University of Virginia Library

Some Unusual Printer's Copy Used for Early Sixteenth-Century Editions of Erasmus' Encomium Moriae
by
Clarence H. Miller

The early editions of The Praise of Folly provide some useful information about how printers chose their basic copy.[1] Erasmus' masterpiece was frequently reprinted during his own lifetime.[2] It was extraordinarily popular and much sought after: no other single small book (except perhaps More's Utopia) offered, both in matter and manner, such a brilliant condensation of the literary and theological attitudes of the humanists. From its first printing in 1511 until the death of Erasmus in 1536, it was printed 35 times, in Paris, Strasbourg and Lyons, in Cologne and Basel, in

Florence and Venice and elsewhere.[3] During these years, Erasmus also revised and augmented the work seven times (in 1512, 1514, 1515, 1516, 1521, 1522, and 1532). About 18% of the final text did not appear in the first edition. The work was also printed by some of the finest printers of the age — Badius van Assche in Paris, Matthias Schürer in Strasbourg, Johann Froben in Basel, Aldus in Venice.

In fact, these printers (with the exception of Aldus) vied with one another in producing editions with the latest revisions and (after 1515) with the commentary added to the work under the name of Gerardus Listrius. Badius was the first to print a revised edition in July 1512 (E841), but two years later Schürer (setting his text from Badius' edition) published a revised and augmented edition (E843), which was in turn reprinted about a year later by Froben (E846-7). But in 1516 Froben himself published an edition including an added passage and many smaller corrections (E848). A year later Schürer (E850) incorporated the revisions of the Froben edition, and in 1519 Badius (E852) brought his edition up to date by copying the Froben edition of 1517 (E849). The last three stages of revision appeared in Froben's editions of 1521 (E860) and 1522 (E862) and in the edition published by Jerome Froben and Nicolas Bischoff (Episcopius) in 1532 (E870).

Much can be learned by collating the early editions and identifying the editions which printers used as their copy, but one point, I think, can be singled out as of special interest to the bibliographer. It is this: the convenience of the printer in designing his format, particularly when he was printing in the italic type dear to the humanists, sometimes influenced his choice of basic copy and the manner in which he chose to include the latest revisions. Among the important printers, Schürer is the only one who deliberately took his basic copy from an inferior edition, which he then

proceeded to correct against the latest revised edition. But among the minor printers the phenomenon occurs more than once and for various reasons.

To begin with Schürer himself. When he set out to publish a new edition (E850) of the Moria in 1517, he knew that the edition incorporating Erasmus' latest revisions was Froben's 1516 edition (E848). As a matter of fact, Froben had based his edition on Schürer's 1514 edition, adding to it Erasmus' revisions and one substantial passage. Now Schürer claimed the same favor by borrowing the changes in the Froben edition. But instead of printing directly from Froben's edition, Schürer chose to set his text from a copy of his own 1514 edition, after incorporating into that copy the additions and revisions from the Froben text. The question, then, is why did Schürer not choose for his basic copy the best edition with the latest revisions? The answer is that he actually found it easier to set from a copy of what he knew to be an inferior edition. The Froben edition included the long commentary by Listrius, which was set as a frame around pages of text that varied in size and shape. Schürer's new edition was not to include the commentary (as his old had not). He could set from his old edition page-for-page and line-for-line, except where he had to add a passage from the Froben edition. Hence he chose his basic copy from his own edition and corrected it against the Froben edition.

Theoretically, the procedure is acceptable enough, but in fact, of course, Schürer missed quite a number of the corrections or changes made in Froben's edition and preserved instead old readings from his own. In fact, in one place the corrector even introduced an error from Froben's revised text. It seems to me quite clear that Schürer could have produced a more correct edition had he chosen to print directly from Froben's edition instead of a corrected copy of his own earlier edition. Indeed, Schürer himself became aware that he had not incorporated all the revisions of the Froben edition. Two years later, in 1519, when he issued a reprint (E853) of his own 1517 edition, he returned to Froben's 1516 edition (or one of two derivatives from it) and again corrected his text, attempting to incorporate the Froben's revisions more completely. He got more of them this time, but still not all of them. And the whole process would have been quite unnecessary if he had not decided to set page-for-page and line-for-line instead of following what he knew to be a better text.

An even more troublesome form of basic copy was chosen by another Strasbourg printer, Johann Knoblauch, who symbolized his odoriferous name by three cloves of garlic at the top of the title-page of his 1521 edition (E859) of the Moria. Knoblauch found it convenient to set not merely from a copy of an inferior edition but from two copies, each from a different edition. In other words, his basic copy was composite. The evidence from the collation of his edition was most confusing at first because up to a point about two thirds through the text, his edition shares errors only with the 1515 edition of Aldus (E845), but after this point it shares some errors only with the 1517 edition of Schürer (E850). And yet, strangely enough, the

first part also contains revisions, even erroneous ones, found only in Schürer's 1517 edition and not present at all in the Aldine text. The mystery cleared up when I discovered that Knoblauch printed from the Aldine edition line-for-line (not page-for-page) up to a certain point in his text (sig. E8v), with only slight variances in line-endings where a short passage had to be added from the Schürer text. But after this point, the line-for-line correspondence disappears. There was a good reason for Knoblauch to change his basic copy from the Aldine to the Schürer edition. Up to the point of change the passages to be added to the Aldine copy from Schürer's fuller text were quite short, usually no longer than a line.[4] But after this point the added passages were much longer so that it became easier to take the longer form as basic copy.

One may ask why Knoblauch did not take Schürer's longer text as his basic copy from the beginning, since he corrected and amplified the Aldine text to conform with it. Again, the reason was his convenience. He intended to produce an imitation of an Aldine text, using italic print and a format like that of the famous Venetian printer. He specifically adverted to his Aldine pretensions in his blurb to the reader on the verso of the title-page, where he expressed the hope that his readers would not take it ill that he had pilfered some of Aldus' marginal notes to explain Erasmus' allusions. Setting line-for-line from Aldus' edition enabled him to cast off his copy rather easily, but only so long as the passages to be added were not lengthy. His whole Aldine ruse was perhaps designed to help him meet the competition of Schürer, who had already printed five editions of the Moria in his own handsome style with roman type. Schürer had been associated with the Moria almost from the beginning of its publishing history, and one of his editions had already made important additions and revisions. In fact, it was one of Schürer's editions (E842) that had provided the printer's copy for the Aldine edition Knoblauch was imitating.[5]

Most of the additions and changes that Knoblauch made in his basic copy must have been written in the margins of the Aldine copy, as is shown by an error made by the compositor at one point (sig. B5v). There we find among the sidenotes in Knoblauch's edition a phrase which actually was supposed to have been introduced into the text; the compositor, apparently, mistook it for a marginal note. In at least two places (sigs. C7v and E1v), Knoblauch's method of marginal additions has resulted in imperfect or partial correction, producing a combination of the earlier and later forms

of the text. In his preface, Knoblauch struck a conscientious pose by making a correction at the top of one page, a change from the Aldine to the Schürer reading; but he had actually failed to change many of the Aldine readings in other places.

Knoblauch himself was aware that his corrections were not complete: a year later, in 1522, when he issued a reprint (E861) of his 1521 edition, he continued the process of correcting it against the Schürer edition.[6] In this reprint Knoblauch also included a new address to his readers, whom he called the minions of Folly: he boasted that Folly now appeared "cleaner and neater, now printed once again in this typeface," that is, in italic.[7] It is quite true that his reprint is in some ways more correct than his first edition. But it would have been far cleaner, neater ,and more correct too, if the convenience of setting from an italic text had not dictated the choice of basic copy for his first edition.

A final example of a printer's deliberately choosing an incomplete edition for his basic copy is provided by Sebastian Gryphius' edition (E869), printed in the late 1520's[8] at Lyons. This edition contains most of the revisions made in Froben's 1522 edition (E862), and yet it also contains many readings (and some errors) not found in that edition. In particular, it agrees at several places only with the editions of Knoblauch (E859, E861, and E865). In fact, it is clear that one of Knoblauch's three editions, corrected against the Froben 1522 edition, provided the copy for Gryphius' edition.

But since Gryphius did not set page-for-page or line-for-line from the Knoblauch edition he used, it would have been impossible to say which of the three he chose if it had not been for a peculiar error which tends to single out Knoblauch's second edition (1522). Folly's indictment of bishops contains the sentence "At nunc belle faciunt, si sese pascunt" ("But nowadays they do a fine job if they feed themselves"). Only after several more sentences does Folly turn her attention to the laxness of the next group, the cardinals. And yet in the sentence about the bishops, Gryphius' edition inserts "cardinales" in the text after "faciunt": "At nunc belle faciunt cardinales, si sese pascunt" (sig. f1v). This puzzling and inappropriate addition can be explained by noting that in Knoblauch's second edition the marginal note "Cardina." has been displaced upward because of the

need to insert a marginal translation of a Greek phrase which occurs right before the opening of the section about cardinals. Only in Knoblauch's second edition (E861, sig. G2v) does this displaced marginal note "Cardina." appear in perfect spacing and alignment right before the line beginning "belle faciunt."

Having chosen this edition of Knoblauch, Gryphius proceeded to correct his copy by comparing it with Froben's 1522 edition, but the process of correction was sporadic and haphazard. If we ask again why Gryphius should have gone to the trouble to set from one edition and correct from a fuller version, instead of setting directly from the fuller version, the answer is not far to seek, since his reasons were similar to those of Knoblauch. Gryphius was printing in italic type without the Listrius commentary, but all three of the editions incorporating the latest revisions (E862, E864, E868) were set in roman type in pages of quite various sizes and line lengths because of the framing commentary. Since he found it more convenient to cast off his copy from regular lines of italic type than from varying lines of roman, Gryphius chose as his basic copy the fullest italic edition.[9]

The general conclusion to be drawn from these examples of Schürer, Knoblauch, and Gryphius is that in a series of editions in the early sixteenth century the presence or absence of a framing commentary or the use of roman or italic type may have caused the printer to choose his basic copy from an edition which he knew to be deficient, or even to form his basic copy from two different editions, because the convenience he gained in casting off copy or setting his type outweighed the difficulty of supplementing his basic copy from a later and fuller edition. Unfortunately, what he gained in convenience might well be lost in accuracy. This practise has special relevance to Latin works because they were more likely to be printed with commentaries than works in the vernacular and because italic type, which was merely the printer's equivalent of the new humanistic script, had considerable prestige among humanist writers and editors.

Among the early printers of the Moria, the normal procedure was to reprint an earlier edition, corrected more or less sporadically, usually without consulting any other edition. Those editions which contain authorial revisions or added passages were normally set from the most authoritative previous edition, even if some other edition might have provided more convenient printer's copy.[10] But when a modern editor of a humanistic

work in Latin is confronted by anomalous conflations of old and new readings or strange blends of preceding editions, he may be dealing with unusual basic copy of the sort employed by Schürer, Knoblauch, and Gryphius in their editions of Erasmus' Moria.

Notes