Title The use of abbreviations in the Gutenberg Sub Title グーテンベルク聖書における短縮語の使用 Author 安形, 麻理(Agata, Mari) Publisher 慶應義塾大学藝文学会 Publication year 2008 Jtitle 藝文研究 (The geibun-kenkyu : journal of arts and letters). Vol.95, (2008. 12) ,p.376(221)- 392(205) Abstract Notes 岩松研吉郎教授高宮利行教授退任記念論文集 Genre Journal Article URL https://koara.lib.keio.ac.jp/xoonips/modules/xoonips/detail.php?koara_id=AN00072643-0095000 1-0392

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Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) The Use of Abbreviations in the Gutenberg Bible

MariAGATA

1. Introduction 1.1. Casting off This study focuses on the use of abbreviations in the text of the

Gutenberg Bible (hereafter "the B42"), the fin~t substantial printed with movable metal type in Europe around 1455 by Johann Gutenberg of . To analyze what that the abbreviations can reveal will add new pieces of information to our understanding of the composi­ tion and process of the B42. The process of printing with consists essentially of making types, composing, imposing, inking, pressing, and binding. At the very beginning of the composition stage, it is necessary to "cast off' a printer's copy (exemplar), manuscript or printed, from which a type is set, "by counting words and by computation according to the sizes of type and page". 1 Casting off makes it possible to order the right amount of paper for the and to allot work to compositors. A few surviving examples from the fifteenth century show that cast­ ing off was already executed by making marks in the margins at early printing houses. For example, a copy of the B42 now preserved in the University was proved to have been used as the

-392- (205) exemplar of the printed by Heinrich Eggestein about 1469 (GW 4208); the most common mark was a double cross (#) to instruct "start the next page here"? Unfortunately, no exemplar (or exemplars) of the B42 survives and there is no direct evidence of how copyfitting was made.

1.2. Composition of the Gutenberg Bible The B42 is a two- Latin Bible in format and its text is heavily abbreviated. Some 500 to 600 words, about 3,000 letters are printed on each page. Schneider showed that there are many examples of the incorrect expansion of abbreviations, and thus concluded that lost exemplar(s) of the B42 must have been a heavily abbreviated small-for­ mat Bible.3 Despite the extensive studies of earlier scholars on various aspects of the B42, the text of the B42 has not been fully investigated, partly because there are no complete transcription data and partly because its text is basically close to the modern edition of the Latin Vulgate. There are a few significant researches on its text, but no com­ prehensive study on the use of abbreviations in the text of the B42 has been carried out. Previous scholars have revealed that the composition and printing process of the B42 is complex. Its text was divided into units which enabled concurrent composition and that printing was done not by the forme (two pages) but by the page. Even after these studies, however, there still remain many open questions concerning details of the com­ positional work: exactly how many compositors were engaged; to what extent compositors were allowed to decide for themselves; and whether each allocation of text demonstrates an identifying characteristic of each compositor. A brief description of the physical characteristics of the B42 will be

(206) -391- chronologicalorder ------•

A1 t--..L.-.J---L-....L...-L---..L..-...&..,---L~"""""r__. ______------A1 A2

81

B3

82

Figure 1. Chronological overview of the first volume useful here. The first volume consists of 33 quires (324 leaves) and the second volume consists of 32 quires (3I9 leaves), and most quires have ten leaves, that is, double folded five sheets (quinternion). The text is printed in double columns of 42-lines per page, but if leaves belong to the first setting in the first volume, Ir to 5r and I29r to I32r have 40 lines per page, and folio 5v have 4I lines, which were printed at the very beginning of the production. Folios 3I Or-v of the first vol­ ume are 4I-line pages in all the copies by accident, as will be seen later. There are four major text units; that is, the work was divided among compositors. They are labeled A, B, C, and D, and subdivided into twelve subdivisions as AI, A2, etc. to represent later additional divi­ sions of copy .4 Figure I illustrates a rough chronological overview of the first volume, based on a chart by Schwab et al.,5 which modified that of Schwenke.6 Each cell represents a quire and the time runs from left to right. However, this chart is different from those of Schwenke and Schwab et al. in one point, in that it does not try to allocate quires to press (or presses), or try to decide the very precise position in the time­ line because further investigations will be required to do so. The work started on unit AI (lr of the first volume: referred to as "I: Ir"), soon followed by unit B I (I: I29r, quire I4). After sixteen pages had been

-390- (207) printed, the line number per page was changed from 40 into 41, and then finally 42. After the change in the number of lines to a page, the printing of unit Cl (II: lr) started. Just after unit Dl began (II: 162r), at the point where I: 32r (quire 4) and 158v (quire 17) and II: 16r and 162r of each unit were printed, a decision was made to increase the edition size; from this point, all the leaves belong to the common setting only, except for several replacement setting pages. Unit B2 (I: 239r, quire 25) is subdivided into three. Before the last page of the quires 10, 13, 24, and 26 were composed, their next pages had been already printed. Therefore, compositors had to end allocated portions of the text exactly at the end of each quire so that the text fitted smoothly to the next page.

1.3. Abbreviation system of the B42 According to Schwenke' s type synopsis, the B42 fount consists of 296 sorts.7 In addition to about 55 basic sorts and their secondary forms (abutting forms), which do not have a diamond-shaped projection on their .leftwards edges, there are about 60 ligatures and more than 120 abbreviations, which serve to compress the text. The abbreviation system of the B42 is the standard one, following the scribal tradition. The largest group consists of 59 sorts: a suspen­ sion mark above a letter indicating usually the omission of "m" or "n", but also other letters. There are other 69 abbreviations: a mark above or below the letter indicating the omission of other letters such as "apl' s" (an abbreviated form of "apostolis"), and a few self-contained abbrevia­ tions such as "con", "us", "rum", and Tironian "et".8 These abbreviations, contractions, and ligatures commonly used in the B42, are assumed to have served for adjustment of minor miscalculations of casting off. Needham examined the page-by-page abbreviation rate for five

(208) -389- quires, which have anomalous characteristics such as an inserted leaf, a blank leaf, and 41-line pages, in conjunction with the ink analysis exe­ cuted by Schwab et al: quires 24-25 and 30-32 of the fist volume. 9 His results clearly show that the page by page abbreviation rates give a use­ ful clue to the copyfitting and work of compositors. The analysis of the average abbreviations per page for quire 25 demonstrates a result of miscalculation; the compositor started to compress the text by many abbreviations from the verso of the third leaf to the recto of the fifth leaf of quire 25 (25/3v-5r) in order to end 3 Esdras on 25/7v because the beginning of 4 Esdras was concurrently composed by a different com­ positor for 25/8r; toward the end of 25/5r, it became necessary to insert a leaf after sheet 4 (25/7 + 1: folio 246); then the 3 Esdras compositor slowed the abbreviation rate to half to end the text on 25/7r. The abbre­ viation rate also shows there was a copy break between quire 24 and 25; the compositor of quire 24 took full advantage of abbreviations to com­ press the text from 24/7v so that 2 Esdras ends on 24/lOv (folio 238v). Furthermore, he showed that the anomaly that the last two pages of quire 31 (31/lOr-v), folios 310r and 310v, were printed in 41 lines had resulted from a miscalculation of page fitting. Since quires 31 and 32 were concurrently composed, the compositor of quire 31 had to end the text at the end of folio 31 Ov. To fill the pages, the compositor refrained from using abbreviations from 3112r onwards. On the last two pages a further adjustment was made; in addition to a sparing use of abbrevia­ tions, the number of lines per page was decreased to 41 lines. In paren­ theses this led to another anomaly. In the B42, each column ends with a complete word. Folio 31 Or is the only exception and the last word of the left column ( a41) is broken and completed in the first line of the next column (b1), which ends with a complete word. Needham explained that b 1 was originally composed as a42, but changed into b 1 to shorten

-388- (209) the page, so that this quire would smoothly proceed on to the next quire, which had already been composed.

1.4. Purposes of this study The purpose of this study is to examine the use of abbreviations in the text of the B42 in order to reveal (1) what tendencies the normal quires demonstrate regarding the use of abbreviations; (2) whether the abbreviation rate of the last few lines is higher than that of the other lines; 10 and (3) what relation the use of abbreviation bears to the print­ ing process. The results will show that the use of abbreviations can pro­ vide important clues for inferring an aspect of the compositional work and the extent of the compositors' discretion.

2. Methodology In the present study, all the pages of the first volume (324 leaves: 648 pages) except for later-mentioned 6 pages of the Library copy were examined using the digital images. For the examina­ tion of the six pages where the pages of the Keio copy do not belong to the first setting, that is, folios 129 and 138 (the second setting) and folio 134 (the replacement setting which is unique to the Keio copy), the digital images of the paper copy of the (IC.55) were used. 11 Therefore, all the pages of the first setting of the first volume were examined. These digital images were kindly supplied by the HUMI Project, Keio University. First, the number of abbreviations in the text of the first volume was counted. Second, the line by line/page by page/quire by quire/ text unit by text unit abbreviation totals were calculated and analyzed in conjunction with the printing process of the B42. There are several possible ways of counting abbreviations: number

(210) -387- of abbreviated words, abbreviation symbols, saved letters, and saved vertical minim strokes. As Needham pointed out, a count of abbrevia­ tions does not directly show how much space is saved and it would be more precise to count how many minims are saved. For example, "the

12 various abbreviation sorts do not all save equivalent space" ; the "&" (= "et") saves only a single letter space, while the "f" (= "tur") saves more. In addition, the same abbreviation symbol often saves different amounts of space: for instance, "a" can represent both an omitted "n" (two minims) and "m" (three minims). It should be also noted that Hebrew proper names are almost never abbreviated and numerals are basically written out in order to assist a reader in aloud smoothly. In spite of these complications, Needham's above-mentioned study proves that a count of abbreviations is useful for shedding some light on the compositors' work at least in the five irregular quires. Therefore, following Needham's method, not the number of abbreviated words but the number of abbreviation symbols which indicate that letters are abbreviated was counted in this study, regardless of how many letters and minims were saved. Ligatures and some variant letter forms such as a final "s" which is shaped like the figure 5 and standing above the line also serve for saving the spaces, but they are not considered. Table 1 shows examples of how to count the abbreviations. In the table, italics indicate abbreviated letters. For instance, both "quonia" and "qm" are abbreviations of "quoniam"; the former saves only a sin­ gle letter ("m") while the latter saves five letters ("uonia"). In the pres­ ent counting system, however, both count as 1 abbreviation. There are words with more than one abbreviation symbol; "6nib3" is abbreviated

9 "omnibus" and counts as two; "seciid " is compressed "secundus" and

13 also counts as two •

-386- (211) Table 1. Counting of abbreviations

Abbreviated word Expanded word Count ------no non 1 Suspension mark: quonia quoniam 1 omission of "n", qiii quoniam 1 "m", or other letters ipe ipse 1 e est 1 Self-contained 7 et 1 abbreviation de9 de us 1 ih'm ihersalem 1 Other abbreviation apl's apostolis 1 symbols u-ba uerba 1 Word with more 5nib3 omnibus 2 than one abbrevia- tion symbol sect1d9 secundus 2

Table 2. Abbreviations per line

Abbreviation Number of lines 0 10217 1 15214 2 13655 3 8497 4 4108 5 1786 6 598 7 131 8 39 9 4 TOTAL 54249

(212) -385- 3. The results 3.1. Abbreviations per line The maximum number of abbreviation per line is 9, and the minimum is 0, as shown in Table 2. Blank lines which were reserved for incipits and explicits and blank pages are excluded from the count. On average 1. 7 abbreviation symbols are used per line. The most common number of abbreviations per line is 1 (15,214 lines: 28 % ), followed by 2 (13,655 lines: 25%), and 0 (10,217lines: 19%). As mentioned above, each column ends with a complete word, except for folios 310r-v. Therefore, it was expected that the last few lines would demonstrate different tendencies from other lines due to fine adjustments. There are pages where more than 10% of the abbreviations of the column are used in the last two lines, and where the final line uses a higher rate of abbreviation when a new book begins on the next col­ umn. A further statistical analysis will be useful to grasp clearer tenden­ cies.

3.2. Abbreviations per page Average abbreviations per page are 147.6. The standard deviation, which shows the degree of scatter from the average set, is 48.8. Folio 310v (3119r) has the smallest number of abbreviations (17); folio 241 v (25/3v) has the largest (329), although there are many Hebrew personal names, which restrict opportunities for abbreviating. On the pages which have blank lines at the end of the column- in other words, pages where there are still enough spaces - the number of abbreviations tends to be small, but the text is still abbreviated. On folio 101 v the text ends on line 38 of the right column and there are 4- line blank spaces. The abbreviation total of the left column is 20 and that of the right column is 34; the page total is 54, which is fairly fewer

-384- (213) 250

Q) 200 Ol <1l 0. Q; 0. 150 en c: 0 15 ·;:; 100 !!? ..0 ..0

0

Figure 2. Abbreviations for quire 26

Table 3. 40-line pages and 42-line pages

~ quire 1 quire 14 Average 213.5 206.1 whole quire Standard deviation 29.6 30.9 Average 201.6 199.9 42-line pages Standard deviation 24.5 27.4 Average 225.4 217.4 40-line pages Standard deviation 30.6 36.1 than the average. On folio 192v, where 2 Kings ends, there are blank spaces in the right column from line 32 downward, but 24 abbreviations appear in the left column and 16 in the right column. Folio 324v, the last page of the first volume, has 55 abbreviations, although the text is printed for only 22 lines in the left column. On the other hand, pages preceding blank pages (246v and 260v) demonstrate higher abbreviation rates. 192 abbreviations (1 04 in the left column and 88 in the right column) are used on an inserted leaf, folio 246r, where 3 Esdras ends; Needham explained that the composi­ tor adjusted the abbreviation rate so that the text should not reach to folio 246v because "the few remaining words of the book would look

(214) -383- forlorn" .14 On folio 260r (26111r), where 4 Esdras ends, 228 abbreviations (103 in the left column and 125 in the right column) appear (see Figure 2). The average number abbreviations of the pages belonging to quire 26 is fairly high: 181.9. Considering that the previous leaf (folio 259) is an inserted leaf and a growing number of abbreviations is used on the last several pages, this quire may be another example of miscalculation of page fitting. The quires 1 (unit A1) and 14 (unit B 1) contain 40-line pages: folios 1r to 5r (1/lr-5r) and 129r to 132r (14/lr-4r). Table 3 shows the average number of abbreviations per page and the standard deviation in these two quires. It clearly demonstrates that 40-line pages have a larger num­ ber of abbreviations on average and the degree of scatter is larger than for 42-line pages in both quires.

3.3. Abbreviations per quire The average abbreviations per quire are shown in Table 4. Boldface indicates that the standard deviation is larger than 35.0. The average abbreviations are fairly small in quires 11 (85.7 abbreviations), 27 (87 .9 abbreviations), and 31 (48.9 abbreviations), compared with the overall average (148.9 abbreviations). The quire-by-quire abbreviation totals can be roughly classified into several groups. In quire 13, pages in the middle of the quire have a larger number of abbreviations. On the contrary, pages in the middle of the quire have fewer abbreviations in quire 2. In quires 1, 11, 14, 18, 31 and 33, the first several pages contain a larger number of abbreviations (see Figure 3), while in quires 17, 24 and 26, the last few pages have more abbreviations. The first and last pages of quires 8, 20, 22 show higher abbreviation rates per page as shown in Figure 4.

-382- (215) Table 4. Abbreviations per quire

Unit Quire Page Average Standard Deviation A1 1 213.5 29.6 A1 2 184.5 16.4 A1 3 185.4 21.3 A1 4 180.8 18.9 A1 5 134.8 25.4 A1 6 117.2 14.7 A1 7 123.3 16.8 A1 8 106.8 19.1 A1 9 122.0 16.0 A1 10 153.1 49.7 A2 11 85.7 15.8 A2 12 121.5 15.0 A2 13 192.4 69.9 B1 14 206.1 30.9 B1 15 161.9 13.4 B1 16 178.7 26.8 B1 17 189.7 35.4 B1 18 134.9 47.6 B1 19 126.5 18.7 B1 20 107.1 36.3 B1 21 114.7 22.1 B1 22 130.7 23.0 B1 23 163.6 32.0 B1 24 174.0 46.1 B2 25 193.6 53.5 B2 26 181.9 29.1 B3 27 87.9 12.4 B3 28 115.3 12.6 B3 29 143.7 15.5 B3 30 148.5 15.3 B3 31 48.9 34.9 B3 32 186.8 28.7 B3 33 199.6 39.4

(216) -381- Q) g> 0.. Q; 0.. en c 0 'E -~ ..c ..c

Figure 3. Abbreviations for quire 18

180 160

Q) 140 mCl 0.. 120 Q; 0.. en 100 c 0 80 'E·;;; ~ 60 ..c ..c

0

Figure 4. Abbreviations for quire 22

3.4. Abbreviations per unit Table 4 and Figure 1 illustrate some tendencies that text units demonstrate. In the normal quires of unit A 1, that is, quires 2 to 9, the standard deviation is quite small. This means that the numbers of the abbreviations on pages which belong to each quire are not widely scat­ tered. However, the actual number of the abbreviations is quite different between the first half and the latter half of the unit; on average, that of

-380- (217) 300

250

Q) [ 200 Q) CL Ul c 0 ~ 150 · ~

~ 100

50

0

Figure 5. Abbreviations for quire 10

Q) Cl CO 0.. ~ (/) c 0 'la -~ .0 .0 <(

Figure 6. Abbreviations for quire 13 quires 2 to 4 is 183.5, while that of quires 5 to 9 is 120.8. The same ten­ dency applies to unit B 1. In quires 15 to 23 the standard deviation is also small, except for quire 18, but the average number of abbreviations is different; that of quires 15 to 17 is 176.8, while that of quires 18 to 22 is 122.8. The standard deviation is also small in quires 11 to 12 of unit A2 and quires 27 to 30 of unit B3. Therefore, it can be stated that quires which were concurrently composed and printed show similar ten­ dencies.

(218) - 379 - The last quire of each text unit requires special attention: quire 10 of unit A 1, quire 13 of unit A2, and quire 24 of unit B 1. The standard devia­ tions of the average abbreviations per page in these three quires are quite large: 49.7, 69.9 and 46.1, respectively. Figure 5 illustrates the abbreviations per page for quire 10 (folios 91-101: folio 99 is an inserted leaf). The number of abbreviations is 271 on folio 94v and 259 on folio 94r, while it is only 54 on folio 101 v, the last page of the quire, of which the last four lines are blank. It is supposed that the com­ positor first tried to compress the allocated text to 10 leaves because the next page (folio 102r, the beginning page of quire 11) had been already printed, but folio 99 was inserted after the 8th leaf, and then the compositor decided to use fewer abbreviations so that the text came to the end of folio 101 v. Therefore, quire 10 is assumed to be an example of miscalculation like quire 25. The reason why quire 18 shows such a large standard deviation is not clear and it requires further research. Relatively fewer abbreviations are used in quires 11 and 12 of unit A2 and the standard deviation is also small. On the contrary, in quire 13 (folios 122-128), the page average is 192.4 and the standard deviation is quite large (69.9); the number of abbreviations ranges from 88 (folio 128r) to 310 (125v). Considering that folio 126 is an inserted leaf, this is assumed to be another example of miscalculation in copyfitting (see Figure 6).

4. Conclusion The present results show that the distribution of abbreviations has a close relationship to the quires and the text units. The fact that the stan­ dard deviation of many quires are quite large indicates that casting off was not very strictly executed. It is supposed that the compositors did not necessarily have to put a certain portion of text into a particular

-378- (219) page; rather, they were allowed to make adjustments within the allo­ cated quires. These results suggest that the compositors had broad dis­ cretion and that they had a Latin high enough for them to decide to abbreviate or expand words. This study shows that the use of abbreviations can shed some light on the work of the compositors. A further examination of the second volume and a careful analysis of the results could give a further clue to the work of a compositor and then to a reconstruction of the practices in the B42 printing house.

Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the HUMI Project of Keio University, which was directed by Professor Takamiya, for supplying me the digital images of the B42.

NOTES Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to . Winchester, St Paul's , 1995, p. 41. 2 Needham, Paul. A Gutenberg Bible used as printer's copy by Heinrich Eggestein in Strassburg, ea. 1469. Transactions of the Cambridge Biblio­ graphical Society. vol. 9, 1986, pp. 36-75. 3 Schneider, Heinrich. Der Text der Gutenbergbibel. Bonn, Peter Hanstein Ver­ lag, 1954, p. 120. 4 They were pointed out by Schwenke based on an investigation of the paper stock. Schwenke, Paul. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des ersten Buch­ drucks. , Behrend, 1900, pp. 51-60. His chronological chart was later revised by Richard N. Schwab et al., based on the ink analyses. 5 Schwab, Richard N. An Ersatz leaf in the Doheny Gutenberg Bible Volume I. The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. vol. 81, no.4, 1987, pp. 479-85 6 Schwenke, Paul. Johannes Gutenbergs zweiundvierzigzeilige Bibel:

(220) -377- Erganzungsband zur Faksimile-Ausgabe. , Insel-Verlag, 1923, p. 29. 7 Schwenke. Untersuchungen, after p. 32. 8 For a more detailed explanation of the abbreviation system with accompany­ ing images, see Needham, Paul. Division of copy in the Gutenberg Bible: three glosses on the ink evidence. The Papers of the Bibliographical Society. vol. 79, no. 3, 1985, pp. 411-26. 9 Needham, Division of copy. 10 This research question was inspired by a question from Professor Brian Donaghey. 11 The images are available online: "Gutenberg Bible: comparing the texts". http://prodigi. bl. uk/treasures/ gutenberg/search.asp, ( accessed 2008-1 0-18). 12 Needham, Division of copy, p. 416. 13 "Que" may be an abbreviated "quae" and "hac" may be an abbreviated "haec", but they count as 0 in the present study because they are never printed in expanded forms in the B42. Needham's counting method is not described in detail, and the present result of quires 24, 30, 31 and 32 is slightly different from that of Needham, but it does not seem to be a big problem in analyzing overall tendencies. 14 Needham, Division of copy, p. 420.

-376- (221)