Bending the Rules
The case of Aguilonius
By Kristof Selleslach, keeper of records at the Museum Plantin Moretus
By obtaining a privilege publishers were in a position to protect their publications from reprinting by competitors. They did however not publish the entire text of the privilege in the publication concerned. They added a summary, usually in the language of the book. This allowed them a certain amount of freedom to interpret facts to their own wishes. The line between a creative translation and downright fraud was sometimes very thin. By comparing the printed summary with the authentic privilege we can pinpoint several occasions on which Balthasar Moretus lied.
A printing privilege
By granting a printing patent the authorities guaranteed a publisher the exclusive right to print and sell a certain book during a well-defined period of time. Occasionally, the author himself and not the publisher was the beneficiary. Obviously the privilege was only valid on the territory of the authorities concerned. Printers from Antwerp could address themselves to two authorities. On the one hand the Privy Council which granted privileges valid all over the Habsburg Netherlands. The privileges of the Council of Brabant on the other hand were only valid in the Duchy of Brabant.
Taking into account the extent of the Duchy, a privilege from Brabant often ensured enough protection. For printers from the neighbouring County of Flanders it was often commercially no longer interesting when their publications were barred from the large market in Brabant.
The Officina Plantiniana appealed for privileges with the Privy Council as well as the Council of Brabant, and in some cases with both at the same time. The Plantin-Moretus Archives contain more than thousand privileges obtained by the Plantin Press. The privileges, written on parchment, often carry an imposing but quite fragile wax seal. The secretary of the Council folded the privilege around the wax seal and then sent the privilege from Brussels to the Moretus firm in Antwerp. On receiving the privilege, the Moretuses very carefully opened the privilege, wrote their summary and folded the privilege again. Because they have been preserved in this way for centuries, it is very difficult to handle the stiff parchment documents.
Franciscus Aguilonius
In 1613 the Officina Plantiniana published the magnum opus of Jesuit Franciscus Aguilonius (1567–1617). A few years before, Aguilonius had founded a special maths school in Antwerp. In his publication Opticorvm libri sex philosophis iuxtà ac mathematicis vtiles (six books on optics, useful for opticorum aguilon philosophers as well as mathematicians) he wrote an extensive overview on the knowledge of optics in those days. He also introduced new terminology which we still use today.
Hundreds of scientific diagrams support Aguilonius’ theories. The museum preserves the complete series of 495 woodblocks. Engraved title vignettes with putti — chubby, naked children’s figures — embellish the first page of each of the six volumes. Peter Paul Rubens made the design drawings for the title vignettes and the engraved title page. Recently, the Flemish Community had the opportunity to acquire one of the six original design drawings for the title vignettes. The Friends of the Museum Plantin Moretus devoted their traditional New Year’s book entirely to this very important acquisition.
The privilege from the Council of Brabant
The Plantin Press decided to invest heavily in the numerous illustrations for Aguilonius’ work. To protect their investment, the Officina turned to the Council of Brabant. On January 20, 1612, the Council granted a privilege for Aguilonius’ work to the brothers Balthasar I and Jan II Moretus.
The privilege was drafted in Dutch and it was valid for a period of ten years. The parchment charter carries no wax seal. It is the signature of secretary Joachim de Busschere which guarantees the authenticity of the document.
The summary by Balthasar Moretus I
![Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Portrait of Balthasar Moretus I, [1613–1641] (MPM.V.IV.003); Photo: Michel Wuyts](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*BXeydGGamXVHh-9bXsSADw.jpeg)
What is so special about the case of Aguilonius is the fact that the museum not only possesses the privilege and the printed summary but also the document which links the two, since the handwritten concept of the summary by Balthasar Moretus I has been preserved as well.
At that time Balthasar Moretus I (1574–1641) and his brother Jan Moretus II (1576–1618) were in charge of the Officina Plantiniana. Balthasar was head of the printing office, while Jan was responsible for sales. From early childhood on, Balthasar and his older brother Melchior had been citing Neolatin poetry to each other. So, for Balthasar, summarising a privilege in Latin was a job right up his alley.
![Summary of the Privilege granted by the Council of Brabant for the printing of Opticorvm libri sex by Franciscus Aguilonius, [after 20 January 1612] (MPM Arch. 1179, no. 404)](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*yZqH3qm4L6Ol7yoUKyubgQ.jpeg)
Territorial deception
Right away, the summary starts with a deliberate bending of the truth. Balthasar writes that the privilege has been personally granted by the Archdukes:
‘Alberti & Isabellæ Claræ Evgeniæ, Archiducum Austriæ, Ducum Burgundiæ, Brabantiæ, &c. Serenissimorum Belgicæ Principum Priuilegio cautum est’
(Albert and Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archdukes of Austria, dukes of Burgundy, Brabant etc., Their August Sovereigns of the Netherlands vouch for the privilege)
The truth is that in the original privilege the Archdukes are only named as the sovereigns who have installed the Council of Brabant:
‘Wt versueck gedaen inden Raede vande Ertzhertogen onse genaedighe heeren ende princen geordineert in Brabant’
(in response to the petition submitted to the Council of our merciful Lords and Sovereigns the Archdukes ordinated in Brabant)
Thanks to the sole focus on the Archdukes Balthasar manages to keep silent about the Council of Brabant. It was a cunning way to suggest a much larger territory, because the Archdukes were the Sovereign Princes of all the provinces in the Habsburg Netherlands. By using the term ‘Inferioris Germaniae’ (Lower Germany) further down in the summary Balthasar explicitly claims the implementation of the privilege in the entire territory of the Archdukes. Which was, in fact, a blatant lie. The original privilege granted the following right:
‘drucken vercoopen ende distribueren allomme binnen desen Lande van Brabant’
(printing, selling and distributing everywhere in the country of Brabant)
It was a sly way to delude the competition. Intelligent printers had of course no trouble to see through Balthasar’s lie, just by looking at the signature. After all, Joachim de Busschere was the Secretary of the Council of Brabant, and not the Privy Council.
Mother’s privilege too
It didn’t stop with the undeniable lie about the territory of the Archdukes. Balthasar added another one in his summary. He maintained that the privilege had been granted to his mother Martina Plantin (1550–1616), his brother Jan, and himself. In truth, the privilege had only been granted to Balthasar and Jan. Their mother Martina wasn’t mentioned at all in the privilege. After Jan Moretus I had died in 1610 his widow Martina stayed in the family business as a silent partner. The heirs agreed to sign every publication as ‘from the Plantin Press, by the widow and sons of Jan Moretus’. Because his mother’s name was prominently mentioned on the title page, Balthasar included her name explicitly in the summary. This lie didn’t make a decisive difference, because the privilege was also granted to the two brothers. But by doing so, Balthasar succeeded in holding on consistently to the branding of the Officina Plantiniana.
Deceiving and being deceived
Balthasar probably inherited this inventive summarising of privileges from his Granddad. In his 1577 edition of the New Testament, Christopher Plantin (c. 1520–1589) also published a Dutch summary of the original privileges in French. He omitted the duration of the privileges on purpose. In 1577, they had already expired for more than five years. The authentic privilege from the Privy Council also mentioned that before Plantin, the Antwerp printer Hans de Laet had the privilege for the Dutch Bible translation. As a matter of fact, De Laet never possessed any such privilege. In his editions he referred very briefly to an already expired privilege that had been granted to the Louvain printer Anthoni Maria Bergaigne. Which means that Plantin himself had been cheated. The inventive summarizing of privileges clearly was a lucrative business.
