Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book in the Age of Confessions, 1560-1630 by Ian Maclean (review)

The author has collected and edited his Lyell lectures with a lot of bravura, and has composed a work that ranges widely, covering an important part of the book trade on the continent roughly from the middle of the sixteenth till the middle of the seventeenth century. The book is very rich in information, in the text and notes, brought together in some cases from secondary literature not always easily found, but also in particular from documents in the Plantin Archives. It is an inspiring book and cannot but be a point of reference when dealing with the (learned) book during this period.

The first point to be considered is that it is of course not easy to determine what is a 'learned' book, and even less to measure it and to look at it apart from the 'rest' of production. What must be made clear in any case is that the printed book was first of all merchandise — a commodity. It was a product, and whatever the content was, this came after and was a function of the product. When it is stated that Plantin for instance accepted for publication only a small part of the texts that were offered to him, these were judgements made, as now, from a commercial point of view. It is clear from the very beginning that a lot of productions were misjudged and proved to be commercial failures. Knowledge ìs a commodity!

A commodity needs to be traded and commerce is at the heart of this book. Fairs were everywhere, from millennia past. In the east and the west they were a basic element for whatever trade. Merchant colonies, branches, factors, agents: all were long-established parts of trade. The west 'inherited' trade patterns that already existed in the east for centuries throughout the trade. In particular 'the Italians' with an intense trade with the Middle and Far East, particularly through Genoa and Venice, were privileged in this exchange of commercial and other knowledge. When the printed book appeared, the Frankfurt fairs had already been for some centuries a centre of the trade in northern Europe and they were naturally a centre for the book trade as well.

Unfortunately there are no reliable sources to know what books and how many were ever presented at the fairs. The earliest so called fair catalogues were produced by the Augsburg bookseller Georg Willer. These listed only the books Willer had bought at the fair or those with which he had made deals with other booksellers and offered for sale through his Augsburg shop or one of its branches. The books listed in his catalogues give only a very partial view of all that was presented and traded in Frankfurt. The later Catalogus universalis published by the city authorities did not list very much more. First of all it had to rely on what booksellers declared. One issue was censorship. The booksellers did not declare everything, whether to escape taxes or to avoid risky books being seized by the controlling city authorities. The city authorities did not list what they found unsuitable, mainly from a religious point of view. The final result was a selection of a selection.

There was barter at the fairs, as there was at other opportunities, but barter is not barter as it is frequently assumed. Barter, baratto in Italian, was no Tauschhandel. This was a commercial operation expressed in currency, but done with kind, com pletely, or partially — the remaining debt paid in cash. In German it is called (ver)stechen, as a noun Stich. This is clear from merchants' manuals, German as well as Italian. It is a more or less complicated mathematical operation where the commodity offered for Stich is evaluated higher than its cash value, on both sides, and then exchanged as a currency. For books, this is obviously seen as only...