,

expensive because materially heavy. Indeed, Cicero and Aristotle epitomize the Western

Tradition, as well as all of the political and intellectual conservatism bound up in that

phrase. But though the contents of these works may be ideologically and structurally

conservative, examination of their material profiles reveals that they do not, necessarily,

mirror that conservatism. More importantly, the use-patterns demanded by these books diverge in surprising ways from each other and from the assumed straightforwardness of their philosophical contents.

Aldo’s Aristotle, as I mention above, weighed close to ten kg, all six volumes

together. Were such a huge mass of paper bound into one mega-volume, the furniture

would be impossibly bulky, the final product unusably massive. On their own, in separate

432 For the record, the De Officiis which I examined at the British Library, Fivizzano’s 1477 edition, was the ninth folio edition, and the seventeenth edition overall. The first surviving edition is Fust and Schöffer’s, printed in 1465 in Mainz. With seventeen editions emerging in twelve years—approximately 1.42 editions per year—it’s safe to say that De Officiis was a popular text.

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volumes as they were issued, the parts of Aristotle are of manageable mass--perhaps not

comfortable to hold in the hand for a long period of time, but certainly usable on a table

or at a desk. By contrast, De Officiis is positively scrawny. It weighs in at 621g, or 6.27%

of the total weight of the Aristotle. The relatively slim profile of De Officiis renders it a

prime candidate for post-sale compilation, according to the practice as defined by

Gillespie, Knight, and others.433 While the Aristotle likely could not be bound with other

volumes, thanks to its hefty material profile, De Officiis could; this opened the latter up

to the fecund contextual potential inherent to the sammelband tradition, opportunities

denied to the Aristotle. The broad range of Aristotelian, quasi-Aristotelian, and pseudo-

Aristotelian texts in Aldo’s five-volume pre-sale compilation had to support each other; they provided each other with a preset group of contextual documents. De Officiis, by

contrast, left the task of framing Cicero through contextual materials to purchasers,

granting them wider agency while simultaneously taking for granted their expertise and

orthodoxy in doing that framing.

De Officiis is printed in a clear roman font; Aristotle is printed in some of Aldo’s

first Greek type. Today, many struggle to read the blackletter font family, given the

triumph of roman. In the 1470s, however, the opposite was true: as historians of the

premodern book love to point out, blackletter was the norm and roman type seemed

quaint or exotic.434 The choice Jacobus de Fivizzano made to print De Officiis in roman,

only seven years after Nicolas Jenson introduced a roman typeface to Venice and Europe,

classified this edition as explicitly, even ostentatiously, of a classical visual aesthetic.

433 Gillespie, “Early English Sammelbände,” and Knight, “Organizing Manuscript and Print.” 434 Bland, “Appearance of the Text,” 116-117; Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 17-19.

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Fust and Schöffer’s 1465 folio edition uses a stolid blackletter, similar to the type Fust

won from Gutenberg; in 1465 neither Fust and Schöffer nor anyone else had access to

roman type. But their (involuntary) decision to print Cicero in a type directly reminiscent

of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century continental manuscript hands typographically depicts

Cicero as a late-medieval philosopher. The 1477 De Officiis, by contrast, typographically

historicizes Cicero, using the material of the folio page to distance the reader from the

book’s author and its contents.

By contrast, the early Aldine Greek type used in the Aristotle sought to faithfully

represent fifteenth-century Greek manuscript hands, reproducing at least one important

aspect of a familiar late medieval mise-en-page. Various scholars have ascribed variable success to these attempts. Some react positively: Febvre and Martin locate the genesis of successful large-scale Greek-type printing in Aldo’s endeavors,435 and Lowry takes the

position that Aldo’s technological and aesthetic insight “solved the problems” plaguing pre-Aldine Greek printing.436 But Lowry acknowledges that since Aldo’s letterforms

copied the “fussy, flamboyant cursive” style of late medieval manuscript Greek, they

“will and must be found wanting” “[i]f they are judged purely by the modern standards of

visual clarity and harmony of form.”437 Precisely because Aldo’s proprietary type-fonts sought to mimic manuscript letterforms, the editio princeps of Aristotle explicitly figures those works as contemporary with the late medieval manuscript hand in which they appeared to be written. Aristotle is typographically fashioned into a familiar, late-

435 The Coming of the Book, 266-267. 436 The World of Aldus Manutius, 89-90. 437 Ibid., 131.

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medieval figure, and his texts into approachable, modern works. To late medieval

purchasers, De Officiis would have looked like an artifact; the huge Aristotle would have

looked fresh and new.

Each of these editions of works of classical philosophy provides scholarly readers

with different avenues into the work. Surprisingly enough, De Officiis might demand

more from its reader, what with its relative lack of contextualizing texts and its curious,

archaizing type-font. The vastly larger, more intimidating edition of Aristotle might actually welcome consumers with less scholarly experience, offering a typeface familiar to students of manuscript Greek and providing a host of contextualizing texts to support reading. Both intended use-patterns, however, demand similar levels of pragmatism: if one sought to understand one of Cicero’s most popular texts, or if one’s studies required a

fluency with a variety of Aristotle’s works, purchasing or borrowing these folios would

have provided that understanding or fluency. Though the works themselves are fairly

abstract, their content offering abstract value, purchasers’ use of them would have

conformed to a model of practical intellectualism.

While a subset of these folios demands a secular intellectual use, some evidence

exists of a different subclass of devotional or religious intellectual use. This use-pattern

primarily occurs in the mind; however, as Mary Carruthers argues, premodern reading

only infrequently took place in complete silence, occurring much more frequently in

subvocalized, barely-audible reading.438 Volume level notwithstanding, folios like the

Epistole Devotissime presuppose a different practical purpose for intellectual engagement

438 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 205, 215.

322 from that implied by De Officiis or the Aristotle. This book signals its intended use- pattern in part through the full-page, hagiographic woodcut portrait preceding its text, unprecedented in Aldine folios. It transmits its text in a medium-large roman, printed

(probably) on the Median size of paper which may have been the Aldine standard. Given the epistolary nature of this text, its fragmentation into brief sections is unsurprising, but the volume takes pains to emphasize the breaks between sections, titling them separately, marking each with a woodcut initial, and numbering them. The numbering of the epistles and the printed foliation on the fore-edge head of each recto are necessary for the table of contents, a five-page preliminary which keys chapter numbers to folium where they are to be found. This table of contents, in definition and in function, merits closer analysis.

Aldo was disposed, as indeed were many incunabular printers, to fill out the title page with descriptions of his volumes’ contents. The title-page grew from a materially utilitarian wrapping sheet, intended to be sacrificed to inevitable wear, into an important preliminary paratext in its own right. Descriptions of contents became a fixed part of title-page design throughout the sixteenth century, slipping away only when ornately engraved title pages came into vogue.439 As a result of this Aldine habit, most of his books, as well as most of the non-Aldine folios in this data-set, rely on the title-page, rather than a separate, redundant preliminary, to fulfil the function of detailing the contents of a multi-work volume, or a single-work volume broken into pieces. Epistole

Devotissime differs, though; it is one of three Aldine works to include a table of contents distinct from the title-page, and its table of contents offers greater depth and more

439 Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 52.

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precision than the other two (the Opera of Politian and the first volume of the Aristotle).

Neither of these works carries page- or folium-numbers, so their tables of contents key to headings of sections. Alone among Aldine folios, Epistole Devotissime keys sections (by

number) to those sections’ specific in-book locations.

Much as the extensive table of contents in the Hortus Sanitatis implies—or

demands—discontinuous reading, so too does the organization of Epistole Devotissime

assume or prompt certain readerly behavior. By preserving and emphasizing the discrete

nature of St. Catherine’s letters, the book invites readers to consume them one at a time,

or a few in one sitting. By appending specific headings to letters, which usually

differentiate between their rhetorical occasions440 and occasionally between their

contents,441 it codes two distinct reasons for discontinuous reading: a focus on a specific

historical moment, or an interest in specific devotional content. Epistole Devotissime

emerges as a reference work resembling but fundamentally different from the Hortus

Sanitatis. Where the latter claims authority based on encyclopedic breadth and offers

content to solve a wide variety of earthly problems, the former bases its authority on the

relatively specific theological ethos of its named author, addressing its efficacy to a

restricted but thoroughly plumbed field of intellectual play.

No other folio volume which I examined works in precisely the same way, though the Iamblichus? addresses the ritual of cults of antiquity in ways which may be akin. This formulation of the folio as site for specific ideological argument does also appear in

440 Cf., e.g., the heading for Epistle 18, on f17v (sig. c1v): “A papa Vrbano.vi.adi.xxx.di Magio.M.ccc.lxxix.in Roma tor/nato a ſancto Pietro. 441 Cf., e.g., the heading for Epistle 11, on f3r [f11r] (sig. b3r): “Riſpoſta duna breue poliza,chel ſo pradecto patre ſancto mando eſ/ſendo in Auignone,laquale reſpoſta il prouoca a uenire a Roma.”

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Caxton’s 1480 abridgement of Higden’s Polycronicon. The ideological thrust of this

work appears in the incipit, possibly written by Caxton himself. According to that incipit,

the Polycronicon addresses itself to two linked sets of twin exigencies. The first pair

concerns the simple availability of knowledge about “this londe whiche of olde tyme was

named albyon / and afar Britayne:” the “descripcion,” the incipit claims, “is not descriued

ne comynly had.” This printed version supplies a lack, in other words; Britain deserves a

widely-owned description, and since such does not yet exist, this work newly “enprinted” will fill that gap. The second pair of exigencies bears a more explicitly political ideology:

“the noblenesse and worthynesse of the same is not knowen.” The OED entries for

“noble” and “worthy” reveal that these two words, while carrying similar connotative

baggage, technically denote differently.442 Nobility has more to do with intrinsic

qualities, while worth has more to do with earned acclaim. Polycronicon thus argues that

the value of Britain resides both in its intrinsic nature and its extrinsic behavior. But

neither nature nor behavior, complains the incipit, are common knowledge, likely

because the descripcion is not descrived nor commonly had.

This printing solves all four of those linked problems, by configuring Higden’s

long work as a reference text, complete with chapter divisions, descriptive chapter

headings, and a table of contents keyed to chapter number and description. Just as

Epistole Devotissime imagines a theologically invested readership using the book

discontinuously, so does Polycronicon invite politically interested readers to search for

the aspect of Britain’s noblenesse and worthynesse which most intrigues them, or about

442 OED, “worthy,” adj. I., and “noble,” adj. I.1.a. OED attests both of these usages to before Higden wrote.

325 which they most immediately need information. At a further remove, there may be a resonance between the ideological statements these works make about their printers.

Lowry surmises that Aldo’s somewhat extraordinary choice to print Epistole Devotissime compensates for his conjecturally controversial printing of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by branding the Venetian printer as culturally and theologically orthodox. Perhaps Caxton, eager to capitalize on the heated political currents of the 1470s and early 1480s but cautious about appearing too partisan, printed the generally pro-England Polycronicon for similar reasons to Aldo’s. The practice of publishing confirmations of dominant ideology is, literally, going on the record.

While the use-pattern implied by some folios’ design renders their ideological rhetoric explicit, others can be interpreted as masking their cultural ideologies. It might be argued, in fact, that the two texts I have particularly in mind, Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili and Aldo’s 1495 Theocritus, soften or occlude their rhetoric behind an implied use for leisure purposes. Each emphasizes particular aesthetics, though predictably those emphases present in different ways. One term which might anachronistically describe their function is “literary.” I have mentioned repeatedly my distaste for critical applications of the category “literature” or the descriptor “literary” to premodern texts. In

1500, much less in 1623, these words had not yet acquired the sense they now carry.

While Aldo might not have used “letterario” and “letteratura,” or “litterarius” and

“litteratura” in any modern sense, he did consider to some extent the idea of a totally non- practical reading—reading primarily for leisure or entertainment. The proof of this lies in the existence of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and, particularly, the Theocritus.

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Strange texts like Poliphili, fecund with finely-turned verbalizations and carefully-executed visualizations, could and, for some, did have pedagogical, intellectual, or devotional uses. Leisure could not be—still is not today—a pure disengagement, the triumph of sensation or spectaculation over cognition. Furthermore, historical accounts of late medieval psychology cannot but conjecture about the definition and limitations of the enjoyable. What qualified as leisure activity for some might seem to be hard or unpleasant labor for others, and vice versa. For example, the Theodorus Gaza which might intellectually stimulate a scholastic type might be impossibly dull to an otherwise- occupied member of the ruling class; alternatively, the lush aesthetic imagescape presented in Poliphili might delight a dilettante but bore a sober scholar.443 All of these caveats notwithstanding, however, the primary emphasis on aesthetic present in both

Poliphili and the Theocritus brands them as something different, inviting or imagining different use-patterns from those named.

Superficial differences between these two works abound. The book of the former contains one work, printed in roman type, bountifully adorned with purpose-cut woodblock illustrations. The book of the latter contains more than a dozen separate groupings of poems, with some of those groupings containing multiple poems, printed in some of Aldo’s earliest Greek type, with a mise-en-page which might be called spartan rather than lush. Poliphili appears to be on the bleeding edge of late-fifteenth-century modernity; Theodorus Gaza collects texts between two thousand years old and eleven hundred years old. The former is in Italian, offering broad access to anyone with a

443 Shivers and deLisle, The Story of Leisure, 49-74.

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working knowledge of the vernacular and finances to afford it; the latter, in Greek,

refuses readerly entry to anyone without experience in classical language. The former is

hefty, only slightly lighter than the average incunabular folio in my data-set (1700 as opposed to 1775.77), while the latter is 43.89% lighter than the average, less than a kilogram despite being crammed with so many different authors’ works.

Yet both offer readers imaginative escape. Above, in discussing the entanglement

of word and illustration in Poliphili, I argue for the innovative multimodality of that text.

Its narrative and aesthetic content is as enthralling as its material features: its mythopoeia

requires consistent readerly investment in order to be legible. The Theocritus offers a

more complex, polyphonal route to imaginative transport. Theocritus’ main claim to fame

lies in his naturally-inflected poetry, what might today be called pastoral or, in Aldo’s

term, bucolic. Hesiod’s Theogony, another significant part of the book, fits this

imaginative mold as well, originating mythic tropes and initiating important Hellenic

cultural narratives. The poems by Theognis, however, and the inclusion of the Distichi of

Cato, lend a didactic cast to the volume’s overall project. These works transmit moralistic

maxims—the Distichi particularly adopt the imperative tone, rendering their didacticism

explicit. In another context, the inclusion of Theognis and the Distichi might seem

pedagogical, and even in this context, they have that effect to a certain extent. But Aldo

did choose to print them with Theocritus and Hesiod, which makes the latter seem more

learned—more “literary.”

This effect goes both ways, though. These works, and some of the other shorter

maxim-based poetic corpora which are included in the book, both contextualize and are

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contextualized by Theocritus and Hesiod. The book includes two blank versos, which can

serve, visually and conceptually, as resets (as they may have done in Aldo’s printshop).

The first beginning, obviously, belongs to Theocritus, and the whole first section, before

the first blank verso, is comprised of Theocritean material. The second beginning

prioritizes maxims, beginning with Theognis and including the pseudo-Pythagorean

Aurea Carmina, Phocylides, the Distichi, and other poetry of a sententious makeup. The

third beginning prioritizes Hesiod’s Theogony, followed by his Scutum Herculis and his

Opera et dies. The former two are narrative and epic in nature; the latter carries the same

sententious valence as does the middle third of the book. By nestling sententiae after the

bucolic poetry and before the (primarily) epic matter, Aldo reminds readers of the

pedagogical value traditionally associated with and drawn from classical texts. Though

the poetry of Theocritus and Hesiod can offer imaginative escape, they exist within a

textual tradition largely composed of moralistic pedagogy, either explicit or interpretively

rendered as such.

The complex nature of the Theocritus reminds us of the perennial risks to

classification. This folio’s thrust remains murky: does the bucolic and epic content in the

Theocritus make it imaginative, leisure-reading, something akin to the modern denotation of “literary?” Or does its broad array of sententious poetry give it an identity of secular morality designed for pedagogical use? Other folios similarly resist attempts at identification, particularly of design for use-patterns. Is Polycronicon primarily political?

Or, given its insistence on its project of spreading information about the noblenesse and

worthynesse of Britain, ought we to consider its primary project to be pedagogical or

didactic? The Thesaurus Cornucopiae clearly has a practical use, but what sort of

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concrete academic endeavor did it primarily support—reading or writing? Would De

Officiis be studied for Cicero’s moral teaching, for the Greek quotations which pepper it,

for the fluidity of its Latin, or for the text’s quotability?

The answer to all these questions is, of course, “yes”: folios did not have to exist within one genre or another. These dichotomies—political/academic, reading-

pedagogical/writing-pedagogical, study/citation—need not be dichotomous at all. In the

21st century, texts across media can carry a variety of valences. Take, for example,

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, Ian Doescher’s mashup of the storyline and characters

of the popular space opera franchise with textual and bibliographic tropes from early

modern English drama. The form and content of this mashup can satirize the Shakespeare

Industry at the same time as it transmits, more or less losslessly, each story in the main

Star Wars franchise. If today, why not in late medieval Europe?

The Theocritus provides an excellent example of how a folio could provide

multiple, fairly disparate opportunities for use. One could appreciate the pastoral charm

of Theocritus’ poems and thrill to Hesiod’s stirring tale of Hercules as well as learning

from the moral maxims collected in the middle third of the book. Collections, in other

words, did not serve singular ideological purposes, nor did they necessarily present

unitary rhetorical fronts. Research like Knight’s into the contextual affordances of the

sammelband practice does not endorse the idea that compilations had to conform to

single foci. However, the search for those foci in studies like Knight’s tends to privilege

the unified compilation. Knight’s evidence regarding post-sale compilations, and the

existence of volumes like the Theocritus as production-point compilations, reveal that a

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subset of compilations chose to allow for polyphony, diffracted perspectives, and

divergent aesthetics.

The economics of the folio format make the widespread presence of polyphony a

logical function of the market. Though most critical generalizations about the folio

format deserve careful scrutiny, at least one has a logical and evidentiary basis: the likely

high cost of most folio books. Most critics accept that paper constituted a large

percentage of printers’ overhead, especially once presses became established and new

expenditures on equipment occurred less frequently.444 A two-hundred-page folio, using fifty sheets, would thus cost (in paper) the same amount as a four-hundred-page quarto or an eight-hundred-page octavo. Thus, by way of contrast, whereas Aldo’s 1494/1495

Lascaris, the first quarto and possibly the first book he printed, required 41 sheets for its

164 leaves/328 pages, the 1495 Theodorus Gaza required 99 sheets for its 198 leaves/396

pages, more than doubling the Lascaris’ required paper investment. I am not arguing that

quartos were absolutely inexpensive, but rather that they were inexpensive relative to

their thickness and folio thickness. Despite using less than half as much paper, and

carrying less than half as much paper-cost, the Lascaris would have been only slightly slimmer than the Theodorus Gaza. Buying a folio, in other words, involved a serious financial investment, significantly more than buying a quarto of roughly the same

thickness.

Thinking of folios as investments allows us to reconsider the diffracted use-

patterns they demand. The individuals who would purchase these folios would be

444 Cf., e.g., Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” 405-410, as one of many who address this.

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financially well-off, literate, and interested either in books generally or in their subject

matter particularly. As Angela Nuovo’s research makes clear, the retail trade in books

relied on informal credit-systems, including tabs and payment in installments, rather than

cash up front.445 Informal credit lines of the type evident in Nuovo’s primary documents

skew to benefit locals and well-known non-locals, as well. A nobody from Mainz passing

through Venice likely wouldn’t be able to buy a folio there on credit, unless they had a

guarantee of some kind. If a purchaser was able to get credit, however, they would be

more likely to extend that credit line through future purchases from the same shop. Folios

with similar visual appearances or similar material profiles would recommend themselves

further; this would explain, to some extent, the remarkable mise-en-page conformity between several of Aldo’s early Greek folios. The Theocritus, the Gaza, and the

Thesaurus Cornucopiae, along with the six volumes of the Aristotle, include roughly 30

lines per page (varying slightly at times), printed in the same size of Greek type. Whether

or not purchasers consciously noticed this trend, the unconscious power of such

resemblance likely had an effect. Combined, the availability of credit lines to certain

purchasers and the uniformity detectable between certain Aldine folios must have

strongly influenced purchasers to invest repeatedly. And since Aldo’s market research

and reliable finances allowed him to print at a prolific rate, purchasers had frequent

opportunities to invest.

Not only were folios readily available as investments, but certain folios offered a

particularly desirable rate of return—not financial, but in terms of use. Since the

445 Book Trade, 411.

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Theocritus so nicely encapsulates the generative potential of diverse compilations, I will continue referring to it. That volume supports two immediately obvious configurations of its holistic thrust: imaginative aesthesis as inflected by moral sententiae, and moral sententiae enlivened by enthralling poesy. A Venetian noble purchasing this folio in June of 1496 might conceive of it as a whole in multiple different ways, or he might focus on certain elements or sections to the exclusion of other sections. The annotative evidence in the copy of the Theocritus owned by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in

Austin, Texas may support this latter possibility. In this copy, annotative engagements occur exclusively in the two more famous works by Hesiod, Theogony and Opera et dies.

Their date is unclear; since they are largely nonverbal, dating their letterforms to a specific era is likely a dead end. The possibility exists, however, that these marks represent a late medieval user’s focused engagement with texts of particular interest.

(Both of the annotated works appear toward the end of the volume; as such, the common annotative habit of heavy marking in early sections which gradually peters out likely does not pertain here.)

If, indeed, late medieval use of incunabular folios resists classification—which is the point to which I have returned, again and again, throughout this chapter—using “the incunabular folio” as a data-bin may recklessly erase some of the individuality of these data-points. To late medieval purchasers and users, these folios offered, first, a degree of permanence, of material insurance against the depredations of time. Permanently, then, each offered different potential and had different value. Evidence of shelving habits, drawn from book-titles burned or inked onto fore-edges and contemporary images, suggests that owners thought of books as, to some extent, individual or distinct from each

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other.446 Instead of “the incunabular folio,” I propose a shift from definite article to

demonstrative pronoun: “these folios.”

C. Folio Diversity and the Incunabular mise-en-page Folio incunabula as critically defined rest in part upon the postulation of a boundary between manuscript and print. In book history at large, this division has been recently addressed by scholars like Alexandra Gillespie, David McKitterick, Adrian

Johns, and Wendy Wall.447 Thanks to the work of these scholars, the idea of a clean

break between fifteenth-century manuscript production and fifteenth-century print

production has been challenged. Yet book history still divides along disciplinary or

periodized lines. Medievalists look at manuscripts; early modernists look at printed

books. Exceptions exist, but prove the rule.

This dissertation postulates the imbrication of premodern patterns of production

with premodern habits of purchase, imagining no sharp break between medieval and

early modern periods. Though print production did differ in key ways from manuscript

production, the purchase of manuscripts—especially secondhand—would still bear some

resemblance to the purchase of books. In addition, given technological best-practices of

manuscript production, particularly regarding writing support and ink, manuscripts have a

way of surviving—not only in modern archives, but also in in libraries and in bookshops.

Nuovo’s inventories reveal that the secondhand trade in books was smaller than the trade

in new books, but by no means minute.448 As a result, that hypothetical Venetian noble

446 Nuovo, Book Trade, 391. 447 Gillespie: Print Culture and the Medieval Author; McKitterick: Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order; Johns: The Nature of the Book; Wall: The Imprint of Gender. 448 Book Trade, 400-409.

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might well have seen a pre-print manuscript of Boethius for retail sale next to Keysere’s

Boethius.

Or he might have seen a more recent, used one: scribes continued to produce

manuscripts after the advent of print. I know of no evidence to suggest that manuscripts

were manufactured on spec—that is, without being commissioned, for retail sale to an

unknown but likely interested buyer. Thus, purchasers of folios in the late medieval

period likely did not see new manuscripts next to new printed folios. But, since the

manufacture of manuscripts continued well into the sixteenth century, they likely would

crop up for second-hand sale. Thus purchasers toward the end of the fifteenth century

might see a 1480 manuscript edition of Boethius alongside a 1473 print edition, reversing

the conventional progression imagined by many book historians.

My argument in these pages is twofold. First, the mise-en-page of many of the incunabular folios which I examined would have been familiar from manuscript tradition to late medieval purchasers. Building upon this premise, I propose that because manuscripts continued to be produced at a significant scale throughout the remainder of the fifteenth century, the mise-en-page present in many incunabular folios would have shaped manuscript mise-en-page. I can’t prove causation, but correlation exists. After describing two similar but distinct iterations of Boethius—one print and one manuscript—I unpack the meaning of certain correlations in visual appearance between the two iterations.

As I detail above, in 1473 the Nuremberg printer Anton Koberger issued a

spacious edition of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. The copies I have examined,

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at the British Library and at the Newberry Library, are printed on large paper. I was

unable to measure the Newberry’s copy, but an eyeball test puts it at roughly the same

size as the British Library’s copy, which measures 403mm tall by 285mm wide (leaf

width). This large paper permits abnormally wide margins: the fore-edge margin, which tends to be both measurably wider and more visibly so than the gutter margin, measures

68mm, 47.31% wider than the average of 46.16mm. The gutter margin is also wider than average: 34mm, 49.58% wider than the average of 22.73mm. Remarkably wide margins notwithstanding, Koberger’s Boethius still boasts a wider-than-average text block:

183mm, 29.68% wider than the average of 141.12mm. I do not have measurements for text-block height, either for this book or for the others I examined, but given the paper size, I estimate that the text block is significantly taller than the average.

It is unclear whether Koberger printed every copy of this impression on large paper. Since type and size of writing support fluctuate across copies of the same book throughout the incunabular period and well into the sixteenth century, the possibility remains that he printed some, even most copies, on a different size of paper, or even vellum. After all, that large text block could just fit on a sheet of Median-sized paper. His spacing decisions, however, suggest that the large paper on which the British Library and

Newberry Library copies are printed was standard for this run of the book. Specifically,

Koberger chose to deploy spacing expressively. The work of Claire M. L. Bourne, who argues for the dramatic expressivity wielded by pilcrows in early modern English playbooks, models the value of this concept of expressive typographical decisions.449

449 “Dramatic Pilcrows.”

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Koberger chose to publish this edition of Boethius in German and Latin, alternating by

sections, as follows:

Metrical Section 1: Latin

Metrical Section 1: German

Prose Section 1: Latin

Prose Section 1: German

Metrical Section 2: Latin

Metrical Section 2: German

…and so on. He set the Latin in wide-spaced lines, and the German in close-

spaced lines, in effect alternating between double-spaced Latin and a single-spaced

German translation. Still more remarkably, he deliberately set certain Latin words and phrases so high in their line as to be interlinear, so that two lines of space (not one) appeared between them and the text below them (cf. Fig. 5).

Figure 8-5 The other remarkable decision Koberger made pertains to those metrical sections.

Instead of setting verse left-justified with a ragged right edge, as certain manuscript

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exempla may have appeared, Koberger printed the Boethian verse justified to both

margins. Except for the headings (metrum and prosa) and the medial dot Koberger’s

compositors set between verse-lines in their paragraph-block shape, nothing visually

distinguishes the Boethian verse from the Boethian prose. As a result of these eye-

catching decisions, Koberger’s Boethius advertises its printedness. The layout and visual

impact of the page emphasize the geometrical regularity of Koberger’s experimental

choices. Even the most careful scribe could not maintain margins as mathematically

straight as Koberger’s, so this edition maximizes its amount of marginal space. In its

spatial generosity—wide margins and double-spaced Latin primary text, which must have

noticeably increased the volume’s sheet count—the edition characterizes itself

differently: as deliberately expensive, rather than grudgingly so. The retail cost for this

volume must have been relatively high. But price inflation stemmed specifically from its

spacious appearance, rather than a high volume of text. By itself, the Koberger Boethius

flaunts its printedness.

At least seven years after Koberger printed his ostentatious edition, a rather more

humble-looking manuscript copy of De consolatione philosophiae was made in England.

Now housed at the Newberry Library, this version nestles Boethius between a set of

English translations of Alain Chartier’s works and an English translation of William of

Tignonville’s Les Dits des Philosophes.450 This manuscript is forthcoming with details

about its creation and provenance. A near-contemporary marginal notation ascribes the translation of the latter to “Anthony Woodvile de la Riveux lord Stalles et cetera,” and

450 Newberry MS 36.

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the explicit of the summary of De consolatione philosophiae concludes as follows “[p]er

dominum J. Clynton priorem scriptum. 148.” Scholars have taken the name to refer to a

scribe and the number to indicate a 1480 date of creation, though these conclusions are

technically conjectural. The front pastedown, amidst a host of other inscriptions legible

and otherwise, bears the words “Christoforus Lincolne Monachus,” written in what Paul

Saenger identifies as fifteenth-century textualis. The red ink in which these words are

written, and the fact that the “s” in “Monachus” has been historiated into the visage of a

monk, suggests an alternative identity for the scribe, or perhaps for one of the scribes,

since the book is written in two similar but distinct hands.451 The other inscriptions seem

to establish a winding and not altogether straightforward path of provenance, including

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century owners. Thomas Sowthen, who owned the manuscript

in the late sixteenth century, made assorted notes in the margins, occasionally related to

the text but most often unrelated.

Visually, this collection is less impressive than the Koberger edition. Both copies of Koberger’s Boethius I examined seem to have been washed and pressed, which likely removed dingy marks of use, but Newberry MS 36 is more slapdash in terms of layout

and execution. Plans for consistent decoration seem to have been abandoned early on.

After the Chartier texts, either a different rubricator took over or the same rubricator’s

motor control diminished rapidly. For the quality of rubrication changes around the same

place the hand changes, moving from fairly fastidious penwork to longer strokes and

(apparently) less care. The presence of red-inked, unembellished guide letters in the

451 Cf. Saenger, A Catalogue, 66-67.

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summary section suggest that decoration took place distinct from copying. While, as

Saenger notes, words tend to hang from upper ruled lines, those lines are sometimes

crooked, and those words sometimes hang loosely.452 In contrast to the Koberger

Boethius, and even more so in contrast to other, more carefully-executed late medieval

manuscripts, this version seems rather hastily composed.

Yet resonances between these two versions of De consolatione do exist. Most

striking, both texts insist upon blending Latin original with vernacular translation. While

the Koberger blends Latin and German more systematically, the manuscript does

intersperse Latin and English with rough regularity. Both also visually preserve the

sectioning which is so important to De consolatione philosophiae. The Koberger does so

typographically, though spacing, section-heads, and subtle differentiations between prose and verse. The manuscript does so decoratively, by leaving space for rubricated initials to begin sections, as well as occasionally including rubricated speech prefixes in the margins to indicate which character is speaking.

Both demonstrate an awareness of the importance of the visual and, particularly,

textual context within which Boethius is encountered. They reveal this awareness through

deliberate contextualization schemes. Visually, both position the text as admirable or

attractive through decorative means—Koberger through typographical regularity,

readable font, and leaving space for rubrication, and the manuscript through rubrication,

consistent ruling, and attention to the difference in shape between prose and verse.

Textually, both position the text of De consolatione philosophiae as inextricably

452 Ibid.

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entangled with interpretive apparatus; Boethius is always already mediated. The

Koberger might appear at first to minimize the mediation which Boethius requires, but

any late medieval reader of both German and Latin would realize fairly quickly that the

German translation printed in Koberger’s text is a free translation which tends at times to

paraphrase.453

Then, too, of course, the Koberger appends a massive commentary, attributed to

Thomas Aquinas, about as long as Boethius’ original text, printed in double columns, and

keyed to sections of the primary text. Similarly, the manuscript version situates Boethius

in the company of Chartier and Tignonville, later writers whose work nonetheless

resembles Boethius’ in their interest in a pedagogical philosophy exercised through

personification and individuation. In a similar move to that made in Aldo’s Aristotle,

described above, the manuscript places Boethius at the heart of a pre-made philosophical compendium, appropriating it as well as its fellows for the use of a reader of Middle

English, and circumscribing its potential interpretations by providing its readers with curated thresholds for comprehension. Surface-level differences aside, these two books reproduce the same philosophical texts in similar configurations, for similar effects; these similarities must not be ignored.

These correlations emerge from a late-fifteenth century culture still very invested

in manuscript. Eisenstein focuses on the gulf between the unique singularity of a

manuscript copy and the mass-produced uniformity of print editions to argue for a major

453 I am indebted to Jeremiah Coogan for pointing out the disjunction between the German and the Latin texts in Koberger’s Boethius.

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shift between an older, manuscript culture and the revolutionary novelty of print

culture.454 Henri-Jean Martin moderates this perspective by figuring the late-medieval

interaction between print and manuscript production methods as a competition which

print was more or less destined to win.455 Heidi Brayman, writing about turn-of-the- seventeenth-century English culture, calls for an awareness of “the profound connection between print and manuscript in this period,” noting “that many of the objects…read during the period were in fact manuscripts.”456 Wendy Wall, theorizing an intersection

between the study of the materiality of the early modern English book and the study of

gender in early modern England, argues that certain male English writers “staged literary

authority” by “self-consciously [holding] on to and modif[ying] manuscript features in

their literary works.” Mimicking in print the rhetorical rhythms and moves of coterie

circulation, these authors deliberately constructed themselves and their authorship as

birthed by, participating in, and powerful over specialized manuscript traditions.457

Brayman and Wall take for granted the presence of a still-vibrant manuscript

tradition in late sixteenth-century England; this indicates that print did not

unceremoniously dismiss manuscript all the way back in the incunabular period. To be

sure, conservative cultural observers did see the disruptive potential of print technology.

This attitude is famously apparent in De Laude Scriptorum, the pro-scribal manifesto

written by Johannus Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim. As Eisenstein458 and Needham459

454 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 10-16. 455 The History and Power of Writing, 238. 456 Reading Material in Early Modern England, 25-34, esp. 25-26. 457 The Imprint of Gender, 227-278. 458 Agent of Change, 14. 459 “Res Papirea,” 123.

342 recount, the Abbot harbored grave concerns about the perilous potential of print, expressing them in his treatise largely in terms of a concern about the durability of paper and, by the transitive property, the knowledge imprinted thereon/in. Although traditionalists like the Abbot may have feared the eventual dominance of mechanical reproduction of text, and what it would mean for ancient habits of transmitting knowledge, this anxiety does not equate to a broad cultural rejection of manuscript.

Several visual elements of late medieval print discussed at length above demonstrate the multivalence of print’s entanglement with manuscript traditions. The simple fact that every extant font-family, blackletter and roman and italic, traces its letterforms’ DNA back to various manuscript traditions displays print’s obsession with reproducing manuscript. Throughout the late medieval period, printed folios reserve space for a rubricator’s decorative pen to embellish. The extant coloring of woodcuts in multiple copies of incunabular folios, some (as the Keysere Boethius) quite vivid and rich, indicates an openness on the part of decorative professionals and amateurs to seeing printed woodcuts as opportunity, rather than threat. Textually, the practice of announcing a work’s thrust and contents in the incipit460 descends directly, without alteration, from manuscript practice. The habit of printing reference technologies, such as indices or tables of contents, chronologically after the printing of the rest of the work, likely descends from manuscript tradition as well.

Examples abound of manuscripts mimicking print mise-en-page, such as the two manuscript title pages appended to a 1556 Italian edition of the Libro di sorti now in the

460 Though crowded out by title pages before the end of the fifteenth century.

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Bodleian Library.461 The very existence of Caxton’s 1477 printing of Les Dits de

Philosophes may have prompted the creation of the manuscript which is part of the philosophical compendium I describe above. Low literacy rates and the high cost of book production (whether manuscript or print) kept circles of bookish people small; even if many manuscript-production professionals had as much anxiety as the Abbot of

Sponheim, they likely couldn’t avoid printed books, and thus couldn’t avoid being influenced by printed books. In an age before easily accessible, cheap printing, manuscript copying of a printed text might be a fairly easy, relatively inexpensive way to make the text one’s own. This sort of copying might not only copy text—it might also include half-conscious reproduction of visual details. Presumably, as the newly-born print tradition developed out of manuscript tradition, it also influenced its manual parent. Print and manuscript in the second half of the fifteenth century composed a feedback loop of influence, each contextualizing and shaping the other.

In the preceding chapters, I argue that, in effect, the incunabular folio did not exist. As a monolithic entity, critically defined, it has no evidentiary basis. Printers produced folios in the incunabular period. All of them shared characteristics with others, and many of them innovated in small ways. But certain ideas are cannot hold up. Big books in the late medieval period did not all look more or less the same. They did not all contain more or less the same texts. They were not all created for or marketed towards a narrow set of use-types. They did not all operate similarly within culture. They did not all cost similar amounts. As Chapter 6 argues, making positive arguments based on data

461 Shelfmark: Vet. F1 d.79. The title pages are in a late-sixteenth-century hand.

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about incunabula ignores the methodological problems opened up by historical loss. As

such, every argument in these chapters is contingent; I acknowledge that, as should other

historians of the late medieval book.

Technological developments in typography, decoration, and dimension construct

the folio as a radical space, upon and in which experimentation did take place. The

existence of this experimentation, primarily in visual elements, actively resists any

classification of the folio as a bibliographically conservative format in the late medieval

period. It also differentiates folios from each other; as a result of technological evolution,

folios differ visually from one another throughout this period. Some innovations remain,

giving birth to best practices that become ingrained in folio traditions throughout the

early modern period. Other innovations fall away, becoming little more than historical

curiosities. Folios from the incunabular period keep an enormous amount of

experimentation in play.

In addition to positioning the folio as a field for evolutionary innovation, a

sandbox within which designers can try out occasionally extravagant experiments, my

data reveal the individuality of folio books in the late medieval period. Chapter 8’s

exploration of a series of artificial critical classificatory systems demonstrates how these data can be made to support any number of anachronistic or contrived conclusions. Such classificatory systems remain current in much premodern book history discourse; artificial though they may be, they have some value. It makes logical sense, to a modern, systematized critical mind, to differentiate between a folio in Latin and a folio in the

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vernacular language of its country of origin. These systems have some value, as long as

the proprietary texture of the individual books in question is acknowledged.

In acknowledging texture, a key goal is uncovering how folios communicate their

use. The macro-argument of this dissertation substitutes intended permanence, deduced

through use-patterns, for prestige as a primary characteristic intrinsic to their materiality.

Examining the use-patterns demanded by incunabular folios can answer the question

“what were these folios permanently used for?” Individuality predominates here as well:

many folios, upon close scrutiny, invite a type of use specific to their content and

historical situation. Some, by contrast, resist specificity in favor of straddling boundaries

of use-patterns. Not only does this further destabilize the concept of critical

systematization—that’s a schoolbook, that’s abstract philosophy, that’s for devotional

purposes—but it also paints a picture of a late medieval book culture in which folios were

(designed to be) put to a variety of practical and intellectual uses. Crucially, this

examination also emphasizes the existence of multivalency in invited use-pattern: that is,

some folios explicitly prompted multiple use-patterns of the same volume, symbiotic or

quite different.

The existence of multivalent use-patterns in turn reminds us of the value placed on books in late medieval Europe. Particularly in the case of folios, which quite often required significant financial investment, purchasers would have expected longevity, both in terms of material temporality and in terms of the intellectual freshness of the contents.

Books like the Polycronicon of Ranulf Higden or Aldo’s collection of Hellenic poetry

anchored by Theocritus and Hesiod support a variety of interpretive frameworks when

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conceived of as wholes, which frameworks can produce a variety of conclusions about

the volume as a whole. Despite the variety of contents with, configurations in, and use-

patterns for which late-medieval folios were designed, the drive toward permanence,

longevity, remains a constant. Permanence emerges a cardinal virtue, in the absence of

other generalizing topoi.

It might be expected of me to conclude this chapter with a triumphant originary

note, something like “and here you see, dear reader, the sublime generation, the

immaculate conception of the folio format.” But as comparative analysis of the two

Boethii—Koberger’s and the manuscript from 1480—demonstrates, the folio format did

not spring into existence fully-armored from Johannes Gutenberg’s forehead. As Tanselle

reminds us, language of format does technically refer to impressions on sheets, so,

technically, there was no folio format—narrowly defined—before 1454.462 Both this

chapter and this dissertation focus rather on “folio” as expressive of a set of quires made

up of sheets of writing-support folded once, yielding a large-sized book. Given this general definition, printed folios have some kinship with the large-sized manuscripts which Gutenberg’s 42-line bible imitates. Kinship in turn implies a family tree extending back well into the medieval period, and earlier. The origin of this book-size may perhaps be as old as the codex; at the very least, its birth-date and ancestors are shadowy.

This same ambiguity stretches forward from the late medieval period. Modern cataloguing and critical discourse together circumscribe incunabula using call numbers,

462 Tanselle, “Concept of Format,” 112-113. Tanselle proposes a broader, more generous redefinition, which has not caught on.

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tags of “permission required,” and the very term incunabula. Though print technology

and norms evolved rapidly in the sixteenth century, and though the evolution of the early

modern mise-en-page eventually rendered certain elements of the late medieval mise-en-

page obsolete, incunabula continued in use well after the critical iron curtain of 1500.

Angela Nuovo and Ian Maclean separately remark how books remained in retail

inventories years, even decades after being printed.463 Provenance marks in seven of the

folios I examined indicate that, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

owners were anxious to establish their ownership of late medieval books.464 The

Newberry’s manuscript philosophical compilation provides a parallel example of this: as

I note above, its margin and endpapers teem with ownership notations, legible and illegible. Particularly if a folio represented a significant financial investment, it would continue to be used—either by its original owner or by a second-hand purchaser.465

Though book designers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were most likely more

influenced by newer books than by incunabula, the fairly widespread survival of

incunabula throughout the early modern period means that they could have provided

inspiration or even models for early modern designers of print.

Like the others, this data-set resists strict periodization or division, tracing its ancestry to the era before print and counting its intellectual offspring throughout the early modern period. Far from reinforcing cultural norms or undergirding intellectual

463 Nuovo, Book Trade, 348-351; Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion, 188-192. 464 The following of the Aldine folios I examined include ownership notes: Gaza, in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century hand; Theocritus, in a seventeenth-century hand; Aristotle I, in a seventeenth-century hand; Crastonus’ Dictionarium Graecum, one dated 1620; Iamblichus, in a sixteenth-century hand; Aristotle V, in a seventeenth-century hand; Scriptores Astronomici Veteres, in a sixteenth-century hand. 465 Nuovo, Book Trade, 400-408.

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conservatism, these incunabular folios represent change, experiment, boldness, and

occasionally failure. From our twenty-first century vantage point, late-medieval folios might appear to be avatars of tradition, reinforcing social and racial and gender and cultural hegemonies. They may do that today; they may even have done so when they first appeared. But I contend that in their unrelenting commitment to play, these folios reconfigured commonly-held beliefs about the organization, transmission, and appearance of knowledge. As a printed thing, the folio began life as a rebel.

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Coda - Implications for Book History; Or, Whither Then? This dissertation is shaped like a recursive circle. As a project, it began with

Shakespeare and CHT, left them behind to focus on the folio format in general, and now

closes with them. The narrative it tells moves in circles, too: backward and backward in

time, never really reaching that longed-for originary moment, and now, here, reaching forward again. And here, in these closing pages, Shakespeare returns yet again, temporarily. The renewed focus on CHT in this coda is intended to demonstrate the

concrete critical value of the foregoing chapters. Yet these data-sets, and my analysis of

them, have value beyond Shakespeare, and so I leave him behind once more, proposing

the value of this project more broadly, to the study of the premodern folio. Thence, I

widen my gaze further, taking in the history of the book as a whole field of study,

assessing the ways in which my research project might inform book-historical theory and

practice. It all ends, fittingly, with ambiguity: whither? Whither this project? Where can

this methodology be fruitfully applied? What conceptual developments might this work

catalyze?

Back, again, to Shakespeare. What, specifically, do the foregoing three hundred

pages mean for the study of the First Folio, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies,

Histories, & Tragedies? Some of my conclusions do not particularly apply: CHT is not

illustrated, so the data on illustration are not especially relevant. Ornamentation, though,

does appear in CHT. The analysis in Chapters 2, 5, and 7 indicates that decorative

borders and printers’ ornaments are increasingly conventional as time passes; they do not

indicate the book’s lavishness or commitment to visual semiosis.

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Similarly, the incidence of reference technologies in folios printed before CHT

provide valuable context for the nature and deployment of reference technologies in

CHT. The interconnection of pagination, variable section headings, and table of contents

stands out: the reference-technology scheme present in CHT coheres internally and works

fairly smoothly. Its design, however, does not require close familiarity with the content

being printed. Neither does its external element (the table of contents) require a lengthy

post-printing composition process. Reference technologies in CHT are inexpensively

efficient.

They do not, however, code CHT as primarily a reference text. This coding, as I

argue throughout the foregoing pages, depends not merely on inclusion of reference

technologies but also on mise-en-page. The reference technologies invite discontinuous reading but resist careful study—a use-pattern bolstered by margin width and type-size.

The small type, frequent turn-overs and turn-unders, narrow gutter and fore-edge margins, and marginal ruling discourage rapid reading and readerly textual engagement.466

Somewhat paradoxically, the bulk of CHT would have demanded some

stationarity. Since its mise-en-page is cramped and monochromatic rather than flashy,

that stationarity was likely private rather than public. That bulk also certainly limited its

mobility, and thus apparently disqualified it from regular theatrical use. I say

“apparently,” because the copy of CHT recently discovered by Eric Rasmussen in Saint-

466 Abundant traces of marginal engagement with CHT demonstrate that these discouragements did not work.

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Omer, France shows clear signs of having been used in rehearsals for theatrical performance. In addition, the native bulk of CHT would have prohibited it from easy compilation. That is, its thickness would preclude it from being bound with other similarly large works, though small works could be conceivably bound with it.

Its bulk does render its material disintegration more likely, though its design resists this. The University of Nevada, Reno Library’s Special Collections holds leaves from one such fractured copy of CHT; the leaves comprise the entirety of The Merchant of Venice. The design of CHT does not make such disintegration easy. Unlike, for instance, Legat’s 1602 edition of Perkins’ Works—which includes internal title-pages between works—CHT prints its plays continuously. If a play ends on a recto, the next play begins on the verso of that leaf. Aspects of CHT’s material design thus cement the volume as individual, independent, discrete, resistant to material incursion.

This is a mere conspectus, rapidly assembled, of my study’s ramifications for scholarship on CHT. Further reflection will spark further insights, not only about the materiality of CHT, but indeed for the study of early modern folios in general. For instance, my discoveries throughout this dissertation suggest that there is much work to be done in the work of contextualizing large folios. The study of English folios, in particular, tends to conceive of them as contextualized only by other English folios, but they existed within a highly diverse market, populated with temporally, materially, and geographically heterogeneous folios. Related to this, it seems clear that the folio, as a subset of {the premodern book}, is a more complex entity than previous critical narratives might suggest. The booke of fortune, the Vita di Cosimo de’ Medici, and

352

Aldo’s Aristotle editio princeps demand widely divergent use-patterns, confirming the inescapable variegation of premodern folios.

Given this variegation, a critical attitude of attention to divergence might

appreciably benefit studies of premodern folios. Francis Connor’s study models such an

attitude. Rather than seeking to discern similarities between folios—critically erasing

their differences—scholarship might usefully wallow in complexity, exploring the

generative piquancy of folios’ individuality. Related to this, my investigations of small

folios (such as The booke of fortune, De officiis, and books of popular music) establish

the legitimacy of the slender folio as a locus for study. Their physical slightness often

belies their critical value. Slender folios can contextualize bulky folios; they can also

support the weight of critical scrutiny on their own.

The implications of this project for book history as a field of study are less

specific to data and more applicable to methodology. First, the medium-data approach to

evidence exemplified in my work—an approach which participates in what Michael

Johnston calls “the quantitative turn”—is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating, yet its results can be both unexpected and valuable.467 Neither numbers nor visualizations are

necessarily better evidence than material case studies (which often populate book history)

or textual clues (the sort of thing one often sees in literary criticism). Numbers and charts

are, however, certainly legitimate as evidence; they are also less well-represented in book history and literary criticism than are case studies and relevant quotations. Despite the

467 Johnston, private communication.

353

expense and trouble required by my methodology, it offers a fresh lens for considering

major movements in textual culture.

My methodology also calls attention to a major gap in book history as a discourse:

the general absence of format study. The introduction to this dissertation makes a forceful

case for the value of statistical format study. The preceding paragraphs, discussing the

value of my findings for study of CHT and premodern folios, should demonstrate the

necessity of data-driven investigations of format in the hand-press period. What other

uninterrogated assumptions have we been making about format? What other discoveries,

lost in the weeds of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century print, might shed light on key

works of literature? What later cousins to The booke of fortune remain unscrutinized?

Study of format—larger formats like quartos and octavos as well as smaller formats like

duodecimos or sextodecimos—have the potential to open unimagined new channels of

literary inquiry.

Beyond such immediate developments, I anticipate expanding this project in a

few separate, but perhaps interlinked, ways. Most immediately, the data-set as a whole

needs to be expanded, with specific attention paid to the fifteenth- and seventeenth-

century subsets. Scheduled visits in April to the Newberry Library and the Rasmussen-

Hines Collection in Alta, California mark the beginning of this expansion. My

discoveries regarding the entanglement of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript

culture with print culture suggests that including large, folio-sized manuscripts might illumine questions of portability, use, and prestige in interesting ways. Theoretical

354

warrant for such an expansion exists: Tanselle’s definition explicitly conceives of

manuscript format as closely akin to print format. 468

This sort of extension demands but little adjustment to the project’s structure.

Other kinds of expansion would require more sweeping revision, however. For instance,

the question of comparison to other formats crops up repeatedly throughout this

dissertation. Were decorative borders and printers’ ornaments industry-standard for folios only, or across quartos and duodecimos as well? Did smaller formats deploy reference technologies in similar ways or in similar populations to folios’ deployments? How frequently did quartos include illustrations—and what types of illustrations would quartos include? What proportion of margin-space-to-text-block is visible in smaller formats

(octavo, duodecimo, sextodecimo), how does that compare to folio proportions, and what does such a comparison reveal about use-patterns suggested by formats? These sorts of questions need to be answered, but without thoroughgoing study of materiality across formats, they will not be.

A related theoretical question expands the potential value of format-study beyond the premodern period and beyond books: what are the cultural affordances of size? How does size—in art, in design, in global capitalism, in environmental thought—shape aesthesis or value-judgements? How do different cultural valuations of {bulk, massiveness, or extensiveness} or, alternatively, {sparsity, minimalism, or austerity} shape cultural history, if at all? Are concepts like bombast, generosity, greed, or volume cognate with bulk? Are concepts like conservatism, control, superficiality, or poverty

468 Tanselle, “Concept of Format,” 112-113.

355

cognate with slenderness? Format studies like mine can offer an entry point into and a

foundation for cultural histories of size, which can in turn stimulate historically-grounded theory. Incomprehensible hugeness shapes modern existence: massive technological networks, environmental catastrophe, corporate systems, rates of population growth.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, premodern printed books may offer a way to theoretically shrink the world back to a comprehensible size.

And whither then? I cannot say.

356

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Appendix - A List of Folios Consulted

Short Title Catalogue Number/Shelfmark469 Date

Aesop HRC: PA/3851/A2/1505/HRC/ALDINE 1504

Aldus Manutius Iunior HRC: q/DG/738.17/M3/HRC/ALDINE 1586

Alexander Aphrodisiensis HRC: Uzielli 86 1513

Alexander Aphrodisiensis HRC: Uzielli 155 1520 priora analytica

Alexander Aphrodisiensis HRC: PA/3892/S7/A43/1520/HRC/ALDINE 1520 sophisticos

Alunno HRC: q/PC/1620/A7/1543/HRC/ALDINE 1543

Ammonius Hermiae HRC: B/439/A946/1503/HRC/ALDINE 1503

Antiphon (Sarum) ESTC 15790 1519

Arcadia ESTC 22540 1593

HRC: Archimedes 1558 q/QA/31/A68/C66/1558/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Aristophanes HRC: q/PA/3875/A2/1498/HRC/ALDINE 1498

Aristotle HRC: q/PA/3890/A6/1513/HRC/ALDINE 1513

Aristotle HRC: Uzielli 66 1504

Aristotle vol 1 HRC: Uzielli 6 (vol. 1) 1495

469 For works listed in the English Short Title Catalogue, catalogue number is given. For incunabula and European works, institution and shelfmark are given (HRC = Harry Ransom Center, BL = British Library, NL = Newberry Library).

373

HRC: Aristotle vol 2 1497 q/PA/3890/A2/1495/vol.2/HRC/ALDINE

HRC: Aristotle vol 3 1497 q/PA/3890/A2/1495/vol.3/HRC/ALDINE

HRC: q/PA/3890/A2/1495/vol.4, Aristotle vol 4.1 1497 pt.1/HRC/ALDINE

HRC: q/PA/3890/A2/1495/vol.4, Aristotle vol 4.2 1497 pt.2/HRC/ALDINE

HRC: Aristotle vol 5 1498 q/PA/3890/A2/1495/vol.5/HRC/ALDINE

Athenaeus HRC: q/PA/3937/A2/1514/HRC/ALDINE 1514

Bayte & Snare of Fortune ESTC 3055 1556

Bembus HRC: q/DG/677/A2/B3/HRC/ALDINE 1551

Bessarion HRC: q/B/394/B6/1516/HRC/ALDINE 1516

Bessarion HRC: qB/394/B6/1503/HRC/ALDINE 1503

Bible HRC: Uzielli 147 1518

Bibliotheca Eliotiae (1) ESTC 7660 1545

Bibliotheca Eliotiae (2) ESTC 7661 1548

Boethius (Koberger) NL: oversize Inc. 1966 1473

Book of common prayer ESTC 2508 1603

Book of Fortune ESTC 3306 1618

Breviary (Salisbury) ESTC 15830 1531

374

Brittania's Pastorals Book 1 ESTC 3914 1613

Brittania's Pastorals Book 2 ESTC 3915.5 1616

Calepinus HRC: q/PA/2361/C34/1564/HRC/ALDINE 1564

Calligraphotechnia ESTC 11803 1619

Castiglione HRC: q/BJ/1604/C3/1545/HRC/ALDINE 1545

Castiglione HRC: q/BJ/1604/C3/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE 1528

Catalogue of English ESTC 17669 1595 Printed Books

Chronicle/Nut-Brown ESTC 782 1503 Maid

Collection: Historie of

England ESTC 6248 1618

Colonna HRC: q/PQ/4619/C9/1499/HRC/ALDINE 1499

Colonna HRC: Uzielli 258 1545

Commentary on Boethius BL: C.5.d.7 1485 (Keysere)

Constitutiones Provinciales ESTC 17107 1501

HRC: Council of Trent 1566 q/BX/1958/A2/1566/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Countesse of

Mountgomeries Urania ESTC 26051 1621

Coverdale's Bible ESTC 2066 1537

375

HRC: Crastonus 1524 q/PA/442/C727/1524/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Crastonus HRC: Uzielli 12 1497

De Magnete ESTC 11883 1600

De Officiis BL: C.1.c.13 1477

Defensatiue against the poyson ESTC 13859 1620

Demosthenes HRC: PA/3949/A2/1504/HRC/ALDINE 1504

Dicta Philosophorum ESTC 6830 1528

Dioscorides HRC: Uzielli 24 1499

Dowland's 1st Ayres ESTC 7092 1600

Drayton's Poems ESTC 7222 1619

Ecclesia Triumphans ESTC 25677 1614

Ecclesiae ESTC 5824 1604

Erasmus HRC: Uzielli 78 1508

HRC: Eustratius 1536 q/PA/3893/E6/E87/1536/HRC/ALDINE

Ferrabosco's Lessons ESTC 10828 1609

First book of architecture ESTC 22235 1611

Fiue Columns ESTC 3162 1608

Fiue decades of epistles of vvarre ESTC 17332 1622

376

Florentine Historie ESTC 17162 1595

Form of making bishops ESTC 16467 1607

Foure Bookes ESTC 1468 1606

Funeral Teares ESTC 5679 1606

Galen Vol 1 HRC: Uzielli 194 1525

Galen Vol 2 HRC: Uzielli 194 1525

Galen Vol 3 HRC: Uzielli 194 1525

Galen Vol 4 HRC: Uzielli 194 1525

Galen Vol 5 HRC: Uzielli 194 1525

Gaza HRC: Uzielli 2 1495

Generall Calendars ESTC 12896 1594

Georgius Trapezuntius HRC: Uzielli 189 1523

HRC: Georgius Valla Vol 1 1501 q/PA/8585/V216/A2/1501/v.1/HRC/ALDINE

Good Living and Good BL: C.70.g.14. 1503 Dying

Gradual (Salisbury) ESTC 15864 1528

Herodotus HRC: q/PA/4002/A2/1502/HRC/ALDINE 1502

Hesychius HRC: q/PA/4013/H2/1514/HRC/ALDINE 1514

Hippocrates HRC: Uzielli 198 1526

Historia Major ESTC 17652 1567

Historie of Man ESTC 1359 1578

377

History of Justine ESTC 24293 1606 hortu HRC: PA/3893/T8/A3/1559/HRC/ALDINE 1559

Hortus Sanitatis HRC: Incun 1491 H787 1491

Humes Poeticall Musicke ESTC 13957 1607

HRC: Iamblichus 1497 q/PA/4220/L3/D4/1497/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Iamblichus HRC: q/PA/4220/L3/D4/1516/HRC/ALDINE 1516

Intrationum ESTC 14116 1510 Excellentissimus

Intrationum Liber Omnibus ESTC 14117 1546

Ioannes Philoponus HRC: Uzielli 204 1527

Ioannes Philoponus HRC: Uzielli 62 1504

Isocrates HRC: q/PA/4216/A2/1534/HRC/ALDINE 1534

Jones' 1st Ayres ESTC 14732 1600

Jones' 2nd Ayres ESTC 14733 1601

La Perspective ESTC 4869 1612

Livy HRC: q/PA/6452/A2/1555/HRC/ALDINE 1555

Lucian HRC: q/PA/4230/A2/1503/HRC/ALDINE 1503

Lucian HRC: q/PA/4230/A2/1522/HRC/ALDINE 1522

Magnum Etymologicum HRC: q/PA/5313/T87/1549/HRC/ALDINE 1549 Graecae Linguae

Medici Antiqui HRC: Uzielli 264 1547

378

Missal (Hereford) ESTC 16163 1502

Missal (Sarum) ESTC 16190 1512

Mocenicus HRC: B/785/M586/U5/1581/HRC/ALDINE 1581

Mutable and wandering ESTC 11279 1597 estate of france

HRC: Natta 1562 PA/8555/N387/A6/1562/HRC/ALDINE

Nobilitas Politica ESTC 11922 1608

Observation on Caesar's ESTC 7488 1600 Commentaries

Observations of Sir

Richard Havvkins ESTC 12962 1622

HRC: Oratores Graeci 1513 q/PA/3479/G7/M26/1513/HRC/ALDINE

Origen HRC: q/BR/65/06/1503/HRC/ALDINE 1503

Ornithoparcus ESTC 18853 1609

Ortus Vocabulorum ESTC 13829 1500

Panegyrike ESTC 6258 1603

Pantometria ESTC 6859 1591

Paulus Aegineta HRC: q/R/126/P4/1528/HRC/ALDINE 1528

HRC: Pausanius 1516 q/PA/4264/A2/1516/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

379

HRC: Perottus 1513 q/PA/6507/A2/P4/1513/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

HRC: Perottus 1517 q/PA/6507/A2/P4/1517/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Perottus HRC: q/PA/6507/A2/P4/1527/HRC/ALDINE 1527

Perottus HRC: Uzielli 22 1499

Petrarch HRC: q/PQ/4489/A1/1501/HRC 1501

Philostratus HRC: q/PA/4272/A3/1504/HRC/ALDINE 1501

Plain and easy introduction ESTC 18134 1608

Plato HRC: Uzielli 92 1513

HRC: Pletho 1503 q/PA/5337/P56/P47/1525/HRC/ALDINE

Pliny HRC: q/QH/41/P7/1559/HRC/ALDINE 1559

Plutarch HRC: q/PA/4369/A2/1519/HRC/ALDINE 1519

Plutarch HRC: Uzielli 80 1509

Policies chief counseller ESTC 12373 1607

HRC: Politian 1498 q/PQ/4630/P5/1498/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Pollux HRC: Uzielli 46 1502

Polycronicon ESTC 13440a 1480

Ptochomouseion ESTC 374 1565

380

Registrum Omnium ESTC 20836 1531 Brevium

Relationes ESTC 14901 1602

HRC: Rhodiginus 1516 q/PA/8570/R7/A5/1516/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Rosseter's Ayres ESTC 21332 1601

Salute Corporis ESTC 12512 1509

School of Music ESTC 21128 1603

Scriptores Astronimici HRC: Uzielli 20 1499 Veteres (2 parts)

Shepheardes Kalender ESTC 22420 1604

Sigonius HRC: q/DG/202/S636/1556/HRC/ALDINE 1556

HRC: Simplicius (in quattuor) 1526 q/PA/3892/C6/S56/1526/HRC/ALDINE

Simplicius (in octo) HRC: Uzielli 197 1526

Simplicius HRC: Uzielli 205 1527

HRC: St Catherine of Siena 1500 q/BX/4700/C4/A28/1500/HRC/ALDINE

Stephanus Byzantinus HRC: Uzielli 42 1502

Strabo Uzielli 123 1516

Suidas HRC: Uzielli 106 1514

Surveyor ESTC 20748 1616

381

Tactiks of Ælian ESTC 161 1616

Tears or Lamentations ESTC 15434 1614

The Counsellor ESTC 12372 1598

Themistius HRC: q/PA/4441/T5/A1/1534/HRC/ALDINE 1534

Theocritus HRC: Uzielli 4 1495

Theorike and Practike ESTC 1500 1598

HRC: Thesaurus Cornucopiae 1496 q/PA/231/T54/1496/cop.1/HRC/ALDINE

Three Colloquies ESTC 23689 1588

Thucyidides HRC: q/PA/4452/A2/1502/HRC/ALDINE 1502

Tres Consciones ESTC 16790 1527

Ulpian HRC: PA/4491/U6/A2/1503/HRC/ALDINE 1503

Ulpian HRC: PA/4491/U6/A2/1527/HRC/ALDINE 1527

Works, Newly Augmented ESTC 6236 1601

Xenophon HRC: q/PA/4494/H3/1503/HRC/ALDINE 1503

Xenophon HRC: Uzielli 195 1525