![]() ![]() The Gutenberg Bible had been designed for liturgical usage in ecclesiastical settings, but later printed Bibles were increasingly designed for ever more sophisticated private or domestic readings. Each of them – from the Tyndale New Testament of 1526 (for which Tyndale was executed) to the King James Version of 1611 – captured and preserved God’s revelation in the English language, specifically aimed to provide a text ideally comprehensible to every English servant and maid. Unlike the Gutenberg Bible, these were published in the vernacular. In England, patents were granted to a small number of specific printing houses, which protected their privileges with passion. By the 16th century, across Europe, but most notably in Protestant countries – England, Germany and the Netherlands – the publication of Bibles became a highly profitable monopoly. The ability to produce hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of copies made the Bible a commercial opportunity and a cultural revolution. ![]() While the Gutenberg Bible was primarily for elite clerical usage, it opened the door to mass and untutored readings and interpretations. Once released from Latin into the vernacular, the word of God became a weapon.Ĭheap Bibles meant more readers and, ultimately, more debate over the meaning of God’s word. The printed Bible in the hands of the public posed a fundamental challenge to papal dominion. For Luther, the emphasis of salvation upon sola fides (faith alone) could only be established by studying God’s word ( sola scriptura). Luther and Tyndale led the way with their clandestine and vernacular Bibles. The crisis of Reformation authority encouraged the printing of Bibles in Germany, England and, eventually, Geneva. The printer who mistakenly omitted a vital ‘not’ from the Ten Commandments was vigorously punished by a very bad-tempered Archbishop Laud in 1631. It also meant that any minor mistakes would be reproduced, too. Printing also enabled accurate, and (mostly) reliable reproduction across a number of volumes. The initial ambition of typographical design aimed at replicating the look of the commonplace manuscript format, in columnar form, with a good balance between white space and the printed blocks. The invention of new forms of ink (more like a veneer) enabled crisper and more durable printing. It heralded a step change in printing technique: whereas earlier forms of printing relied on woodblock technology, the use of moveable metal type allowed more flexible, efficient and cheap printing. The result of a timely collaboration between technology, finance and skill, the Gutenberg Bible was a triumph of technical organisation, which lay the foundations for what has been called, in Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, the ‘Gutenberg Revolution’. It is no exaggeration to say that this innovative production created an object of authority but it also encouraged dissent. Some 180 copies were produced, of which 49 exist today, all carefully listed by Stephan Füssel in the introduction. Often, as evidenced in the Eton copy of the work, which I have examined, the binding itself, with metal clasps and embossed corner protections, added to the sheer weight of the book. As the modern edition establishes, this was a big book, running to nearly 1,300 pages and weighing around 66lbs or 30 kilos. The production was technically complex and required an extraordinary amount of careful labour, which included setting 42 lines of text per page, consuming 2,500 bits of type, drawn from a font of 300 distinctive pieces. The first printed Old and New Testaments, reproduced in this new Taschen facsimile edition in two folio volumes, marked a cultural turning point, which was to shape religious controversies and political crises and conflicts throughout the following centuries. Manuscript copies were expensive and limited to elite, bespoke consumption, usually for monastic and scholarly usage. Before that, although there had been innovations in the production of handwritten (scribal) editions of scripture – including what were regarded by many as heretical attempts by the proto-Protestant Wycliffe to produce vernacular editions of the Bible – these only had limited audiences. An inventor, Johannes Gutenberg, a printer, Peter Schöffer, and a financier, Johann Fūrst, collaborated to publish a Bible – the Gutenberg, as it is now known – widely regarded as a transformative moment in the history of European culture. In 1454, in the Rhineland town of Mainz, three friends formed a legal arrangement to produce an epochal object. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |