June 19, 2025 • 52 mins
There are a lot of gamechanging inventions that shifted the trajectory of the Middle Ages, but one machine managed to hit at just the right time and place to create a massive enterprise in medieval Europe, with consequences that touched the entire globe: Gutenberg's printing press. This week, Danièle speaks with Eric White about Johannes Gutenberg’s life, his early entrepreneurship, and the invention that changed the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
five of The Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sabelski, also known
as the five Minute Medievalist. As a historian, one of
the questions I'm asked pretty often is what was the
most important invention of the Middle Ages. There are a
lot of game changing inventions that shifted the trajectory of
(00:37):
the medieval world, and gunpowder is always one of the
front runners. But for my part, if I had to
pin it down to a single invention, I think the
one that really signals the end of the medieval world
as it had been is Gutenberg's printing press. Leg Gunpowder
printing itself long predates Johannes Gutenberg's lifetime in the fifteenth century,
(00:57):
but his particular machine managed to hit at just the
right time and place to turn printing in Europe into
a massive enterprise with consequences that touched the entire globe.
So who was this so called man of the Millennium
and how did he come up with this clever device?
This week I spoke with doctor Eric White about the
(01:17):
life and inventions of Johanna Schuttenberg. Eric is curator of
Rare Books at Princeton University Library and the author of
Exhibition Catalog scholore dozens of articles on early books, and
the award winning Editio Princeps, A History of the Gutenberg Bible.
His new book is Johann Schuttenberg, A Biography in Books.
(01:40):
Our conversation on Gutenberg's life, his early entrepreneurship, and the
invention that changed the world is coming up right after this. Well,
thank you Eric for joining me to talk about Gutenberg.
I think it's about time I talked about this printing
press on the show, because I think it's such an
important part of history, this idea of printing really starting
(02:03):
and exploding. So thank you so much for being here
to talk about Gutenberg.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Thanks for having me. I think it'll be fun and interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I always have a great time. Hopefully you'll have a
great time here too. So when we're talking about the
Gutenberg press that appears in the fifteenth century, give us
a little bit of an idea about what book production
is like at this moment in time before the famous
press appears.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, up till about fourteen fifty in Europe, if you
wanted a book, you would pay someone to gather up
sheets of parchment or paper and write that book out.
If they weren't the author of the book, they were
copying somebody else's book, and so you needed the example
(02:47):
to copy from, and you needed the materials, and after
weeks or months of work, you had a second copy
of that book. If you wanted to do it again,
it's weeks or months more. And this is the rate
at which books are made in medieval Europe. In Asia
there was already printing, but don't try to picture a
printing press. It was more like carving the text in
(03:11):
wooden blocks and rubbing the backs of the sheets of
paper onto those inked blocks and making books out of that.
Much more rapid production, greater numbers, but still a craft
that takes materials and a lot of work.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Absolutely. I don't know if kids are still doing that
these days, but we back in kindergarten or something carved
into a potato, right and put it in some ink
and stamped it. And this is kind of what we're
talking about when we're talking about early wood blocks, right.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, we're talking about that kind of relief. Raised surface.
Raised in relief is what we say, and raised surface
that catches the ink and transfers to the paper with
these Asian books. However, you're carving out Chinese characters, you
know what those look like. That is some real artisanship,
carving away everything you don't want to print.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yes, it's one of those jobs where I know I
would be absolutely hopeless at it. I mean, we can
talk to my parents about what my potato printing look like.
They could probably confirm that for you. So here we are.
We are in Germany in around fourteen fifty set the
stage for us here.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Right. We don't have records of their motivations or who
thought of what and exactly how it happened. But Johann Gutenberg,
who lives in Mentz, Germany on the Rhine, is encountering
people interested in putting money forward to something they're going
to call the work of the books. And it doesn't
(04:40):
say printing press, it doesn't say printing a Bible. Just
says paper, parchment, ink, wages for workers, and they call
it the work of the books. At the same time,
librarians know we have these very early printed Latin Bibles
that must be the first major thing printed, and those
(05:01):
two go together in time. And we've heard of the
Gutenberg Bible, but it doesn't have gutenberg name in it.
It's just something we have worked out must be that
work of the books, and it's a new system. It's
a new system. The invention seems to have been making
those relief surfaces, raised letters, but individually out of cast
(05:24):
metal that could be sorted into any sentence and locked
up and inked and printed. You know, picture printing the
first words of the Book of Genesis hundreds of times.
Now you have hundreds of copies of page one. If
you want a whole Bible, you'll need to go onto
page two and print hundreds of those on the other side.
It just goes on for years.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah. So I do want to get into the mechanics
of the press and all of that stuff in a moment.
But I need to ask you why did you feel
it was important to dig into Gutenberg's biography? Why do
we need to look at this What do you think
was important about sort of pulling it out of where
it was popular imagination and looking at it again. What
was important to you about that?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well? I have worked with books and in libraries my
adult life, and I see daily here at the university,
we teach with not only things that people need to read,
but we teach the history of things and how people
read them. And so I see these books in the classroom,
five hundred and fifty year old books sometimes, and they
(06:27):
do connect people see that. You know, when you have
the original book, it's not like you're trusting somebody to
describe it on the internet and you have no idea
whether that's right or not. You're seeing the real thing,
and so we all have an interest in the real thing,
seeing how it was done that long ago. And the
authenticity of seeing these beautiful fifteenth century books makes them
(06:51):
really fascinating objects for study. And yeah, just authentic. They've
made them, they survive, they haven't changed. It's a real
window into fifteenth century culture and it's something that has
lasted to our own time in a different way.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And it's always so cool to see these early printings.
And hopefully people will go and see them, because often
you can go to a library that has these very
old books, just ask and you can see them for yourself.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, at my library, I'm at Princeton University, and at
this library you don't need to be a Princeton student.
We have people coming in they've always wanted to see X,
Y and Z and we sign them in and you know,
fifteen minutes later they're looking at the thing. We watch them,
But no, we want people to see these things. We're
(07:40):
invested in access. We're invested in people seeing with their
own eyes, learning things, knowing the truth.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes, and there's a tactile sense and a smell and
all of these things that you can't get through the internet.
So when it comes to Gutenberg himself, he is hugely mythologized.
Tell us a little bit about the man and what
we know about the man, because it's still sketchy, as
so many medieval figures are.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, let me back up a little bit and think
of you know, when I came to this project, I
knew a lot about Gutenberg. But then I started asking myself,
how do I know it? What do I know? People say,
so doesn't count things? So what do we know about Gutenberg?
He lived in the fifteenth century, He was able to
get people to invest in what he was doing. He
(08:29):
was able to invest people in his projects, even if
they were a little secretive. And so that's something that
says something about his personality. Because we have no remembrances
of him, no descriptions of him. But We can see
people gathering around him on various projects even before he
was a printer, willing to take a chance on what
(08:49):
he was doing and wanting in. He wasn't a goldsmith.
He's often called a goldsmith, but he was doing things
with metals and heat and casting that made the goldsmiths
want to keep an eye on him, that's for sure.
And he must have been educated. He could figure out
complex ways of organizing labor, the proportions of things. I
(09:14):
think he had to know some Latin to do all this.
An interesting figure. We don't have the facts about him,
but we can kind of read in from what he
accomplished well.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
And one of the places where you start to see
him first appear that you pulled out in the book
is he's already an entrepreneur. He's trying to make money
off of the pilgrim trade. So tell us about this
early experiment with entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, medieval Christians in Europe had various ways to gain salvation.
You know, there was prayer, there was another activity called pilgrimage,
and you could be promised spiritual benefits by going on
a pilgrimage. You may have heard of the Canterbury tales.
That's pilgrims going to Canterbury. Other pilgrims we'd go to
(09:56):
a town in Germany named Achen, and at they would
show relics of the Virgin Mary and things like that,
and you would get basically, you know, spiritual points. It
helped you in life and in the afterlife. Pilgrims, they're
just grew up a tradition around this, pilgrims to Achen
(10:16):
every few years. When they showed the miraculous relics of
the saints, those pilgrims wanted to have a mirror with them,
a little portable mirror so they could hold it up
and catch the rays, so to speak, catch the light
from the holy relics, and then take that home with them.
And that was the rage. They wanted to have these
mirrors so they could take a sort of spiritual souvenir home.
(10:39):
What we have is a document, several documents, where Gutenberg
and again some investors are working on a secret project
to get the mirrors ready for the pilgrims that are
going to Achen in the next big pilgrimage. And so
he's manufacturing something. We don't know what it looks like,
but some sort of mirror that convinced people it was
catching these holy rays.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Well, this is an incredible will document or a series
of documents, because it implies that there is casting, probably
casting metal work involved, but also the polishing of stones.
That's pretty fascinating. How do you think these went together?
Do you have some speculation? I know that we had
just said before we turn on the microphones that this
is like the most wildly speculative part of your book.
(11:20):
What do you think is happening?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
You know, there are Pilgrims badges and some of them
have little mirrors attached to them, but we can't say
those are by Gutenberg. They're either earlier or later, or
not from the right town. So yeah, what was he doing?
The document again shows that he wasn't the craftsman who
was doing all this. He employed somebody to polish some gems.
And that's part of the way of you know, making
(11:42):
a reflective surface for a mirror. Whether he was stamping
metal or casting it hot, we don't know, but yeah,
he's he seems to be good at, you know, making
things out of metal. This is more than a decade
before the Bible comes out, So it's interesting that he's
into this kind of idea of mass producing things using
(12:03):
his skills with metal, employing people to do the work,
getting people to invest. Yeah, it's an interesting precursor.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yes, it's a collection, a collection of skills that are
going to come up later. And I think maybe this
is important to remind the listeners. If you have a
collection of skills and you don't know what they're for yet,
have some faith because maybe something great will come out
of it. So we're looking at maybe ten years later.
He starts to look for more investors and he finds
a partner. Can you tell us a little bit about
(12:31):
his early partner and what will become printing?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah, if you're going to print books in quantity, you
need a lot of supplies, and so you know, not
only the startup costs of making huge alphabets of metal type,
hundreds of e's, hundreds of s's, hundreds of t's per page.
Then you say, oh, we're going to print you know,
(12:57):
hundreds of books, well, picture hundreds of books books. That's
a lot of blank paper that you've just imported from
over the Alps. If you want the good stuff, So
right away, before they've even sold copy number one, huge
expenses are mounting, so he needed to convince somebody that
his work would work. And so he probably had some
(13:20):
smaller things that he'd printed, little calendars, little school books,
little poster announcements of some Christian content, and they must
have said, oh, this does work, we can go bigger
with this. So his first partner is a man named
Johann Fust. Fust all we know about him is that
(13:40):
he was able to bring together large amounts of money,
like the costs of multiple houses before anything had been printed.
And he's the one that shows up in this document
that mentions the work of the books, and at first
it's loans, and then it's his own personal investments a
lot of money in the work of the books. What's
(14:03):
interesting is that the document itself is the closure of
this partnership. It's in November of fourteen fifty five, and
Johann Fust is kind of asking for Gutenberg to pay
back anything he didn't put into the project and the
interest on the loans and everything that was invested, and
Gutenberg saying, no, no, no, not so fast. Your investment
(14:24):
is your investment. It's not the same as a loan.
I don't owe that. So there's a little bit of
a wrangle there. Feust then shows up with another gentleman
named Peter Schiffer, and they put their names in books
that are printed after the Gutenberg Bible. So the second, third,
and fourth and fifth books printed in Europe are by
this guy Feust, not Gutenberg.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yes, and some people have made such a big deal
of this in the mythology of Gutenberg, like this is
a big rift and then they're not going to speak
to each other again, and this makes Gutenberg destitute and
he's desperate for work after this. What is the sense
of it you get from looking at the documents and
looking at all of the evidence that's available.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, that could be true. It could be that Fust
has come in and needs his money back, and then
the court in minds says, oh, yeah, you should ruin
this guy because you need your investment back. So it's
a partial document. It doesn't tell us what the judgment
of the court was, and so there's kind of a
(15:25):
myth grown up that yes, this was too much money
for Gutenberg to pay back. It ruined him, and Fust
then goes on and prints and Gutenberg doesn't. Well, we
have so little surrounding this document that that's kind of
hard for me to conclude. Maybe Foust is one of
two or three investors, and Fust wants some money back
(15:49):
and Gutenberg's got it. We don't know. We don't know.
Better to focus on what we do know. The document
tells us it's fourteen fifty five. They've got an expensive
work of the books in progress. Foosts next act is
to print very beautiful books in mints by fourteen fifty seven.
It's a window into the beginnings of printing. We can't
(16:10):
quite see.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
What's going on, right, So when we're talking about the
work of the books, maybe it's time to talk about
what this actually looks like. So we've gestured to the
fact that we have to carve in relief. But there's
more to it than this. Because we have to carve
every letter, we have to carve them backwards. Tell us
a little bit about how this whole process works.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Picture each letter in the Gutenberg Bible. It's just a
few millimeters seven millimeters tall, so less than a fingernail
of space taken up by a letter, and they're about
twenty six hundred of them on every page. Well, those
all had to be there, present, locked up in order
backwards in Latin, so that they could be inked and
(16:51):
that would transfer forward reading black on white. So that
invention that movable piece of type is a little difficult
to know how he made it, but it ends up
as being a little maybe three quarters of an inch
tall shaft of metal square or rectangular, and on its face,
its upper face, is this letter coming out at you backwards.
(17:14):
So he's carved away at least one pattern of that
and cast that pattern hundreds of times. Let's just picture
your finger is some sort of piece of steel. It's
possible that he made a letter A and pointed is
you know, take your finger and pointed into the sand,
and you know, make the top and then the side,
(17:35):
and then the side and then the crossbar. That empty
A that you've just made in the sand can be
cast and you'll get hundreds of little brothers of that
letter A. We're not sure how he did it. Some
of the a's look like he did it multiple times
or anew every time. All I can say is he
ended up with hundreds of a's and they look pretty beautiful.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
And there are some problem with this at the beginning,
so it didn't come out perfectly right away. What were
some of the problems that they had, especially when they
were going from maybe casting in Latin or like printing
in Latin to printing in English. What are some of
the difficulties that you came across.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Oh, yeah, at the very beginning, you know, nobody had
seen this before, nobody knew what was going to work.
And you know, I think they imagined, oh, this will work,
let's try it, and every time they tried it, something
else went a little bit wrong. In Minz, Germany, in
the Gutenberg Museum is something that they found at the
very end of the eighteen hundred's a little scrap of
paper with just a few lines of an epic German
(18:37):
poem about the end of time. And it's printed by Gutenberg.
It's in these Gothic letters. It's from the town of Minz.
It's that old, and it's wobbly and uneven, and certain
letters don't print quite right. By wobbly, I mean they
don't rest on a single line and go left to
right nice and straight, and some letters don't fit together well.
(19:02):
And then in this book we call the Gutenberg Bible
from about fourteen fifty five, similar letters, a new font,
a little smaller, little neater. They're really fitting together. Well,
they're beautiful, they're evenly printed. So foosts, money and Gutenberg's
inventions seem to have come together to take this invention
that was kind of working good enough for German epic
(19:25):
end of Times poems, but now they wont the Latin Bible.
And this is what really is a beautiful work of art,
an unbelievable fifteenth century accomplishment. If you look at the
Gutenberg Bible, big lectern bible too big to have in
your lap, really fits better on a lectern, two columns
of just gorgeous printing, has even It's just unbelievably black
(19:50):
and clean and perfect.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
I think it's hard for people to picture this in
that when you look at an early printed Bible, for example,
gutenber Our Bible, it looks so much like a manuscript
that it may take some investigating to see is this
printed or is this just like fabulous cursive or fabulous handwriting,
in part because these early books were meant to be
(20:14):
illuminated in the same way, right, So can you tell
us a little bit about how that process went from
printing to the final product.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, Gutenberg's job was to get the words down on
the page by the hundreds, so that there would be
hundreds of these books after months or years of work,
as opposed to the one. And it looks like a
manuscript in that it behaves like a manuscript. The words
are in straight lines, the words are into columns. The
(20:43):
columns have even margins. There are spaces for larger initials.
If you're beginning the Book of Exodus, you want a
big H there. If you're beginning the Book of the Apocalypse,
I think you get a big A there. They've left
room for that, and that's where the illuminator will come
in later. Gutenberg just printed black, sometimes a few little
(21:05):
red lines for headings. But then he gave it up.
He printed the black, and all of the books would
go to their buyers and to their destinations. And those
folks were responsible for kind of finishing that Bible. We
don't do it like that anymore. They had to arrange
for an artisan or maybe a monk to paint in
(21:27):
that letter H or that letter A, those big initials,
and more often than not they do it beautifully and
with flowing floral tendrils, maybe some animals in the margins. Yeah,
so at first glance, it looks like a medieval illuminated manuscript.
But here the perfect rows of black letters are Gutenberg's
(21:48):
arrangement of movable type.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Which is interesting because it means that while every Gutenberg
Bible is the same sort of just about the same,
they're all actually different.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, it's what makes studying them. And I wrote a
different book about this several years ago. Gutenberg set up
the type, locked it in place, and so in theory,
every page is the same in every copy. They actually
once in a while would notice, you know, that spacing's
not right or that word is not right, and they'd
fix things here and there, and so there are occasional differences.
(22:26):
But yeah, the purpose is to make let's say, one
hundred and eighty copies. In theory, those are one hundred
and eighty identical copies. But then they go to all
these different buyers. He's in Germany, but doesn't he want
to send them all over Germany? Doesn't he want to
send them to Eastern Europe, or to Scandinavia, or to France,
or to England, or to Spain. And when they get there,
(22:49):
local people illuminate them or draw in all the headings.
The chapter numbers the initials, and you can go to
Lambeth Palace Inn then and see the Archbishop's copy and hey,
it looks English. That is English illumination in that one.
And you can go to any other copy. There's one
(23:09):
at here at Princeton. You say, hey, that's German. That's
from the town of Airport. We know that style. And
so yeah, each one becomes its own local, kind of
personalized Gutenberg Bible.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Which is incredible. And again I think something that maybe
people didn't realize maybe before this moment or maybe before
investigating it. So in the process of creating the Gutenberg Bible,
you have seen that there are like six teams at work.
And so when we're thinking about putting these these sheets
on a press, we've we've got a tray full of letters,
they're all backwards, we've inks them and then the press
(23:44):
comes down almost like a sort of wine press like
you'd see now. And in fact, they have one at
the University of Toronto, which is where I got my degree,
and we all we all had to stamp our own
before we could get our degree, which is really interesting.
So it's all there, we have six going at the
same time time and then This is something that just
sort of occurred to me as I was reading your book.
(24:06):
Within about five years there are printing presses all over
Minds and perhaps all over Germany. And I'm wondering. You
mentioned that Gutenberg is maybe well you sort of float
the idea that maybe he's a litigious bore. Do you
think if he was friendlier, maybe these presses wouldn't have
appeared all over Germany? What do you think?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. The spread of printing is interesting
other towns. I think he must have been cooperating somewhat
or else, these other two partners of his I don't
think people were sort of inventing it in parallel. Whoever
had worked in that first shop then could sort of
maybe take his earnings and save up find investors for
(24:47):
his own shop. And so at first, the spread of
printing is pretty slow. A few years go by before
we have two different presses, and a few more go
by before we have ten different presses here and there.
So yeah, they have to learn the and that uphill
challenge of having enough capital to get anything going the
press itself. It's another one of those things where I'm
(25:08):
going to say, we just don't know we don't have
one nowadays. We think we know what a fifteenth century
press looks like. It's sort of a wooden frame and
there's a corkscrew in it. You pull the bar and
that screw turns, and that sounds exciting, but what you
have to think about is, well, wait a minute. We
don't want anything to turn. We want something to come down.
And so somehow when that screw is turning, it's got
(25:31):
to be forced through and down. And then you don't
want the plate to turn on the paper because then
you'll get sort of concentric smears of ink. So the
downward motion has to straighten out and just make that
plate descend straight onto the paper so it engages the
ink on the type below. So i'd love to see
(25:51):
what that looked like exactly. There's one illustration from the
year fourteen ninety nine showing a printing press. It's incomplete
and kind of made up, and that's forty four years
too late anyway. But yeah, probably a modified wine press
and some system of making it flexible enough so that
they could do this two hundred times a day. And
(26:11):
then the other point you made was different teams working
at the same time. If the Bible had been printed
from the Book of Genesis the very beginning, in the beginning,
and then they went page by page every day. It
would have taken six seven hundred work days to do
every leaf. I think I have to double that because
(26:32):
every leaf has two pages, so a lot of days.
What it turns out is the way they use their paper,
which had water marks on it, we can sort of
see patterns in their work. It starts to look like
they had four teams at first, one starting at the
binion of volume one, one starting at the beginning of
volume two, another one starting halfway through volume one, and
(26:52):
another one starting halfway through volume two, and so kind of,
you know, four of them all at once started concurring currently,
and then as things got close to the end, they
added you know, yeah, maybe five six, so they're working concurrently,
and that sped things up, and so it didn't take
you know, six or eight years. I think it took more.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Like three, which is incredible because we're talking about something
like one hundred and fifty eight copies or something, which
is more than more than six teams of monks could
have done in that time.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, every day they had to make all of those
copies of page one, and then if those had come
out correctly, get copies of page two impressed beautifully on
the other side. And then every leaf is part of
a two leaf folded sheet, and so you might have
pages one and two. Then the way it folds into
the book, you might need pages nine and ten on
(27:45):
the rest of that sheet. You don't want to mess
those up when you get that far, and you know,
so it's sooner or later you need hundreds and hundreds
of copies of hundreds and hundreds of different sheets. And
that's kind of the genius of putting all this together well.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
And it's an incredible amount not only of effort of
human power that's happening, but also every time I think
about it, I think about how much real estate you
need as well, because if you're making sort of two
hundred copies of each sheet each day, it has to dry.
Even though this is specialized ink that again we think
maybe had some seat to do with Gutenberg himself, but
(28:19):
still like this is a place where you'd have to
have like two hundred sheets lying flat or hung up
on something like that is an incredible amount of real estate.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
I'm being a little nerdy. I was watching a basketball
game and thinking, I wonder if if they needed sort
of a basketball court to set up all the drying
area and supplies for these different presses. And there aren't
many medieval structures that are as big as a basketball arena, So.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, I mean it probably I would guess have to
hang from the ceiling, like laundry or something, hang on
ropes from the ceiling, ropes and wires. Yeah. Absolutely, So
we have this printing. It's happening on paper. Paper has
been in Europe for about one hundred years at this point,
but paper isn't the only thing that they print on
even at this moment, right right.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
It's interesting from the very beginnings of printing, Sung was
on paper, good paper, not the sort of brittle, crumbly
stuff that we might have. This is really go to
the art store and buy some one hundred percent acid
free linen water color paper that's more like what they
were printing on, really good stuff, handmade. Most of it
(29:25):
came from Italy. The other material that they made sort
of a special issue of books like the Gutenberg Bible,
was parchment. The same word vellum animal skin, so they
were skinning young calves, eating the veal, using the animal
byproducts for various things, but keeping those hides and turning
(29:47):
one animal into maybe four leaves two sheets of parchment.
I guess you're getting eight pages out of one animal. Well,
if they made thirty or forty copies of a Bible,
you're getting into thousands of of young calves. So another
expense that Foos had to manage.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
But it really shows to me not only the expense
and the time and the effort and all of that stuff,
but the way in which people didn't immediately abandon the
old ways of producing books just to sort of like
jump straight into paper box.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I think that we get this impression that the way
people tell history is always quite cut and dry, right
where the printy rec appears and that's it. It's all
paper from there. But that's not actually how things happened, right.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
They valued the parchment because it's kind of beautiful material.
It's really good for painting. If you want of those illuminations,
you want to add gold, you probably want the parchment.
It works on paper, but it's just really lovely on
the parchment. And they believed somewhat correctly, that parchment would
last centuries longer than the paper. It's a little ironic
(30:52):
that all the paper copies of the forty eight that survive,
you know, I think thirty six of them are on
paper and twelve are on parchment, and that's probably the
original proportion of paper to parchment. So it's not like
anything has gone to waste or disappeared any faster than
the other. But they believed it was. It was more
permanent and more beautiful, and it was more expensive and
(31:12):
it was worth it.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
It seems to me is the type of thing where
nobody wants to jump on the new tech too fast
in case you end up looking like the new writch
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, nobody set up that does it. I'm a scribe.
I guess I'll go do something else with my life.
It actually gave scribes incredible amounts of work, so they
needed to pay somebody to put it in all these headings, initials,
chapter numbers, all kinds of things. Or these scribes who
knew how to write and to abbreviate and to organize
(31:45):
a page, they became printers. So, you know, the industry
goes on and then everything's not printed books. Scribes take
notes in court, they make manuscripts of kinds of books
that not everybody wants hundreds of copies of. So yeah,
writing stayed on in the fifteenth sixteenth. Nowadays people forget
(32:06):
how to or never learned how to do handwriting. But
not true. Back then it was parallel arts. The scribes
were fine. Printers were the ones who were taking the
risks and coming along a little slowly. There was no
overnight There was no overnight success.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yes, even if people were kind of excited about this
technology and talking about there's a buzz around it. So
what were some of the other things that people, well
that Gutenberg himself was printing early on, because the Bible
seems like it's kind of a given. That is the
book that everybody wants more copies of at this time,
But there are other things that he decides that he's
(32:41):
going to print. What are some of these things?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Yeah, it's interesting about the Bible. It's not like people
lacked Bibles, like, oh, I wish we had a Bible
around here, but they wanted this big, beautiful Bible and
that work that was a safe bet. Other books that
were printed were I think I mentioned school books, Latin
school book, all the schools associated with cathedrals would teach
(33:03):
Latin from one way in northern Europe, and that was
a book called the Donatus. This is an ancient Latin
author and it was a great thing to print up.
It just took like a day or a few days
because it's like twelve leears long, and everybody needed it,
so its a perennial best seller. As soon as another
(33:24):
schoolmaster needed more copies. Oh we can print that. Yeah,
that's no problem. So those were printed over and over.
There are many many editions of that. Funny thing is
none of them survive. They're just scraps. People cut up
the parchment for stuffing inside of other bindings. That's where
we find these things. They'll be kept. One of those
school books, think back, where is your third grade spelling
(33:45):
book right now? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I think it's recycled into a new third grade spelling book. Probably.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah, it's not in rare books at Princeton.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
No.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
No, these things were thrown away, so it's hard to
get a glimpse of them, but it occurs other things.
One of the great books that's also featured in the
biography is a dictionary, a Latin dictionary, and so yeah,
that's going to be a best seller. And it looks
like they printed that three times right there in the
fourteen sixties and seventies. So other books, Yeah, canon law,
(34:16):
which is, you know, papal decrees. The Book of Psalms
was different from the Bible. You just needed the Psalms
and they would recite them at different times with music.
That was an early printed book. And then some big
names come along, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Cicero, and the classics.
Virgil comes along. These are not books that Gutenberger himself printed,
(34:38):
but those are the books that are in demand right
off the bat in the fifteenth century.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yes, and they also expanded to things that weren't just books, right,
I'm thinking of the massive prints of indulgences that they did.
So tell us a little bit about these indulgences, because
that is a great opportunity that I might not have
thought of. But wow, what a good money maker that was.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Yeah, we were talking abo pilgrimage earlier, and you know,
let's monetize Christian belief. At that time, the pope and
the bishops archbishops could decree that a particular indulgence would
be honored. An indulgence meant that you would get forgiveness
of sins for various periods of time for you and
(35:19):
your relatives living and deceased if you did an act
of piety, confess to your priest, and then made a
donation to a Christian cause, and you would get this certificate.
Sometimes people say, oh, they were selling indulgences. It's more
like they made indulgences available and you could make your
donation and get it. It was up to you what
(35:40):
you paid. Well, they needed these things in Mints. In
the fourteen fifties, an indulgence had been announced. It came
from Afar, and they learned that, oh, if you make
a donation that will support the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus
against the Turks, you'll get you know, spiritual benefits and
it'll help. So they needed thousands of these forms written up. Well,
(36:06):
Gutenberg was just beginning then, and somebody noticed, and somebody agreed,
this will work, and so we have about fifty of
these indulgence forms, just the size of I don't know,
and oversized, a little bigger than a postcard, not as
big as a sheet of paper. But a certificate, a
certificate for the figuriveness of sins. And what's fun about
(36:27):
them is they're printed with one of Gutenberg's recognizable fonts
and then a smaller type font for all the information
in it, and it leaves blanks. And there's one here
at Princeton. We know that a woman named Margaretta Kramer
made the donation and got disindulgence and it's filled out
and she did it on the twenty second day of
October in fourteen fifty four, and that's kind of nice.
(36:50):
That's the earliest date we have written on any kind
of European printing. So good for Margaretta. She did the
indulgence and it's served somewhere and chopped up in a
book binding, and it's made its way to Princeton, and
now we have sort of a birth certificate for the
existence of printing in Europe.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
It's incredible. And as much as we were talking about
scribes being fine with printing happening because they still have
a bunch of work, this is one instance where I
think the scribes are probably relieved because imagine writing out
the same form every day by hand that just spells
out the indulgence, but you could just print it with
blanks and then all the scribe has to do is
write in the person's name, get it sealed by the priest.
(37:33):
Bob's your uncle. That seems like a great idea.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, now a feeling some scribes were involved in putting
together and editing of these documents. They weren't totally out
of work.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
For sure. And one of the things I think is
interesting that I hadn't thought of. When I think of
early print, I'm thinking about sort of playbills and posters
and things like that, and this is something that Gutenberg
is doing really early as well. Right, things that go
on the wall.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Yeah, there are some. They're in Germans so that people
can you know, understand them locally. And sometimes they have
to do with medical advice. And you know, we have
we may have calendars or you know, reminders even up
in our houses or in our offices, and these would
be reminders of when the stars align with certain you know,
(38:19):
the position of the moon and whatever. Here's where you
have your physician take blood. So they're called blood letting calendars.
And this is Hey, it's the fifteenth century. You want
your doctor to take blood at the right time according
to the heavens.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, if you're going to go through the effort. You
want to see at the right time.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Yeah, So these these were produced in all seriousness to
assist people. Also, he made one little we call them
broad sides. They're printed on one side and you can
post it. One of them is just a sort of
memory aid for knowing the names of all the dates
of the calendar. They did things less like saying it's
(39:00):
the fourteenth of February. They would say, oh, it's Valentine's Day.
It didn't have to be a big holiday. They would
just know which saint it was. They wouldn't say March nineteenth,
they'd say, oh, it's Joseph's Day. So they needed a
way to memorize all that. He printed up a neat,
little rhyming German ditty that every word stood for the
(39:22):
I think they're three hundred and sixty five words in
the text, and they each add up, and so somehow
the word John falls on John's Day, and things like that.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Well, you think about the places where you see posters
on the wall that are supposed to teach you something.
You remind you something like everyone's seeing a poster in
the doctor's office, and everyone's seen a poster in a classroom.
These are good places to put them in. Again, it
shows sort of the innovation that you can have when
printing is suddenly available. Now. One thing that you mentioned
is that when we look at early printed books, many
(39:53):
of them do have wood cuts, and I'm thinking, especially
the sixteenth century, there's a lot of woodcuts. But Gutenberg
himself did really play with woodcuts. Why do you think
that is. Do you think that's philosophical or just too
much work?
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I think his mind was sort of on one or
two problems. Basically, how can we make the metal type
better than, or at least a more rapid reproduction than
manuscript writing or even carving woodblocks. I mean that is
another possibility, and so I think his mind was engaged
in technical problems. When this dictionary was printed, that introduced
(40:29):
a new technical problem. It appears that they actually went
back and said, you know, we're going to want to
reprint this dictionary. Can't be cast these letters and then
sort of freeze them in place, so we don't have
to sort of go back to the case and spell
everything backwards in Latin again next time. So he may
have invented some sort of cast strips for making that
(40:50):
whole text easier to set again where the words are
already in order. So I think he was into those
technical problems and doing what he could to get by.
He wasn't a big investor in his own sort of speculations.
If he decided I'm going to make money with a
woodcut illustrated book would have been a little bit outside
(41:10):
his well what little we know of his path, and
you know, handed to somebody else. You know, there's a
guy in another town named Bamberg and his name was Fister,
and he seems to be the first one to put
page with simple woodcut pictures that you can have somebody
color by hand to illustrate Bible stories or funny little
(41:32):
books about this and that. So illustrated cheap books. Oh,
I said cheap. Yeah, the Bible. I just wanted to say.
The Bible is not a cheap book. So these are
not you know, they're not quite making books for everyone.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Maybe some little pamphlets, maybe some little broadsides were affordable,
but the books they were printing were for institutions and noblemen.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yes, And I think this is something that we see
change over time, when when the market gets flooded with
mores and there is more competition and that kind of stuff.
But yet early on, I mean, you're certainly not going
to have to buy The Reformation by Luther's time in
the fifteen teens and twenties.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Yeah, then people, it's shifted a little bit, you know.
Oh yeah, I messed in this controversy. I'm going to
buy that little pamphlet that becomes more affordable m hm.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
And then in a century later you have people who
are getting sort of bootleg copies of Shakespeare's plays that
somebody's written down at the theater.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
So, yeah, the whole history of printing is just so
interesting and I love it. Of course, this is something
that I studied at university and can't get enough of.
But we do have to wrap up our time here.
So one of the things that you wrestle with in
the book is what is Gutenberg's place in the history
of printing. We have mythologized to him, He's got statues
and everything. What conclusions did you come to personally? Where
(42:49):
do you think he fits in the history of printing?
Where do you think he fits?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, I've been thinking about Gutenberg for a long time,
and I've I've read a lot of a lot of
facts a lot of arguments, a lot of you know,
interesting little things, but also a lot of fluff. And
some of us have kind of fallen over ourselves to
show how we understand his influence and how he set
everything in motion. And it sounds ever more smart and
(43:14):
clever the more things you can think of they're connected
all the way back to Gutenberg. Well, it gets a
little dicey, a little thin on the evidence. Sometimes. What
I think I've come out with is that here is
a guy who started something in the fourteen fifties and
died in fourteen sixty eight, and things really got going
and got enough different cities and got to big centers
(43:36):
like Venice, which actually had boats that they could send
books around the world on. That all started after he died. So,
like we just said, the woodcut illustrations, that was somebody
else in a different town. The rapid expansion of printing,
endless new printers in different towns he never visited, he
never met. So, yeah, he set a spark in motion.
(43:58):
That's incredible enough for one lifetime. He'll always be remembered.
It'll always be correct to say Gutenberg started things for
the European corner of the world and whatever Europe did
to the rest of the world with its books, and
you know, money in navies and who knows what that's
not all Gutenberg. But putting words on paper served for centuries.
(44:23):
We do it differently now. Not too many people are
setting type, pulling the crank and going copy by copy.
It's like photography. We don't take pictures now like they
used to in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah, I mean, I think that that is fair to say.
The technology made a huge difference, whether we're talking about
the technology of printing in Asia or the particular Gutenberg
press in Europe. The technology of printing just had just
an enormous impact, for better and for worse.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Yeah. So his impact was on Europe in the fifteenth century,
and I think history took it from there and has
made things very interesting.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
Yes, and here we are adding more to the conversation.
So thank you so much, Eric for coming on and
telling us all about Gutenberg. It's been a pleasure to
talk about this with you.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
I had fun as well. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
To find out more about Eric's work, you can visit
his faculty page at Princeton University. His new book is
Johannes Gutenberg a biography in books. Before we go, we're
gonna check in with Peter from medievalis dot net. In
a madhouse right now, Peter, what is going on in
the background of your house?
Speaker 3 (45:30):
Well, you know, we've got the three kittenss down here
with mom. Dad's also here, but he's doing nothing. But
the three kittens and mom are all like either in
super play mode or Mom is like disciplining them for
for I don't know what reason.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Either way, it's a little bit noisy in the background.
So if you're hearing some of the background, this is
because Peter has all of those beautiful kittens that you're
seeing on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Indeed, indeed, yeah, they're doing their good work a little
videos and stuff like that. They're being very good workers,
but right now they're not.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Right now, they're taking a break from their work as
medievalist done as interns. So you're back in your house
where it's madness with kat After last week we were
at the Canadian Society of Medievalists and Annual conference.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Yeah yeah. This was held in the Kitchener Saint Jerome's University,
which is part of the University of Waterloo, which is
mostly known for its tech Right but they have a
pretty good medieval a program there, headed up by Stephen Bergnardsky.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yes. I mean, if you're going to be medievalist visiting
the University of Waterloo, it's going to be at Saint Jerome's.
Of course, that just makes.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Sense, exactly exactly. And so there's a lot of papers
given my people associated with their Dragon Lab, a lot
of people from all across Canada giving papers, so a
lot of fun stuff. I one thing that impressed me
was a person looking at Toulouse and who was living
there being able to piece together the kind of property
arrangements so this half a block.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Mm hmm. We're gonna have to find the name of
that scholar because it is escaping me right now. That
was a really good paper. I also was really happy
to see my old mentor Joe and Find and she
gave a paper on giants, and then Jacqueline Murray gave
one that was really risque but's super important. I also
go out to meet Shannon McSheffrey and Donna Trabinsky and
(47:22):
Winston Black, friends of the podcast, who I'd never actually
met in real life, so that was really nice to
see the people in real life and share oxygen in
the same room because I had never actually met them.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Yeah with me, you know, it's been like many years
since I met them, Like I went to grad school
with Donna. So it's really kind of cool to see
them again. And they're all doing pretty.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Good, I think, yes, yes, I mean, if you love
their work, then keep following them on social media and
their work on academia dot edu or their faculty pages
because they continue to put out good work and just
genuinely nice people. So I was super happy to see them. Indeed, indeed,
what else have you got going on?
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, so it was some fun news over the last
week or so. One of the more interesting projects that's
out there is the Cambridge University's Medieval murder Maps, where
they look at cases from London and other English towns
and try to give us insights into you know, people
killing each other, right, and in this case, the research
tracking on new details about the case of John Ford,
(48:25):
a clergyman who was cut down near Set Paul's Cathedral
in thirteen thirty seven. Oh scandalous, it very much was,
because apparently it was all orchestrated by an aristocrat named
Ella Fitzpaine and five years earlier, she had to do
public penance for having an adultery with Afoorsa John. Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
Wow, the scandal gets deeper, spilling the.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Tea right indeed, indeed, and moreover, it seems that she
was leading a kind of a criminal gang which John
was a member of, because they were doing some you know,
some shape rating and the countryside and wow, and then
things I guess went problems. So five years later she
got some of her boys to track him down and
(49:09):
in public killing.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Wow, that's how you send a message in fourteenth century London.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
Indeed, indeed, and all I oh, yes, she got away
with it.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
She got away with it, and yet we know about
it today. It is the true crime that everyone is
looking for.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Yeah. I love this stuff. So, yeah, we have the
news about that. Plus we take a look at medieval
labyrinths in manuscripts.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
Nice. So when we're talking about labyrinths in manuscripts, what
does that look like?
Speaker 3 (49:36):
Yeah, So a couple of scholars did research and he
found about like ninety of them, all ranging from the
eighth century up to the fifteenth and they're all sorts
of things. They're usually kind of that circular, sometimes eleven levels.
If you can imagine it, but they are all there's
so many differences. There's rectangular ones, there's ones with like
odd shapes, there's ones that are just kind of like scribbles,
(49:57):
ones that are made up of words or musical notes.
So all sorts of fun kinds of stuff. So we
actually include on like a dozen images of them in
this piece for you to wander your way through into.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Right awesome, so people can actually see these for themselves.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
Yeah, and we've found all these little details that we
shared thanks to their research, so we've got that. Plus
we have piece on legendary blades of the Middle Ages
and English strategies during the Viking Wars.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Awesome. Well, that sounds like stuff to keep everyone's medieval
minds busy for the week. Thanks Peter for stopping by
and telling us what's on the website. Thanks thank you
to all of you who support my work by letting
me ads play through, sharing your favorite episodes, reading, borrowing
and lending my books, and becoming patrons on patreon dot com.
(50:48):
Patrens can access all sorts of great stuff like Medievalist
dot nets, book club, extensive list of open access articles,
and access to this podcast ad free to find out
more or to become a patron. Please visit patreon dot
com slash Medievalists for everything from printing to splinting. Followmidievalist
(51:08):
dot net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue sky
at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sibolski across social
media at five in Medievalist or five minute Medievalist, and
you can find my books at all your favorite bookstores.
Our music is Beyond the Warriors by Geefrog. Thanks for
(51:29):
listening and have yourself an awesome day
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
five of The Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sabelski, also known
as the five Minute Medievalist. As a historian, one of
the questions I'm asked pretty often is what was the
most important invention of the Middle Ages. There are a
lot of game changing inventions that shifted the trajectory of
(00:37):
the medieval world, and gunpowder is always one of the
front runners. But for my part, if I had to
pin it down to a single invention, I think the
one that really signals the end of the medieval world
as it had been is Gutenberg's printing press. Leg Gunpowder
printing itself long predates Johannes Gutenberg's lifetime in the fifteenth century,
(00:57):
but his particular machine managed to hit at just the
right time and place to turn printing in Europe into
a massive enterprise with consequences that touched the entire globe.
So who was this so called man of the Millennium
and how did he come up with this clever device?
This week I spoke with doctor Eric White about the
(01:17):
life and inventions of Johanna Schuttenberg. Eric is curator of
Rare Books at Princeton University Library and the author of
Exhibition Catalog scholore dozens of articles on early books, and
the award winning Editio Princeps, A History of the Gutenberg Bible.
His new book is Johann Schuttenberg, A Biography in Books.
(01:40):
Our conversation on Gutenberg's life, his early entrepreneurship, and the
invention that changed the world is coming up right after this. Well,
thank you Eric for joining me to talk about Gutenberg.
I think it's about time I talked about this printing
press on the show, because I think it's such an
important part of history, this idea of printing really starting
(02:03):
and exploding. So thank you so much for being here
to talk about Gutenberg.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Thanks for having me. I think it'll be fun and interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I always have a great time. Hopefully you'll have a
great time here too. So when we're talking about the
Gutenberg press that appears in the fifteenth century, give us
a little bit of an idea about what book production
is like at this moment in time before the famous
press appears.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, up till about fourteen fifty in Europe, if you
wanted a book, you would pay someone to gather up
sheets of parchment or paper and write that book out.
If they weren't the author of the book, they were
copying somebody else's book, and so you needed the example
(02:47):
to copy from, and you needed the materials, and after
weeks or months of work, you had a second copy
of that book. If you wanted to do it again,
it's weeks or months more. And this is the rate
at which books are made in medieval Europe. In Asia
there was already printing, but don't try to picture a
printing press. It was more like carving the text in
(03:11):
wooden blocks and rubbing the backs of the sheets of
paper onto those inked blocks and making books out of that.
Much more rapid production, greater numbers, but still a craft
that takes materials and a lot of work.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Absolutely. I don't know if kids are still doing that
these days, but we back in kindergarten or something carved
into a potato, right and put it in some ink
and stamped it. And this is kind of what we're
talking about when we're talking about early wood blocks, right.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, we're talking about that kind of relief. Raised surface.
Raised in relief is what we say, and raised surface
that catches the ink and transfers to the paper with
these Asian books. However, you're carving out Chinese characters, you
know what those look like. That is some real artisanship,
carving away everything you don't want to print.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yes, it's one of those jobs where I know I
would be absolutely hopeless at it. I mean, we can
talk to my parents about what my potato printing look like.
They could probably confirm that for you. So here we are.
We are in Germany in around fourteen fifty set the
stage for us here.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Right. We don't have records of their motivations or who
thought of what and exactly how it happened. But Johann Gutenberg,
who lives in Mentz, Germany on the Rhine, is encountering
people interested in putting money forward to something they're going
to call the work of the books. And it doesn't
(04:40):
say printing press, it doesn't say printing a Bible. Just
says paper, parchment, ink, wages for workers, and they call
it the work of the books. At the same time,
librarians know we have these very early printed Latin Bibles
that must be the first major thing printed, and those
(05:01):
two go together in time. And we've heard of the
Gutenberg Bible, but it doesn't have gutenberg name in it.
It's just something we have worked out must be that
work of the books, and it's a new system. It's
a new system. The invention seems to have been making
those relief surfaces, raised letters, but individually out of cast
(05:24):
metal that could be sorted into any sentence and locked
up and inked and printed. You know, picture printing the
first words of the Book of Genesis hundreds of times.
Now you have hundreds of copies of page one. If
you want a whole Bible, you'll need to go onto
page two and print hundreds of those on the other side.
It just goes on for years.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah. So I do want to get into the mechanics
of the press and all of that stuff in a moment.
But I need to ask you why did you feel
it was important to dig into Gutenberg's biography? Why do
we need to look at this What do you think
was important about sort of pulling it out of where
it was popular imagination and looking at it again. What
was important to you about that?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well? I have worked with books and in libraries my
adult life, and I see daily here at the university,
we teach with not only things that people need to read,
but we teach the history of things and how people
read them. And so I see these books in the classroom,
five hundred and fifty year old books sometimes, and they
(06:27):
do connect people see that. You know, when you have
the original book, it's not like you're trusting somebody to
describe it on the internet and you have no idea
whether that's right or not. You're seeing the real thing,
and so we all have an interest in the real thing,
seeing how it was done that long ago. And the
authenticity of seeing these beautiful fifteenth century books makes them
(06:51):
really fascinating objects for study. And yeah, just authentic. They've
made them, they survive, they haven't changed. It's a real
window into fifteenth century culture and it's something that has
lasted to our own time in a different way.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And it's always so cool to see these early printings.
And hopefully people will go and see them, because often
you can go to a library that has these very
old books, just ask and you can see them for yourself.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, at my library, I'm at Princeton University, and at
this library you don't need to be a Princeton student.
We have people coming in they've always wanted to see X,
Y and Z and we sign them in and you know,
fifteen minutes later they're looking at the thing. We watch them,
But no, we want people to see these things. We're
(07:40):
invested in access. We're invested in people seeing with their
own eyes, learning things, knowing the truth.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes, and there's a tactile sense and a smell and
all of these things that you can't get through the internet.
So when it comes to Gutenberg himself, he is hugely mythologized.
Tell us a little bit about the man and what
we know about the man, because it's still sketchy, as
so many medieval figures are.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, let me back up a little bit and think
of you know, when I came to this project, I
knew a lot about Gutenberg. But then I started asking myself,
how do I know it? What do I know? People say,
so doesn't count things? So what do we know about Gutenberg?
He lived in the fifteenth century, He was able to
get people to invest in what he was doing. He
(08:29):
was able to invest people in his projects, even if
they were a little secretive. And so that's something that
says something about his personality. Because we have no remembrances
of him, no descriptions of him. But We can see
people gathering around him on various projects even before he
was a printer, willing to take a chance on what
(08:49):
he was doing and wanting in. He wasn't a goldsmith.
He's often called a goldsmith, but he was doing things
with metals and heat and casting that made the goldsmiths
want to keep an eye on him, that's for sure.
And he must have been educated. He could figure out
complex ways of organizing labor, the proportions of things. I
(09:14):
think he had to know some Latin to do all this.
An interesting figure. We don't have the facts about him,
but we can kind of read in from what he
accomplished well.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
And one of the places where you start to see
him first appear that you pulled out in the book
is he's already an entrepreneur. He's trying to make money
off of the pilgrim trade. So tell us about this
early experiment with entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, medieval Christians in Europe had various ways to gain salvation.
You know, there was prayer, there was another activity called pilgrimage,
and you could be promised spiritual benefits by going on
a pilgrimage. You may have heard of the Canterbury tales.
That's pilgrims going to Canterbury. Other pilgrims we'd go to
(09:56):
a town in Germany named Achen, and at they would
show relics of the Virgin Mary and things like that,
and you would get basically, you know, spiritual points. It
helped you in life and in the afterlife. Pilgrims, they're
just grew up a tradition around this, pilgrims to Achen
(10:16):
every few years. When they showed the miraculous relics of
the saints, those pilgrims wanted to have a mirror with them,
a little portable mirror so they could hold it up
and catch the rays, so to speak, catch the light
from the holy relics, and then take that home with them.
And that was the rage. They wanted to have these
mirrors so they could take a sort of spiritual souvenir home.
(10:39):
What we have is a document, several documents, where Gutenberg
and again some investors are working on a secret project
to get the mirrors ready for the pilgrims that are
going to Achen in the next big pilgrimage. And so
he's manufacturing something. We don't know what it looks like,
but some sort of mirror that convinced people it was
catching these holy rays.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Well, this is an incredible will document or a series
of documents, because it implies that there is casting, probably
casting metal work involved, but also the polishing of stones.
That's pretty fascinating. How do you think these went together?
Do you have some speculation? I know that we had
just said before we turn on the microphones that this
is like the most wildly speculative part of your book.
(11:20):
What do you think is happening?
Speaker 2 (11:21):
You know, there are Pilgrims badges and some of them
have little mirrors attached to them, but we can't say
those are by Gutenberg. They're either earlier or later, or
not from the right town. So yeah, what was he doing?
The document again shows that he wasn't the craftsman who
was doing all this. He employed somebody to polish some gems.
And that's part of the way of you know, making
(11:42):
a reflective surface for a mirror. Whether he was stamping
metal or casting it hot, we don't know, but yeah,
he's he seems to be good at, you know, making
things out of metal. This is more than a decade
before the Bible comes out, So it's interesting that he's
into this kind of idea of mass producing things using
(12:03):
his skills with metal, employing people to do the work,
getting people to invest. Yeah, it's an interesting precursor.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yes, it's a collection, a collection of skills that are
going to come up later. And I think maybe this
is important to remind the listeners. If you have a
collection of skills and you don't know what they're for yet,
have some faith because maybe something great will come out
of it. So we're looking at maybe ten years later.
He starts to look for more investors and he finds
a partner. Can you tell us a little bit about
(12:31):
his early partner and what will become printing?
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah, if you're going to print books in quantity, you
need a lot of supplies, and so you know, not
only the startup costs of making huge alphabets of metal type,
hundreds of e's, hundreds of s's, hundreds of t's per page.
Then you say, oh, we're going to print you know,
(12:57):
hundreds of books, well, picture hundreds of books books. That's
a lot of blank paper that you've just imported from
over the Alps. If you want the good stuff, So
right away, before they've even sold copy number one, huge
expenses are mounting, so he needed to convince somebody that
his work would work. And so he probably had some
(13:20):
smaller things that he'd printed, little calendars, little school books,
little poster announcements of some Christian content, and they must
have said, oh, this does work, we can go bigger
with this. So his first partner is a man named
Johann Fust. Fust all we know about him is that
(13:40):
he was able to bring together large amounts of money,
like the costs of multiple houses before anything had been printed.
And he's the one that shows up in this document
that mentions the work of the books, and at first
it's loans, and then it's his own personal investments a
lot of money in the work of the books. What's
(14:03):
interesting is that the document itself is the closure of
this partnership. It's in November of fourteen fifty five, and
Johann Fust is kind of asking for Gutenberg to pay
back anything he didn't put into the project and the
interest on the loans and everything that was invested, and
Gutenberg saying, no, no, no, not so fast. Your investment
(14:24):
is your investment. It's not the same as a loan.
I don't owe that. So there's a little bit of
a wrangle there. Feust then shows up with another gentleman
named Peter Schiffer, and they put their names in books
that are printed after the Gutenberg Bible. So the second, third,
and fourth and fifth books printed in Europe are by
this guy Feust, not Gutenberg.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yes, and some people have made such a big deal
of this in the mythology of Gutenberg, like this is
a big rift and then they're not going to speak
to each other again, and this makes Gutenberg destitute and
he's desperate for work after this. What is the sense
of it you get from looking at the documents and
looking at all of the evidence that's available.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, that could be true. It could be that Fust
has come in and needs his money back, and then
the court in minds says, oh, yeah, you should ruin
this guy because you need your investment back. So it's
a partial document. It doesn't tell us what the judgment
of the court was, and so there's kind of a
(15:25):
myth grown up that yes, this was too much money
for Gutenberg to pay back. It ruined him, and Fust
then goes on and prints and Gutenberg doesn't. Well, we
have so little surrounding this document that that's kind of
hard for me to conclude. Maybe Foust is one of
two or three investors, and Fust wants some money back
(15:49):
and Gutenberg's got it. We don't know. We don't know.
Better to focus on what we do know. The document
tells us it's fourteen fifty five. They've got an expensive
work of the books in progress. Foosts next act is
to print very beautiful books in mints by fourteen fifty seven.
It's a window into the beginnings of printing. We can't
(16:10):
quite see.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
What's going on, right, So when we're talking about the
work of the books, maybe it's time to talk about
what this actually looks like. So we've gestured to the
fact that we have to carve in relief. But there's
more to it than this. Because we have to carve
every letter, we have to carve them backwards. Tell us
a little bit about how this whole process works.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Picture each letter in the Gutenberg Bible. It's just a
few millimeters seven millimeters tall, so less than a fingernail
of space taken up by a letter, and they're about
twenty six hundred of them on every page. Well, those
all had to be there, present, locked up in order
backwards in Latin, so that they could be inked and
(16:51):
that would transfer forward reading black on white. So that
invention that movable piece of type is a little difficult
to know how he made it, but it ends up
as being a little maybe three quarters of an inch
tall shaft of metal square or rectangular, and on its face,
its upper face, is this letter coming out at you backwards.
(17:14):
So he's carved away at least one pattern of that
and cast that pattern hundreds of times. Let's just picture
your finger is some sort of piece of steel. It's
possible that he made a letter A and pointed is
you know, take your finger and pointed into the sand,
and you know, make the top and then the side,
(17:35):
and then the side and then the crossbar. That empty
A that you've just made in the sand can be
cast and you'll get hundreds of little brothers of that
letter A. We're not sure how he did it. Some
of the a's look like he did it multiple times
or anew every time. All I can say is he
ended up with hundreds of a's and they look pretty beautiful.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
And there are some problem with this at the beginning,
so it didn't come out perfectly right away. What were
some of the problems that they had, especially when they
were going from maybe casting in Latin or like printing
in Latin to printing in English. What are some of
the difficulties that you came across.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Oh, yeah, at the very beginning, you know, nobody had
seen this before, nobody knew what was going to work.
And you know, I think they imagined, oh, this will work,
let's try it, and every time they tried it, something
else went a little bit wrong. In Minz, Germany, in
the Gutenberg Museum is something that they found at the
very end of the eighteen hundred's a little scrap of
paper with just a few lines of an epic German
(18:37):
poem about the end of time. And it's printed by Gutenberg.
It's in these Gothic letters. It's from the town of Minz.
It's that old, and it's wobbly and uneven, and certain
letters don't print quite right. By wobbly, I mean they
don't rest on a single line and go left to
right nice and straight, and some letters don't fit together well.
(19:02):
And then in this book we call the Gutenberg Bible
from about fourteen fifty five, similar letters, a new font,
a little smaller, little neater. They're really fitting together. Well,
they're beautiful, they're evenly printed. So foosts, money and Gutenberg's
inventions seem to have come together to take this invention
that was kind of working good enough for German epic
(19:25):
end of Times poems, but now they wont the Latin Bible.
And this is what really is a beautiful work of art,
an unbelievable fifteenth century accomplishment. If you look at the
Gutenberg Bible, big lectern bible too big to have in
your lap, really fits better on a lectern, two columns
of just gorgeous printing, has even It's just unbelievably black
(19:50):
and clean and perfect.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
I think it's hard for people to picture this in
that when you look at an early printed Bible, for example,
gutenber Our Bible, it looks so much like a manuscript
that it may take some investigating to see is this
printed or is this just like fabulous cursive or fabulous handwriting,
in part because these early books were meant to be
(20:14):
illuminated in the same way, right, So can you tell
us a little bit about how that process went from
printing to the final product.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, Gutenberg's job was to get the words down on
the page by the hundreds, so that there would be
hundreds of these books after months or years of work,
as opposed to the one. And it looks like a
manuscript in that it behaves like a manuscript. The words
are in straight lines, the words are into columns. The
(20:43):
columns have even margins. There are spaces for larger initials.
If you're beginning the Book of Exodus, you want a
big H there. If you're beginning the Book of the Apocalypse,
I think you get a big A there. They've left
room for that, and that's where the illuminator will come
in later. Gutenberg just printed black, sometimes a few little
(21:05):
red lines for headings. But then he gave it up.
He printed the black, and all of the books would
go to their buyers and to their destinations. And those
folks were responsible for kind of finishing that Bible. We
don't do it like that anymore. They had to arrange
for an artisan or maybe a monk to paint in
(21:27):
that letter H or that letter A, those big initials,
and more often than not they do it beautifully and
with flowing floral tendrils, maybe some animals in the margins. Yeah,
so at first glance, it looks like a medieval illuminated manuscript.
But here the perfect rows of black letters are Gutenberg's
(21:48):
arrangement of movable type.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Which is interesting because it means that while every Gutenberg
Bible is the same sort of just about the same,
they're all actually different.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, it's what makes studying them. And I wrote a
different book about this several years ago. Gutenberg set up
the type, locked it in place, and so in theory,
every page is the same in every copy. They actually
once in a while would notice, you know, that spacing's
not right or that word is not right, and they'd
fix things here and there, and so there are occasional differences.
(22:26):
But yeah, the purpose is to make let's say, one
hundred and eighty copies. In theory, those are one hundred
and eighty identical copies. But then they go to all
these different buyers. He's in Germany, but doesn't he want
to send them all over Germany? Doesn't he want to
send them to Eastern Europe, or to Scandinavia, or to France,
or to England, or to Spain. And when they get there,
(22:49):
local people illuminate them or draw in all the headings.
The chapter numbers the initials, and you can go to
Lambeth Palace Inn then and see the Archbishop's copy and hey,
it looks English. That is English illumination in that one.
And you can go to any other copy. There's one
(23:09):
at here at Princeton. You say, hey, that's German. That's
from the town of Airport. We know that style. And
so yeah, each one becomes its own local, kind of
personalized Gutenberg Bible.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Which is incredible. And again I think something that maybe
people didn't realize maybe before this moment or maybe before
investigating it. So in the process of creating the Gutenberg Bible,
you have seen that there are like six teams at work.
And so when we're thinking about putting these these sheets
on a press, we've we've got a tray full of letters,
they're all backwards, we've inks them and then the press
(23:44):
comes down almost like a sort of wine press like
you'd see now. And in fact, they have one at
the University of Toronto, which is where I got my degree,
and we all we all had to stamp our own
before we could get our degree, which is really interesting.
So it's all there, we have six going at the
same time time and then This is something that just
sort of occurred to me as I was reading your book.
(24:06):
Within about five years there are printing presses all over
Minds and perhaps all over Germany. And I'm wondering. You
mentioned that Gutenberg is maybe well you sort of float
the idea that maybe he's a litigious bore. Do you
think if he was friendlier, maybe these presses wouldn't have
appeared all over Germany? What do you think?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. The spread of printing is interesting
other towns. I think he must have been cooperating somewhat
or else, these other two partners of his I don't
think people were sort of inventing it in parallel. Whoever
had worked in that first shop then could sort of
maybe take his earnings and save up find investors for
(24:47):
his own shop. And so at first, the spread of
printing is pretty slow. A few years go by before
we have two different presses, and a few more go
by before we have ten different presses here and there.
So yeah, they have to learn the and that uphill
challenge of having enough capital to get anything going the
press itself. It's another one of those things where I'm
(25:08):
going to say, we just don't know we don't have
one nowadays. We think we know what a fifteenth century
press looks like. It's sort of a wooden frame and
there's a corkscrew in it. You pull the bar and
that screw turns, and that sounds exciting, but what you
have to think about is, well, wait a minute. We
don't want anything to turn. We want something to come down.
And so somehow when that screw is turning, it's got
(25:31):
to be forced through and down. And then you don't
want the plate to turn on the paper because then
you'll get sort of concentric smears of ink. So the
downward motion has to straighten out and just make that
plate descend straight onto the paper so it engages the
ink on the type below. So i'd love to see
(25:51):
what that looked like exactly. There's one illustration from the
year fourteen ninety nine showing a printing press. It's incomplete
and kind of made up, and that's forty four years
too late anyway. But yeah, probably a modified wine press
and some system of making it flexible enough so that
they could do this two hundred times a day. And
(26:11):
then the other point you made was different teams working
at the same time. If the Bible had been printed
from the Book of Genesis the very beginning, in the beginning,
and then they went page by page every day. It
would have taken six seven hundred work days to do
every leaf. I think I have to double that because
(26:32):
every leaf has two pages, so a lot of days.
What it turns out is the way they use their paper,
which had water marks on it, we can sort of
see patterns in their work. It starts to look like
they had four teams at first, one starting at the
binion of volume one, one starting at the beginning of
volume two, another one starting halfway through volume one, and
(26:52):
another one starting halfway through volume two, and so kind of,
you know, four of them all at once started concurring currently,
and then as things got close to the end, they
added you know, yeah, maybe five six, so they're working concurrently,
and that sped things up, and so it didn't take
you know, six or eight years. I think it took more.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Like three, which is incredible because we're talking about something
like one hundred and fifty eight copies or something, which
is more than more than six teams of monks could
have done in that time.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, every day they had to make all of those
copies of page one, and then if those had come
out correctly, get copies of page two impressed beautifully on
the other side. And then every leaf is part of
a two leaf folded sheet, and so you might have
pages one and two. Then the way it folds into
the book, you might need pages nine and ten on
(27:45):
the rest of that sheet. You don't want to mess
those up when you get that far, and you know,
so it's sooner or later you need hundreds and hundreds
of copies of hundreds and hundreds of different sheets. And
that's kind of the genius of putting all this together well.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
And it's an incredible amount not only of effort of
human power that's happening, but also every time I think
about it, I think about how much real estate you
need as well, because if you're making sort of two
hundred copies of each sheet each day, it has to dry.
Even though this is specialized ink that again we think
maybe had some seat to do with Gutenberg himself, but
(28:19):
still like this is a place where you'd have to
have like two hundred sheets lying flat or hung up
on something like that is an incredible amount of real estate.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
I'm being a little nerdy. I was watching a basketball
game and thinking, I wonder if if they needed sort
of a basketball court to set up all the drying
area and supplies for these different presses. And there aren't
many medieval structures that are as big as a basketball arena, So.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, I mean it probably I would guess have to
hang from the ceiling, like laundry or something, hang on
ropes from the ceiling, ropes and wires. Yeah. Absolutely, So
we have this printing. It's happening on paper. Paper has
been in Europe for about one hundred years at this point,
but paper isn't the only thing that they print on
even at this moment, right right.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
It's interesting from the very beginnings of printing, Sung was
on paper, good paper, not the sort of brittle, crumbly
stuff that we might have. This is really go to
the art store and buy some one hundred percent acid
free linen water color paper that's more like what they
were printing on, really good stuff, handmade. Most of it
(29:25):
came from Italy. The other material that they made sort
of a special issue of books like the Gutenberg Bible,
was parchment. The same word vellum animal skin, so they
were skinning young calves, eating the veal, using the animal
byproducts for various things, but keeping those hides and turning
(29:47):
one animal into maybe four leaves two sheets of parchment.
I guess you're getting eight pages out of one animal. Well,
if they made thirty or forty copies of a Bible,
you're getting into thousands of of young calves. So another
expense that Foos had to manage.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
But it really shows to me not only the expense
and the time and the effort and all of that stuff,
but the way in which people didn't immediately abandon the
old ways of producing books just to sort of like
jump straight into paper box.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I think that we get this impression that the way
people tell history is always quite cut and dry, right
where the printy rec appears and that's it. It's all
paper from there. But that's not actually how things happened, right.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
They valued the parchment because it's kind of beautiful material.
It's really good for painting. If you want of those illuminations,
you want to add gold, you probably want the parchment.
It works on paper, but it's just really lovely on
the parchment. And they believed somewhat correctly, that parchment would
last centuries longer than the paper. It's a little ironic
(30:52):
that all the paper copies of the forty eight that survive,
you know, I think thirty six of them are on
paper and twelve are on parchment, and that's probably the
original proportion of paper to parchment. So it's not like
anything has gone to waste or disappeared any faster than
the other. But they believed it was. It was more
permanent and more beautiful, and it was more expensive and
(31:12):
it was worth it.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
It seems to me is the type of thing where
nobody wants to jump on the new tech too fast
in case you end up looking like the new writch
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, nobody set up that does it. I'm a scribe.
I guess I'll go do something else with my life.
It actually gave scribes incredible amounts of work, so they
needed to pay somebody to put it in all these headings, initials,
chapter numbers, all kinds of things. Or these scribes who
knew how to write and to abbreviate and to organize
(31:45):
a page, they became printers. So, you know, the industry
goes on and then everything's not printed books. Scribes take
notes in court, they make manuscripts of kinds of books
that not everybody wants hundreds of copies of. So yeah,
writing stayed on in the fifteenth sixteenth. Nowadays people forget
(32:06):
how to or never learned how to do handwriting. But
not true. Back then it was parallel arts. The scribes
were fine. Printers were the ones who were taking the
risks and coming along a little slowly. There was no
overnight There was no overnight success.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yes, even if people were kind of excited about this
technology and talking about there's a buzz around it. So
what were some of the other things that people, well
that Gutenberg himself was printing early on, because the Bible
seems like it's kind of a given. That is the
book that everybody wants more copies of at this time,
But there are other things that he decides that he's
(32:41):
going to print. What are some of these things?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Yeah, it's interesting about the Bible. It's not like people
lacked Bibles, like, oh, I wish we had a Bible
around here, but they wanted this big, beautiful Bible and
that work that was a safe bet. Other books that
were printed were I think I mentioned school books, Latin
school book, all the schools associated with cathedrals would teach
(33:03):
Latin from one way in northern Europe, and that was
a book called the Donatus. This is an ancient Latin
author and it was a great thing to print up.
It just took like a day or a few days
because it's like twelve leears long, and everybody needed it,
so its a perennial best seller. As soon as another
(33:24):
schoolmaster needed more copies. Oh we can print that. Yeah,
that's no problem. So those were printed over and over.
There are many many editions of that. Funny thing is
none of them survive. They're just scraps. People cut up
the parchment for stuffing inside of other bindings. That's where
we find these things. They'll be kept. One of those
school books, think back, where is your third grade spelling
(33:45):
book right now? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I think it's recycled into a new third grade spelling book. Probably.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah, it's not in rare books at Princeton.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
No.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
No, these things were thrown away, so it's hard to
get a glimpse of them, but it occurs other things.
One of the great books that's also featured in the
biography is a dictionary, a Latin dictionary, and so yeah,
that's going to be a best seller. And it looks
like they printed that three times right there in the
fourteen sixties and seventies. So other books, Yeah, canon law,
(34:16):
which is, you know, papal decrees. The Book of Psalms
was different from the Bible. You just needed the Psalms
and they would recite them at different times with music.
That was an early printed book. And then some big
names come along, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Cicero, and the classics.
Virgil comes along. These are not books that Gutenberger himself printed,
(34:38):
but those are the books that are in demand right
off the bat in the fifteenth century.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yes, and they also expanded to things that weren't just books, right,
I'm thinking of the massive prints of indulgences that they did.
So tell us a little bit about these indulgences, because
that is a great opportunity that I might not have
thought of. But wow, what a good money maker that was.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Yeah, we were talking abo pilgrimage earlier, and you know,
let's monetize Christian belief. At that time, the pope and
the bishops archbishops could decree that a particular indulgence would
be honored. An indulgence meant that you would get forgiveness
of sins for various periods of time for you and
(35:19):
your relatives living and deceased if you did an act
of piety, confess to your priest, and then made a
donation to a Christian cause, and you would get this certificate.
Sometimes people say, oh, they were selling indulgences. It's more
like they made indulgences available and you could make your
donation and get it. It was up to you what
(35:40):
you paid. Well, they needed these things in Mints. In
the fourteen fifties, an indulgence had been announced. It came
from Afar, and they learned that, oh, if you make
a donation that will support the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus
against the Turks, you'll get you know, spiritual benefits and
it'll help. So they needed thousands of these forms written up. Well,
(36:06):
Gutenberg was just beginning then, and somebody noticed, and somebody agreed,
this will work, and so we have about fifty of
these indulgence forms, just the size of I don't know,
and oversized, a little bigger than a postcard, not as
big as a sheet of paper. But a certificate, a
certificate for the figuriveness of sins. And what's fun about
(36:27):
them is they're printed with one of Gutenberg's recognizable fonts
and then a smaller type font for all the information
in it, and it leaves blanks. And there's one here
at Princeton. We know that a woman named Margaretta Kramer
made the donation and got disindulgence and it's filled out
and she did it on the twenty second day of
October in fourteen fifty four, and that's kind of nice.
(36:50):
That's the earliest date we have written on any kind
of European printing. So good for Margaretta. She did the
indulgence and it's served somewhere and chopped up in a
book binding, and it's made its way to Princeton, and
now we have sort of a birth certificate for the
existence of printing in Europe.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
It's incredible. And as much as we were talking about
scribes being fine with printing happening because they still have
a bunch of work, this is one instance where I
think the scribes are probably relieved because imagine writing out
the same form every day by hand that just spells
out the indulgence, but you could just print it with
blanks and then all the scribe has to do is
write in the person's name, get it sealed by the priest.
(37:33):
Bob's your uncle. That seems like a great idea.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, now a feeling some scribes were involved in putting
together and editing of these documents. They weren't totally out
of work.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
For sure. And one of the things I think is
interesting that I hadn't thought of. When I think of
early print, I'm thinking about sort of playbills and posters
and things like that, and this is something that Gutenberg
is doing really early as well. Right, things that go
on the wall.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Yeah, there are some. They're in Germans so that people
can you know, understand them locally. And sometimes they have
to do with medical advice. And you know, we have
we may have calendars or you know, reminders even up
in our houses or in our offices, and these would
be reminders of when the stars align with certain you know,
(38:19):
the position of the moon and whatever. Here's where you
have your physician take blood. So they're called blood letting calendars.
And this is Hey, it's the fifteenth century. You want
your doctor to take blood at the right time according
to the heavens.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, if you're going to go through the effort. You
want to see at the right time.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Yeah, So these these were produced in all seriousness to
assist people. Also, he made one little we call them
broad sides. They're printed on one side and you can
post it. One of them is just a sort of
memory aid for knowing the names of all the dates
of the calendar. They did things less like saying it's
(39:00):
the fourteenth of February. They would say, oh, it's Valentine's Day.
It didn't have to be a big holiday. They would
just know which saint it was. They wouldn't say March nineteenth,
they'd say, oh, it's Joseph's Day. So they needed a
way to memorize all that. He printed up a neat,
little rhyming German ditty that every word stood for the
(39:22):
I think they're three hundred and sixty five words in
the text, and they each add up, and so somehow
the word John falls on John's Day, and things like that.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Well, you think about the places where you see posters
on the wall that are supposed to teach you something.
You remind you something like everyone's seeing a poster in
the doctor's office, and everyone's seen a poster in a classroom.
These are good places to put them in. Again, it
shows sort of the innovation that you can have when
printing is suddenly available. Now. One thing that you mentioned
is that when we look at early printed books, many
(39:53):
of them do have wood cuts, and I'm thinking, especially
the sixteenth century, there's a lot of woodcuts. But Gutenberg
himself did really play with woodcuts. Why do you think
that is. Do you think that's philosophical or just too
much work?
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
I think his mind was sort of on one or
two problems. Basically, how can we make the metal type
better than, or at least a more rapid reproduction than
manuscript writing or even carving woodblocks. I mean that is
another possibility, and so I think his mind was engaged
in technical problems. When this dictionary was printed, that introduced
(40:29):
a new technical problem. It appears that they actually went
back and said, you know, we're going to want to
reprint this dictionary. Can't be cast these letters and then
sort of freeze them in place, so we don't have
to sort of go back to the case and spell
everything backwards in Latin again next time. So he may
have invented some sort of cast strips for making that
(40:50):
whole text easier to set again where the words are
already in order. So I think he was into those
technical problems and doing what he could to get by.
He wasn't a big investor in his own sort of speculations.
If he decided I'm going to make money with a
woodcut illustrated book would have been a little bit outside
(41:10):
his well what little we know of his path, and
you know, handed to somebody else. You know, there's a
guy in another town named Bamberg and his name was Fister,
and he seems to be the first one to put
page with simple woodcut pictures that you can have somebody
color by hand to illustrate Bible stories or funny little
(41:32):
books about this and that. So illustrated cheap books. Oh,
I said cheap. Yeah, the Bible. I just wanted to say.
The Bible is not a cheap book. So these are
not you know, they're not quite making books for everyone.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Maybe some little pamphlets, maybe some little broadsides were affordable,
but the books they were printing were for institutions and noblemen.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yes, And I think this is something that we see
change over time, when when the market gets flooded with
mores and there is more competition and that kind of stuff.
But yet early on, I mean, you're certainly not going
to have to buy The Reformation by Luther's time in
the fifteen teens and twenties.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Yeah, then people, it's shifted a little bit, you know.
Oh yeah, I messed in this controversy. I'm going to
buy that little pamphlet that becomes more affordable m hm.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
And then in a century later you have people who
are getting sort of bootleg copies of Shakespeare's plays that
somebody's written down at the theater.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
So, yeah, the whole history of printing is just so
interesting and I love it. Of course, this is something
that I studied at university and can't get enough of.
But we do have to wrap up our time here.
So one of the things that you wrestle with in
the book is what is Gutenberg's place in the history
of printing. We have mythologized to him, He's got statues
and everything. What conclusions did you come to personally? Where
(42:49):
do you think he fits in the history of printing?
Where do you think he fits?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, I've been thinking about Gutenberg for a long time,
and I've I've read a lot of a lot of
facts a lot of arguments, a lot of you know,
interesting little things, but also a lot of fluff. And
some of us have kind of fallen over ourselves to
show how we understand his influence and how he set
everything in motion. And it sounds ever more smart and
(43:14):
clever the more things you can think of they're connected
all the way back to Gutenberg. Well, it gets a
little dicey, a little thin on the evidence. Sometimes. What
I think I've come out with is that here is
a guy who started something in the fourteen fifties and
died in fourteen sixty eight, and things really got going
and got enough different cities and got to big centers
(43:36):
like Venice, which actually had boats that they could send
books around the world on. That all started after he died. So,
like we just said, the woodcut illustrations, that was somebody
else in a different town. The rapid expansion of printing,
endless new printers in different towns he never visited, he
never met. So, yeah, he set a spark in motion.
(43:58):
That's incredible enough for one lifetime. He'll always be remembered.
It'll always be correct to say Gutenberg started things for
the European corner of the world and whatever Europe did
to the rest of the world with its books, and
you know, money in navies and who knows what that's
not all Gutenberg. But putting words on paper served for centuries.
(44:23):
We do it differently now. Not too many people are
setting type, pulling the crank and going copy by copy.
It's like photography. We don't take pictures now like they
used to in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah, I mean, I think that that is fair to say.
The technology made a huge difference, whether we're talking about
the technology of printing in Asia or the particular Gutenberg
press in Europe. The technology of printing just had just
an enormous impact, for better and for worse.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Yeah. So his impact was on Europe in the fifteenth century,
and I think history took it from there and has
made things very interesting.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
Yes, and here we are adding more to the conversation.
So thank you so much, Eric for coming on and
telling us all about Gutenberg. It's been a pleasure to
talk about this with you.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
I had fun as well. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
To find out more about Eric's work, you can visit
his faculty page at Princeton University. His new book is
Johannes Gutenberg a biography in books. Before we go, we're
gonna check in with Peter from medievalis dot net. In
a madhouse right now, Peter, what is going on in
the background of your house?
Speaker 3 (45:30):
Well, you know, we've got the three kittenss down here
with mom. Dad's also here, but he's doing nothing. But
the three kittens and mom are all like either in
super play mode or Mom is like disciplining them for
for I don't know what reason.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Either way, it's a little bit noisy in the background.
So if you're hearing some of the background, this is
because Peter has all of those beautiful kittens that you're
seeing on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Indeed, indeed, yeah, they're doing their good work a little
videos and stuff like that. They're being very good workers,
but right now they're not.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Right now, they're taking a break from their work as
medievalist done as interns. So you're back in your house
where it's madness with kat After last week we were
at the Canadian Society of Medievalists and Annual conference.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Yeah yeah. This was held in the Kitchener Saint Jerome's University,
which is part of the University of Waterloo, which is
mostly known for its tech Right but they have a
pretty good medieval a program there, headed up by Stephen Bergnardsky.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yes. I mean, if you're going to be medievalist visiting
the University of Waterloo, it's going to be at Saint Jerome's.
Of course, that just makes.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Sense, exactly exactly. And so there's a lot of papers
given my people associated with their Dragon Lab, a lot
of people from all across Canada giving papers, so a
lot of fun stuff. I one thing that impressed me
was a person looking at Toulouse and who was living
there being able to piece together the kind of property
arrangements so this half a block.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Mm hmm. We're gonna have to find the name of
that scholar because it is escaping me right now. That
was a really good paper. I also was really happy
to see my old mentor Joe and Find and she
gave a paper on giants, and then Jacqueline Murray gave
one that was really risque but's super important. I also
go out to meet Shannon McSheffrey and Donna Trabinsky and
(47:22):
Winston Black, friends of the podcast, who I'd never actually
met in real life, so that was really nice to
see the people in real life and share oxygen in
the same room because I had never actually met them.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
Yeah with me, you know, it's been like many years
since I met them, Like I went to grad school
with Donna. So it's really kind of cool to see
them again. And they're all doing pretty.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Good, I think, yes, yes, I mean, if you love
their work, then keep following them on social media and
their work on academia dot edu or their faculty pages
because they continue to put out good work and just
genuinely nice people. So I was super happy to see them. Indeed, indeed,
what else have you got going on?
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Yeah, so it was some fun news over the last
week or so. One of the more interesting projects that's
out there is the Cambridge University's Medieval murder Maps, where
they look at cases from London and other English towns
and try to give us insights into you know, people
killing each other, right, and in this case, the research
tracking on new details about the case of John Ford,
(48:25):
a clergyman who was cut down near Set Paul's Cathedral
in thirteen thirty seven. Oh scandalous, it very much was,
because apparently it was all orchestrated by an aristocrat named
Ella Fitzpaine and five years earlier, she had to do
public penance for having an adultery with Afoorsa John. Hmmm.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
Wow, the scandal gets deeper, spilling the.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Tea right indeed, indeed, and moreover, it seems that she
was leading a kind of a criminal gang which John
was a member of, because they were doing some you know,
some shape rating and the countryside and wow, and then
things I guess went problems. So five years later she
got some of her boys to track him down and
(49:09):
in public killing.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Wow, that's how you send a message in fourteenth century London.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
Indeed, indeed, and all I oh, yes, she got away
with it.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
She got away with it, and yet we know about
it today. It is the true crime that everyone is
looking for.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Yeah. I love this stuff. So, yeah, we have the
news about that. Plus we take a look at medieval
labyrinths in manuscripts.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
Nice. So when we're talking about labyrinths in manuscripts, what
does that look like?
Speaker 3 (49:36):
Yeah, So a couple of scholars did research and he
found about like ninety of them, all ranging from the
eighth century up to the fifteenth and they're all sorts
of things. They're usually kind of that circular, sometimes eleven levels.
If you can imagine it, but they are all there's
so many differences. There's rectangular ones, there's ones with like
odd shapes, there's ones that are just kind of like scribbles,
(49:57):
ones that are made up of words or musical notes.
So all sorts of fun kinds of stuff. So we
actually include on like a dozen images of them in
this piece for you to wander your way through into.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Right awesome, so people can actually see these for themselves.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
Yeah, and we've found all these little details that we
shared thanks to their research, so we've got that. Plus
we have piece on legendary blades of the Middle Ages
and English strategies during the Viking Wars.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Awesome. Well, that sounds like stuff to keep everyone's medieval
minds busy for the week. Thanks Peter for stopping by
and telling us what's on the website. Thanks thank you
to all of you who support my work by letting
me ads play through, sharing your favorite episodes, reading, borrowing
and lending my books, and becoming patrons on patreon dot com.
(50:48):
Patrens can access all sorts of great stuff like Medievalist
dot nets, book club, extensive list of open access articles,
and access to this podcast ad free to find out
more or to become a patron. Please visit patreon dot
com slash Medievalists for everything from printing to splinting. Followmidievalist
(51:08):
dot net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue sky
at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sibolski across social
media at five in Medievalist or five minute Medievalist, and
you can find my books at all your favorite bookstores.
Our music is Beyond the Warriors by Geefrog. Thanks for
(51:29):
listening and have yourself an awesome day
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