Incunabula research
The incunabula research (also: incunabulum) deals with the printed book of the 15th century . Its subject matter is the incunabula (also: cradle prints), i.e. printed works that have been produced with movable metal letters since the invention of letterpress printing by Johannes Gutenberg up to the year 1500. Incunable research, which began in the 17th century, is part of general book studies . It can be differentiated into two different areas of activity: creating incunabula lists (catalogs and bibliographies ) and printing and printer research (analyzing printing technology). In a broader sense, dealing with the historical conditions of the incunable period and the biographies of the incunable printers (history of the printers ) is also part of incunable research.
Definition of terms
The term incunabula (from the Latin incunabula = cradle, diaper) describes a printing work made with movable metal letters, which was completed before January 1, 1501. This definition is irrevocably established in today's incunable research, although in earlier times there were also bibliographers who set the temporal limit of the incunable period differently (e.g. Georg Wolfgang Panzer ). The definition of the year 1500 is of course an arbitrary convention. Nevertheless, it has an inner justification, since around 1500 developments began which led to the fact that the new publications differed significantly from their predecessors. So the printing press began to break away from looking at the medieval manuscripts as examples to be imitated and to orientate itself on their design. Rather, the book medium developed its own principles, which ultimately led to its appearance, which is also familiar to today's readers. An example of this is the eradication of the ligatures and abbreviations adopted from medieval manuscripts . In his handbook of incunabula, Konrad Haebler refers to another process of change that began around the turn of the century. In contrast to the incunable period, the printer of the 16th century no longer faced his work as a self-employed master with artistic aspirations, but switched to the artisanal and commercial production of books. This process, like the separation of book printing from the handwritten model, did not start suddenly on January 1, 1501. The limitation of the incunabula by the turn of the century therefore represents a compromise between different approaches to classifying the age of the cradle prints. This convention is still valid today, because it is easy to remember on the one hand and clarifies the special position of the incunabula on the other hand compared to later printed works. The term incunable appears for the first time in connection with the early printing period in a writing by Bernhard von Mallinckrodt . In 1640, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the invention of the printing press, von Mallinckrodt published the work De ortu et progressu artis typographicae , in which he referred to the age of the earliest printing as prima typographicae incunabula and ended it in the year 1500. It should be noted that Mallinckrodt described the epoch and not the pamphlets themselves as incunabula . For the earliest printed works themselves, the term incunable was not used until the early 19th century . This technical term has become firmly established today and has also found its way into many other languages. The German term Wiegendrucke , however, is less common.
Incunabulum directories
In the middle of the 17th century, about 200 years after the invention of the art of printing by Johannes Gutenberg, the incunabula were for the first time the subject of special consideration and cultural-historical investigation. The incunabula were understood as a group that was clearly different from the printed writings of more recent times, which is why it was considered necessary to record the incunabula separately in bibliographical terms. Since the conceptual definitions are not always unambiguous, it should be noted at this point that a catalog in the following as a directory of a separate collection (e.g. a library or special library) or region, a bibliography as a directory that aims to include the entirety of all existing titles of a to include certain subject areas.
One reason why special attention was paid to the earliest printed products was probably the anniversary celebrations that took place in many German cities in 1640 in honor of Johannes Gutenberg and his invention . The interest in incunabula, aroused in many places, formed the basis for their scholarly examination and soon led to the publication of the first incunabula catalog. John Saubertus added to his Historiae bibliothecae reipublicae Noribergensis anno 1643 as an appendix a directory in which contained 825 incunabula that are in the public library at Nuremberg were. Ten years later, the Frenchman Phillippe Labbé supplemented his Nova bibliotheca with Supplementum IX , in which 1289 cradle prints from the holdings of the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris were bibliographically recorded.
Cornelius van Beughem's directory Incunabula typographicae from 1688 represented a step forward in that an attempt was made for the first time to create a directory of all printed works of the incunabulum period. His forerunners Saubertus and Labbé, however, had concentrated on creating catalogs of individual collections that were available to them. Van Beughem's directory, conceived as a comprehensive bibliography, contained almost 3,000 titles, including only those that contained sufficient information about their origin and were clearly recognizable as incunabula. Like Saubertus and Labbé, Cornelius van Beughem also recorded the incunabula purely bibliographically, made no explanatory notes and treated the cradle prints no differently from titles of more recent date.
Michael Maittaire's Annales typographici ab artis inventae origine ad annum MD were the first incunabula that could also meet scientific demands. In contrast to his predecessors, Maittaire did not stop at just writing down the titles bibliographically. In extensive notes, he recorded relevant information on the respective incunabula for the academic observer. Furthermore, Maittaire arranged the titles of his bibliography in chronological order and described the great majority of the recorded incunabula based on his own experience. The second edition of Annales typographicae , published in 1733 , also made significant progress in terms of the number of documented publications. It contained approximately 5600 incunabula.
Michael Denis saw his work Annalium typographicorum Michaelis Maittaire Supplementum of 1789 as a continuation and improvement of Maittaire's bibliography. By closely following Maittaire's practice of arranging and describing titles, he succeeded in more than doubling the number of verifiable incunabula. In his bibliography, Denis recorded 6311 previously unknown cradle prints. Special merits Michael Denis acquired by the fact that he was first tried on a large scale, even those considered to titles that have no publisher's imprint had. His incunabula contained 2237 titles in which no information was given about printer, place of printing and date. Nonetheless, Michael Denis believed that he could identify these issues as cradle prints based on his own research.
Although Francois Xavier Laire's directory Index librorum ab inventa typographica ad a. 1500 chronologice dispositus of 1791 claimed the title to be a general incunabula bibliography, it was in reality only the catalog of the collection of Cardinal Loménie de Brienne . Nevertheless, Laire's work remained of lasting importance in the history of incunabula research. The peculiarity of the catalog was not the list of proven incumbents, but the way in which the individual titles were treated. Laire described all characteristic features of the incunabula in unprecedented detail and conscientiously recorded all information relevant to the incunabula researcher. So his work contained z. B. Information on the type of sentence , signatures , custodians , registers , etc.
Georg Wolfgang Panzer pursued the aim of compiling a comprehensive list of all known cradle prints. In the Annals of Older German Literature published in 1788 , Panzer first turned to the German-language incunabula separately . On the other hand, his Annales typographici , published in Nuremberg from 1793 to 1803, was more universally oriented and conceived as a complete bibliography of all of the incontinence prints that were verifiable at the time. The titles listed were arranged according to printing location, within the locations according to the individual printing works and only then chronologically. But also with regard to the temporal limitation of the incunabulum, Panzer went his own way and recorded all printed works up to 1536. Among the 16,151 documented titles of his directories, both real and supposed incunabula can be found.
Ludwig Hain's Repertorium bibliographicum ( Stuttgart , 1826–1838) meant a departure from the layout and method of the older incunabula lists. What was new was not the alphabetical sorting by author or title, but the exact, letter and line-accurate reproduction of the beginning ( Incipit ) and end ( Explicit ) of the works. This made it possible to identify the individual copies according to their literary description with complete certainty and flawlessly. Hain, who arranged according to authors or keywords, also provided detailed information on format , sentence form, type type , the number of pages and lines as well as the existence of signatures, custodians, page counts, registers and woodcut illustrations . His Repertorium bibliographicum comprised a total of 16,397 titles, whereby it must be taken into account that the work was incomplete at the death of its author, which also explains the lack of registers and the lack of information about locations and owning libraries . Despite these imperfections, Hain's Repertorium bilbliographicum remained the fundamental work of incunabula research for almost a century. Hain's bibliography owes this importance mainly to its method and the groundbreaking innovation of completely listing Incipit and Explicit. This new approach was also modeled on the large number of new incunable catalogs of individual collections that appeared as a result of the repertory .
As a complement to Hains directory that is still indispensable, despite its shortcomings for the Inkunabelforscher, understood WA Copinger be from 1895 to 1902 in London appearing Supplement to Hain's Repertorium Bibliographicum . In the first part of his work, Copinger recorded several thousand additions to incunabula that were only incompletely described in the Repertorium bibliographicum . The two volumes of the second part contained 6,619 new cradle prints that Hain had not yet known. A disadvantage of Copinger's supplement is that only a very small number of the prints recorded were described on the basis of one's own autopsy (visualization). Dietrich Reichling's Appendices ad Hainii-Copingeri Repertorium bibliographicum had the advantage that their author had the opportunity to examine most of the incunabula himself. Reichling mainly drew on the holdings of Italian and Swiss libraries, whose previously unknown items he recorded using Hain's method. With the incunabula documented for the first time by Reichling, the “official” number of incunabula rose to 25,352. With this number, however, it should be noted that Dietrich Reichling, like earlier bibliographers, wrongly described some of the already known incunabula as new titles. It is still uncertain to this day how many different balance sheets actually exist worldwide. Estimates assume approximately 30,000 titles, of which around 500,000 copies are likely to be preserved.
Towards the end of the 19th century, plans matured to replace Hain's Repertorium bibliographicum with a world catalog of incunabula based on a new inventory. In 1904, at the suggestion of the Prussian Ministry of Culture, a commission was set up for the complete catalog of Wiegendrucke ( GW ), which was initially chaired by Konrad Haebler. The commission members founded a central office for the GW at what was then the Royal Library (today: Berlin State Library ) and began their task initially with a careful inventory of the German holdings. The members of the commission received active support from foreign incunabula researchers to record the world holdings. The First World War brought sensitive disruptions to international cooperation and the creation of the GW . So it took until 1925 before the first volume with 1256 descriptions was published by the Hiersemann Verlag in Leipzig . As a result, a total of seven volumes appeared about every two years until the Second World War temporarily brought work on the complete catalog of incandescent prints to a standstill. Unfortunately, the continuation of the work was severely hampered by the political turmoil between the two post-war German states, which is why the complete eighth volume was only available in 1978. To this day, the GW remains an incomplete project. It is available in ten volumes and two deliveries of the eleventh volume. By the eleventh volume the letters A – H will be completely indexed. In the meantime, the complete catalog of the balance sheets is also available as an online database .
The GW is alphabetically by authors or with anonymous works by property titles in order. The literary historical aspect of the incunabula is therefore placed first. Each entry consists of a bibliographic note ( author , title, printer, place of printing, etc.), collation (information on scope, signatures, custodians, page count, arrangement, equipment, etc.), the textual description (reproduced text based on the original in Antiqua or Schwabacher printed) and finally the source and copy reference.
Against the background of the difficulties in international cooperation at the GW and the resulting incompleteness of the work, those companies that dealt with the cataloging of the incunabula holdings of individual countries and collections were of particular importance. The largest project of this kind is the Catalog of Books printed in the fifteenth Century now in the British Museum (today: British Library ), begun in 1908 . In London , the Incunabula Short Title Catalog (ISTC) managed by the British Library is being set up on a computer basis and is to be developed into a global inventory. The richest collection of incunabula on German soil is available in the incunabula catalog of the Bavarian State Library . The Distributed Digital Incunabulum Library has been online since mid-2005. It contains more than 1000 cradle prints from the holdings of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel and the Cologne University and City Library in digital form.
Print and printer research
When developing their catalogs and bibliographies, Ludwig Hain and his predecessors always concentrated more on the literary than on the technical book dimension of the incunabula. The technical material of the earliest book printers was mostly only of interest insofar as its analysis could help to determine wholly or partially unfirmised incunabula more precisely and to integrate them into the incunabula. Since many incunabula lacked a printer's endorsement and thus gave no or only incomplete information about their origin, it was of course impossible to clearly determine the incunabula character of a work and to assign the print to a printer's workshop with a purely literary description of the incunabula. In order to clarify the origin of these titles, which were not clearly dated, the incunabula bibliographers compared the types of unfirmed prints available to them with those used in clearly assigned incunabula prints. The approach was initially not scientifically exact. The assignment of an undated work was made due to the "similarity" of the types used. A sophisticated method of comparing types was not yet used, but rather relied on the very arbitrary sense of similarity of the respective bibliographer.
Henry Bradshaw made the first attempt to provide a scientifically exact basis for the comparison of types in 1870. He suggested dividing the incunabula according to type forms and also advocated the geographical-chronological order based on the model of Georg Wolfgang Panzer. However, his ideas only came to their full effect through the work of Robert Proctor. Inspired by Bradshaw's approach, Bradshaw began to compile an inventory of all incunabula in the British Museum and Oxford's Bodleian Library . He also arranged the titles according to places of printing and printer and only then in chronological order. In his work, Proctor fully concentrated on the typographical side of the cradle prints. He dispensed with any textual description and only gave the brief title as well as the year and date of publication of the respective work. This was followed by detailed information on the fonts used. Proctor gave a broad overview of the types used for each printer workshop. His most important tool for determining the grade of a type was the measurement of twenty lines measured at the edge of the page.
Konrad Haebler tried to improve Bradshaw and Proctor's method further. With his type repertory of the cradle prints he wanted to break away from Proctor's concept of similarity in the comparison of types and put in its place the consideration of the distinguishing features. As the most important criterion for the comparison of types, Haebler adopted the measure of twenty lines from Proctor, but improved the mode of measurement. In order to meaningfully pre-arrange the vastly increased comparative material, he used the M, which occurs in a large variety of forms, for the Gothic typefaces. Haebler decided on the Q as the critical type for the antiqua typefaces .
In addition to the comparison of types, there are other modern methods that can help to classify undated prints chronologically and to clearly assign them to a specific printer workshop. The research into watermarks is just as much a source of new knowledge as the chemical analysis of printing inks .
With a broader interpretation of the term, the history of the printers of the 15th century can also be understood as part of incunabula research. While the “classical” incunable research deals with the methods of the oldest book design, the historical research dealing with the incunable period examines the historical relationships of the early printing period and the biographies of the printers. The viewing and evaluation of historical source material (e.g. files, documents , tax lists) is of particular importance. Ferdinand Geldner's two-volume work Die deutscher Inkunabeldrucker (The German Incunabula Printer) provides an excellent overview of the biographies of German incunabula printers .
literature
- S. Corsten: Incunable research. In: Lexicon of the entire book industry. (LGB). Edited by Severin Corsten. 2nd, completely revised and expanded edition. Volume III. Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7772-9136-6 , pp. 620-622.
- F. Geldner: Incunabulum. An introduction to the world of the earliest book printing . Reichert, Wiesbaden 1978, ISBN 3-920153-60-X .
- K. Haebler: Handbuch der Incunabelkunde . Reprint of the 1925 edition. Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-7772-7927-7
Web links
- British Library's Incunabula Catalog (ISTC)
- Incunabula Catalog of German Libraries (INKA)
- Database of the complete catalog of the cradle prints of the Berlin State Library - Prussian Cultural Heritage (GW)
- TW - type repertory of incandescent prints
- Incunable catalog of the Bavarian State Library (bsb-ink)
- Incunable census Austria
- Distributed digital incunabulum library
Individual evidence
- ^ FNL Poynter: A Catalog of Incunabile in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library. Oxford University Press, London 1954.