Exploring the Print World of Early Modern Iberia

Abstract

Until very recently, scholars were confronted with a distorted picture of the book world of Renaissance Iberia. Forced to rely on incomplete and fragmented surveys of printing, there was no real basis from which to understand the nature of the Iberian experience or indeed how this contrasted with other European countries. The appearance in 2010 of Iberian Books sought to redress this problem. By knitting together library catalogues and existing bibliographies, scholars now have access to a single bibliography of books printed in Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Peru before 1601 or printed elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese. They can also access a global survey of surviving copies. This article discusses the rationale and methodology employed by the Iberian Book Project, as well as offering a frank assessment of its limitations. More significantly, however, it harnesses the underlying datasets of the project in an attempt to understand the broader geography of print in the Peninsula, surveying both its structure and the changing patterns of production from the age of incunabula up to the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Notes

¹Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1997), 190–91. This was first published as L'Apparition du livre (Paris: A. Michel, 1958).

²Antonio Joaquim Anselmo, Bibliografia das obras impressas em Portugal no século XVI (Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional, 1926).

³ A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland: And of English Books Published Abroad, 1475–1640, compiled by William Pollard and Gilbert Redgrave (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926). The second edition was begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson and completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, 2 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1986).

⁴The ground-breaking work of Cristóbal Pérez Pastor has not been given the full credit it deserves in the history of modern European bibliography. Pérez Pastor was one of the first scholars to take printing centres as a central unit of investigation, and in 1887—eight years before the first volume of H.-L. Baudrier and J. Baudrier, Bibliographie lyonnaise. Recherches sur les imprimeurs, libraires, relieurs et fondeurs de lettres de Lyon au XVI ^e siècle, 12 vols (Lyon: Louis Brun, 1895–1921)—he published his La imprenta en Toledo: descripción bibliográfica de las obras impresas en la imperial ciudad desde 1483 hasta nuestros días (Madrid: Manuel Tello, 1887). Between 1891 and 1907, Pérez Pastor produced a bibliography of printing in sixteenth-century Madrid, Bibliografía madrileña; ó, Descripción de las obras impresas en Madrid (Madrid: Tip. de los Huérfanos, 1891–1907); and, in 1895, completed his survey of the smaller printing centre of Medina del Campo, La imprenta en Medina del Campo (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1895). Pérez Pastor also harvested information from archival sources on books known to have been published but which no longer survive in the major research collections.

⁵These recent studies include Julián Martín Abad, La imprenta en Alcalá de Henares (1502–1600) (Madrid: Arco Libros, 1991) and Lorenzo Ruiz Fidalgo, La imprenta en Salamanca (1501–1600) (Madrid: Arco Libros, 1995).

⁶Further information on the UCD Iberian Book Project can be found at <http://www.ucd.ie/ibp>.

⁷Alexander S. Wilkinson, Iberian Books. Libros Ibéricos. Books Published in Spanish Or Portuguese Or on the Iberian Peninsula before 1601. Libros publicados en español o portugués (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

⁸ IB has been able to expand even excellent bibliographies by around one fifth. For instance, Lorenzo Ruiz Fidalgo's La imprenta en Salamanca lists 1,636 items in total (states and issues have been separated out for the purpose of this analysis). IB records over 2,160 items.

⁹Interestingly, around 25 per cent of items in IB cannot be found in any Spanish or Portuguese collection.

¹⁰More information on the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, can be found at <http://ww.ustc.ac.uk>.

¹¹It is estimated that the first iteration of Iberian Books Online in November 2011 will contain around 3,000 digital links from a variety of different sources. The most significant online portal for Spain's printed heritage is the Biblioteca Virtual de Miguel de Cervantes—an impressive project based at the University of Alicante. This weaves together many of the major university collections including those in Barcelona, Seville, Salamanca and the Complutense in Madrid.

¹²Pedro Mexía, Historia imperial y cesarea. IB 12982, 12987, 12989, 12994, 12995, 13006, 13009, 13016, 13017, 13022, 13031 and 13032.

¹³My thanks to Lynda Corey Claassen, Director, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California San Diego who checked this record. The other unique items in San Diego were consulted and found to be exactly as described.

¹⁴My thanks to Malcolm Stuart, Assistant Curator, Rare Book Collections, National Library of Scotland.

¹⁵A useful feature of the online version of IB and the other partners in the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project is that ghosts will be retained rather than simply removed in the online catalogue. Such records will be signalled clearly, and a reason for their identification as ghosts will be given. Retaining this information will prevent the reintroduction of erroneous data. It will be possible to undertake searches with or without these ghost entries.

¹⁶This line graph excludes 1,250 items belonging to the period, but which have no stated or inferred date.

¹⁷Carlos Romero de Lecea, ‘Raíces romanas de la imprenta hispana’, in Historia de la imprenta hispana, ed. Antonio Odriozola, Carlos Romero de Lecea, Guillermo S. Sosa, Agustín Millares Carlo & Joaquín Salcedo Izu (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1982).

¹⁸ Sinodal de Aguilafuente (Segovia: Johannes Parix, 1472), IB 5606.

¹⁹The first item to have been published in Portugal is uncertain—perhaps Certificado de indulgências de Inocêncio VIII (Lisboa, 1486–1493), broadsheet, IB 6031 or Pentateuco (Faro: Don Samuel Gacon, 1487), 2°, IB 1965.

²⁰See also Alexander S. Wilkinson, ‘The Printed Book in Spain and Portugal, 1500–1540’, in The Book in Transition: The Printed Book in the Post-Incunabula Age, ed. Graeme Kemp and Malcolm Walsby (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 78–96.

²¹This point was made by Clive Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville. The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1998), 56.

²²On the burning of Medina del Campo, see Pedro Mexía, Historia del Emperador Carlos V, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1975), 160–70. A new history of the fair is wanting. For the moment, see Cristóbal Espejo and J. Paz, Las antiguas ferias de Medina del Campo (Valladolid: Tipografía del Colegio de Santiago, 1912).

²³See Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, ‘Cities and the State in Spain’, in Theory and Society, 18:5 (1989), 721–31. For a helpful summary of the experience of Spain during the price revolution, see John Lynch, Spain 1516–1598: From Nation State to World Empire (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 174–84.

²⁴On printing in Seville in the first half of the century, see Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville.

²⁵Theodore S. Beardsley Jr, ‘Spanish Printers and the Classics: 1482–1599’, Hispanic Review, 47:1 (1979), 25–35 (p. 29).

²⁶88 per cent of vernacular production before 1601 was in Castilian, while 6 per cent was in Catalán and 6 per cent in Portuguese.

²⁷See Andrew Pettegree, ‘North and South: Cultural Transmission in the Sixteenth-Century Book World’, Figure 1, in this volume, 507–20 .

²⁸ The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, III, 1400–1557, ed. Lotte Helinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1999), 9.

²⁹There were 4,887 vernacular items published in Spain between 1501 and 1555 for a population of roughly 4.8 million. For Spain, this gives us a figure of 1,018 items per million of population. In France, there were 13,490 in French for a population of 16 million around 1550, which gives us a figure of 843 vernacular items per million of population.

³⁰James Casey, Early Modern Spain. A Social History (London: Routledge, 1999), 21. This revises down earlier figures for the population of Spain.

³¹32 pages=16 folios. 16/4 (quarto)=4 sheets.

³²Information on the productive capacity of the French presses comes from the underlying datasets of the French Vernacular Book Project. For the printed catalogue version, see Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby and Alexander Wilkinson, French Vernacular Books. Books Published in the French Language before 1601/Livres vernaculaires français. Livres imprimés en français avant 1601, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

³³Incredibly thought-provoking discussion on the broader issues raised by this assertion can be found in James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (New York: Random House, 2004). In contrast to the model presented here of the collective wisdom of producers to respond to the market needs, see Marinela García-Sempere and Alexander S Wilkinson, ‘Catalán and the Book Industry in the Crown of Aragón, 1475–1601’, in this volume, 557–74. This offers an intriguing case study of what could happen when there was a reliance on only a small number of publishers.

³⁴William A. Pettas, A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Bookstore: The Inventory of Juan de Junta (Darby: Diane Publishing Company, 1995).

³⁵For instance, see Patrick Collinson, ‘The Fog in the Channel Clears’, in The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain, ed. Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2010), in which he states that the English Short Title Catalogue actually impeded a full understanding of the English Reformation, ‘since it tended to divert attention away from the fact that the bulk of the books owned and read in England by the literate and learned […] had their origins in that supposedly alien continent [of Europe]’, (xxxv). On the cross-currents of communication, see also Pettegree, ‘North and South’, in this volume, 507–20.