>>Kerry Magruder: Thank you for joining me
in the special collections of the University
of Oklahoma Libraries. Let's see a few treasures
from the vault that will throw light on science
and the printing revolution.
A small but beautiful manuscript in the Bizzell
Bible Collection is this book of hours, produced
in manuscript about 600 years ago on vellum.
The colors remain brilliant and beautiful.
Accompanying text is handwritten in an exact
and legible style. This devotional work was
published in northern France perhaps a generation
before Gutenberg. Gutenberg printed the Bible
with movable type in 1454, and what we now
call the printing revolution changed the world.
OU does not have an original Gutenberg Bible;
this is rather an exact facsimile copy of
one of the surviving Gutenberg Bibles. It
was created by hand in 1913, so it is a valuable
book in its own right. This huge, heavy folio
volume is only half of it, there are actually
two volumes. It's opened to the first page
of Genesis. The text is laid out in two columns,
printed in a Gothic font. Early printers needed
metallurgists to shrink the typeface to reduce
the size and overall cost of books. After
printing the text with movable type, copies
were hand-colored or illuminated. One this
first page of Genesis, six scenes along the
left-hand side depict the Earth during the
six days of creation. By the sixth day, land
animals were created and the illumination
explodes into a riot of life, from Adam and
Eve on the left to the peacock on the right.
Gutenberg printed 180 copies, some on parchment
and most on paper. 48 copies are still extant.
50 years after Gutenberg, more than 10 million
books were in print. This is the earliest
Bible in the Bizzell Collection, printed by
Anthony Koberger in Nuremberg in 1479. It
is bound in discarded sheets of vellum, with
older music still legible. Like the Gutenberg,
the Koberger Bible is a huge and heavy folio.
It is not for taking with you under your arm,
or for holding in an easy chair. Yet by developing
a slightly smaller typeface, Koberger was
able to shrink it down to one large volume
instead of two.
The Koberger Vulgate is one of the earliest
Bibles to contain a woodcut, here hand-colored.
Koberger also printed The Nuremberg Chronicle,
one of the most lavishly illustrated books
of the 1400's, the first half-century of printing.
Erhard Ratdolt was another important early
German printer. He moved to Venice and set
up shop there. How important are geometrical
diagrams for works in the exact sciences?
Ratdolt used copper wire, molded into geometrical
shapes, to print the diagrams. This was much
more efficient than carving woodblocks! Ratdolt
also printed the Kalendarium of Regiomontanus.
This work is often regarded as the first book
with a special first page.
There is no title yet, but the date of 1476
appears.
A "calendar" was a series of astronomical
predictions. These tables, with their straight
rules, and combination of red and black ink,
are a spectacular example of the early printing
arts. Regiomontanus here predicted the positions
of the Sun and Moon, and the occurrences of
lunar and solar eclipses for 30 years. Circular
calculating devices are called "volvelles."
Here's a volvelle for calculating the position
of the Moon. The book itself has become a
scientific instrument. In this copy of Seneca,
we see an example of a printer's device. A
printer's device is the logo of the printer,
in this case Aldus Manutius in Venice. One
of the great achievements of the Aldine Press
was this 6-volume edition of the works of
Aristotle in Greek. The font is simply beautiful.
Early print shops were a remarkable cross
section of society. The household of Aldus
in Venice included over 30 skilled craftsman,
skilled in the variety of book arts, which
included font-design, type-casting, type-setting,
paper-making, printing, binding, illuminating,
and woodblock carving. Participants included
the master printer, artists, tradesmen and
tradeswomen, authors, multi-lingual scholars,
translators, copy editors, indexers, proofreaders,
suppliers, salesmen, investors, accountants,
and many others.
One of the effects of the printing revolution
was the widespread availability of images.
Printing catalyzed a spectacular transformation
in the use of visual representations across
all fields of knowledge. We can see this,
for example, in two works on mineralogy and
metallurgy. This is The Pirotechnia, by Biringuccio,
printed in 1540. It covers the arts of glassmaking,
smelting, assaying, and metallurgy. It must
be Gandalf's fireworks manual. This beautiful
work is Georg Agricola's De Re Metallica,
printed in 1556. Agricola described early
modern mining and metallurgy practices throughout
the German speaking areas of Europe. The remarkable
illustrations page after page make De Re Metallica
a paramount example of how abundant visual
representations transformed science and technology.
An English translation of Agricola was prepared
by a US President and his wife, Mr. and Mrs.
Herbert Hoover. This is an inscribed copy.
Another effect of the Printing Revolution
was the reconfiguration of disciplines, as
topics traditionally encountered within a
single discipline might migrate to new contexts,
and cross-pollinate new disciplines. For example,
this mathematical discussion of the optical
effects of the atmosphere, namely the formation
of a halo around the Moon, appears in Aristotle's
meteorology. This is one of the most interesting
uses of mathematics in all of Aristotle's
writings. Yet in this manuscript from the
16th century, we see two different transcriptions
of the same university lecture by Erasmus
Reinhold. The diagrams are nearly identical
to the discussion of halos in Aristotle's
Meteorology. The most significant change is
the setting: Reinhold was a well-known Wittenberg
astronomer, sympathetic to Copernicus. The
migration of this diagram from meteorology
to optics to astronomy illustrates both the
remarkable interdisciplinary character of
meteorology and the changing boundaries of
disciplines in the printing revolution, where
migrating topics reshuffled early modern disciplines
into new permutations.
The Printing Revolution also encouraged humanist
habits of scholarship, the comparison and
collation of texts. This is the Geneva Bible,
printed in English in 1560. The first thing
one notices about it is the small size: it
fits in your hand, it's lightweight, it's
portable. Second, it's written not in Latin,
but in the vernacular. It's both portable
and designed for the layman. The title page
indicates that it is translated not from Latin
but from the original languages, reflecting
up-to-date scholarship with, "most profitable
annotations upon all the hard places." Contrast
the readable typeface of the Geneva Bible
to the Gothic fonts of the other Bibles. Even
though it's smaller, it's clear, readable
type appealed to lay readers in contrast to
the hard-to-read Gothic font of other Bibles.
In contrast to large altar Bibles like Gutenberg's
or Koberger's, the small typeface made the
Bible portable and affordable. The Geneva
Bible was made not to sit on an altar, but
to be taken in hand and read, and carried
to church or to the pub. On this first page
of Genesis we can see introductory notes at
the top. The text is broken up by numbered
verses. These are the first verse divisions
to appear in an English Bible. The popularity
of the Geneva Bible made its divisions endure;
they're the ones used today. Marginal explanations
on all the hard places didn't hesitate to
promote the theology of the Protestant Reformation.
The verse divisions and cross-references encouraged
a profound change in the act of reading. Readers
began to pay less attention to a single unbroken
text, and to pay more emphasis on comparing
and contrasting diverse verses, moving back
and forth between different chapters and verses
at will. For all these reasons, the Geneva
Bible represents the subversive potential
of the printing revolution. It was the first
lay study Bible: written in the vernacular,
portable, affordable, designed for self-study.
It was the Bible of Shakespeare, of the Puritans,
of the settlers in the colonies of New England,
and of Scotland. Lay study of the Geneva Bible,
often in small groups at local pubs, helps
explain why English translations of the Bible
so vexed Henry VIII. The king lamented that
ordinary peasants, instead of accepting what
they were taught by bishops, now disputed,
rhymed, sang and jangled the scripture in
every alehouse and tavern across the land!
In contrast to the Geneva Bible of 1560, this
is the first edition of the King James Bible,
published in 1611. Immediately we notice that
we're back to an altar-sized Bible rather
than a hand-held one. When we open it up,
notice the return to a Gothic font, appropriate
for a Bible that was designed to be read by
bishops in the Church rather than by laity
in their homes or taverns.
The King James has the same verse divisions
as the popular Geneva Bible, and plenty of
cross-references, but no theological annotations.
James was Catholic and intended to replace
the subversive Geneva Bible with an English
translation that was cleaned up a bit, replacing
troublesome words such as "congregation" with
more traditional words like "church." Above
all, as a King of England with a thick Scottish
accent, James desired a translation with rhythm
and cadence that would sound beautiful when
read aloud on solemn occasions. This is another
vernacular Bible, Luther's German translation.
The story of the Bible and the printing revolution
is an instructive example for exploring how
a more widespread availability of texts shaped
society. In the 1520s, fully one-third of
all books printed in Germany were written
by Luther, in German. Across Europe, vernacular
publications energized emerging nationalist
and religious movements. The Protestant Reformation,
like the Scientific Revolution, would hardly
be conceivable apart from printing. Therefore,
many argue that the printing press then caused
greater cultural changes in Europe than the
computer has yet wrought in ours. Until we
see political transformation on a super continental
or global scale. While we have Luther's German
Bible before us, let's notice that this copy
was published in Germantown, Pennsylvania,
in 1743. The first Bible printed in the colonies
of North America in a European language was
this Bible in German, not English. Printing
required not only a market for books, but
the establishment of a colonial paper-making
industry. The publisher of this Bible, Christoph
Sauer, nearly went bankrupt from giving copies
away to poor families. He was saved by the
Continental Congress, which needed a printer.
Let's conclude our sampling of the Printing
Revolution with two examples of the book arts.
First, consider this Greek New Testament,
published in Oxford in 1763. If you look at
the text block from the side, all you see
is a gilded edge. But if you rotate, if you
roll the pages to one side, a fore-edge painting
of a street scene is revealed. Then you roll
the text block in the other direction to show
a second fore-edge painting! This one is a
river scene. These scenes are visible when
the book is open before you, one on either
side. Fore-edge paintings remind us that the
meaning of the book only appears to us while
we are reading; not when the book is unopened
or on the shelf. Second, consider this modern
edition of Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina. The case opens to show the size
of a miniature version published about a century
ago. This edition, printed just for fun in
1967, is smaller still. This little book will
fit in its entirety on the surface of a nickel.
In summary, there have been at least four
revolutions in written communication: the
invention of writing, the alphabet, printing,
and the Internet. One might wonder, which
communication revolution has had the greater
effect to date?
Science is a story. What stories do you want
to hear and tell about the printing revolution?
