Institute for History Annual Report 2010 - O - Universiteit Leiden

Hanno Wijsman
Over the centuries, the Low Countries have been a
key region in Europe for the developments of book
production, art production, and commercialisation.
This project intends to view these
developments in a combined way, focussing on
changes in illustrations in manuscripts and printed
books in the 15th and 16th centuries.
In former research, manuscripts and printed books
have largely been studied as separate worlds, by
medievalists on the one side and modernists on
the other. Printing has often been seen as a
‘revolution’ or even as the ‘invention of the book’.
Only very recently one starts to see that it is more
fruitful to stress the continuity of book production
and to consider the introduction of printing as one
technical step in book history, though a very
important one. Books, whether hand written or
printed, are important objects in the transmission
of culture. The main novelty of printing is a
commercial one: printers seek a new public to sell
books they now make in several dozens or even
hundreds of copies, instead of individually in
commission. It has been often stated that books get
more numerous and cheaper, but many questions
remain on how exactly the printers tried and
managed to reach new target groups in society.
This interdisciplinary project intends to venture
into the field where the history of art and history
of the book meet with social and economic history.
The production of books and other works of art is
closely linked to the important position of
commerce. The major commercial cities in
Northern Europe were Bruges (13th-15th cen-
Institute for History
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turies) and Antwerp (16th century). In the same
period the production of books and art flourished
as never before. The trading network and the
presence of many foreign agents led to the exportation
of these luxury products all over Europe,
especially to England, the Iberian Peninsula and
Italy. The economic shift from Bruges to Antwerp
is reflected in book production, because Bruges
was the major town for manuscript production in
the 15th century Netherlands, but Antwerp
became by far the foremost printing town in the
16th century (although the first flourishing of
printing (1470-1490) was in the North, in cities like
Gouda and Haarlem).
Our project wants to examine how market strategies
of the book producers (aiming at socially and
geographically ever growing markets), technical
innovations, the culturally conditioned demand of
book possessors, and changing contents of books
are linked together. Our aim is to combine the
history of taste and fashion at the side of the
consumers with the history of technological and
stylistic inventions of book production, especially
concerning the illustrations, focussing on form and
content of the books, social stratification of the
buyers and strategies of the printers. Thus we
want to innovate in a field where a lot of research
has been done, but where different approaches are
as yet not combined systematically and on a
quantitatively representative basis. Our main
source is constituted by the surviving books,
manuscripts and printed books. It is our intention
to study them first broadly, quantitatively, in
order to see the long term developments and sec-