Sacrobosco at the Book Fairs, 1576–1624: The Pedagogical Marketplace

Abstract

Between 1576 and 1624, there were at least twenty declarations of Latin editions of the De sphaera and one of Francesco Pifferi’s Italian-language version in the Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogues. These declarations are not straightforward. Some are editions, and some are reissues; some are associated with the names not of the publisher but of the bookstore through where they were on offer. In some cases, the year of declaration and the place of publication are misleading, and, in the case of the Christophorus Clavius commentaries, the claim made about the number of the edition (whether third, fourth, fifth, or “seventh”) is false. The aim of this paper is to elucidate how the fairs operated, to identify which edition is in question, to place these in the context of the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed pedagogy of the period, and to show how producers, advertisers, and commissioning agents of the Sacrobosco Sphaera editions interacted, with special reference to the editions of Rome and Venice (and their publishers the Basa family and Giovanni Battista Ciotti), and those of Lyon and St. Gervais (and their publishers de Gabiano and Samuel Crespin). The final case considered is the declaration in 1624 of the edition of the Jesuit Bernardus Morisanus produced by the Reformed printer-publisher Peter Mareschal, as an element in a cursus philosophicus.

1 Introduction

In this paper I set out to use information from Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogues and the resources of material bibliography to investigate the market for Johannes de Sacrobosco’s (d. 1256) De sphaera and Christophorus Clavius’ (1538–1612) commentary over the period 1576–1625, paying particular attention to the constraints imposed by the Fair, the constraints imposed by publishing practices, and the constraints arising from the nature of the market for textbooks. I shall begin with the list of all entries relating to the De sphaera or commentaries on the De sphaera that I was able to find in the various redactions of the Fair Catalogues and in an early omnibus compendium of the Fair catalogues: the Collectio in unum corpus omnium librorum… in nundinis Francofurtensibus ab anno 1564 usque ad nundinas autumnales anni 1592… (Collectio 1592).¹ In this list, “S” refers to the Spring, “A” to the Autumn Catalogue; all are from the “Libri philosophici” section, except three: The declaration of S1592 is in the “Libri historici” section; the Italian-language entry of A1604 is in the “Libri peregrino idiomate scripti” section (i.e., those not written in Latin or German); the declaration of Cholinus’ printing in A1607 is in the section “books forthcoming at future fairs” (Libri proximis nundinis prodituri).²

• A1576 Christophori Clauii Bambergensis, ex societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannes de Sacro Bosco Commentarius 4. Romae.

  (Willer 1972–2001): probably a reissue of (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1570).

• S1578 Fr. Iunctini Florentini, sacrae Theologiae Doctoris, Com[m]entaria in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco accuratissima. 8. Lugduni apud Philippum Tinghium.

  (Willer 1972–2001): (Sacrobosco and Giuntini 1578).

• S1581 Sphaera Ioannis de Sacrobosco emendata. Eliae Vineti Santonis scholia in eadem Sphaeram, ab ipso authore restituta. Quibus accessere Scholia Heronis et aliorum. 8. Coloniae. [apud Maternum Cholinum 1581].

  (Willer 1972–2001): (Sacrobosco et al. 1581).

• S1582 Christophori Clauii Bambergensis ex Societate Iesu in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco commentari[a]us 4. Romae.

  (Willer 1972–2001): (Sacrobosco et al. (1581).

• [1582] Ioan. De Sacro Busto Sphaera emendata. Antwerpiae apud Bellerum 1582. V.8 (Collectio 1592, 500): (Sacrobosco et al. 1582).

• [1591] [Ioan. De Sacro Busto Compendium in Sphaeram.] Accessit compendium in Sphaeram Pierij Valerianii Bellunens. Coloniae ap. Mater. Cholinum 1591 V.8.

  (Collectio 1592, 500): (Sacrobosco et al. 1591).

• S1592 [Libri historici] Christophori Clauij Bambergensis societatis Iesu in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacrobosco commentarius tertio recognitus & locupletatus Ven. 8.

  (Lutz 1592): (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1591).

• A1592 Christoph. Clauij in Sphaeram Ioan. de Sacro Bosco Com[m]entarius. Editio 4. ab authore recognita. Lugd. sumptibus fratrum de Gabiano in 4. futuris nundinis ve[r]n[alibus] exponetur.

  (Willer 1972–2001): (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1593) or (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1594).

• S1601 Christophori Clauii commentarius in Sphaeram Ioan. de Sacrobusto, iam recognitus apud [Joannem Baptistam Ciotti] in 4.

  (Catalogus…vernalibus 1601): (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1601a).

• S1601 Sphaera Ioannis de sacro Bosco emendata, cum notis aliquot doctorum virorum. Col. In 8. Cholin.

  (Catalogus…vernalibus 1601): (Sacrobosco et al. 1601).

• A1601 Libellus de Sphaera Iohannis de Sacrobusto. Accessit eiusdem autoris computus Ecclesiasticus, & alia quaedam. Wittebergae impensis Zachariae Schureri in 8.

  (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1601): (Sacrobosco et al. 1601).

• S1602 Christophori Clauii Iesuitae commentarius in sphaeram Sacrobusti. Editio quinta. Lugduni apud Crispinum.

  (Catalogus…vernalibus 1602): (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1602a). A reissue of (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1602b).

• S1603 Christoph. Clauij in Sphaeram Ioan de sacro busto Comment. Editio septima locupletior. ap. soc. Venet. in 4. 1603.

  (Catalogus…vernalibus 1603): (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1603). A reissue of (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1601a, b).

• A1604 Sfera di Gio. Sacrobosco tradotta e dicharata da Don Francesco Pifferi Sansauino. Con nuouo aggiunte di molte cose notabili, e dilettouoli [Societ. Venet.] in 4. 1604.

  (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1604): (Sacrobosco and Pifferi 1604).

• A1607 Christophori Clauii Bambergensis S.I. in Sphaeram Ioanis de Sacro Bosco Commentarius. Lugduni apud Iacob Chouet. 4 & 8. Candon 4.

  (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1607): Not readily identifiable. See Sect. 5.

• A1607 Sphaera Clauii nova Romae. apud Arnold. Quentel.

  (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1607): (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1606) or (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1607d).

• A1607 [Libri prodituri] Sphaera Joannis de Sacro Bosco emendata: cum scholiis Vineti et Commentariis Clauii. [Coloniae] ap. [Cholin]. 8.

  (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1607): No surviving copy; probably the 1610 edition: (Sacrobosco et al. 1610).

• S1608 Christophori Clauii in Sphaeram Ioannis de sacro Bosco commentarius. Ab ipso auctore locupletatus. Accessit Geometrica atque uberrima de Crepusculis tractatio. S Gervasio ap. Sam. Crispinum. in 4.

  (Catalogus…vernalibus 1608): (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1608).

• S1610 Sphaera Ioannis a Sacro Bosco emendata, aucta & illustrata. Coloniae apud Petrum Chol. In 8.

  (Catalogus…vernalibus 1610): (Sacrobosco et al. 1610).

• A1624 [Bernardi Morisani Derensis Ibernici] Commentarius in Sphaeram Ioannis de S. Bosco ibid. in 8.

  (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1624): (Sacrobosco and Morisanus 1625)

Before my substantive discussion of the Latin editions of this list, I should first comment on the one Italian-language entry from A1604: Francesco Pifferi’s (1548–1612) Sfera di Gio. Sacrobosco tradotta e dicharata…con nuove aggiunte di molte cose notabili, e dilettovoli (Sacrobosco and Pifferi 1604). This quarto edition was published by Salvestro Marchetti of Siena (fl. 1594–1620) in 1604 and declared at the Fair by the Societas Veneta (a consortium of Francesco de’ Franceschi (ca. 1530–1599), Giovanni Battista Ciotti (1564–1635) and Roberto Meietti (1572–1634), whom we shall meet again). In his dedication to Cosimo II de’ Medici (1590–1621), Pifferi declares that he was appointed by Cosimo’s mother, Christine de Lorraine (1565–1637), to teach Cosimo mathematics and that he had undertaken the translation and commentary to this end. In 1605, he was replaced as tutor by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who in 1615 published the famous pro-Copernican Lettera to Cosimo’s mother. Pifferi was a Camaldolese monk, a professor of mathematics at Siena, a member of the Accademia degli Intronati, and an associate of the Accademia dei Lincei. His library (inspected and inventoried in 1603 by the Inquisition) contained a number of editions of the Sphaera from Antwerp, Rome, Cologne, Paris, and Venice, a wide range of books by Christophorus Clavius, and an impressive collection of other works on sphaeristics. Pifferi’s commentary relies heavily on those of Francesco Giuntini (1523–1590) and Clavius; its approach to cosmology is functionalist, and it engages negatively with Copernicus, but Pifferi does record the argument of Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) that the work was designed to “save the appearances” (salvar l’apparenze): i.e., that it was no more than a hypothesis.³ This is an interesting case of the vulgarization of Sacrobosco in court circles and vernacular academies, but that does not explain its advertisement at the Frankfurt Book Fair, or who the targeted purchasers there might be.⁴

Interpreting the list of Fair declarations is not straightforward, given the legal and commercial constraints under which the Fairs operated, the ambiguity of the terminology of declarations, and the complex practices of the publishers who declared their wares in its catalogues. I shall begin by giving an account of these difficulties, offering examples from the list given above, after which I shall discuss three groups of entries at greater length.

2 Novi, emendatiores, auctiores (“New, Improved, Enlarged”): The modus operandi of Fairs and Its Effect on Publishing Practices

For the details of what follows, see (Maclean 2021, 6–68).

In the half-century preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, the twice-yearly Fair was the preeminent European meeting place for scholars and book merchants, who went there to exchange news from the world of letters and advertise recent publications. From 1564, catalogues of the exhibited books were printed there (the most famous being the ones produced by the Augsburg bookseller Georg Willer the Elder (1514–1593)). The catalogues only became officially sanctioned publications after 1597, and even then, not all of the catalogues that were derived from its authorized version were identical. They also contained omissions and commissions: books whose titles had been submitted in advance but were not actually present at the fair, and books not declared that were available for purchase.

During this period, regulations were introduced both at the level of the City of Frankfurt and the Holy Roman Empire covering the financial, socio-economic, and politico-religious issues relating to the book market. Declarations of titles were subject to the oversight of the Frankfurt City Council and the Imperial Book Commission, which acted also for the Roman Catholic Church. Religious censorship was only applied directly to the De sphaera in respect of one Catholic commentator, and in the requirement in Catholic contexts that the names of Protestant commentators (such as Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560)) should be obliterated from copies (Sander 2018). It impinged on the publication of some non-theological works in a quite different way. It was very difficult to export books in all disciplines with imprints announcing that they had been produced in Protestant or Reformed cities (Frankfurt, Geneva) to countries that accepted the authority of the Roman Index. This led publishers using printers from those cities either to adopt fictitious bibliographical addresses of unimpeachable Catholicity (mainly Cologne and Lyon), or to disguise the provenance of their books by an oblique reference to it (in the case of Geneva, “Aurelia Allobrogum,” “Colonia Allobrogum,” and “Saint Gervais” were all used in this way). An example of the use of Cologne as an address to disguise a printing undertaken in Frankfurt by an author relevant to this paper is Giovanni Battista Ciotti’s edition of the De rebus naturalibus by Jacopo Zabarella (1533–1589) (Zabarella 1590a; Rhodes 2013, 41–43); Samuel Crespin (1560–1648) of Geneva used Saint Gervais as the address for his editions of Clavius’ commentary on the De sphaera, and published other works as though from Lyon, e.g., Antoine Favre’s (1557–1624) Coniecturae of 1607 (Favre 1607).

Certain commercial constraints applied to all declarations of titles which echoed the conditions found in licenses or privilege agreements. These are clearly set out in the title of the Book Catalogues: Catalogus Universalis, Pro Nundinis Francofurtensibus…Hoc Est, Designatio Omnium Librorum, Qui Istis Nundinis…, Vel novi vel emendatiores, aut auctiores prodierunt (Fig. 1). Ways were found to circumvent the requirement that all exhibited books should be in some sense “either new, or improved, or enlarged.” New is here apparently unambiguous, but in publishers’ and booksellers’ catalogues, it can describe any or all of the following: books new to Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogue; books newly available in Frankfurt (listed in a publisher’s backlist affixed to their stall at the Fair); books new to the given publisher’s or bookseller’s bookshop; a first printing; or any new edition. Editions were numbered, sometimes dishonestly, to indicate that changes had occurred (see the example of Clavius’ commentary on the De sphaera: “editio quinta,” declared by Samuel Crespin in 1602 is in fact the fourth edition, and “editio septima” published by Ciotti in 1603, is in fact the third edition). In both these cases, the dishonest numbering was used to attempt to sell editions that had been superseded.

Fig. 1

Titlepage of the Autumn Book Catalogue of the Frankfurt Fair for 1607, setting out in Latin and German the conditions to be met by books entered there: namely, that they have to be either altogether new, or revised and corrected, or enlarged. From: (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1607). Courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/254-4-quod-3s/start.htm?image=00001

Various claims were made about improved editions. Some were based on modifications to the text (“purged of an infinite number of errors:” ab infinitis mendis purgatus), here seen in the editions that claim to be “emendata.” A given publication might be augmented by additional material in the form of other texts (this applies to the texts from Wittenberg, and Goswin Cholinus’ (fl. 1588–1612) text of 1601, for example). The De sphaera might have the Pedro Nuñes (1502–1578) text, or the various scholiae by Élie Vinet (1509–1587), Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558), Albertus Hero (1549–1589), Francesco Giuntini, Christophorus Clavius, or Jacques Martin (fl. 1607), printed at the same time. A book might be produced in the same press run, yet be supplied with title pages bearing different dates to suggest revisions and updating (e.g., the editions of Clavius’ Commentary by Jean de Gabiano (1567–1618) in 1593 and 1594, and that of Giovanni Paolo Gelli (fl. 1606–1629) in 1606 and 1607, cited below). These practices led to the emergence of four categories of declarations: (1) genuinely new editions (e.g., the Pierre Mareschal (1572–1622) edition of Bernardus Morisanus’ (1600–1650) commentary, declared in A1624); (2) reissues disguised as new editions (e.g., Ciotti’s entry for S1603); (3) reprints disguised as new editions (e.g., the Cholinus entry for S1591); (4) unauthorized reprintings by unscrupulous printer-publishers, which, if these infringed the privilege system of book protection in given jurisdictions, could justifiably be called pirated editions and be pursued in law (this is possibly the case of Ciotti’s declaration in S1592, but by 1601, the relationship with the Basa firm had been regularized). The municipal and imperial authorities were naturally keen to prevent unauthorized republication as far as possible, in order to protect the interests of the international cohort of publishers on whom the Book Fair’s prosperity depended.

The usual form of declaration in the Fair catalogue included the format of a given book. This was necessary, as a good part of the trade in books was wholesale and involved merchants not only in cash transactions but also the swapping of books with those of other producers (“Tauschhandel”) according to the number of sheets of the various formats. The declarations in the fair catalogues mainly used the locative preposition “apud” after the title of the book. This could introduce any of three instances of names: (1) the printer or the printer-publisher (as in the case of Cholinus, de Gabiano, and Ciotti above); (2) the book merchant at whose temporary stall in Frankfurt’s Buchgasse the book in question could be found; (3) the name of an agent acting on commission. The entry for A1607—Christophori Clauii Bambergensis S.I. in Sphaeram Ioannis de sacro Bosco Commentarius Lugduni apud Iacob. Chouet 4 & 8 & Candon 4—is a good example of how confusing the entries can be; it will be examined in detail below. The presence of a publisher’s name in a given declaration is no guarantee that that person was physically present at the Fair: he could have been represented by a factor or a colleague. The Societas Veneta, for example, whom we shall meet again, represented a wide variety of Italian book producers.

Many foreign book merchants kept bookstores throughout the year in the city which were full of their unsold copies of old editions. Because they could store their holdings permanently in Frankfurt, this turned Frankfurt into an immense repository of books, all of which were available for purchase officially during the period of the fair, and through local agents at other times. The non-declared books were often advertised in “nomenclaturae,” or stock lists in the form of broadsides attached to a given stall, but even these did not list all the books available. The declarations in the catalogues under-represented the whole field of the books on offer, and almost certainly under-represented the number of editions of the De sphaera that were available.

One near-contemporary bibliography that was compiled in Frankfurt is the Bibliotheca classica of the bibliographer George Draudius (1573–1635). This first appeared in 1611 and was published in a much enlarged second edition in 1625 (Draudius 1611, 1625). Its publication was announced in the “libri prodituri” section of A1607, in which it is declared to be the list not only of books declared at the Fairs but also all those present elsewhere in Frankfurt (“Verzeichnis aller Bücher, so wol deren, welche je hin und wider in Buchläden gefunden warden, so in alten Bibliotheken fast gefunden warden, nach dem Alphabet ordentlich fürgestellet”). Booksellers were asked to send in details of their holdings either to the bookseller-publisher Peter Kopf (fl. 1593–1635) or to Draudius. The entry in the Bibliotheca classica of 1625 under the rubric “sphaerica” reveals that the following Sacrobosco editions could at some point have been found in Frankfurt (I have retained Draudius’ abbreviated descriptions, and removed references to other works on sphaeristics):

Ioannis de SACROBUSTO. Paris. 1507 in fol. cum Com. Iac. FABRI. Witeb. Venet & Antuerp.82.8. cum Alberti HERONIS Eliae VINETI, & Francisci IUNCTINI Scholijs. Colon. Apud Cholinum 91.8. In hanc: Bartholomaeus VESPUCIVS. Venet 1508. Cum aliis opusc. De Sphaera. Christoph CLAVIUS. Romae 75.4. Et ibid. apud Dominic. Basam. 81.4. …Venet. Apud Ciottum. 90.4. CICHUS Venet. 1499. In fol. cum alijs quibusdam. Erasmus Oswaldus SCHRECKENFUCHSIUS. Basiliae. 1569. fol. Franc. IUNCTINUS. Lugduni 1568.8. Hartmannus BEIER. Francof. 8. Iacobus FABER Venet 1405 cum aliorum Comm. In eand. Io GLOSCOVIENSIS. Cracouiae. 1514. Petr. CIRUELLENS. Paris. 1498.fol.cum Petri de Aliaco quaestionibus. …Bernar. MORISANVS.4. Francof. apud Mareschall. 1624.8.

Some of these dates may have been misrecorded (Faber [Stapulensis] is probably 1495, Iunctinus 1578, Ciotti 1591, Glogoviensis 1513), but allowing for this, there are seven editions mentioned that do not appear in the Fair Catalogues, of which six predate 1564, the year of the catalogue’s first appearance. This suggests how many editions could have been found in Frankfurt by an assiduous enquirer (as was Draudius).

The Fair catalogues were organized by subject area, beginning with the three senior university faculties of theology, law, and medicine; next came “libri historici,” and thereafter “libri philosophici,” in which category all the books relating to the arts course fell, including mathematical and astronomical works such as Sacrobosco’s De sphaera. The Catalogues were compiled from slips sent independently by exhibitors to the publisher of the book fair catalogue. This resulted in the presence of competing editions of the same work, advertised at the same time by their producers (as in S1601 and S1607, above). They frequently ended with an appendix of late declarations or contained a list of forthcoming books.

The relationships of the book merchants with each other were sometimes made explicit in prefatory material. The Heidelberg publisher Jean Mareschal (1510–1590), whose son we shall meet later in this essay, made this clear (possibly disingenuously) in his edition of Jacopo Zabarella’s logical works which reproduced without permission the authorized edition of the Venetian publisher Roberto Meietti, in which he addresses the author in the following terms:

There is no need to fear that the publisher Meietti would complain about the appearance of this edition, which has been brought out not for financial gain but for the public good; his character and probity are known to me; he is more likely to see himself as having been helped by [me] in the task of disseminating your excellent doctrine, for he will be able to sell his copies in Italy and neighboring places. Nor will there be any harm to him through the fact that copies of another edition are on sale in German lands, which very few copies of his own edition reach.⁵

The Fair catalogues contained much unauthorized publication of this kind; speculative and unscrupulous printers could use the printed editions of others as copy, saving the authorial costs, the need for closely supervised composition by a qualified proof-reader or “corrector,” and the expense of creating illustrations. Savings in the costs of production by the use of an existing edition as copy could be maximized by the choice of smaller formats and cheaper paper.

In broad terms, there are three possible relationships between publishers attending the Fair at this time: collaboration, peaceful coexistence, and competition. The advertisements listed above offer examples of all three relationships: (1) Collaboration could occur between publishers of different religious persuasions who allowed commercial considerations to override confessional allegiances. An advanced form of collaboration involved the sharing of an edition, which might also have entailed the sharing of typeface, etched plates or woodcuts (e.g., Ciotti and Basa 1601) (2) coexistence, as implied disingenuously in the Mareschal quotation given above, can be found in cases where different market zones were targeted (e.g., Cholinus and Ciotti 1601) (Clavius 1992, VI, letter no. 305), (3) competition in the same market zones, which applies to the rest.

One class of books—“scholastica” or school books that were mainly produced in smaller formats (8vo, 12mo, 16mo)—was quite frequently advertised in the section on philosophical books, together with the staple diet of new scholarly monographs or editions, which often were produced in larger formats. The editions of the De sphaera fell principally into the former category, but even the more expensive quarto editions were probably targeted at, and certainly acquired by, educational establishments.⁶ The extraordinary proliferation of universities, gymnasia, and colleges in Europe in the confessional age (roughly 1560–1650) produced a market opportunity that was vigorously competed for, and led to the frequent advertisement of textbooks (Maclean 2009a). It was less common for editions of school textbooks implicitly or explicitly produced for local consumption to be advertised at the Fairs, as can be seen in the case for the Elzeviers’ edition of the De Sphaera from 1626 to 1656 (“decreto illustr. et potent. DD. Ordinum Hollandiae et West-Frisiae, in usum scholarum ejusdem provinciae” (Sacrobosco and Burgersdijk 1626)). The Elzeviers were entrepreneurial publishers who were very frequent contributors to the Book Fair Catalogues and would not have passed up lightly an opportunity for international sales, but in this case clearly did not aspire to one. Other publishers of the De sphaera who seem also to target only local sales are the Scoto and Sessa publishing houses of Venice with eleven editions between them between 1569 and 1620, the Lyonnais Gazeau and Pillehotte who printed octavo editions between 1606 and 1617, and Spirainx of Dijon in 1619. There are also cases of sporadic advertisement at the Fairs: The Antwerp book merchants printed the De sphaera with additional material between 1542 and possibly 1593 but made no declarations at the Fair after 1582. One particular group of publishers—those working in Paris, whose names appear frequently in the Book Fair Catalogues for the relevant years—did not include among the items they declared the De sphaera, of which they produced at least ten editions between 1564 and 1619. The probable explanation for this is that they did not need an international dimension to their trade in order to achieve sufficient sales to make a profit. The items they did declare seem to have constituted an act of cultural politics, and to have been chosen to enhance their international reputation for up-to-date high-level scholarship.

3 Scholastica: Lutheran Pedagogy, the Reformed Academies, and the Jesuits

The radical revisions of school and university curricula in the second half of the sixteenth century opened up a market opportunity for publishers serving the Lutheran (Protestant), Reformed (principally Calvinist), and Catholic communities. These revisions are associated with the names of Melanchthon, Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), and the Society of Jesus, and in each case they were supported by an efficient publishing operation. Melanchthon, known as the “teacher of Germany” (praeceptor Germaniae), was the close associate of Martin Luther (1483–1546), and deeply involved with the academic curricula of the University of Wittenberg. He collaborated in a succession of editions of the Libellus de sphaera which appeared from 1531 to 1629 (Chap. 5). Only one of these editions was declared at the book fairs, in the Spring of 1601. This was produced by Zacharias Schürer (1570–1626), who became an independent publisher in 1600 when he took over the business of the recently deceased Andreas Hoffmann (d. 1600) (Benzing 1977, col. 1263). He paid for the printing of the Libellus de sphaera by the firm of Krafft (who had produced it up to 1568, and presumably still possessed the requisite images) in 1601.⁷ In the same year, he reissued the Opera omnia of Melanchthon. The Libellus de sphaera was reissued by his heirs in 1629, betokening poor sales in the intervening years, perhaps due to market saturation or changes in school curricula, or the decline of Melanchthon’s reputation and influence after the Formula of Concord of 1577–1580 (Dingel 1996; Maclean 2009b).

The fortunes of Petrus Ramus as an educational writer depended at various stages in his career on the Parisian André Wechel (d. 1581) and the Basel house of Pietro Perna (1519–1582). He was forced to flee from Paris after the St. Bartholomew’s eve massacre of August 1572 in which Ramus was assassinated. After Wechel had re-established himself in Frankfurt, a publishing war broke out between the two publishers of Ramus which resulted in an astonishing number of editions of Ramus’ various textbooks, including those on mathematics, and the espousal of his teaching methods by a significant group of Reformed academies, colleges and gymnasia in the Rhineland and Northern Germany after 1580 (Ong 1958). Friedrich Beurhaus (1536–1609), the head of the Dortmund Archigymnasium, and Bernhard Copius (1525–1589), Rector of Lemgo, were among those who promoted his works.

Beurhaus produced Ramus’ Dialectica with a commentary many times greater than the parent text; this was published in 1583 by the Catholic Maternus Cholinus (1525–1588), and again in 1596 by Goswin Cholinus of Cologne (Ramus and Beurhaus 1583, 1596), both of whom, as well as being zealous supporters of Counter-Reformation publications and producers of teaching manuals for the Jesuits including the De sphaera, supplied materials belonging to other pedagogical traditions. Ramus’ curricula were particularly popular in the Hanseatic cities, whose mercantile communities appreciated his practical approach to the teaching of mathematics. Ramus’ work on sphaeristics was unpublished at his death; it was developed by Wilhelm Adolf Scribonius (1550–1600) and used in the schools that followed a Ramist or “Semi-Ramist” curriculum. Other Reformed scholars who set out to provide a complete cursus philosophicus include Rudolphus Goclenius the Elder (1547–1628) and Bartholomäus Keckermann (1571–1609), whom we shall meet again in the context of the 1625 presentation of the De sphaera. Both were eclectic and irenic (Keckermann owed much to Jacopo Zabarella) and were served by significant and committed publishers who were active at the Fairs. The apogee of the encyclopedic ambitions of the Reformed community was the monumental Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia (1609–1620) of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) (Alsted 1620; Hotson 2007, 25–29, 74–79, 169–273).

In the Catholic camp (Chap. 11), the swift progress of Jesuit pedagogical establishments all over Europe, and later their missionary activities, led to measures to regulate their syllabuses; the first draft Ratio studiorum appeared in 1586, to be followed by another draft in 1591, and the definitive version of 1598–1599. Christophorus Clavius of the Collegio Romano, the commentator on the De sphaera, wrote memoranda to his Society in 1581, 1582, and again in 1593 about their teaching program, stressing the need for mathematics and astronomy, that were in his view underrated by the Society’s espousal of a strict Aristotelian conception of “scientia.“ In the final version of the Ratio studiorum, mathematics and astronomy were given a place, even if not as prominent as that for which Clavius lobbied. They also enjoyed a respectable status in the Aristotelian commentaries of the Coimbra fathers, who included the De sphaera in their own cursus.⁸ Clavius’ contribution to sphaeristics was such that Alsted recommended his De Sphaera commentary in the reading prescribed in his Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia (Hotson 2007, 200–202).

The other strand of German Catholic editions of the De sphaera was in the hands of Maternus Cholinus of Cologne, who began in the book trade in the 1540s. He was a close associate of the Jesuits, who acted sometimes as correctors in his print shop. He held valuable printing privileges (including a General Privilege for all his publications from the Imperial Chancery) and was a frequent attendee of the Frankfurt Fair (Schrörs 1808). The majority of his publications were in the service of the Roman Catholic Church, but he also produced philosophical and mathematical textbooks, of which the De sphaera was one. After his death in 1588, his son Goswin took over the very successful business; he was succeeded in turn by his son Peter Cholinus (d. ca. 1645) in 1610 (Reske 2015, 481–482, 494, 503). The Cholinus family printed the De sphaera in octavo, which is consistent with the aspiration to achieve sales of the work as a textbook, possibly for use in Jesuit schools: The editions of 1591, 1594, 1601, and 1610 bear the printer’s mark of the Society of Jesus on the title page. It is not clear whether this implies financial support from the Jesuits or their patrons, or whether it is an imprimatur relating solely to the content of the book, linking it to the teaching program of the Society.

The edition of 1601 has added material in the form of notes taken from Clavius’ commentary, probably in response to the Ratio studiorum of 1599.⁹ The first Cholinus edition attested by a surviving copy is 1566; this was not declared at the Frankfurt Fair, but the editions of 1581, 1591, 1601, and 1610 were.¹⁰ There is also an edition of 1594, which is a reprint (not a reissue) of the edition of 1591. The rhythm of these declarations is dictated by the General Privilege, which specified the protection of their editions for periods of ten years. The publishing house would have a strong interest in reprinting at the end of a decade with some modification to meet the legal requirement of “emendatior, novus or auctior,” as happened in 1601 with the addition of excerpts from Clavius’ commentary. From the evidence of the reprint in 1594, it would seem that they were supplying a steady market in scholastica, and benefiting from the possession of the woodcuts, which saved the cost of providing new illustrations. From these declarations, it is possible to infer that the Cholinus house had secured control over a given, probably relatively local, sector of the market, and sought to extend their sales into other parts of the German lands through declarations at the Fair.

4 The Clavius Factor: Basa and Ciotti

There are two difficulties which have to be addressed in respect of the various editions of Clavius’ commentary on the De sphaera. The first concerns the format: This text is clearly targeted at Jesuit colleges and any other institution that might wish to avail itself of it, but it is in an expensive format (quarto) and is of substantial length. That is not consistent with the usual, more economical way in which schoolbooks were produced. Guillaume Cavellat (1500–1576) (Chap. 9), Girolamus Scotus (1505–1572), Melchiorre Sessa (1505–1565), Cholinus, Jean Bellère (1526–1595) and Pierre Bellère (1530–1600), and Johann Krafft the Elder (1510–1578) all chose the format of octavo, and presumably profited from the choice, as their editions were repeated at regular intervals. Is Clavius’ text a quarto because that format alone can accommodate the text and its illustrations for pedagogical purposes? Or did the first edition in Rome determine the format of later editions because the illustrations could only fit into a page of quarto or greater? Or because there was a custom in Rome to produce scholastica in quarto?

The second difficulty concerns reissues of the text. A reissue (where only the title page or the first gathering is changed) can bear witness to a number of commercial decisions. If the reissue is from the same press, then the motivation is most likely to be a desire to seem as up to date as possible, or to qualify for declaration at a Book Fair under the category “libri novi.” If the reissue has a different bibliographical address, the second motivation could of course still apply, but it is more likely that the change of address was dictated by the targeted market zone, whether Catholic or broadly Protestant. In the case of the Clavius commentary, there are examples of the former possibility (Rome 1570, 1575; Gabiano 1593, 1594; Gelli 1606, 1607), as well as the second (Gabiano 1602; Crespin 1602). A reissue with a changed publication date can also indicate a failure in sales, as in the case of the Wittenberg 1629 edition mentioned above.

In this list, I have supplied in italics the Rome, Venice, and Lyon editions of Clavius’ Commentary that were not declared at the Frankfurt Fair, in order to give coherence to the discussion that follows.

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Romae: apud Victorium Helianum, 1570, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1570)

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Romae, 1575, 4to.

  (Lalande 1803, 101). No extant copy in public domain

• A1576 Christophori Clauii Bambergensis, ex societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannes de Sacro Bosco Commentarius 4. Romae.

  No extant copy in public domain.

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Romae:ex officina Dominici Basae, 1581, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1581)

• S1582 Christophori Clauii Bambergensis ex Societate Iesu in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco commentar[a]ius 4. Romae.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1581)

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Romae: ex officina Dominici Basae, 1585, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1585)

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Venice: apud Ioan. Baptistam Ciotum 1591, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1591)

• S1592 Christophori Clauij Bambergensis societatis Iesu in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacrobosco commentarius tertio recognitus & locupletatus Ven. 8.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1591).

• Christophori Clavii in Sphaeram Ioan de Sacro Bosco Com[m]entarius. Nunc quarto ab ipso Authore recognitus, et plerisque in locis locupletatus, Lyon: sumptibus Joannis de Gabiano, 1593 and 1594.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1593) or (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1594).

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Venetiis: apud Bernardum Basam sub signo solis, 1596, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1596).

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Venetiis: sub signo solis, 1601, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1601b).

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Venetiis: apud Io. Baptistam Ciottum sub signo aurorae, 1601, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1601a).

• S1601 Christophori Clauii commentarius in Sphaeram Ioan. de Sacrobusto, iam recognitus apud [Joannem Baptistam Ciotti] in 4.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1601a).

• Christophori Clavii Bambergensis, ex Societate Iesu, in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, commentarius, Venetiis: sub signo aurorae, 1603, 4to.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1603).

• S1603 Christoph. Clauij in Sphaeram Ioan de sacro busto Comment. Editio septima locupletior. ap soc Venet. in 4. 1603.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1603).

Clavius’ commentary on the De sphaera first appeared in 1570 from the presses of Vittorio Eliano (1528–1581) who began printing for the Jesuits in 1570.¹¹ According to Lalande and de Backer-Sommervogel, the bibliographers of the Society of Jesus, this edition was reprinted (or reissued) in Rome in 1575; although no copy of this reprint or reissue appears to have survived, confirmation of its existence is to be found in the Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogue for Autumn 1576 (Lalande 1803, 101). Thereafter, Clavius’ commentary was revised by the author five times before his death in 1612: 1581 (“iterum,” printed by Domenico Basa (1500–1596)), 1585 (“tertio,” printed by Basa), 1593–1594 (“quarto,” printed by de Gabiano), 1606 (“quinto,” printed by Gelli in Rome), and 1611–1612 (“postremo,” published in Mainz by Anton Hierat (fl. 1597–1627) of Cologne as part of Clavius’ Opera mathematica in folio). It is not clear why the fourth revision of 1593–1594 was entrusted to the brothers de Gabiano in Lyon and endowed with a ten-year Privilege of the Jesuit Order, to which was associated the Society of Jesus’ General French Privilege of 1583. According to Adriaan van Roomen (1561–1619), Clavius’ correspondent, there was only one Roman bookseller (Gaspar van den Wouwer (1564–1616), originally from Antwerp) present at the Frankfurt Book Fairs in 1593 (Clavius 1992, IV, letter no. 96 (11 November 1593)). Perhaps Clavius, who no doubt hoped to disseminate his commentary beyond Italy, sought a publisher who could ensure an international distribution. It is noteworthy also that the “third” editions of Basa and Ciotti in 1596 and 1601 take no cognizance of the availability of a revised fourth edition, which may suggest that the local Italian market was impervious to certain northern publications.

After the production of the first edition of Clavius’ commentary on the De sphaera in 1570 by Eliano and its possible reissue in 1575, the subsequent second and third editions were produced by Domenico Basa in 1581 and 1585, in collaboration with Francesco Zanetti (1530–1591) (Chap. 11). Basa was one of the major publishers and printers in Rome and a close associate and friend of Paolo Manuzio (1512–1574), the scholar and grandson of the famous Aldo. Basa was very well connected with members of the religious hierarchy and was twice involved in the development of the Vatican Presses. His relations with other Roman book merchants were not however always harmonious. His management of the Vatican Presses passed on his death in 1596 to his nephew Bernardo, who represented the interests of his uncle in Venice. His bookshop “all’insegna del sole” (sub signo Solis) was established in 1582 and his presses became active in 1584 (Cioni 1970). His reprinting of the third edition of Clavius’ commentary in 1596 and 1601 is inextricably linked to the reprintings and reissues undertaken by Giovanni Battista Ciotti, to whom I now turn.

Ciotti was a native of Siena, as was one of the earliest Italian attendees of the Frankfurt book fair, Francesco de’ Franceschi who almost certainly took him under his wing in 1587. Their publishing careers were subsequently very closely allied. Both were prolific publishers of Italian imaginative literature and post-Tridentine theological and religious books; both had strong connections to the Society of Jesus; both were based in Venice, but collaborated widely with printers in other Italian cities and in Frankfurt; both had editions printed with the fictitious bibliographical address “Cologne;” both frequently imported books from the Frankfurt Book Fair; both were members of the exporting consortium (which included also their Venetian colleague Roberto Meietti) known in Frankfurt as the Societas Veneta, founded in 1592, which remained very active until 1613 (Maclean 2021).

Ciotti was an opportunist and a somewhat unscrupulous publisher with an eye to potentially profitable scholastica: For example, he reprinted Zabarella’s De rebus naturalibus, as we have seen, in the wake of the Meietti and Mareschal editions, and declared it in the spring catalogue of 1590 (Rhodes 2013). It is therefore not surprising that he should aspire to do the same to the Clavius commentary. Ciotti’s first involvement was with the third recension, which he produced from the Basa edition of 1585 in 1591. In it, he wrote a dedicatory letter to a young Veronese literary figure dated 1591, in which he claims that Clavius’ commentary had been printed in Rome “three or four times;” this could either show that he only had a vague sense of the sequence of printings, or that he was aware that the lost 1575 edition was a reissue.¹² He stressed the fact that he had had new illustrations made, and that the book had undergone “diligent correction.”¹³ From the colophon, it appears that the book was printed for him by Francesco de’ Franceschi (fl. 1558–1599) (Rhodes 2013, 110). He declared it at the Book Fair of Spring 1592. It was followed by another Venice edition of Ciotti’s text in 1596 by Bernardo Basa.¹⁴ This is a reprint of the Basa 1585 publication of the third edition (even though by now the fourth edition had appeared in Lyon in 1593–1594); the errors recorded on the errata page in the 1585 edition are incorporated into the text. What Clavius thought of this edition of a superseded recension of his text is not recorded. It contains Ciotti’s dedication, given a new date of 1596, and uses the same illustrations as the 1591 edition. The presence of the re-dated dedication makes it very likely that this is a commercial collaboration with Ciotti, printed by Daniele Zanetti (fl. 1576–1606), Basa’s printer in Venice. Bernardo is presumed to have died in or before 1599; his widow Isabetta was active in the book trade in 1600–1601, inscribing the few books that she produced (or reissued) with the bibliographical address “ad instantia d’Isabetta di Bernardo Basa.” The shared edition of Clavius (still not recognizing the de Gabiano fourth edition) appeared in 1601 with the addresses of both her (sub signo solis) and Ciotti (“apud Io. Baptistam Ciottum sub signo aurorae”).¹⁵ From the style of the printing, and the presence of a “Regestum” at the end of the volume (a compositorial practice more common in Rome than Venice), I infer this to have been printed for Isabetta Basa; Ciotti either collaborated ab initio, or bought up the stock after the demise of the Venetian enterprise of the Basa family. It appears not to have sold well, as Ciotti reissued it in 1603 (its colophon reads “Venetiis 1601”) and added the false claim that it was the seventh edition of the Clavius commentary. He declared it through the Societas Veneta at the Spring Fair of 1603.

5 Lyon and St. Gervais

This is the relevant sequence of declarations:

• S1578 Fr. Iunctini Florentini, sacrae Theologiae Doctoris, Com[m]entaria in Sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco accuratissima. 8. Lugduni apud Philippum Tinghium.

  (Sacrobosco and Giuntini 1578)

• A1592 Christoph. Clauii in Sphaeram Ioan de Sacro Bosco Com[m]entarius. Editio 4. ab authore recognita. Lugd. sumptibus fratrum de Gabiano in 4. futuris nundinis ve[r]n[alibus] exponatur.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1593) or (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1594)

• Christophori Clavii in Sphaeram Ioan de Sacro Bosco Com[m]entarius. Nunc quarto ab ipso Authore recognitus, et plerisque in locis locupletatus, Lyon: sumptibus Joannis de Gabiano, 1602.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1602b)

• Christophori Clavii in Sphaeram Ioan de Sacro Bosco Com[m]entarius. Nunc quarto ab ipso Authore recognitus, et plerisque in locis locupletatus, St. Gervais: Crispinus, 1602.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1602a)

• S1602 Christophori Clauii Iesuitae commentarius in sphaeram Sacrobusti. Editio quinta. Lugduni apud Crispinum.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1602a)

• Christophori Clavii in Sphaeram Ioan de Sacro Bosco Com[m]entarius. Nunc quarto ab ipso Authore recognitus, et plerisque in locis locupletatus, St. Gervais: Crispinus, 1607.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1607a, b)

• Christophori Clavii in Sphaeram Ioan de Sacro Bosco commentarius, Rome: Sumptibus Io. Pauli Gellii, 1606.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1606) or (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1607d)

• A1607 Sphaera Clauii nova Romae. Apud Arnold. Quentel.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1606) or (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1607d)

• Christophori Clavii in Sphaeram Ioan de Sacro Bosco Com[m]entarius. Nunc quinto ab ipso Authore recognitus, et plerisque in locis locupletatus, Lyon: sumptibus Joannis de Gabiano, 1607.

  (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1607c)

• A1607 Christophori Clauii Bambergensis S.I. in Sphaeram Ioannis de sacro Busto Commentarius. Lugduni apud Iacob. Chouet 4 & 8 & Candon 4.

  Not determinable

A version of the Giuntini commentary first appeared together with others in Lyon in 1564, from the Giunti presses (Sacrobosco et al. 1564).¹⁶ Filippo Tinghi (d. 1580), a relative of the Giunti (Chap. 8), published it in two volumes in 1577–1578 with a ten-year French Royal Privilege dated 24 December 1576 and accompanied this publication with a separate printing of the plaintext corrected by Giuntini which was not announced at the Book Fair. The Fair declaration was one of only two that Tinghi made in his time as publisher, both in 1578, two years before his death. Tinghi was a very shrewd and experienced publisher with strong connections in France, Italy, and Spain. He was the promoter of Giuntini, who, like Tinghi himself, was a member of the powerful Italian community of Lyon. No doubt he declared the theologian-astronomer’s work in Frankfurt to draw international attention to his work. His heir, Symphorien Beraud (fl. 1571–1586), included the commentary in the folio edition of Giuntini’s Speculum astrologiae of 1581, which was reissued in 1583 (Baudrier 1964–1965, V, 60–61, 65–66).

As recorded above, the expanded fourth revision of Clavius’ commentary was entrusted to the brothers Jean and David de Gabiano (ca. 1559–ca. 1598) in Lyon who were in partnership, and endowed with a ten-year Privilege of the Jesuit Order, to which was associated the Society of Jesus’ General French Privilege of 1583.¹⁷ It was printed in Lyon by Guichard Jullieron (d. 1627) and reissued in 1594. There are various noteworthy features of this edition and its producer, Jean de Gabiano. After their family’s self-imposed exile to Calvinist Geneva in 1568, both brothers had returned to Lyon in 1581, to take over their uncle’s book business. There is no indication that the brothers chose to convert back to Catholicism as the price to pay for their repatriation. In those years, the town council of Lyon seems to have been very intolerant toward members of the Reformed Faith (Baudrier 1964–1965, V, 298), but it could not afford to turn away the scions of a family of very powerful marchands-libraires such as the de Gabianos, who had been established in the city since the beginning of the century and had very close commercial ties with the printing industry in Geneva (Baudrier 1964–1965, VII, 207). A notable symptom of these ties was the practice, engaged in by even impeccably Catholic Lyonnais book merchants such as Filippo Tinghi, of publishing books printed in Geneva bearing title pages with Lyon addresses, all under letters patent from the king.¹⁸ The Consulat (the council of twelve of Lyon) forbade this practice; they attributed the decline of book production in Lyon directly to it. On July 14, 1588, they summoned a group of influential libraires including David de Gabiano to answer the charge that they had severely damaged the printing industry in Lyon by using Genevan printers and by citing on their products Lyon as their bibliographical address, to ensure that their works could be sold in Catholic countries. This had led to the emigration of compositors and other print workers to Geneva. The accusation read as follows:

That to the great detriment of the City and [its] journeymen-printers, [the named marchand-libraires] have destroyed the printing industry in Lyon and have transferred their printing activities to Geneva, and, what is even worse, that they declare on the title pages of the books they have printed in Geneva that they have been printed in Lyon, so that they can be put on sale in Italy, Spain and other Catholic countries, this constituting fraud and the suppositious use of a name…and that as a result printing, which once had a high status and reputation in this City of Lyon, will be altogether lost, and in order to earn their living, the said journeymen-printers will be forced for as long as this state of affairs lasts to leave Lyon and to go to Geneva, where in the course of time they become heretics.¹⁹

The marchands-libraires produced the counter-accusation that the printers had imposed ruinously high tariffs on them, which obliged them to engage in an unscrupulous commercial practice (Baudrier 1964–1965, V, 41).

Two of the three editions of Clavius’ commentary that the de Gabianos declared (1593–1594, 1607) have a colophon in which the Lyon printers that they engaged to produce them are named (1593–1594: Guichard Juillieron; 1607: Jacques du Creux dit Molliard (1607–1652)). It is reasonable to suppose that this proof of Lyonnais printing was a response to the arraignment of 1588. The fourth edition produced in their name in 1602 does not bear the name of a printer (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1602b). It is identical (except for one line of the title page) to the book declared in Spring 1602 with the bibliographical address “Sancti Gervasii, apud Samuelem Crispinum” (Sacrobosco and Clavius 1602a). Samuel Crespin was the son of a prominent Genevan printer-publisher, whose earliest imprints date from the mid-1590s. He declared books with Lyon addresses and produced works in tandem with Jean de Gabiano; there is evidence that they were on good commercial terms.²⁰ On its title page, this edition claims to have been produced “cum privilegio.” At the end of the volume, as is also the case of the 1593–1594 edition, a Jesuit privilege is reproduced, together with a short paragraph of errata which contains an expression of piety in the Catholic mode (“vale, et nostro labore ad D[ei] O[ptimi] M[aximi] maiorem gloriam fruere”). There is no indication why a Lyonnais publisher (albeit one who published other Jesuit authors)²¹ rather than a Roman one was entrusted with these two recensions by Clavius. No Genevan publisher (Saint Gervais being a transparent cognomen for Geneva) could ever have possessed or cited a Jesuit license. The copious illustrative material of the 1602 editions is that of the 1593–1594 edition. Jean de Gabiano had sold the plates to Claude Michel of Tournon (d. ca. 1630) in June 1599, who may have printed for both Crespin and de Gabiano. The text of the two editions is identical. It would seem likely that both versions of this edition were produced either in Tournon or in Geneva. The title page correctly records that it is the fourth edition, but the declaration in the Spring Catalogue of 1602 calls it the fifth.

Crespin reprinted the 1602 edition in 1607, but its saleability was compromised by the genuine fifth edition that had appeared a year before in Rome at the expense of the Roman bookseller Gelli.²² The Roman edition was reprinted in 1607 in Lyon by Jacques du Creux for Jean de Gabiano, using the Gelli copy of 1606. It was reprinted in turn by Crespin in 1608 and declared at the Spring Fair; it uses the same images as 1593–1594 and 1602, but the text is certainly recomposed. The Roman bookseller Gelli reissued the 1606 edition in 1607, and declared it in the Autumn of 1607, presumably to assert its right to be seen as the authorized text against de Gabiano’s reprint. It was sold through the stall of Arnold Quentel (d. 1621) of Cologne, and not through the Societas Veneta (Fig. 2). Perhaps that association’s link with the somewhat unscrupulous Ciotti made it unattractive to some Italian book merchants; it is also possible that Gelli chose Quentel because of his excellent relations with Cologne book merchants.²³

Fig. 2

A page from the Libri philosophici section of the Autumn Catalogue of 1607, showing the entry for the edition of Clavius’ commentary on the Sphaera produced in Rome by Giovanni Paolo Gelli, and advertised as being on sale through the stall of Arnold Quentel of Cologne. From: (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1607). Courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/254-4-quod-3s/start.htm?image=00021

We now come to the enigmatic A1607 entry:

• Christophori Clauii Bambergensis S.I. in Sphaeram Ioannis de sacro Bosco Commentarius Lugduni apud Iacob. Chouet 4 & 8 & Candon 4 (Fig. 3)

  Fig. 3

  

  A page from the Libri philosophici section of the Autumn Catalogue of 1607, showing the enigmatic portmanteau entry for two different quarto editions and one octavo edition of Clavius’ commentary on the Sphaera, associated with Lyon as a place of publication and the book merchants Jacques Chouët (of Geneva) and Horace Cardon (of Lyon), who kept stalls at the Fair. From: (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1607). Courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/254-4-quod-3s/start.htm?image=00018

“Apud” here can only refer to the stall at which the books were available for sale. Jacques Chouet (1626–1683) was not a Lyonnais, but a Genevan publisher and a colleague of Crespin; he and his heirs had a stall in Frankfurt.²⁴ I suggest, therefore, that the quarto edition here announced is that produced by Crespin of the fourth edition. The edition “apud Ca[r]don” was put on sale at the stall of Horace Cardon (1566–1641), a prominent Lyonnais libraire and a colleague of the de Gabiano brothers. It is, I suggest, the newly produced fifth edition by de Gabiano, from the Roman edition of Gelli of 1606. It carries the General Jesuit Privilege for the Kingdom of France dated 10 May 1583, and a specific six-year Privilege dated January 11, 1607, which protected the publication of three works by Clavius: the commentary on the De sphaera, the Geometrica, and the De crepusculis tractatio.

The octavo “apud Jacob. Chouet” is an enigma: It may refer to one of the Crespin and de Gabiano editions, as the main text, although quarto in size, is in gatherings of eight rather than four, but this is a weak surmise. It might also (even less plausibly) be the 1606 octavo edition of the De sphaera (not containing the Clavius commentary) produced in Lyon by Hugues Gazeau (fl. 1584–1611). There is one other entry in the Autumn Catalogue of 1607, under the rubric of books forthcoming at the next Fair (Fig. 4) The Cholinus firm, that had declared this version of their edition in the Spring of 1601, announced a reprint, which did not in fact appear until 1610. Such premature announcements were not uncommon and were used to inform rivals of a publisher’s intention to bring out a new edition, in order to deter others from unauthorized reprinting.

Fig. 4

A page from the section of the Autumn Catalogue of 1607 listing books due to appear at the next Fair, one of which is a reprint of the edition of the Sphere by Cholinus that first appeared in 1601. The reprint eventually appeared in 1610. From: (Catalogus…autumnalibus 1607). Courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/254-4-quod-3s/start.htm?image=00042

6 The Owl of Minerva and the cursus philosophicus: Mareschal and Morisanus

Under the rubric “Libri Philosophici” of the Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogue of Autumn 1624, the following two books were declared:

• Bernardi Morisani Derensis Ibernici In Aristotelis Logica, Physica, Ethica, Francofurti apud Petrum Mareschall in 4.

  (Morisanus 1625)

• Ejusdem Commentarius in Sphaeram Ioannis de S. Bosco ibid. in 8.

  (Sacrobosco and Morisanus 1625).

These entries bring together two very different figures, united by exile and an interest in the Arts Course. I shall deal with them in turn. Pierre Mareschal was the son of the Lyonnais publisher Jean Mareschal. His father was an early convert to Calvinism and became himself a refugee, having fled from Lyon after its return to Catholic control in 1563. Jean Mareschal went first to Basel, and then to Heidelberg where he became one of the accredited university booksellers, whose role it was to publish disputations and official university documents (Benzing 1977, col. 1210). On most of the books he published, the title page did not specify a place but strongly implied Mareschal’s Lyonnais identity by the use of the epithet “Lugdunensis” after his name. His publications include Calvinist theological and political polemic and works by prominent scholars on the university arts course and its three senior faculties. Some of these were unauthorized reprints, as we have seen in the case of Zabarella.

The widespread practice of unauthorized reprinting was engaged in also by his son, Pierre, who was born in 1572. He matriculated at the University of Heidelberg on August 24, 1591, where he acquired a sophisticated grasp of Latin to which his later prefaces bear witness, and succeeded his father in due course as a university bookseller (Toepke 1886, 2, 154 (no. 126: August 24th, 1591)). From 1591 to 1598, he published a number of works in the same subject areas as those chosen by his father. Two of his publications, both polemical works by the Marburg reformed philosopher Rudolphus Goclenius the Elder, attacked the gnesiolutheran Daniel Hoffmann (ca. 1538–1611), the Helmstedt scholar who argued that philosophy should not be divorced from theology: The relevance of this will emerge below.²⁵ After 1598, Mareschal’s presses fell silent, but he continued to act as a bookseller in Heidelberg until 1622, when the Palatinate city was conquered after a siege by Bavarian and Spanish forces which ended on September 16. This led to the looting of the city’s cultural heritage, including the magnificent Palatine library which was sent by the Duke of Bavaria as a bribe and a trophy to the Pope in Rome.²⁶

Mareschal was linked to a number of prominent scholars and publishers who fled from the city as a consequence of this event: the Calvinist theologians Paul Tossanus (1572–1634) Abraham Scultetus (1566–1625), David (1548–1622) and Philip Paraeus (1576–1648), Janus Gruter (1560–1627), the Elector Palatinate’s Librarian, as well as the distinguished scholarly printer-publishers Isaac (1598–1676) and Abraham Commelin (b. 1597), Gotthard Vögelin (b. 1597) (both of whose printing enterprises were already internationally based and afforded an easy transition of the presses to Leiden and Leipzig, respectively), and Johann Ammon (1623–1656), whom he joined on his flight to Frankfurt.²⁷ Ammon was a son-in-law of Theodor de Bry (1561–1623), the prominent publisher of illustrated books, and had connections through him to the cartographer Matthaeus Merian (1593–1650), the engraver Paul de Zetter of Hanau (1600–1667), and his brothers Jacob (b. 1609) and Peter de Zetter (fl. 1629–1635), who was to join the consortium of printer-publishers known as the Wecheliani, the foremost Calvinist printing house in Frankfurt and nearby Hanau. All of these figures could be said to belong to the by then beleaguered “Calvinist international” (Grell 2011; Murdock 2011). Paul de Zetter was later to engrave a portrait of Pierre Mareschal, which was clearly intended for inclusion in an unpublished recension of the Bibliotheca Chalcographica, Illustrium Virtute atque Eruditione in tota Europa, Clarissimorum Virorum Theologorum, Iurisconsultorum, Medicorum, Historicorum, Geographicorum, Politicorum, Philosophorum, Poetarum, Musicorum, Aliorumque…, a continuation of Jean-Jacques Boissard’s (1528–1602) collection of images of prominent European scholars that appeared in 1650. Mareschal’s portrait is one of the groups of Heidelberg worthies listed above who left that city around the same time as Mareschal.²⁸ It describes him as enduring exile “for the love of religion” and dying in Strasbourg in 1622.²⁹ This cannot be the case, as he dates the dedications in his Frankfurt books after that year. Nothing is heard of Mareschal after 1625, which may well be the year of his death.³⁰ Shortly after his arrival in Frankfurt, he set up his bookshop and began printing and publishing, often in collaboration with his fellow refugee Johann Ammon, who remained active as a producer of books for several decades thereafter.³¹ The titles that they produced jointly and severally reflect Ammon’s connection to the de Bry family (maps and emblems), and the interests represented in the portfolio of publications of Mareschal’s father: Calvinist pastoral literature, speculatively produced reprintings in various fields, and works in the higher faculties and philosophy. Like his father, Mareschal declared most of his publications at the Frankfurt Fair.³²

Mareschal’s most surprising titles—which are not reprints—are in my view those written by a scholar originally from Derry in Ireland called Bernardus Morisanus. He was a member of the Irish Catholic diaspora, a refugee like Mareschal, but of a very different religious persuasion.³³ Mareschal wrote prefaces to both of the previously unpublished textbooks of Morisanus that he had acquired (In Aristotelis Logicam, Physicam, Ethicam, Apoletesma and In Sphaeram Joannis de S. Bosco commentarius…nunc primum publicae utilitati donatus), which were intended to be sold together as a pedagogical package (Morisanus 1625; Sacrobosco and Morisanus 1625). The full title of the Apotelesma (Commentariis luculentissimis, ad mentem Magni Magistri [viz. Aristotelis] penitus accommodatis, ut et Disputationibus ingeniosissimis, quibus cum veteres tum recentiores Controversiae solide pertractantur atque deciduntur, universum Peripateticae Philosophiae Corpus absolvens) reveals Mareschal’s targeted market: the purchasers of complete pedagogical courses for schools, colleges, and universities. In the preface to the work, Mareschal does not disclose any more about the deceased author than that he was “a most acute philosopher and a very subtle disputant,” that his work is remarkable for its brevity and innovative discussions of philosophical issues arising from the texts, and that it should not be ignored because its author lacked the reputation of more famous writers of compendious philosophical texts (Zabarella, Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), Francesco Piccolomini (1520–1604), Benito Perera (1536–1610), Franciscus Toletus (1532–1596), Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Goclenius the Elder, and the Coimbra Fathers are here named by Mareschal).³⁴ The most significant name in this list may well be Keckermann, who set out to provide a complete philosophy course for the Reformed community of Europe to challenge the Jesuits’ teaching program. Mareschal’s interest in these works by Morisanus lay principally therefore in the fact that they belong to the genre of cursus philosophicus. There are indications that the preface was not without effect, for Morisanus’ books are found in many European Catholic libraries; a Cambridge don called Richard Holdsworth also recommended them to a Cambridge undergraduate of the 1640s (Trentman 1982, esp.: 836–837).

Mareschal’s act of publication follows what I believe to be the opportunistic acquisition of Morisanus’ Nachlass.³⁵ Through Mareschal’s own university training, the precedent publications of his father (Zabarella) and his own production of Goclenius’ work, he was in a good place to judge the quality of Morisanus’ work. Mareschal chose not to make anything of Morisanus’ explicit statement in the Apotelesma of his membership of the Society of Jesus, where he associates himself with a group of Jesuits from the Spanish Netherlands.³⁶ This may suggest that Morisanus was resident for some time in that province (there were Jesuit Colleges in Louvain, Douai, and Antwerp, and a Jesuit house in Brussels) (Fraesen and Kenis 2012). Morisanus’ Apotelesma contains summaries, commentaries, and disputations on parts of the Aristotelian corpus that are consistent with the program of the Coimbra Jesuit Fathers, whose Aristotelian pedagogical works, published between 1591 and 1606, constituted part of what is now known as the second scholastic. The commentary on Sacrobosco’s De sphaera, which also formed part of the curriculum of Portuguese Jesuits, pays special tribute to that of Christophorus Clavius (Sacrobosco and Morisanus 1625, 13, 18; Carvalho 2018, 85).³⁷ The ensemble of texts does not correspond to the mathematical component of the Jesuit Ratio studiorum, but to the genre of cursus philosophicus, as Mareschal’s preface makes clear.³⁸ This may suggest that the market for the De sphaera in Jesuit Colleges was saturated by the mid-1620s; if money was to be made out of pedagogical texts, then a new corpus needed to be put in place. An unusual feature of Morisanus’ text is its references to the works of Galen (medicine forming no part of the Jesuit curriculum).³⁹ It was also unusual for expatriate Irish scholars to be committed Thomists, as Morisanus was; most of them at this time were Franciscans and Scotists (Binasco 2020).

In his preface to the De Sphaera, Mareschal declares that he was moved to publish it for the benefit of learned youth and “of the Church and Commonwealth.”⁴⁰ As the Apotelesma and the De Sphaera are explicitly and even polemically Catholic in tone, this is difficult to reconcile either with Mareschal’s previous secularist publications by Goclenius or his other Frankfurt imprints of the years 1624–1625 that are very explicitly Calvinist. This would suggest that the edition of Morisanus’ texts was a speculative enterprise aimed at all those with an interest in scholastic pedagogy (hence the silence over Morisanus’ membership of the Society of Jesus, which would not have been a recommendation to all potential purchasers).

Taken together, the two works constitute a not inconsiderable investment of money by Mareschal. This implies that he had arrived in Frankfurt with some funds at his disposal: an implication that can be drawn also from his financial support of another publication at this time.⁴¹ In this case therefore, Sacrobosco’s De sphaera achieved publication through its association with an Aristotelian philosophical corpus, and the opportunism of an exiled learned publisher newly arrived on the Frankfurt scene who suppressed its Jesuit provenance in an attempt to gain access to a broad market for pedagogical material of a traditional kind.

7 Some Conclusions

This investigation has been dependent on evidence from material bibliography, that is, the description of books as physical objects, and the use of contextual data to explain the circumstances of their publication. In a number of cases, it has been possible to show that editions with different title pages and dates are in fact the results of the same printing event (Ciotti 1601; Basa 1601; Ciotti 1603; Gabiano 1602; Crespin 1602; Gelli 1606, 1607; Gabiano 1593, 1594). This means that the seventeen editions of Clavius’ commentary between 1570 and 1608 recorded in bibliographies represent only twelve printing events. It has also been possible to establish by visual inspection whether editions with the same pagination and text composition are reprints or not, and to form the hypothesis that there will always be a final reprint in a series that will not sell well and could well lead to a reissue. Thus, in the case of Wittenberg, the reprint of 1601 that was reissued in 1629 can be said to show that there was a clear decline in pedagogical use of the De sphaera at some point between these dates for the relevant market zone. But the Scoto edition of the De sphaera which appeared in Venice in 1620 (Sacrobosco et al. 1620) is a reprint, not a reissue, of the previous edition of 1586 (Sacrobosco et al. 1586), and probably indicates that the Scoto presses had some confidence in the saleability of the 1620 edition. The same would apply to the Cholinus 1610 reprint of the 1601 edition (Sacrobosco et al. 1601). Arguments about the “popularity” and the “impact” of a given text derived from the number of “editions” can be supported or undermined by determining whether a given printing event is a reprint or a reissue. This can throw light on the speculative commercial activity of publishers, who in some cases (reprintings) were predicting the continued existence of a given market, and in others (reissues), were simply trying to get any return whatsoever from dead stock.

In the case of illustrations, it has not been possible to create a stemma, or show which sets of plates and diagrams have been deployed in different editions. This is due to the remarkable skills of woodcutters, who were able to create near-exact reproductions of existing images and could also subtly adapt existing ones. If a stemma could be established, then more could be deduced about the relationships between publishers and editions. In the case of the images found in the Clavius commentaries, it would be reasonable to suppose that there were at least three sets: The 1570 set that was used subsequently by Basa, Gelli, and eventually Hierat, who asked for them to be sent to him as he was preparing the edition of the complete works of Clavius in the Spring of 1609 (Clavius 1992, VI, letter no. 305);⁴² the set that Ciotti claims to have produced in 1591; and the de Gabiano set of 1593–1594, that was used by Crespin and bought by Michel of Tournon in 1599, but more work is needed to establish all of this.

The strong connection with the Society of Jesus is evident from the involvement of their chosen printer-publishers (Eliano, Gelli, Basa, Ciotti, Gabiano, Cholinus), and the effect of the Ratio Studiorum’s appearance on marketing (in 1601, notably). The 1607 cluster of declarations is linked more specifically to the latest edition of Clavius. The lull in publication after 1610 could be explained by market saturation.⁴³ The confessional rivalry which found expression in competing comprehensive philosophy courses is a feature of the 1610s, and may help to explain the last declared commentary of 1625 by Morisanus, which does not flag up its Jesuit connection, but has a potential place in a complete cursus philosophicus of a pre-Copernican kind.