This is an important and much needed book. Professor Pettegree, now Head of the School of History at the University of St. Andrews, has long established a deserved reputation as a leader in the field of Reformation studies. His personal oeuvre ranges from exemplary monographs on the Marian exiles—his first book about Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) or his collection of essays Marian Protestantism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1996)—to his latest publication Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), a groundbreaking study of conversion to Protestantism in sixteenth century Europe. But he is also known to many more because he created and directed the exceptionally competent and dynamic St. Andrews Book Project group that produced the remarkable bibliography of French Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language before 1601 (2 vols. [Leiden: Brill, 2007]), putting to shame French bibliographers and cultural institutions alike. A project that expanded to the whole of Europe has now become the online Universal Short Title Catalogue, available as of 2011, and an invaluable database of all European sixteenth century books printed before 1601.
Henri-Jean Martin, the late dean of French studies in the history of the book, wrote his seminal L'Apparition du livre, first published in 1958 with Lucien Febvre as a co-author, at the beginning of his career (The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 [London: Verso, 1976]), and in spite of the long lasting influence of this masterly overview of the modernizing impact of the printed book on preindustrial cultures and societies, specialists like Paul Needham have underlined its innumerable inexactitudes, especially about non-French situations and the second-hand character of its information. These flaws were most apparent in the chapter “Le livre ce ferment” (“The book as a force of change”) in which Martin addressed the impact of printing on religion. The other major work in the history of the early modern book, Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) similarly presented print as a revolutionary force. Pettegree, writing on the basis of an impressive track-record as a researcher, focuses on the first century and a half of printing instead of embracing the whole hand-press period, and puts to good use not only fifty odd years of specialized literature (often his own) published since the Coming of the Book but also precious statistical evidence made available thanks to the work of the St. Andrews Book Project. This allows him to give a more balanced and thorough view of the period, making of the book under review a necessary companion, and very often a substitute to Martin and Eisenstein.
Globally the overall production of fifteenth and sixteenth century books is thus now more firmly established than ever before at 345,170 editions: 94,000 in Germany, 88,000 in the Italian print world, 75,500 in the French kingdom, 31,917 in the Low Countries, and 11,000 in Switzerland, all this representing 87.03% of the total output. The remaining 12.97% were divided between Spain (18,000), England (15,127), Eastern Europe (9,960), and Scandinavia (1,666). Such precise statistics, refined by town of production, are essential to understand the specific geography of print, its conflictual relationships with political, economic, and religious borders. They are also essential to address questions such as the role printing in the development of vulgar languages or to establish a better balance between humanist publications and the “grubby, small books and pamphlets that made the great bulk of production” (353).
In four parts (“Beginnings,” “Consolidation,” “Conflicts,” and “New Worlds”) and sixteen chapters, Pettegree develops an elegantly written and broadly chronological narrative punctuated by well-chosen, original illustrations and excellent maps. Precise descriptions of market forces are intertwined with subtle analyses of reading patterns or shifts in cultural and religious attitudes. I particularly enjoyed “Polite Recreations” (151–176), with its mix of significant microhistory—viz the taste for chivalric romances of a German evangelical minister—and luminous presentations of complex issues such as female readership of poetry in Italy. To historians of religion I signal his chapters on “Book Town Wittenberg” (91-106) and “Luther's legacy” (107–129) that give the best synthetic account of the role of print in the German Reformation. All in all The Book in the Renaissance is not only an indispensable reference tool but a tour de force of “histoire totale,” to use a well-known phrase by Lucien Febvre.
Regrets are unavoidable when reviewing a book of such a scope, but they are definitely minor. Some irritating typos and errors, particularly where Pettegree deals with Italian matters, will be easy to correct in future editions: for example Ferrara was a university town in the fifteenth century but contrary to Padua was not part of the Venetian Republic (50), the author of the Morgante Maggiore, not Morgan, was Luigi Pulci, not Luigo (153), Lodovico Ariosto was governor of the Garfagnana, not Garsagnana (154), and so forth. The constraints of space led Pettegree to over pack with information, in my view, the last part of the book, especially the very last chapter “Word and the Street” (332–352), to the point of making the head of this reviewer spin. They probably also deprived the book of a proper conclusion that would have balanced its fine “prelude” (xxiii–xvi). And of course other affirmations and legitimate choices of Pettegree will be open to debate. For my part, after scolding the author for providing too much information in his last chapter I will end by deploring the exceedingly scarce number of pages dedicated to book illustration, as if books were made of word only, a fact that reflects the state of historiography but is nevertheless regrettable in such an innovative piece of work.
