Early Printing in Cologne and William Caxton’s First Books
An essay by Lotte Hellinga
Not all printers leaving Mainz in the 1460s turned southward. Ulrich Zell, who had worked with the printers in Mainz, decided to go downstream along the Rhine and set up a printing house in the great city of Cologne that began operating in 1466. One of his earliest book is an edition of sermons by Johannes Chrysostomus [JRL 8574.2, ISTC ij00297000]. Cologne was the see of an archbishopric, there were many monasteries in the city and it was home to one of the most important medieval universities. There was therefore no shortage of specialists who could offer texts to be printed and oversee their production, nor of a local clientele clamouring for printed books. But Cologne was also a commercial centre of prime importance, situated at a crossroad of trade routes that connected East with West overland, and by the river Rhine South with North. The Hanse League of merchants had one of its major offices in the city. Cologne ranked therefore in the German lands with Strasbourg, Basel and Nuremberg as one of the hubs for the trade in very many kinds of goods, where the meeting of merchants and printers resulted in a flourishing printing trade.
Ulrich Zell’s printing house may initially have been partly dependent on the enterprise in Mainz, and his printing type is closely similar to one of the Mainz types. But in due course, it became a stable and independent presence in the city, mainly producing unspectacular Latin books until the end of the century. Local merchants observed that printing and publishing could be a profitable business, and from 1470 books printed in Cologne by others than Ulrich Zel began to appear. Most of them were as unassuming as Zell’s books, but printed in a different typographical style that represented the script common to the local monasteries. At least two other printing houses began to operate in the early 1470s, Arnold ther Hoernen and Johannes Koelhoff. One of Ther Hoernen’s earliest books is a work by a local Carthusian author, printed in 1470, Werner Rolewinck’s Sermo in festo praesentationis Beatae Mariae Virginis [JRL 9460, ISTC ir00303000]. In the same years a group of some fifty small books were produced in Cologne, apparently commissioned by merchants, whose names occasionally appear in the imprints.
It has proved difficult to unravel the background to these fifty books, an episode which lasted some four years — who printed for whom? But it is not without significance, for it is this model that gave England’s first printer his first taste of printing and publishing. William Caxton, a born Englishman, had been a highly successful merchant who had spent most of his life in Flanders, where eventually he became in Bruges the representative of the English merchants (‘Governor of the English Nation’), and fulfilling diplomatic and consular functions. Close connections between the English royal court and the court of the dukes of Burgundy were established in 1467 through the marriage of Duke Charles the Bold with Margaret of York, sister of King Edward IV of England. The diplomacy involved in this event led Caxton into the circles of the court of Burgundy, and in particular Margaret of York.
For unknown reasons Caxton, now about fifty years old, had to go into exile for eighteen months, from the middle of 1471 to the end of 1472. He spent this time in Cologne, where he found fellow-merchants who had ventured into publishing printed books (albeit on a modest scale), and he was soon infected with their enthusiasm. He even went well beyond the small books the Cologne merchants had backed. Instead of modest quartos he engaged printers who first produced for him a very large work, followed by two smaller books, all in Latin. They are three texts that all have an English connection, although they were best known in Latin versions: Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, a medieval encyclopaedia on the universe, the earth, and all that lives on it [JRL 9416.2, ISTC ib00131000]; and two texts with moralizing stories, the Gesta Romanorum [JRL 16740, ISTC ig00281000] and Walter Burley, De vita et moribus philosophorum [JRL 8655, ISTC ib01318000]. Their typography is closely related to the founts of type used in the small books backed by the merchants.
Caxton’s name does not occur in the books. We only know that he was responsible for the Bartholomaeus Anglicus because a quarter of a century later, in 1496, the English version of the text was published in Westminster by Wynkyn de Worde, who added a poem in which he declared that Caxton was ‘first prynter of this book in Laten tonge at Coleyn’ [JRL 12674, ISTC ib00143000]. De Worde’s edition included fine, large woodcuts with illustrations that had by then become traditional in the many vernacular versions of this text; there were editions in French, Dutch and Spanish in the fifteenth century. Of the many surviving copies of these three books, none was at an early date in England. Caxton obviously made use of the trade connections that Cologne had to offer.
The copy of the Bartholomaeus Anglicus in The John Rylands Library is a splendid example of early ownership. It is bound with another encyclopaedic work from the Middle Ages, Isidore of Sevilla, Etymologiae [JRL 9416.1, ISTC ii00183000]; together they form a very impressive volume. Both parts are beautifully decorated by hand with coloured initials and penwork in a style that is seen in Cologne and further along the Rhine. On the first leaf of the volume is an ownership inscription in bold writing: ‘Istud volumen [ha]bemus ex parte domini Hermanni de Hammons ad albas dominas. [Re]quiescat in pace. Amen’. [JRL 9416.2, second image] The ‘albae dominae’ can be identified as canonesses or Norbertine Sisters of the Praemonstratensian Order. The name of the donor of the book, Herman de Hammons, or Hamberg (Homberg), suggests that the canonesses belonged to the Praemonstratensian Abbey Hamburg that still exists in a suburb of that name in the town of Duisburg (about 55 km north of Cologne on the Rhine). The Isidore was printed (c. 1476) by Konrad Winters de Homborch, and we may wonder whether there was a connection between the printer of the book and Herman de Homberg who gave the book to the learned white ladies.
