In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  The story of Servetus is particularly important in the history of publishing, because even in this extreme case in which all jurisdictions worked in unison, a startling thing occurred: three copies of this most reviled book survived and it would become clear (after some time, it has to be said) that printing had made the social mind almost indestructible. One surviving copy had belonged to Calvin himself, even though he had introduced a law imposing the death penalty for possession of the book. He clearly trusted himself with the toxic heresy, but could not choose the moment of his passing. Beyond the irony, what better demonstration could there be of the durability of the printed word. Writing had created a tangible but fragile part of the social mind; printing had removed that fragility. This was not the only innovation: the almost obsessive nature of the Calvin-Servetus rivalry must have been one of the first great literary feuds. Servetus’s erudition took him effortlessly to the top and, in spite of being a very young man from a modest background, he was invited to Charles V’s coronation as emperor in Bologna. Yet he was disgusted by the pomp and extravagance, and chose to turn his back on a promising career. Calvin, on the other hand, worked hard to make the right connections and initially appeared bent on a career within the Catholic Church in moderate reforming mode – an attempt to repeat Erasmus’ dazzling publishing success. His first book – a further absurdity in this bizarre tale – was a plea for tolerance; paid for from his own limited funds, the book was an utter failure. However, copies of Servetus’ first polemical tract jumped off the booksellers’ shelves, even though the names of the author and printer could not be acknowledged because of the inflammatory nature of the content. In the new universe of the printed word, it was no longer just important what you wrote; it mattered when you got it published. The pace of debate had quickened. Calvin eventually had the courage to make the leap over to the reformed religion and achieved his publishing success with Institutes of the Christian Religion, but we are left with this nagging doubt: had the public reacted more favourably to Calvin’s first work, would he have remained a Catholic?

  And this was not the only literary spat: at the other end of the literary scale and at about the time Calvin had Servetus burnt to death, two ex-Augustinian monks turned inveterate hacks were demonstrating how vicious rivalries could be in the first Grub Street. Ludovico Domenichi was a rather pedestrian writer of anti-classical texts and his friend Anton Francesco Doni a spirited, eclectic and actually very talented writer, if we take into account the straitened circumstances in which such men had to work. Doni explained that he worked in the printer’s workshop on four books at a time. When he had finished a page of one book he would hand it to the printers, and move on to the next book. Unsurprisingly his books did not stand out for the coherence of their structures. These were people who were barely making a living, not because their books weren’t selling in large numbers but rather because they were working at the bottom end of the market where the margins were small. Doni’s partnership with the printer Marcolini was particularly fruitful and his works were translated from Italian into other European vernaculars. Then Domenichi did the unforgivable: he plagiarised one of Doni’s short stories. It was not a great work of literature, but these were men who had to produce text every day and occasionally they just had to cheat. Copyright law did not exist, and in any case, that would not have been Doni’s style. He sent word to Piacenza, which Domenichi was about to visit, saying that a vicious heretic would soon arrive in the town. Domenichi was arrested and tortured, although fortunately he was released when the Inquisition eventually came to the conclusion that in this case their source had not been entirely reliable. The printing press turned up the volume, raised the stakes and, at the very least, changed the style of litigiousness.

  Printing created the “intellectual” in the more general sense, rather than the intellectual member of a court or religious or administrative hierarchy. This new figure was a person of any class who used the greater access to the social mind to expand the individual mind in a manner that was not previously possible. “Intellectual” is, of course, an elusive concept like so many others, but I take it to mean the holder of a bookish knowledge affected by a certain detachment from reality or even impracticality, arising from an emphasis on reason in a society in which reason is not the dominant force. Pure intellectuals rarely make good politicians, although there are some notable exceptions. Although seekers of “reason”, intellectuals are often extremely unreasonable in their professional and personal lives, as we have seen with Calvin and Servetus. Other famous spats included those between Hume and Rousseau, and between Hegel and Schopenhauer. Clearly intellectual pursuits were always attractive to human beings, but printing made this a real possibility not solely for an elite, but for great numbers of people from very different social backgrounds.

  During the first half-century after Gutenberg, this widening of the subject matter suitable for books was not dramatic, because printers were satisfying the centuries-old demand for bibles and classical works by a small group of exalted writers, particularly Cicero and Virgil. Before printing, books were in danger not only from invading armies and the flaming torches of the intolerant mob, but also from the natural deterioration of the various substances on which text was written, all of which were made of organic matter (with the exception of clay bisques for cuneiform script). The business of copying by hand was so laborious that society was put under a considerable strain just maintaining the core religious, legal and medical texts. Initially publishers had plenty of work just satisfying this ancient demand, but around 1500, it became clear that their unimaginable success had saturated the market. Over the next sixty years, all the genres we would now recognise were developed by resourceful printerpublishers (the distinction between these two categories had not yet occurred). Of course, they drew on medieval literature with variations of the chivalric romance, and on classical literature, with a plethora of Platonic dialogues. All the time there was a shift from Latin to the vernacular, and the new genres started in the vernacular. In the early sixteenth century, only very self-confident languages, such as Italian (more correctly called the Lingua Toscana), leapt into such established genres as history. In the 1520s, they started to publish collections of letters, which obviously used all manner of speech because they were not written for publication (Machiavelli, for instance, wrote to an aristocratic friend and mentioned for no particular reason that “I was sitting on the bog [cesso] when they brought me your letter”, which also says something about the familiar relationship between servants and masters at the time (it is unlikely today that an employee would hand his employer his mail while the latter was defecating, in spite of the enormous premium we put on an efficient use of time). Anti-classical satires enjoyed mimicking and ridiculing the great names of classical literature. The demotic was gradually making its way into literature. On a more practical level, publishers produced travel guides to help tourists and pilgrims, and collections of aphorisms on politics or literature taken from a wide range of writers so that the upwardly mobile could show off erudition they didn’t really have.

  Of course, contemporaries were well aware of the revolutionary nature of printing in the sixteenth century, and as with modern technology, feelings were mixed even amongst those who were most fascinated by this new reality. In the preface to his first book, the moderate Catholic reformist commentary on Seneca’s books on clemency, Calvin wrote, “Whoever in this day has been born with more than average ability … generally rushes out with it into the world, fired by the ambition of getting fame, so that posterity may venerate his memory with monuments to his genius … Hence the insane passion to write something.”15 Aristocrats naturally disliked their territory being invaded, and Calmeta, one of the more vocal detractors, regretted the inflationary effect that devalued the currency of literature – he was probably thinking of such plebeians as Doni, but possibly also minor and impoverished nobles such as Calvin:

  But in this present age, presumptuous ambitio
n reigns supreme because of the great availability of printers, so that, ignoring Horace’s admonishment that says et nonum prematur in annum,16 people get their works published as soon as they have finished them in order to claim a certain fame.17

  Doni himself had a better measure of what was happening, but then he was amongst those writers whose ambition was simply to make a meagre living:

  And […] this is a treadmill we are all happy to turn. Yet we paper-shitters [schacazza-carte] (who are obliged to do this) are driven by our madness to throw out something for the plebs to chew on every day. The truth is that there are those who prepare a better table, that is to say they provide a more tasty and nutritious food, and possibly more sticky and starchy too. But then this dining-table needs all qualities of meat in order to feed lords, gentlemen, women, workers, peasants and porters, because we are indebted to those who are knowledgeable and those who aren’t.18

  The greater availability of classical texts was to lead to their demise and a greater reliance on the observation of reality and the careful recording of its phenomena. If we take medical research as our example, we find that there was an increasing impatience with the works of Galen, previously considered the fountain of all reliable knowledge. Andreas Vesalius, the great Flemish anatomist who for a period taught at Padua University, would shout “leave your books!” (via dai libri) at his students. The more erratic and less successful German scholar Paracelsus would ritually burn copies of Galen and Avicenna. Printing was encouraging people to distrust established ideas and to observe from experience, often of course with the intention of writing down their own results. Indeed Vesalius was a prolific writer as well as an untiring researcher into the mechanics of the human body.

  Doni, forever playing around and recording the chatter of his times for us, took up Vesalius’ argument and, as ever, turned it into the absurd, “I have read that fire burns, but unless I touch it I will never know what fire is.”19 Indeed a jobbing literary buffoon like Doni left us with a great deal of technical information from the time. He wrote a popular handbook on music, which accounts for much of our knowledge of sixteenth-century music, and another one on painting and sculpture, about which he joked, “by my faith, I wouldn’t know how to make a drinking-trough for chicks with a chisel, nor could I draw the head of a cricket, and yet, thanks be to God, I jabbered on for I don’t know how many pages.”20 With Doni you also get the weariness of the professional writer: “I haven’t chewed on a piece of bread that wasn’t sweated out of my brain.” He loved to repeat that the fumes of the print-shop drove people mad with ambition. The first “mass medium” had arrived.

  The written word may have been devalued by printing, but it was more powerful, because it was everywhere. As power depends on linguistic relationships (as argued in Chapter One), a sudden change in how language was used was bound to affect the stability of power. That printing was going to change politics and social organisation forever had been made clear by the success of the Reformation, whose ideas were fairly timid and even slightly reactionary, unlike many of the short-lived attempts at religious revival in the Middle Ages or indeed the contemporary social unrest in Germany. In German-speaking areas, the “broadsheet” was a large single-sheet, polemical and masscirculation propaganda tool, and its effect was devastating. From now on there would be greater popular involvement in political conflict, and it seems reasonable to argue that printing contributed to the rise of nationalism because it both simplified the communication of ideas between different regions and coalesced peoples around a cultural standard (although this second factor remained fairly limited in its scope for three centuries). Because printing caused such a chaos of ideas, it was important for the authorities to control publishing, as we have seen in the case of Servetus. Of course, they were in part successful, although they often had to resort to draconian measures.

  As the printed word chipped away at the power structures and very slowly pushed the continent towards democracy, power discovered increasingly sophisticated methods for counteracting the seditious nature of the printed word that did not involve outright repression. Power had to fight fire with fire, and so it used its greater resources to dominate the printed word. As printing was a European invention and therefore at the heart of Christendom, the Bible played a significant role in the formation and survival of languages. Its translation was of course associated with Protestantism, although it was also translated in some Catholic countries, often by a protestant minority. Luther’s translation was the most significant, while the English Bible had less influence on the language than might have been expected. The sixteenth-century translations of Slovenian and Welsh Bibles at least partly explain their better performance compared with other languages and “dialects” in their regions. Many mistakenly believe that the demise of Scots was principally due to the Union of the Crowns and the Union of Parliaments. Although those events and others certainly made their contribution, it was John Knox’s decision to adopt the existing English translation rather than commission a Scots one that dealt the heaviest blow to the language that, with the steady contraction of Gaelic, was by then the most widely spoken in Scotland. Two centuries later, an English army officer visiting Edinburgh at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment noted that Hume, Smith and their set spoke and argued in Scots, and could communicate only in rather stilted English, the language of culture in which they expressed themselves on paper with some difficulty.21 Had there been an authoritative Bible in Scots, they would very probably have been writing in Scots.

  The standardising influence of the printed word also made its presence felt in early sixteenth-century secular literature. Italy was the country in which secular publishing was most developed, and within that world, Venice was the centre of this new industry. They had a problem, however. They needed a standard that would be acceptable to all literate Italians. Because of the widely acknowledged pre-eminence of Tuscan or, perhaps more specifically, Florentine literature, it was accepted the solution had to lie in that direction, but as language changes over time as well as geographically, this did not solve the problem. The Venetian cardinal, Pietro Bembo, who produced the industry standard, had to choose from three contenders: sixteenth-century Florentine (the language used by Machiavelli and Guicciardini), courtly Tuscan (the language used in the various courts of Italy, largely based on Tuscan/Florentine) or fourteenth-century, “classical” Florentine (the language of Boccaccio in prose and Petrarch in poetry). He chose this last “classical” version, probably because it had greater authority, and it was indeed remarkably successful in establishing itself in a short time as literary Italian and much later as the national language of Italy. Paradoxically, Florentine writers were the most dissenting group and continued to write in their own modern version, while writers outside Tuscany wrote in a Florentine that was no longer spoken. Ludovico Ariosto had already published two versions of his famous poem, Orlando furioso, when his third and final version came out in 1532, and this one fully conformed to Bembo’s dictates. The relationship he had with this new language must have been very similar to that of David Hume with standard English, but he lived in a more complex linguistic world. He was trilingual at the very least: he would have spoken an upper-class version of emiliano, Latin and a variant of Tuscan that acted as a lingua franca. He would also have had more than a nodding acquaintance with Venetian and some other European languages required for his diplomatic activities. The idea of the clearly defined national language was still far off, but printing had started pushing European societies in that direction.

  Printing was ultimately the cause of the increasing intolerance of the Modern Era. Historians currently perceive medieval men and women as fundamentally different from ourselves. Of course, they were different and also very different amongst themselves. However, it is wrong, I think, to consider them to be universally orthodox in their religious and philosophical views. In many ways, the Middle Ages were quite liberal: Augustinian and Thomist views, which would be claimed b
y Protestants and Catholics respectively, co-existed in the medieval Church after Aquinas. More importantly, there is evidence of widespread heretical views and atheism, which were occasionally repressed with great ferocity, although there was usually another good political reason for doing so. Dante put a cardinal in hell for famously believing in the mortality of the soul: this does not appear to have interfered with the cleric’s career in the Church. Popular writers of the first half of the sixteenth century spoke of people who “did not believe in anything above the rooftops”. The expression was recorded by printing, but there is no reason to believe that such expressions did not predate Gutenberg. Printing now covered a much wider range of language than before, but the spoken language was still immeasurably richer in dialects, registers and surely matters suitable for discussion.

  Thus printing introduced us to a new world that was decidedly more dogmatic (previously people had been willing to murder each other on a grand scale out of loyalties to a network ultimately based on the family unit and vassalage, now they were also willing to do this out of loyalties to rigid and abstract ideas), less reverential (the written word lost its mystery and so did the power of the literate), more knowledgeable (the social mind continued to expand exponentially and no one could hold it back through acts of destruction), more conflictual (social movements could spread their ideas more easily), and above all more wordy. A historical trend had been reversed: not for a long time had the word enjoyed such power and imparted such pleasure, albeit in a new and somewhat artificial form. Humanity had rediscovered its innate garrulousness and the fumes of the printer’s workshop were indeed driving it mad.