Co-operative Inter-regional Worlds: Productions, Markets, Travel and Trade

Workshop: Co-operative Inter-regional Worlds: Productions, Markets, Travel and Trade

Venue: Institute of Historical Research, London
Date: 15 October 2016 (Saturday)

Research Questions

Institutions of higher education could not operate without the supply of different materials that helped every-day learning and teaching. They sought co-operative and inter-regional networks of trade and skills: how did the marketing of book along trade routes reflect the connections between regionally, nationally and internationally-connected universities and colleges? How were objects for natural philosophy courses or the scholarly collection of a university produced and merchandised?

Participants

Peter Davidson, History, University of Oxford

Matthew Eddy, History of Science and Culture, Durham

University

Mordechai Feingold, History, California Institute of Technology

Alette Fleischer, Amsterdam

Anja-Silvia Goeing, History, University of Northumbria/University of Zurich

Martina Hacke, Universität Düsseldorf

Urs Leu, Zurich Central Library

Ian Maclean, History, Oxford University

Glyn Parry, History, University of Roehampton

Roemer, Bert van de, Cultural Studies, University of Amsterdam

Jane Stevenson, Humanities, University of Aberdeen

Iolanda Ventura, History of Medicine, Université d’Orleans

Abstracts 15 Oct 2016

Alette Fleischer (Independent Scholar)

Travelling salesmen or scholarly travellers? Early modern botanists on the move marketing their knowledge of nature.

Within four years from each other, the Italian Paolo Boccone and the German/Dutch Jacob Breyne produced books on botany: Paolo Boccone, Icones et Descriptiones Rariorum Plantarum Siciliae, Melitae, Galliae, et Italiae, Oxford, 1674. And: Jacob Breyne, Exoticarum aliarumque minus cognitarum Plantarum centuria prima, Danzig, 1678. Boccone had travelled from South Italy to Northern Europe in order to find financiers for his publication. One of his possible patrons was the Dutch diplomat and curator of the Botanical Garden of the University of Leiden: Hieronymus van Beverningh. Breyne, who lived in Danzig (today Gdansk, Poland), too visited Beverningh at his country estate Oud-Teylingen (near Leiden). As a merchant Breyne was not so much looking for funds. In order to compile and publish his book, he searched for exotic plants from, amongst others, Beverningh’s vast garden. By tracing the paths of these two botanists, this paper wants to show the different ways how knowledge could be constructed and marketed.
 

Martina Hacke (University of Düsseldorf)

The Messengers of the University of Paris and the Book Trade (late 15th – 16th cent.)

Because books are a medium for the transfer of knowledge, it was inevitable that a connection arose between universities and the book trade. For example, after the invention of printing, the apprentices of Gutenberg set up a printing press in the Sorbonne. Most of the books that were received by the members of this university were from outside of its walls – if not from Paris, then they came from important print centres such as Lyons or Basel. The books were often transported by printers and publishers themselves, who sold them at the big fairs. This phenomenon is already known. What is not known is that several of these printers were at the same time messengers of the University of Paris.
For example Johannes Wattenschnee († 1515) took over in 1489 the office of the messenger
for the masters and scholars of the diocese Regensburg of the German Nation. The radius of his activity as a bookseller included, besides Paris, the book markets of Frankfurt, Leipzig and Basel – this latter having connections to the Italian book trade – and extended as far as Lyons and Barcelona.
The acquisition of the office of the messenger at the University of Paris allowed publishers to be integrated in the academic book market as well as the opportunity to use the geographic reach of the university’s messengers.
These Parisian university messengers, both booksellers and links between vast and divergent parts of Europe, were an important interface between the university and the book market.

Urs B. Leu (Zentralbibliothek Zürich)

The Cooperation between Professors and Printers in Basle and Zurich during the Early Modern Period

The professors at the Reformed Hohe Schule in Zurich, which was founded by Zwingli in 1525, belonged to the main authors of the local printers, especially of Christoph Froschauer. They wrote few textbooks, but their works were studied by students and theologians not at least for their daily work. In contrast to Zurich, the professors of the University of Basel not only published standard works in their field by the Basle printers, but they wrote also books specifically for teaching. Especially in the field of Greek language and literature can be ascertained a close cooperation. In the 17th century the Golden Age of printing in Basle and Zurich was over and they main scholarly book production were hundreds of dissertations, which has even led in Basle to install a printer for the University. Meanwhile the books from Zurich were intended for the reformed market, the Basle book production aimed at a scholarly European audience.

Ian Maclean (University of Oxford)

Authors and international publication in 1700: the case of Georgio Baglivi (1668-1707)

This paper addresses the problems faced by learned authors at the end of the eighteenth century in getting published and ensuring that they achieved international recognition for their work, by examining the case of the ambitious physician, anatomist and physiologist Giorgio Baglivi (1668-1707).

 
Jane Stevenson (The University and King’s College of Aberdeen)

Domestic Academies

One aspect of the early modern world of learning and cultural production which is worth considering is the involvement of women, not least because it is all too easily assumed that they were not in a position to participate. But as well as occurring within the all-male spaces of universities and schools, significant aspects of cultural production took place in private homes, and also at courts. Courts serve many purposes besides display and diplomacy, and they are places where it is particularly difficult to disentangle the public from the private sphere.  The aspect of all this which is interesting me is the obvious fact that both private homes and courts contain women, and there are certain types of cultural production which are to an appreciable extent, domestic. The areas I want to examine are humanist education, printing, alchemy, and astronomy. Education could be family centred; and by virtue of parental connections, humanistically educated daughters might have both a place in the intellectual life of their native cities, and an international network of correspondents. They also contributed to the cultural capital of Renaissance courts, either by acting as tutors to young princesses, or by taking part in public entertainments. In a different way, printing straddled the borderline of intellectual work and artisan production, which was so often a family business; printers tended to marry printer’s daughters, the printing house and the printers’ domestic quarters interpenetrated, and it is quite clear that both wives and daughters often took a hand, since in some cases, they ended up running a workshop themselves: Tace Sowle, in London, and Charlotte Guillard, in Paris, are cases in point. Both alchemy and astronomy were studied outside universities, and often, in domestic contexts. Even purpose-built laboratory spaces might be within a private house, and furthermore, a variety of rulers maintained alchemists, some of whom worked within the court complex, and on occasion, directly with their employers.  Astronomy is also interesting, because it demanded thousands of observations and calculations made over prolonged periods of time; in the interests of continuity, drafting wives and children into a joint enterprise made every kind of sense. As a result, there is a variety of notable female astronomers, all of whom have fathers, husbands, or both, who shared their work.