Ian Maclean,Scholarship,Commerce,Religion: The Learned Book in the Age of Confessions,1560–1630

Reviewed by: Erika Squassina, University of Udine, Italy

Ian Maclean’s book, a revised and expanded version of his Lyell Lectures in Bibliography delivered at Oxford in 2010, is a comprehensive overview of the scholarly publishing world in the period between 1560 and 1630 in Europe. Elite culture in this period was a transnational business, spread mainly in Latin, published by specialized firms and exchanged in international fairs such as the Frankfurt Fair, the nerve centre of an intense intellectual exchange among scholars as well as profitable commercial relations among publishers.

Maclean highlights market operations involving learned books through an investigation of the relationship between the knowledge and the intricate mechanisms of book production and circulation. Every aspect that characterized and influenced the learned book market (religious, political, economic) from its heyday until its dramatic decline is analysed in the book. Authors who wanted to print their works and publishers in search of profitable sales necessarily had to consider the context in which they operated, taking into account religious divisions, wars, plagues censorship, competition from other publishers and repression that could hinder the realization of a publishing initiative.

The learned book, claimed Pierre Rebuffi (a French jurist, 1487–1557), is one that contains knowledge, which being a divine gift cannot be sold. On the contrary, through the analysis of the production, distribution and reading of scholarly books Maclean shows that knowledge was considered indeed a commodity and therefore subject to market rules. Printing itself had not as primary aim the diffusion of knowledge, but making a profit. A publishing enterprise entailed capital investments and risks which forced the publishers to make particular choices to achieve secure commercial returns. In addition, publishers had to sell quickly to cover the costs and overheads, for these reasons they had to decide which titles to select, how many copies to print and where to place them on sale. Maclean writes that publishers who had access to promising manuscripts appear to have been predisposed to accept work in a higher percentage of cases compared to modern counterparts (Plantin accepted about half of the manuscripts that were offered him). It was a part of marketing strategy not only to encourage readers to buy more books, but also to push clients to buy the same book again. In fact, in relation to market assessments, the practices most adopted by publishers were reprinting and reissuing.

The pursuit of profit, given the widespread practice of piracy and unauthorized reprints, led many publishers (and sometimes even the authors) to look for legal protection through printing privileges in order to protect their own investments. Book privileges are treated by the author in the chapter devoted to the control of the market, where Maclean offers an extensive discussion of the privileges granted by the Imperial Chancery. This topic is discussed in conjunction with the question of censorship, with which it was closely connected in this period.

Commercial interests collided with, and sometimes compromised, the world of scholarship. This often induced authors to assume a flexible and versatile attitude in negotiations with publishers. As Maclean recalls, even the great Erasmus had to be at the service of publishers doing a variety of tasks such as writing prefaces, proofreading, promoting his works and suggesting texts for publication. Moreover, Maclean insists on the importance of law books in the early modern scholarly book market, although this area is often neglected by book historians, in part due to the decline in Europe of the influence of Roman and canon law.

The book is rich in information and wisely structured. Maclean combines quantitative data and clear examples, enriching the volume with an illustrative apparatus made up of images of books (usually the title pages) and archival documents. He provides models of historical inquiry through the study of primary sources that include catalogues, inventories, correspondences and account books, making this work a benchmark for book historians and all those interested in the intellectual history of early modern Europe.