Devilish Commercialisation

From the earliest days of printing in Italy, both benefits and dangers of the press were subject to impassioned debate. As the technology—and printers with it—moved out of Mainz and diffused across Europe, cities like Venice were subject to an explosion in the printing industry. By the late 15th century, foreign printers and publishers were pouring into the urban centers to try their luck at the craft. The rate at which the press was able to mass produce literature at lower prices aggravated intense response from various cultural and social commentators who expressed fear that such an uncontrollable disseminative capacity had the potential to break down the cultural, social, political and religious elements that organized Venetian society.

It is in this context that we find Fra Filippo De Strata, a Benedictine monk and theologian who lived and wrote in Venice during the 1470s onwards. Unlike the common musings of disgruntled scribes complaining about the ravages of printing behind the auspices of ‘sarcastic asides’, De Strata was much more forward in his distaste for the press. It is in his Polemic Against Printing (1473-4), which he sent to the current Venetian Doge Nicolo Marcello, that we gain the greatest insight into his grievances. Filippo attempts to convince the Doge to curb printers. He decries their corruption of books and therefore society—a concept that became progressively echoed later in the 16th century.

Chief among Filippo’s grievances is the status and motivations of the printers themselves. The rise of the printing profession, in his eyes, saw the degradation of both moral and scholarly standards of book making. On multiple occasions throughout the passage, Filippo paints writers and their “the superior art” as the victims of a malevolent press which drives “reputable writers from their homes.” He continues later, 

Writing indeed, which brings in gold for us, should be respected and held to be nobler than all goods, unless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses.

As is apparent, printers did not have to work as hard to produce books, compared to scholars like Filippo who would work laboriously over manuscripts. Moreover, the printers often had little education and few new scholarly ideas, and so were more frequently associated with lower social status and intellectual and material worth. Printers commercialised a trade that Filippo held as sacrosanct. Books became a hollow shell of what they once were, made from minimal exertion or inspiration.

Filippo’s hatred of printers is also racially charged. For the most part, printers during the early 15th century in Venice, and across Italy, were German. In 1469, the Venetian government granted a monopoly on the art of printing to the German John Speyer. After John’s death in 1470, however, the industry was permitted with little restraint. By the late 1470s, a third to a half of Venetian print output was controlled by German syndicates. Filippo sees these foreign invaders as drunkards, fueled by wine and greed. They are taking decent, Italian deserved jobs. “The printers guzzle wine and, swamped in excess, bray and scoff. The Italian writer lives like a beast in the stall.” Although hyperbole, in 1471 one German editor was found “bartering three manuscripts of Livy for two cartloads of wine” in Treviso. Although such anti-immigrant rhetoric is chauvinistic, such ideas were not uncommon, and were reiterated by the likes of Erasmus and Brandt later on.

Embedded in Filippo’s writing is the use of gender and religion; Filippo uses women to personify his hatred of devilish print. In multiple passages he compares the press to prostitutes and harlots, with traditional bookmaking representative of a pure maiden. Just as a prostitute is motivated by monetary gain, corrupting susceptible young minds, so does the press sinfully foster wantonness. Such use of gender to ascribe good and evil, feminist authors might argue, leaves women undervalued and without agency, reinforcing subjection. Yet Filippo’s rhetoric here is a marker to show how little access women at this time actually had in the literary field, that they are used to describe, not actively partake in, literature.

Filippo is also concerned with the undermining of the traditional literate hierarchy. The flooding of the market with cheap, often “sexual” books allowed the sundry to think themselves learned: “anyone and everyone procures [books] for himself in abundance.” The result is that “asses go to school.” He incredulously concludes that these uncultured, brutish printers now fraudulently name themselves the new educators of the city. This process undermined the customary distinctions between learned and unlearned, provoking unrest from traditional scholars.

All the anxieties Filippo discusses are intertwined and inflected with notions of the proper ordering of society, culture and class, due to the pressures of print. Contention on the subject escalated well into the 16th century, reaching a crescendo as institutions began to censor (Indices of Prohibited Books), and scholars like Anton Francesco Doni attempted to satirically distinguish the canonical from the rubbish.

The direct effects of Filippo’s plea were largely inconsequential. The Doge did not take any action to outlaw printers; people continued to buy print books in increasing numbers. Moreover, it is difficult to define to what degree ordinary individuals shared De Strata’s view. Most would have simply enjoyed the new range of cheap products, while others may have been apathetic. While the Polemic Against Printing is an exasperated protest that moans and wails against a force De Strata does not fully grasp and cannot stop, it also taps into a long tradition of thinking about books as precious, rare repositories of knowledge, not to be subject to the framework of the market, but to be shared and exchanged as gifts amongst the learned. Print commercialised, and thus sullied, books. 

Filippo’s source is important for modern scholars, not because of its immediate effect, but because it outlines complaints that would be echoed well into the 16th century by contemporary scholars and religious leaders alike. De Strata’s polemic is a glimpse into the beginning of a microcosm of conservative backlash to the unstoppable, unbridled force of market capitalism in the form of the printing press. People wanted it, so people sold it. Even today, such grumbles are all too common as books become increasingly digitalised.