the reach and effectiveness of institutional leadership: they issued episcopally authorized editions of the liturgy. Falk Eisermann’s study of the press of Georg Reyser in the service of the Würzburg prince-bishop shows how the bishop’s arms were used at the front of a 1479 Würzburg missal as a license to advertise the authority of the critical edition, as part of the bishop’s public self-fashioning, and as part of a larger program to use print in the central administration of his diocese.2 Quality control was so crucial to that commission that readers were employed to check for errors in each printed copy, a measure that eliminates any labor-saving advantage to mechanical reproduction and suggests a certain suspicion that the technology was not foolproof.3 The Mainz Agenda presents a standardized version of diocesan practice, produced under the name of the archbishop (at that time Diether von Isenburg) and with his arms as a visual sign of his endorsement.
For the printer Peter Schöffer, whose press issued over 80 percent of Mainz publications in these years, similar commissions of missals and ordos represent a considerable aspect of his output. From 1476 to 1488, the ten years before the publication of the Peregrinatio through its last Mainz edition, his press published five broad categories of works, all in Latin except for the last: papal and ecclesiastical pronouncements, including indulgence materials (seventy-two editions); works for a clerical audience, such as confessors’ manuals or a commentary on the psalms (five); liturgical texts, in particular ordos and missals (eight); texts for academics and university students on law, logic, and Latin style (five); and works and announcements in Latin or German for a more general audience, such as almanacs, an invitation to a shooting match, and a vernacular cookbook (ten).4 This last category includes the Gart der Gesundheit, but not the three editions of the Peregrinatio. Miscellanea may edge out liturgical books for sheer numbers, but the five missals for the different dioceses represent the press’s most significant critical and typographical projects in these years. As a participant in the enterprise that first developed movable type, Schöffer carries a pioneering pedigree that belies the conservative content of his later production. This conservatism lies not simply in the number of works for a clerical audience, which still comprise the majority of readers of any kind, but in the number of editions issued by a central ecclesiastical authority or its agent, as a means of promoting homogeny in the religious services of his jurisdiction.
Beyond the strong episcopal presence in Mainz printing through commissions, the archbishop sought to shape press output by another means. Less than two weeks after his formal installation, Archbishop Berthold von Henneberg sharply criticized the publishing industry in an edict that provides rare documentation of an early institutional response to the technology through an attempt at censorship.5 The directive requires that books on any subject translated into German be examined by scholars at the universities of Mainz or Erfurt or by similarly credentialed clerics in Frankfurt before they can be printed or sold. Ignoring the mandate risked excommunication, confiscation of the volumes, and a penalty of one hundred gold coins. Although Frankfurt did not have a press before the sixteenth century, the city’s semiannual fair was already a nexus of the international book trade, so that the archbishop’s decree represents an early attempt to manage print media at a key node in the network for the circulation of both books and industry monies. The edict also invokes the unique status of “our golden Mainz” as the origin of the new art with a rhetorical flourish that seems to reflect a real sense that Mainz authorities have a responsibility, if not a special prerogative, to defend the “honor” of the art of printing in order to keep it “most highly refined and completely free of faults.”6
The oldest documented copy of the edict, from March 22, 1485, was addressed to the priest in charge of pastoral care (pleban) for Frankfurt’s most important foundation, the Church of Saint Bartholomew. It was sent to the city council of Frankfurt with a summary letter in German, and it instructed them to choose one or two credentialed scholars, to pay them an annual stipend, and to let the pleban (himself a doctor of theology) and the other scholars evaluate the translated works for sale at the city’s fair. On May 1, the prince-bishop of Würzburg, one of the archbishop’s suffragans, had the mandate printed to be read also from the pulpit.7 The order was then reissued by Henneberg on January 4, 1486, in a version that named four scholars from the University of Mainz to serve as a review board there, with one expert from each of the four faculties of theology, law, medicine, and arts, and a letter to Henneberg’s suffragan bishops exhorted them to enforce the order with secular leaders. In the directive, the archbishop expresses particular horror at the translation of the text of the mass (Christi libros missarum officia) and other works that express “divine matters and the apex of our religion,” as well as the provisions of canon law, but the composition of the Mainz review committee and references to “works in the remaining fields” make clear that he was concerned with texts across a wide range of subjects.8
The archbishop introduces his edict by echoing his former mentor, Nicholas of Cusa, in extolling a “divine art of printing” for making human learning easily accessible. But men have misused the gift. In their greed for money and vainglory, “some foolish, rash, and ignorant people” seek to expand their sales, so they translate texts into the vernacular.9 Henneberg objects to this on several counts: language, reading context, and shoddy product.10 Over the long history of using Latin for sacred matters, the language and its users have developed terms that lend Latin a professional finesse that vernacular languages lack. Moreover, just as a body of qualified readers has reached consensus over conventions of Latin usage, so the meaning of texts is properly determined through the give-and-take of scholarly debate. It is not just that poor approximations of subtle texts are being put in the hands of the “common people” and “laymen, uneducated men, and the female sex.”11 These audiences cannot understand them because they do not participate in institutional—as opposed to private—reading practices, where extracts of raw Scripture are buffered by interpretation: “Let the text of the Gospels or Paul’s letters be seen [as an example]; no reasonable man can deny that you need to supplement and fill in from other texts.” And what of texts, he asks, whose meaning “hangs from the sharpest debate” among scholars in what is meant to be a “catholic” church?”12 The edict champions an ideal of expertise that arises from lifelong study of the most recondite writings. While he is at it, Henneberg also decries basic errors or deceits in works from other fields: the incorporation of raw falsehoods, the use of false titles, and translators’ attributing their own inventions (figmenta) to distinguished authors.
The archbishop is concerned in part about the fixity of sacred texts, which suffers through poor translation, but he is also concerned about stability of meaning, which arises not from the text itself but from its reading context. Henneberg approaches this as a social problem, rather than a problem with the medium per se, and according to his analysis, it is the structure of print commerce that undermines fixity and stability.13 He intervenes, therefore, to try and engineer these qualities. In creating review boards, he inserts a new readership between printer and consumer, effectively restructuring the flow of works so that they are intercepted and vetted by institutional representatives who stand in for the scholarly community that traditionally shaped a work’s reception. It is not just a question of fixing a text, but of maintaining the proper parameters for evaluating interpretations.
The archbishop seems also to see himself, the church’s anointed representative and the head of the clerical estate in the empire, as the guardian of sacred writings with the charge to control their dissemination. The concept of copyright per se did not yet exist, and the legal conception of licensing was still in its infancy. Henneberg acts, however, much like a copyright holder (to express his actions in forward-looking terms). He invents a justification for his right to control not just the Bible itself or liturgical books, but all texts written in the sacred language of Latin on subjects touching Christian doctrine or God’s creation. Then he establishes a mechanism to assert his privilege.14 This works in tandem with quality-control strategies adopted by dioceses in commissioning new editions of their liturgical books: these circulate like critical editions, proofed and distributed from the center, under the imprimatur of the bishop.15
