The First Printed Bibles
THE FIRST PRINTED BIBLES
Why the Bible Two reasons may be given. First, it posed a challenge, which aroused Gutenberg's professional interest. The Bible is a large book, and to print it in its totality represented pressing the technology then available to its uttermost limits. The 1468 version of the Bible produced by Gutenberg—known as the “Thirty-Six-Line Bible,” due to the number of lines of type in each column of print—runs to 1,768 pages. By the standards of the time, this was a phenomenal challenge. Few can resist the desire to rise to a challenge like that, and show that they have what it takes to meet it. Gutenberg's massive achievement instantly secured his place in history.
Second, the Bible was an immensely popular and influential work. Today, it remains the world's best-selling book. If any one book may be said to have shaped Western civilization, it is the Bible. The fifteenth century was a period of considerable growth in religious activity throughout Western Europe, which saw new interest develop in reading and owning copies of the Bible. Virtually every measurable parameter—such as the number of churches being built, donations to religious charities, or the numbers of those going on pilgrimages—points to a surge in interest in religion at this time. The rise of movements such as the “Modern Devotion” led to a growing interest in reading religious books—supreme among which was, of course, the Bible itself.
The ability to read had once been the exclusive preserve of the clergy. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, this literary monopoly was in the process of being decisively overthrown. During the Renaissance—the cultural movement that began in Italy and swept northward—the ability to read and write was regarded as of immense importance. The development of printing meant that works available earlier only to a charmed clerical circle were now available to a much wider readership. The demand for religious books spiraled. And the book in greatest demand? The Bible.
The sheer length of the Bible—which consists of sixty-six books, thirty-nine of which are located in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New—made it a major publishing undertaking. The cost of copying it by hand was prohibitive. Yet many households saw the possession of a Bible as essential for the private matter of personal devotion, not to mention the rather more sordid and public matter of drawing attention to their social status. Studies of the household inventories of patrician families in early fifteenth-century Florence show that virtually every noble household possessed a copy of the New Testament, painstakingly copied out in manuscript. The demand for the Bible was immense; Gutenberg's invention suddenly made possible a new means of meeting this demand.
As far as can be established, Gutenberg began cutting the type for this project in 1449 or 1450. Composition began in 1452, and the printing was completed by 1456. During the final stages of the process, six compositors were employed, working simultaneously. The work had been divided up between them, with each compositor knowing exactly what section of the work he was responsible for. Each page had two columns of text, consisting of forty-two lines of type. It is not clear how many copies were printed. The most reliable estimate suggests that the print run for the work was tiny by modern standards—possibly as few as 185 copies were produced, of which about 40 still exist today. While most of these were printed on paper, a small number were printed on the more expensive vellum. The cost of this would have been considerable. Each printed Bible consisted of 340 folio sheets. As each calf hide yielded 2 folio sheets, 170 animal hides were required for each of the two-volumed Bibles. The investment required to produce a single Bible was thus considerable. The asking price for each Bible was thirty florins, estimated to be three years' wages for a learned clerk. Gutenberg was a businessman, and knew that the production of a best-seller was a sure-fire way of making money. The investment he was forced to make in this new technology was huge—but so were the rewards that he could hope to reap. Nobody else had access to the technology that was essential for the task, and he thus had a virtual monopoly on the production of Bibles. He added another line of business; he began to print indulgences—pieces of paper, issued on behalf of the Pope or a local bishop, offering written promises of dispensations from time in purgatory (a matter to which we shall return in chapter 3). These slips of paper—which served the Church by raising funds for projects (such as funding Crusades or building cathedrals)—were initially handwritten. With the innovation of the printing press, however, indulgences could be printed by the thousands.
Sample pages from the Gutenberg Bible, c. 1455
The importance of this point was realized by William Caxton (1422–91), England's first printer. Caxton learned the skills of printing in mainland Europe, and printed his first book in the city of Bruges. In 1476, Caxton returned to England, and set up his printing shop at Westminster. The first work Caxton published took the form of an indulgence, issued by John, Abbot of Abingdon, to a couple called Henry and Katherine Langley. The indulgence—the price of which, incidentally, is unknown, but likely to have been very high—assured the couple that their sins had been fully forgiven. The indulgence delicately hints that the couple were no strangers to the delights of the world, and consequently had rather a lot of sins to be absolved. In addition, they would receive the benefits normally associated with pilgrimages, without suffering the inconvenience of actually having to make them. It is likely that Caxton received a commission for every indulgence sold, and profited considerably as a result. It was hardly surprising that Gutenberg chose to muscle in on the trade. One reliable report suggests that he may have printed as many as two hundred thousand. His future seemed as rosy as it was secure.
Stained glass portrait of William Caxton from Stationers' Hall in London, c. 1880
In the event, however, Gutenberg did not end his life as a wealthy man. He lacked business sense, and ended up losing a serious legal battle with his partner, Johann Fust, over the repayment of loans. Fust promptly formed an immensely successful new partnership with Gutenberg's former employee Peter Schoeffer. The secrets of typesetting could not be kept for long, and the advantage Gutenberg enjoyed over his competitors was soon eroded. Printing houses sprang up throughout the 1460s to meet the new demand for printed books. Others grew rich through Gutenberg's invention, while he went on to die in poverty in 1468. By the end of the century, the production of printed Bibles was so firmly established that it had become virtually routine. Printed Bibles were of major importance for the private devotions of individual Christian families; their novelty value was, however, at an end. Prices had fallen dramatically. The cost of a Gutenberg Bible was equivalent to a large town house in a German city; by 1520, Bibles had become an affordable luxury.
Yet many were aware that another religious best-seller lay just over the horizon. The Bible printed by Gutenberg was in the Latin language—the language of diplomacy, of the Church, and of scholarship—but not of ordinary people. Yet the Bible was not originally written in Latin, but in the languages of the ancient world—in the case of the Old Testament, Hebrew, with a smattering of Aramaic, the great diplomatic language of the ancient Near East; in the case of the New Testament, Greek. For Western Christianity, the Bible has always been known as a translated book. This can be contrasted with the sacred text of Islam, the Koran, which is still read by Muslims in its original Arabic. The translation and publication of the Bible in the living languages of Western Europe was thus widely recognized as the next publishing landmark. Gutenberg's innovations put Germany ahead of the opposition. The first German Bible was printed by Mentelin of Strasbourg in 1466; by 1483, there were nine different vernacular German Bibles in print.
But there was not the slightest hint of an English version of the Bible being about to appear in print in the late fifteenth century—despite the best efforts of John Wycliffe and his followers to bring about such a development.