Monastic Printing and the Press at St Albans
An essay by Lotte Hellinga
Monasteries were in the Middle Ages the places where most books were written and preserved. The religious orders were certainly influential when printing began to appear, but their activities in the new art were limited.
At the beginning of printing, in Mainz, the Benedictine Order probably encouraged the printing of Gutenberg’s Latin Bible, completed in 1455 [JRL 3069, ISTC ib00526000], and Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer printed four years later the Psalterium Benedictinum explicitly produced for the Order [JRL 3075, ISTC ip01062000]. The abbey of St Jakob, just outside Mainz, probably provided editorial support on more occasions than the single one that can be documented, Schoeffer’s edition of the Epistolae of St Jerome (1470), extensively corrected by the former abbot, Adrianus de Brielis. Fust and Schoeffer’s printing house was independent and purely commercial, operating at arm’s length from the abbey, to mutual benefit whenever the occasion arose. Caxton’s pragmatic arrangement with Westminster Abbey had similar advantages. The abbey did not run financial risks but made occasional use of the facility of the printing press, for example for some books of hours, a psalter, and liturgical directories destined for the priesthood. The arrangement survived Caxton, lasting until 1500.
But when printing was organized and carried out within a monastic house, it tended to follow the pattern that is also found in universities: productivity would peter out after only a few years. In the Benedictine abbey of Santa Scholastica in Subiaco the two printers, Sweynheym and Pannartz, stayed for only two years (1465 -7), and after teaching some monks to print departed for Rome. As far as we can tell, the monks never practised their printing skills afterwards. In Augsburg, the abbot of the Benedictine abbey of SS Ulrich and Afra established a press that operated from circa 1472 to 1476, a short period in which 17 books were printed, many of them very substantial. After that date the monastery only printed occasionally letters of indulgence. The John Rylands Library has seven of the books printed at SS Ulrich and Afra; there are two copies of the earliest, Burchardus Uspergensis, Historia Friderici Imperatoris; another copy has the rubricator’s date 1472 [JRL 19930, Christie 3 h 19, ISTC ib01285000]. In the early years the Benedictine Order clearly favoured printers. Other orders followed, the Brethren of the Common Life quite early on, and in the 1490s notably the Carthusians and Bridgettines.
The Benedictine abbey of St Albans, the only monastic house in England where printing took place in the fifteenth century, apart from Westminster Abbey, conforms to the pattern of irregular, short-lived activity we have seen on the Continent, rather than following Westminster’s model. Yet there may have been a link with Caxton and thus with his landlords at Westminster. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, one of the greatest scriptoria of medieval England had been situated in St Albans abbey. There are two distinct short episodes when books were printed at the abbey, from 1479 to 1481, and in or about 1486. Its two printing ventures may have been attempts to revive or extend the old tradition at a time when the abbey went through a phase of disrepute and the scriptorium was apparently inactive.
There was a school at the abbey, and its earliest book, printed circa 1479, was probably intended to be used there. It is Augustinus Datus, Elegantiolae, a small modern textbook for teaching Latin. It is printed in a new fount of type, its style based on the script forms that had been traditional in the abbey’s scriptorium. It was a delicate, if somewhat spindly type and, mysteriously, this is its only appearance in a book. (It made one further appearance, as page-signatures at the bottom of pages in the Traversanus edition.) The next book, however, which includes the date 1480, shows a close relationship to Caxton. It is a publication of lectures on rhetoric given in Latin at Cambridge University by the learned Franciscan friar Laurentius Gulielmus Traversanus de Saona. The lectures were first published by Caxton after they were given in 1478, but they sit rather uncomfortably among his English books and his Latin publications, which were all related to the Church. The reprint of the book fits much better in the programme of publishing works of education and learning that the press at St Albans was beginning to develop over the next couple of years [JRL 9114, ISTC it00427760]. The Traversanus edition is typographically distinct from all that followed. It is extremely well printed, in a new fount of type, expertly cast, that at first sight shows a strong resemblance to Caxton’s Flemish type (he had used that in his Traversanus edition). On closer inspection some features that are particular to the St Albans style of script can be distinguished.
After the Traversanus, the press published another four Latin titles in yet another fount of type, small, economical, and in style close to the St Albans script. They are an advanced schoolbook on logic and three substantial books on theology and philosophy at university level; the last is dated 1481, and this marked the end of St Albans’s publishing in Latin. Then, after an interval of about five years, two very different books were printed at the press in St Albans. They are the Chronicles of England and the Book of hawking, hunting and blasing of arms [JRL 15410, ISTC ic00479000 and JRL 10001, ISTC ib01030000]. Both were in English, printed in a new (and very poor) casting of the type that resembled Caxton’s, accompanied by a casting of another type that belonged to Caxton, as well as a set of new initials, resembling those used by Caxton. The Chronicles includes at the end of its prologue the date 1483; the Book of hawking states at the end that it was compiled at St Albans in 1486. Since the typography of the two books is very closely connected, the likelihood is that they were printed with no great interval of time, in or shortly after 1486, the Chronicles first of the two. Neither was a work of learning as the Latin books printed between 1479 and 1481 had been, but appear destined to be read by laymen with an interest in English history and in particular in the traditions of hunting and heraldry.
Although the quality of the printing is poor, they show an interesting experiment with multi-colour-printing, in red, blue, yellow and even gold — unique in England, and rare in the fifteenth century overall. The text of the Chronicles provides a further link with Caxton, for it is an elaboration and extension of his own Chronicles, published in 1480 and 1482 [JRL R26166, ISTC ic00477000 and JRL 17316.1, ISTC ic00478000]. A long tradition links this text to a ‘Schoolmaster of St Albans’ to whom the running of both printing ventures has been ascribed. But it is doubtful that any schoolmaster was involved in printing the Chronicles, or any of the other books produced at St Albans. Texts and type, however, indicate that there were links with Caxton. We may see here how through him the two great Benedictine abbeys, St Albans and Westminster, were sharing some material and experience.
