PRINT and BOOK CULTURE in the DANISH TOWN of ODENSE Wolfgang Undorf the Place of Provincial Cities in Early Modern Book History

PRINT AND BOOK CULTURE IN THE DANISH TOWN OF ODENSE

Wolfgang Undorf

The place of provincial cities in early modern book history, among other historical disciplines, is almost inevitably on the periphery. The notion of the province is invariably connected to a peripheral position in opposition to, or, at best, next to a capital. On a national level, provincial printing by definition comprises all printing executed throughout a pre-defined historical period outside the political capital of a specific country, Scan­ dinavia being no exception in this regard.1 When we turn towards provin- cial printing, bio-bibliographical knowledge represents the basic level of our knowledge, although inevitably quite anecdotal in nature. It is not a surprise that the capital of Denmark, a country in the periphery of the northern European book trade and print system, tends to appear rather a provincial town itself in a wider context. It is one of the peculiarities of the establishment and development of printing in the earliest decades of printing that it doesn’t necessarily follow any capital versus provincial pattern. The subsequent victory of printing establishments in the capital over their competitors in the provinces is predominantly a result of politi- cal decisions made in independent processes such as nation building, religious doctrine and the establishment of censorship or other forms of political and governmental control. Usually the factors that can be shown to have anything from considerable to decisive impact on printing are out- side printing itself. The establishment and development of Scandinavian printing shops, their output, patrons, markets, and, finally, failure or success, becomes more understandable both in a comparative, especially trans-national, and international perspective. Such a study has to be founded upon thorough analyses of the internal structures of domestic markets, their interplay with patrons and readers connected to the chal- lenge imposed by the dominating European export book markets, and their output of genres and languages. According to Pettegree, Scandinavia

1 Grethe Larsen, Danske Provinstryk 1482–1830: en bibliografi, 6 vols. (Copenhagen: Det kongelige Bibliotek, 1994–2001). 228 wolfgang undorf as a whole must be regarded as “a still remote outer periphery” in compari- son to both the inner periphery (Spain, Portugal, England and southern Italy) and the inner core of the European book system (France, Germany, Italy).2 Another factor that has to be considered thoroughly in this context is the question whether printing in, let’s say Odense in Denmark, can be earnestly called provincial when there was no printing being done or a printing shop even existing in the capital for about a decade at that time.3 Seen in the context of demand and supply, an integral assumption of Christaller’s Central Place Theory, both Copenhagen, the capital, and Odense, the provincial town, are equally subordinated to Lübeck, the nearest central place in the northern European book market system; Lübeck, in turn, is subordinated to the central places of the book trade in Paris, Nuremberg or Venice, the inner core of the European book system according to Pettegree.4

Printing in Scandinavia

Scandinavian print culture around 1500 was a peripheral enterprise in many regards, geographically in the first place, but also with regard to handicaps in book trading infrastructure and the extent of the cultural elites that formed the literate public of the late medieval period. Denmark was the capital of Scandinavia, the Danish king was King in Norway and Sweden as well. From an historical perspective, it might seem as if Copenhagen, the Danish capital, would have been predestined to become the centre of printing at least in Denmark as early as the late 1480s, espe- cially with the establishment of Poul Raeff’s printing shop in 1513. But at first printing shops, although quite short-lived, were established in politi- cally peripheral cities. Later, the absence, from Copenhagen between the years 1495 and 1505 of the Dutch printer Gotfred of Ghemen, who intro- duced printing in Copenhagen in 1489, left the city without any printer for more than ten years. Before 1489, and during the absence of any printing shop in Copenhagen, a number of provincial towns made their marks on the map of printing history, in various aspects challenging any apparently God-given primacy

2 Andres Pettegree, “Centre and Periphery in the European Book World,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 18 (2008): 105–106. 3 Lotte Hellinga and Wytze Hellinga, “Gotfred af Ghemens faerden ca. 1486–1510: en typologisk undersoegelse [with summary in English: Govert van Ghmen’s Activities ca. 1486–1510: A Typographical Study],” Fund og forskning 15 (1968): 7–38. 4 Walter Christaller, Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (Jena: Fischer, 1933).