Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance

Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance.

Andrew Pettegree’s book describes the development of printing in terms of the industry itself and the reading public. It is a masterful work and provides fascinating detail about a development that fundamentally altered the nature of European culture. Pettegree arranges his work into four sections, in roughly chronological order. The first section explores the nature of manuscript culture and the beginnings of print, from the development of Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press to the arguments for and against printed materials over manuscript during what is known as the “incunable” period, or the first fifty years of the printing press. It is the transition period from manuscript to print dominance. In the second section, Pettegree explores the role of the religious reform movements of the early sixteenth century in the developing print industry. The religious turmoil provided printers with work and an increased international demand for printed materials, but also was the source of potential pitfalls, thanks to the delicate political situation. The third and fourth sections focus on the expansion of print into other genres, such as popular literature and scientific treatises, and, consequently, backlash by authorities who banned books and prosecuted printers or authors who released work on forbidden subjects.

By explaining the nature of the book industry, Pettegree punctures the romanticized ideal of the scholarly publishers and the explosion of popularity for reading. In his portrayal of the book world during the early years of printing, it is clear that printers were victims of the developing capitalist system. He shows publishing to have been a difficult career path, both politically and financially. Thanks to the Reformation, in its varied forms throughout Europe, the demand for printed materials – from high quality vernacular Bibles to cheaply-made sermons – increased dramatically. Pettegree shows convincing evidence that the Reformation would not have taken the form it did without printing. Moreover, he reminds his readers that printers suffered bans and prosecutions just as much as the authors who wrote inflammatory works. The Vatican’s list of banned books has a category in which any materials printed by specific shops are to be forbidden. While this would be difficult to prove in the current day of digital text, laser printers, and so forth, it was true through the years of the typewriter that a document could be traced back to the specific machine that created it. This is especially important in the early years of printing, before the character stamps were made by machine. Chipped letters, offset lines, and other distinguishing marks were hard to disguise for these early printers.

The greatest flaw to the book is that it is clearly aimed to be more popular nonfiction than scholarly. As Caroline Duroselle-Melish writes in her review of the book, Pettegree makes some great claims and assertions without sufficient footnoting to back up those claims. She objects to some aspects of the organization, such as putting tables and some of the relevant notations in appendices rather than in the preface, but on this I disagree. While it would be useful to have some of that information up front, it seems like a minor quibble. A greater problem, in my opinion, is the sense of distance from the actual book as an object. Pettegree explains the mechanics of printing, creating paper, and so forth, but there continues to be a barrier between the reader and the items printed. While I have no suggestions to remedy this problem, it could perhaps be alleviated a little by the admittedly more expensive insertion of color images rather than black and white. At times, Pettegree shows images and explains the significance of having certain parts written in red or blue ink, but in a black and white photograph these distinctions are hard to make out. All in all, it is an excellent book and very interesting to read, as well as providing intriguing details to flesh out the development of European culture through the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, all of which were made possible by printing.