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Chapter 6 Publishing Before Print (1) A Series of Publishing Moments In January 1417 at the Council of Constance, Gerson preached a sermon in which he mentioned a ‘‘recently composed’’ tract that would soon be published.1 He was referring to one of the most important statements of conciliar theory ever produced, On Ecclesiastical Power and the Origin of Laws, which appeared the following month, on 6 February (the date that appears in most manuscripts). But two Munich copies give an earlier date of completion, thus proving Gerson correct: he had composed it recently, on 7 October 1416.2 The delay in publication is puzzling, though. What was he waiting for? Piecing together the evidence, I arrive at the following reconstruction of events. The manuscripts that give the later date of completion, 6 February , also specify that the work was ‘‘pronounced’’ (pronuntiatus) at Constance.3 To ‘‘pronounce’’ a work was to have a completed work—not merely one in the author’s mind—read to listeners for dictation, a technique that both Gerson and Pierre d’Ailly used several times at the council .4 Originally a technique of the schools, the pronunciatio was soon being used in various contexts to achieve a broader distribution.5 Those attending the event, it seems, did not just listen but wrote the text down.6 (Years earlier, Jan Hus had used the same technique to reproduce multiple copies of On the Church; Jean Petit had done the same for his Justification. Gerson knew of the latter case, and even claimed that copies of the Justification were then offered for public sale.)7 On 1 October 1416, just as Gerson was completing his tract, D’Ailly arranged to have his own tract On Ecclesiastical Power pronounced, followed a few weeks later by another tract, On the Reformation of the Church in the Council of Constance, which took weeks to finish pronouncing.8 With the procedure to remove Pope Benedict XIII from office dragging on (he was formally deposed in July 1417), it appears that Gerson waited for the best opportunity to deliver the text to the widest possible audience. In the case of On Ecclesiastical Power, the strategy worked: the text survives today in about eighty copies.9 A Series of Publishing Moments 153 This curious example brings into focus a topic that is fundamental to any discussion of medieval authorship: the complex material support system necessary to the production of every text before print. Gerson wrote On Ecclesiastical Power in October 1416 and gave it limited release, but waited for just the right moment four months later to broadcast it. He must have advertised the moment of formal publication, the ‘‘pronunciation ’’ that occurred at some designated place (perhaps the Dominican convent nearby, where he had pronounced an earlier work). Or how else would anyone know to show up? The final chapters turn the investigation of authorship in a new direction , to the material realm of the publishing and circulation of texts. We tend to think of publishing as a single moment and to associate it with financial risk because of the investment that it requires.10 But publishing before print meant something very different: less drama, more complexity and variety, and a much longer time scale. Medievalists have been slow to tackle this topic directly, perhaps out of fear that by applying the category of publication to the world before print, they risk anachronism, or perhaps because of the topic’s complexity and the scale of evidence that resists a single, workable model. As recently as 1979 it had still received so little attention (one short article from 1913) that Elizabeth Eisenstein even cast doubt on whether one could speak of publishing before print in a meaningful and consistent way.11 More recently, from the perspective of New Philology (a more historicist approach to textual criticism, growing out of scholarship in Old French literature), Stephen Nichols frowned on the term publication applied to medieval texts because of its ‘‘strongly marked semantic associations with the lexicon of printing.’’12 Yet no less than modern writers, ancient and medieval authors published their texts, both orally and in writing. They had a vocabulary for doing so.13 Gerson frequently speaks of texts being ‘‘composed’’ (editus) and ‘‘presented to the public’’ (prodire in publicum), and of publication itself (publicatio) in the sense of spreading abroad.14 The January sermon cited above distinguishes clearly between the writing of a text and the act of presenting it to the public...

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