Supporting Question 1

Featured Source

Source A: The British Library, website describing the printing press, diffusion of literature, and examples of early prints, “Treasures in Full: The Gutenberg Bible,” no date

Gutenberg’s Texts

Gutenberg’s invention made it possible to mass-produce books. He himself did not make money out of it, but his method had great commercial potential and it became the basis of the success of many later printers and publishers.

Technology is not enough for success however. A publisher needs to choose the right texts for his market. This was much more important for a printer than for the men and women who made a living from producing manuscripts. A printer had to sell many copies of the same work at the same time, and he had to sell them fast to recover a substantial investment.

Gutenberg and his team were aware of this problem: all copies of the Bible had been sold even before printing was completed.

In the 50 years after Gutenberg began printing, printed books spread along the trade routes of Western Europe. Books did not become cheap immediately after the appearance of Gutenberg’s printed works, but prices soon began to fall. By 1500 access to books had changed profoundly. This meant more access to information, more dissent, more informed discussion and more widespread criticism of authorities. Europe and the world beyond would have been a very different place without Gutenberg’s invention.

© The British Library Board. http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/gutenbergstexts.html.

1. The Bible

Gutenberg’s first and only large-scale printing enterprise was the Bible in Latin. This is not an obvious choice of text, for the Bible was not very central to the daily life of the Church in the 15th century.

Parts of the Bible would have been used in church every day, but not in the order in which they appear in the Bible. The texts of the Bible were reorganised in a Missal to suit the complicated order in which extracts were to be read. Missals were different from region to region, however. Perhaps Gutenberg realised that, in order for a large-scale printing project to be commercially successful, he had to aim at an international market. The Bible might sell fewer copies in each region, but it had the potential to sell all over Western Europe.

Gutenberg and his team also knew that they needed to market their new invention. In 1454 they showed their product to an international audience in Frankfurt, perhaps even before the project was completed. They must have been aware that a successful launch would be much easier if they began with a high-profile book of importance beyond their local area.

© The British Library Board. http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/bible.html.

2. Donatus’s Latin Grammar

In the 15th century, Latin was the language used by the educated and governing classes throughout Europe. The most widespread work used for teaching it, Ars minor (The Smaller Art [of Grammar]), was written in the 4th century by Aelius Donatus. He was the teacher of Jerome who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin.

Donatus’s Ars minor was one of the first items to be printed in Europe. There are many editions from the 15th century, but most survive only in fragments. Little books used by schoolboys, most have been worn to bits. Large and prestigious books such as the Bible have survived in much better condition, for they often ended up being owned by institutions with libraries where they were spared heavy use and they were protected from one generation to the next.

Quite a number of fragments survive of Donatus’s grammar printed with the same type as the Gutenberg Bible. The British Library has a copy of leaf 2 of one of these editions. It was previously dated around 1455, but the date now seems less certain, for it is of course possible that the type was used after the Bible was printed.

It is highly likely that some of the editions are earlier than the Gutenberg Bible, for it would have made sense to print a small schoolbook while preparing for a gigantic publication like the Bible. It would have brought in much needed ready cash.

© The British Library Board. http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/donatus.html.

3. Indulgences

Indulgences were awarded by the Catholic Church as a remission of sin, earned either by prayer or, especially in the later Middle Ages, through a donation of money.

A letter of indulgence took the form of ready-made receipts leaving an empty space for the name of the purchaser, who was meant to take it to a father confessor as proof of having obtained the right to the forgiveness of sins.

Nicholas V, from The Nuremberg Chronicle Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 12 July 1493. 

It now seems possible that Gutenberg printed indulgences as early as 1452, at the request of Nicolaus Cusanus, the prominent German cardinal—a very early connection between printing and the bureaucratic needs of the Church. But none of the indulgences which may have been printed in 1452 has survived.

On 12 April 1451, in order to assist the defence of Cyprus against a Turkish invasion, Pope Nicholas V granted to John II, King of Cyprus, the income raised from an indulgence. On 6 January 1452, John II appointed as his commissary Paulinus Zappe or Chappe, a Cypriot nobleman. The indulgence was valid between 1 May 1452 and 30 April 1455.

The British Library copy was sold at Neuss (near Düsseldorf) to Hinricus Mais, Pastor in Rosellen (near Neuss), his sister Greta Pinenkranss, and another of his female relatives, on 29 April 1455—the day before the permission to sell the indulgence expired.

It is printed on vellum, as are all surviving printed copies of the indulgence, and measures 157 x 235 mm. It was acquired by the Library in June 1845….

Sale of indulgences

For the printer, indulgences could have meant cash, paid for by the Church, much needed during or after a capital intensive venture. For the Church it meant a rationalisation of an otherwise labour-intensive bureaucratic procedure: thousands of identical letters of indulgence could be required at a single visit to a town. Compared with writing them out by hand, they could now be produced at much reduced cost. Printing provided an efficient solution to a bureaucratic problem.

We do not know how many copies of this indulgence were printed. By the end of the century, one indulgence was said to have been printed in as many as 142,950 copies.

The sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages was satirised by Chaucer in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, a pardoner being someone who sold indulgences.

© The British Library Board. http://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/indulgences.html.