Revolution and the Antiquarian Book: Reshaping the Past, 1780–1815 (review)

The Latin word ‘incunabula’ used to signify a type of book rather than to describe the infancy or cradle years of typography was an invention of the late eighteenth century. Earlier appearances such as in the title of Cornelius à Beughem’s Incunabula typographiae (Amsterdam, 1688) referred to the childhood of typography and not, as we would use the word today, to the books themselves printed before 1501. The modern understanding of the word apparently began in Germany and a French visitor in 1802 criticized the term as ‘the barbaric expression of these learned lands’. A reviewer of the catalogue of incunabula in the University Library of Ingolstadt (1787–89) chose to ‘applaud the work of the author without beginning with a long quarrel about the usage of the word incunabula for books which appeared in the childhood of printing, which of course is just as wrong as using cradles to mean children in a cradle’. Soon after, by 1815, the word was in common usage and had spread beyond the sphere of experts.

Kristian Jensen demonstrates that this is the period when incunabula were ‘invented’, and this was the focus of his Lyell Lectures in 2008, published now by Cambridge University Press. The title perhaps suggests a broader scope, but in fact this is a study of how specifically incunabula changed in status during a turbulent period of European political and intellectual history. Meticulously researched from a lengthy list of primary and secondary published sources, and making extensive use of archival collections that are a mine of new information (the Althorp/Spencer papers at the British Library, archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and papers at the Bodleian Library familiar to the author from his years working there) the story that unfolds is a fascinating one. It spans a remarkable period of European enlightenment and revolution during which ancient monastic libraries were destroyed and modern public and private collections were formed. It examines changing attitudes to the texts and the actual books themselves (the printing types, bindings, paper, etc.), and the closely observed details of the principal players (the librarians, private collectors, and antiquarian booksellers) are full of personality and human interest.

Consider, for example, the Abbé Jean-Joseph Rive (1730–92), the disagreeable and irascible librarian to the duc de La Vallière, and a collector in his own right (he owned a Gutenberg Bible, now in the New York Public Library). In 1789 he published La chasse aux bibliographes et antiquaires mal-advisés (Hunting Bibliographers and Misled Antiquaries), where, according to Dr Jensen, nearly all his examples of misleading dealers and hoodwinked collectors focus on incunabula. Rive ranted and railed against what he saw to be a new and misguided fashion of paying exorbitant sums and wasting luxury bindings on old but trivial books, which is to say the majority of incunabula. ‘The age of editions does not make them valuable. It is only bibliomaniacs and traders who are warmed by that notion’. Rive was of the school that valued early printed books not as objects worthy of study and attention in their own right but for their textual accuracy and legibility.

Attitudes, however, were changing and Dr Jensen describes the phenomenon both in detail and in its broader intellectual context: ‘I wish to explore how it came about that the men in high office deemed old printed books to be so important for public instruction and national glory [. . .]’. He discusses the work of the French philosophers Malesherbes, Condorcet, and others, who understood the power of the printing press and included discussions about its invention and the increase of literacy in their attempts to reach a better understanding of their own times. This was the intellectual environment that came to allow the staff of the Bibliothèque nationale to use state resources for collecting incunabula. He discusses the effects of continental monastic dissolution and the activities of...