This volume of essays derives from the 12th annual book history conference held at the University of St Andrews, hosted by the Universal Short Title Catalogue project group. In 2019, we welcomed scholars at St Andrews to discuss Crisis or Enlightenment? Developments in the book trade, 1650–1750. The conference was partially inspired by the planned extension of the USTC project’s from 1650 to 1700, an extension that is now happily concluded, and makes available to the global community of print scholars more than 1.5 million records of editions printed with moveable type, surviving in over 6 million copies worldwide.
Our conference was also prompted by a broader sense that the period between the end of Thirty Years’ War and the middle of the eighteenth century represented an era that has never enjoyed particular attention in the book historical profession. It is a period that is far removed from the heydays of incunabula and the formative development of the print trade in the sixteenth century, a period which has understandably garnered much interest. But the century between 1650 and 1750 is also generally too early for the dynamic crowd of book historians who occupy themselves with the era of European revolutions.
To intellectual historians, this might seem baffling: the second half of the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth century are the critical years in Paul Hazard’s defining Crisis of the European Mind, 1680–1715 (first published 1935), and they also occupy centre stage in accounts of the Early Enlightenment. This was the age of Baruch de Spinoza, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, an era of momentous scientific and philosophical experimentation that would ultimately reshape fundamentally the European intellectual world. What we wanted to test at our conference, was the extent to which the European book trade engaged with this ‘Crisis of the European Mind’, and whether the Enlightenment itself affected the book trade in any major way.
Over the course of our conference, it became clear that, in the book trade, the impact of Enlightenment was extremely limited, and that Enlightenment ideals only very gradually infused the practices of what remained a conservative trade. This was not because book professionals themselves were necessarily a reactionary crowd, but because European society as a whole remained far more hesitant to radical intellectual change. Instead, the staples of the print trade, the Bible, bestselling devotional prayer-books, almanacs, news books, political pamphlets, poems and song books remained at the heart of the book business throughout the century between 1650 and 1750.
What our contributors did demonstrate, is that there were specific areas of development and change in the book trade that were worthy of note, and worthy of expansion upon. There was a general geographical shift in the balance of production, which saw European printed output gravitate towards Britain, the Netherlands and northern Germany, from earlier heartlands in southern Germany and Italy. The conference highlighted too that regional or national output could regress as much as progress; political and religious factors, in Catalonia, Poland-Lithuania, Czechia and the Southern Netherlands saw regression instead of growth. As Xevi Camprubí’s contribution in this volume highlights, the era of ‘Enlightenment’ could in fact also mean an absolute decline in terms of education, literacy and the consumption of books.
Change manifested itself in other ways between 1650 and 1750. The rise of vernacular publishing came at the expense of Latin, but the persistence of universities, and the numerous opportunities for occasional publications at academic institutions (funeral orations, congratulatory poetry, wedding pamphlets, invitations to public events) ensured that printing in Latin declined far less than is commonly presumed. The rise of periodicals and serial publishing, most of which were printed in vernacular languages, did ensure that the splintering of the international book trade was mediated through frequent translations and imitations. While the French language increasingly challenged Latin to the status as the polite pan-European language, contributors to this volume (in particular Hanna de Lange and Alexandra Ortolja-Baird) demonstrate that European readers and collectors continued to build varied libraries, richly populated by books in diverse languages, vernacular and scholarly alike.
The twelve following contributions in this volume all expand on the issue of change or development in the European book world between 1650 and 1750. They comment in particular on three notable areas: publishing strategies; practices of censorship; and the circulation of second-hand books and the building of libraries. They demonstrate that the era of Early Enlightenment saw formative changes in each of these realms: book trade practices, sales and advertising, the modus operandi of censors, and collecting habits. They also show that these changes took place in tandem with the activities of Enlightenment luminaries, but that they were rarely connected closely to their intellectual priorities.
Ultimately, this volume emphasises that the century between 1650 and 1750 is a period of book history which deserves our close attention, and we hope that this collection of essays might serve as a launching platform for future research and publications.
We wish to express our gratitude to our contributors for their pieces, and for their patience with the development of this volume since our conference in St Andrews.
Ann-Marie Hansen and Arthur der Weduwen
September 2023