The Reformation and the Book (review)

The Reformation and the Book. Edited by Jean-François Gilmont. English edition and translation by Karin Maag. [St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate. 1998. Pp. xxii, 498. $127.95.)

This English-language edition of a landmark 1990 volume, published in French as La Réforme et le livre: L'Europe de l'imprimé (1517-v.1570) by Les Éditions du Cerf at Paris, is faithful to the content and scope of the original. No one can doubt the centrality of printing and books to the Reformation, especially in Germany; but despite the grand synthesis attempted by Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979), relatively little sustained work on the topic has been done to test the consensus "no book, no Reformation," a view that reaches back to Luther himself. Gilmont, prudently, did not himself undertake the task of verifying the hypothesis on a grand scale, but a decade ago, drew together many of the foremost authorities on books, printing, and the Protestant Reformation to study the issue in as many regions and cultural areas as possible. Gilmont contributed an introduction and an intriguing but short piece on three border cities, Antwerp, Strasbourg, and Basel, places of exchange through which much of the book-trade passed and where printers and book-sellers had access to more than one market, which seems to have been an important factor in the spread of ideas that otherwise might have faced more serious obstacles.

The heart of the volume is the extensive and richly detailed essay on the book in Reformation Germany by John L. Flood, which runs to over eighty pages and is a small monograph in itself. Not only does Prof. Flood detail the central place of printing and of books in the German Reformation, he provides a useful analytic survey of the Reformation itself and engages critically with the more whiggish exponents of this topic, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein. Other highlights include Francis Higman's essay on books in the French-speaking regions (1520-1562), tracking both religious and broader cultural phenomena; Peter Bietenholz's erudite contribution on printing and the Basel Reformation (1517-1565), and a detailed chapter on the book and the Reformation in Italy by Ugo Rozzo and Silvana Seidel Menchi. This latter piece works against the grain of much Italian scholarship to produce a picture of reforming printing and publishing in Italy that will surprise non-specialists by the vigor and variety of book-related activity. The authors are all well-reputed scholars and acknowledged experts in their fields, though by no means obligated to the views of previous generations of scholars.

Other essays on the main geographical areas of Europe (including England) and on central and northern European areas (including Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms) provide exemplary coverage and scope. Nowhere is an author content to list the production of printing-houses or to print title catalogues; all the articles are informed by critical engagement with the scholarly literature. The framing of the volume by cultural/linguistic/national boundaries means that there is a good deal of overlap, and there is little sense of the pan-European impact of the work of an Erasmus, say, or a Luther, but there is so much local detail, nuance, and information in this volume that the absence of certain synthetic elements is hardly a serious flaw. Each chapter ends with an extensive bibliography, usually updated for the 1998 English version. Both the original editor, Jean-François Gilmont, and the editor/translator of this volume, Karin Maag, deserve to be congratulated for their work in producing this coherent mosaic of interlocking pieces and for bringing it to an undergraduate and generalist audience in English.

Andrew Colin Gow
University of Alberta

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