The Crombergers of Seville: the history of a printing and merchant dynasty (review)

Reviews 147 this impressive piece of scholarship. Might she now turn her hand to the horrors of Alanus? I hope so. Valerie IJ. Flint Department of History University of Auckland Griffin, C, The Crombergers of Seville: the history of a printing and merchant dynasty, Oxford, Clarendon, 1988; pp. xix, 270; 20 microfiche; 5figures;4 tables; R.R.P. A U S $155.00. This book covers the rise and fall in the Seville of 1504-1560 of a printing house founded, like so many in the early stages of the great revolution in European book production, by a German immigrant. Unlike many others, however, this printer, not content with becoming an outstanding practitioner of his craft, branched out into publishing, book selling, property investments and ventures in trade and silver mining in the N e w World. Readers should not expect a sixteenth-century version ofBuddenbrooks. The founder of this house, Jacobo Cromberger, and his successors remain shadowy figures. There are no memoirs, diaries, or personal letters to illuminate them. What they did leave behind are masses of legal and business records that were lodged with the various notaries who obtained their custom. Fundamentally, the sourcesrisefrom the Crombergers' activities in earning a living; however, Dr. Griffin has used them in such a way as to enrich our understanding of many aspects of social, cultural and religious history, as well as business and economic history, and inter-relationships amongst them. This was a period of extraordinary change, in an extraordinary city, in an extraordinary country. In 1504 the Spanish Inquisition,firstestablished in Seville, was linked not only with the repression of heresy but also with the promotion of religious reform. In the 1520s the Crombergers were printing translations of Erasmus, who was favoured by Inquisitor General Manrique, as he had been years before by Cardinal Cisneros, also an Inquisitor General. That world was literally disapearing in flames by 1559. In 1504 it was not clear that the voyages of Columbus had led to all that much. The Spanish certainly had not reached Asia. However, well before 1560 the vast colonies in the Americas under the Crown of Castile had become the envy of Europe and Seville was the gateway to them all. In 1504 Queen Isabella died, the conquest of Granada only twelve years past, and the Union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon by no means certain to endure. In 1560 her great-grandson, Philip, was ruling a Monarqufa Catdlica that reached from Naples to Mexico City, where the first printing press in the N e w World had been set up by the Crombergers in 1539. Although the courtesy and helpfulness of the staff usually do much to ease the pain, Spanish archives are not the easiest of places in which to work. 148 Reviews Amongst the most dreaded are notarial archives. W e are especially indebted, then, to gallant researchers, such as Griffin, who have survived their labours in these mines and have brought back for us cargoes of the treasure they have extracted. Yet that is only part of his achievement. This is also a major work of bibliographical history. Three of the eight chapters deal with the Crombergers' books: tides, types, ornamental material, and so on. There is an index of editions and, finally, there are 1600 pages of bibliographical information on microfiches. The book is expensive but, in view of what it delivers, it is not exorbitant, and it will last. If ever there was a definitive work, this is it. G.B. Harrison Department of History University of Sydney Gurevich, A., Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. M . Bak and A. Hollingsworth, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1988; pp. xx, 275; R.R.P. A U S $99.00. This is an interesting, ambitious but, it seems to me, ultimately rather oldfashioned and unsuccessful book. There is plenty of interest excited by the author. In his useful introduction Peter Burke refers to Aron Gurevich, Professor at the Institute of General History, Academy of Science, Moscow as 'one of the most gifted historians at work in the U.S.S.R. and one of the most original medievalists anywhere in the world...