Early Modern German Printing

Summary

Die Literarischen Studien Blühen, eine Menge Bücher steht um billiges Geld auch den Minderbemittelten zur Verfügung; bei so bequemer Möglichkeit des Zugangs zur Welt der Bücher sieht sich jedermann geradezu verlockt, höherer Bildung teilhaftig zu werden” (Literary studies are blossoming, a host of books is available for so little money that even those of modest means have access to them; with the comfortable possibility of such easy access to the world of books, everyone is virtually seduced to partake in higher education). So euphorically did the Bavarian ducal historiographer Johannes Turmair (1477–1534), also known as Aventinus, describe the cultural situation in his 1525 Annales ducum Boiariae (translated into German as Bayerische Chronik, 1533) owing to the invention of printing. This glorification of the art of printing is a much-used literary topos, however, and not to be taken literally, coming as it does some seventy-five years after the actual invention; it had become a commonplace already before 1500 to praise the printing of books as a decisive step in the evolution of the community of educated peoples. Thus the German “arch-humanist,” Conrad Celtis (1459–1508), writes in one of his odes that it is thanks to a certain son of the city of Mainz that the Germans no longer can be ridiculed by the Italians as intellectually lazy. The translatio artium (literally, “transfer of the arts”) was the highest objective of the German humanists, for it was the process by which they could access the intellectual greatness of antiquity.It had once been transferred from Greece to Rome, in the time of Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Vergil; Johannes Gutenberg had made it possible for the ancient learning to be transferred across the Alps to Germania, as Celtis writes in Ode 3, 9 (“Laudat Germanum inventorem artis impressoriae”):

Qui sculpsit solidas aere citus notas,

Et versis docuit scribere litteris,

Quo nasci vtilius non poterat magis

Cunctis (credite) saeculis.

Iam tandem Italici non poterunt viri

Germanos stolida carpere inertia,

Cum nostris videant crescere ab artibus

Romanis saecula litteris. (ll. 9–16)