Flickering of the Flame Exhibition Catalogue

FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 1 FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 2 FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 3 Flickering of the Flame Print and the Reformation Exhibition and catalogue by Pearce J. Carefoote Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library 25 September – 20 December 2017 FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 4 Catalogue and exhibition by Pearce J. Carefoote Editors Philip Oldfield & Marie Korey Exhibition designed and installed by Linda Joy Digital Photography by Paul Armstrong Catalogue designed by Stan Bevington Catalogue printed by Coach House Press Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Carefoote, Pearce J., 1961-, author, organizer Flickering of the flame : print and the Reformation / exhibition and catalogue by Pearce J. Carefoote. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library from September 25 to December 20, 2017. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-7727-6122-4 (softcover) 1. Printing—Europe—Influence—History—Exhibitions. 2. Books—Europe—History—Exhibitions. 3. Manuscripts—Europe—History—Exhibitions. 4. Reformation—Exhibitions. 5. Europe—Civilization—Exhibitions. I. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library issuing body, host institution II. Title. Z12.C37 2017 686.2'090902 C2017-902922-3 FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 5 Foreword The year 2017 marks the five hundredth anniversary of the Reforma- tion, launched when Martin Luther penned and posted his Ninety- Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg – or so the story goes. Unbeknownst to Luther, this act would alter Western society and culture forever. It spread a revolution of profound religious, cultural, and political changes. The Reformation is deemed one of the cata- lysts of the Enlightenment, democracy, and civil society. Further, its educational ideal had an enduring impact on society, scholarship and art. Five hundred years later, its effects remain tangible today. To mark this historic anniversary, Pearce Carefoote’s exhibition, Flickering of the Flame: Print and the Reformation explores the evolu- tion of this movement and its propagation in text and the arts. Using the Fisher Rare Book Library’s outstanding collection of early theological and religious works, Pearce focuses on the years between 1517 and 1648. The resulting exhibition and accompanying catalogue demonstrate how Protestant and Catholic reformers alike used textual and visual support to promote their views and to engage a mass audience. As he demonstrates, the history of the Ref- ormation and print is complex and nuanced. Such analysis consider- ably broadens our understanding of the Reformation and the myths surrounding it. Support for the printing of this catalogue has been generously given by Janet Dewan and Barbara Tangney in memory of their father, Harry F.M. Ade, a Lutheran by birth and a long-time Friend of the Fisher Library. We are also grateful to Dr Eric Robertson, Knox Col- lege, and the librarians from the Faculty of Music for lending us their materials for display. Above all, I wish to thank Pearce Care- foote for this remarkable exhibition and catalogue. This is Pearce’s second exhibition in 2017. He also curated the successful Struggle and the Story: Canada in Print to mark Canada’s 150 anniversary. He has certainly made 2017 a noteworthy year of anniversaries, celebra- tion, and reflection here at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. For this, we are most thankful. Loryl MacDonald Interim Director, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 6 Introduction ‘No printing press, no Reformation.’ This axiom has been repeated so often and for so long, that it is simply taken for granted by stu- dents, specialists, and even the broader public. An exhibition like Flickering of the Flame: Print and the Reformation allows us to take a fresh look at what all those printing presses produced, and Pearce Carefoote’s superb catalogue gives us the materials to reconsider the old mantra. As we look through the display cases and catalogue, we can indulge in a little counter-intuitive speculation: did the printing press generate the Reformation, or did the Reformation generate the printing press? ‘No Reformation, no printing press?’ This was certainly the case in Wittenberg, where five publishers opened and then closed their doors from 1502−1516. Everything changed once Luther began doing his own work on a door (perhaps only apocryphally) in 1517. From that year till the end of the sixteenth century, Wittenberg published the most books of any city in the German-speaking lands. Across the North Sea, Scotland’s first two printers launched their presses in 1507−1508 and then went out of business soon afterwards. Printers and presses found a public and profitability only after the Scottish Parliament adopted a Protestant confession in 1570. Over the next seventy years, almost forty per cent of the books produced on those presses dealt with religious themes. Geneva and Strasbourg barely had a press before Reformation politics turned them into publishing centres, and Basel printers expanded in numbers and production as they expanded their titles beyond scholarly texts and into religious controversies. While Protestants are often seen as the ones who exploited and benefited the most from the printing press, it was the Catholic stronghold of Cologne that had Europe’s largest concentra- tion of printers. German publishers of a Protestant bent had Luther to thank for their profits: the Saxon friar wrote well over half of all books published in German in the early 1520s. A few decades later, only the names had changed: from 1541 when he settled in Geneva until a year after his death in 1564, Calvin was the author who most com- pletely dominated the European market: forty-two per cent of all pages published by a single author in these years originated from his very busy pen, and his nearest rivals were colleagues in the Reformed camp. By contrast, through those same decades the Bible in its German, French, English, Italian, and other translations consumed only fourteen per cent of the pages that passed through Europe’s busy presses. The press also brought new readers to some old classics. Both the thirteenth-century Golden Legend of Jacobus 6 FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 7 de Voragine and the fourteenth-century Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis were sufficiently steady sellers to gain translation into different vernaculars, and the latter had an impact that tran- scended religious boundaries: eighteenth-century Methodism was descended in part from it, thanks to the impact that à Kempis’s imi- tative piety had on reformer John Wesley when he was a child reading the four-hundred-year-old classic with his mother. The printing press certainly gave some medieval authors an early modern readership. But it was early modern authors who gave the bulk of work to contemporary printers. John Foxe’s Acts and Monu- ments consumed a year and a half of its publisher’s time before appearing in 1563 – it was the largest publishing project in Britain, and while it was expensive, it was also profitable. In the five cen- turies since its first appearance it has never been out of print. Most know it as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and its title and longevity under- score another reason why the Reformation made the printing press. In the fraught religious politics of the sixteenth century, the best defence was offence. Lutheran presses had been on the offensive from the very beginning, producing woodcuts that rendered the most black and white elements of Luther’s writings into memorable visual form. Luther could be pungent, but Lutheran images even more so: complex arguments against papal primacy had less impact than a woodcut image of German peasants with their pants down defecating into an overturned papal crown. These edgy, profane, and sometimes almost pornographic images gradually gave way to a different kind of emotional titillation. The market for martyrs was strong. Even before Foxe’s Acts and Monu- ments, Protestant and Catholic presses alike produced images depicting the pain, violence, and suffering endured by their co-reli- gionists at the hands of a religious oppressor. Foxe’s many woodcut illustrations of torture and burnings were available separately, almost like a self-contained graphic version of the full version’s high- lights. Catholic presses pumped out vernacular saint’s lives and the English College in Rome published images of the gruesome martyr- doms frescoed around its interior. Some violence was tacit: English antiquarian William Dugdale teamed up with the Bohemian engraver Wenceslaus Hollar to produce visual catalogues of the monasteries and churches demolished or left to decay by a religious culture less awed by their architectural rendering of sacred space. We recognize the profitability of these polemics, but the Reforma- tion also made the printing press through poetry and psalms. Many reformers constructed the sacred with the fluid architecture of song, and printers found a dependably steady market for the psalters, hymnals, and missals that structured worship. Religion had been 7 FIS Reformation g14.qxp_Layout 1 2017-09-15 1:07 PM Page 8 the business of printers ever since Gutenberg printed indulgences – far more profitably than the Bibles that ruined him – and it remained so as Catholic and Protestant churches alike leaned more on printed manuals to re-organize worship, and printed ledgers to register births, marriages, and deaths. ‘No Reformation, no printing press?’ Europe’s printers soon expanded far beyond religious polemics, and what they unleashed would turn around to change religion itself.

Load more