296

Book Reviews

Andrew Pettegree. The Book in the Re-
naissance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale 
University Press, 2010. 421p. $40.00 
(ISBN 9780300110098). LC2009-026513. 

“Printing did not invent the book,” An-
drew Pettegree reminds his readers at the 
outset of this highly readable volume. 
Much of the remaining pages essay a new 
history of the first hundred and fifty years 
of printing, a history tantalizingly de-
coupled from just the books themselves. 
This is a vision of the history of the book 
that may only be possible now that global 
Internet resources are available to histo-
rians. Pettegree in his concluding “Note 
on Sources” notes that the foundations 
of book history in the writings of Lucien 
Febvre and Elizabeth Eisenstein had been 
rooted in the most prominent library col-
lections, which naturally represent the 
printed works that have been most valued 
and received the greatest custodial care. 
The Book in the Renaissance is an attempt 
at reformulating our understanding 
of the first age of print, based on new 
tabulations—and guesses—about printed 
materials that have heretofore escaped 
scrutiny. 

The Book in the Renaissance is an out-
come of long work by a team at the 
University of St. Andrews, synthesiz-
ing the wide variety of Web-based data 
now available with a wealth of more 
traditional scholarship in book history; 
it is a herald of the information that will 
soon be available in the Universal Short 
Title Catalogue. The book aims toward 
a much wider history of early printed 
works—not only the humanists’ pride in 
the rediscovered wisdom of the ancients, 
but also the everyday prayer books, best-
seller romances, pamphlets, almanacs, 
newsletters, broadsheets, indulgences, 
among others, that provided the income 
that allowed many printers to keep their 
business alive. The text carefully navi-
gates a balance between popular history 

and scholarly monograph, 
between educational tool 
(the opening chapters might 
easily serve as a course read-
ing) and sociology essay. Its 
historical narrative contains 
both chronological and topi-
cal elements, illustrated with a great va-
riety of the printed objects described in 
the text (with emphasis on the author’s 
Reformation specialty). 

Pettegree’s history keeps the busi-
ness motivations of all parties—authors, 
scribes, publishers, booksellers—at the 
forefront, and this economic focus domi-
nates the beginning of his history. The 
opening chapters are devoted to a well-
crafted introduction to the history of the 
book before printing, to the invention of 
various book-printing technologies from 
woodcuts to movable type, to the spread 
of those technologies from Germanic 
lands to stylistic and technical advances 
in Venice, and further spread to hundreds 
of European cities. He carefully delin-
eates the factors leading to the success 
or failure of early printing shops, with 
special care for how the needs of local 
markets such as universities and distri-
bution centers played a factor. The text is 
full of insights such as the unsuspected 
influence of Gutenberg by his choice of 
Jerome’s Vulgate text for the Bible, and 
the development of title page design. 
At the same time, Pettegree’s narrative 
frequently acknowledges the profit pos-
sible to a printer of “standard editions.” 

The second part of the book transitions 
somewhat uneasily from narrative his-
tory to the topical history at its heart. As 
Venetian printing innovations spread and 
the Reformation helped create new print-
ing centers such as Wittenberg and Basel, 
new genres of printed material emerged, 
genres that have been more ephemeral to 
traditional histories of printing. Pettegree 
devotes this section to genres of printed 



Book Reviews 297

works less well collected by major librar-
ies: prayer books, newsletters, Papal 
indulgences (perhaps 30 percent of the 
surviving printed documents from the 
fifteenth century), the Reformation’s war-
ring pamphlets, best-selling vernacular 
works (especially chivalric romances), 
and bread-and-butter Latin grammars 
and other educational works. In all cases, 
Pettegree is able to back up his narrative 
with concrete data from a variety of sourc-
es, often including counts of specific print 
runs to demonstrate the relative profit-
ability of a particular printed edition. 

The third and fourth sections of The 
Book in the Renaissance evolve into even 
more interesting and even more esoteric 
subjects; in these chapters, the history 
of print is a lens and data point through 
which to view several different areas of 
more general social history. Printed books 
are examined as a point of political and 
religious conflict (via incidents of book 
burnings and mass censorship), as a 
philosophical grounding point in strife-
torn France, as a benchmark for economic 
distribution in the midst of confessional 
wars, and as participants in the sixteenth-
century development of technical scien-
tific illustration and medical practice. 
Finally, he offers a chapter ruminating 
on the effects of widespread printing on 
the Renaissance concept of the library 
itself: the collections that had once been 
the province (and the pride) of great lords 
became possible for average scholarship, 
and the erudite discourse once relegated 
to the libraries of the nobility were now 
possible in the stationer’s shop. 

Pettegree admits, however, that even 
this more boisterous history of early Eu-
ropean printing may still be incomplete. 
Plantin kept a single copy of everything 
he printed, no matter how ephemeral; 
for how many other presses are the com-
plete riches of history lost? Booksellers’ 
inventories can be quite revealing, but if 
they represent unsold inventory, do we 
gain a complete picture? Pettegree closes 
his history with two counterexamples to 
his own approach. After noting the too-

numerous examples of book destruction 
in the course of warfare (up to World 
War II and the Gulf wars), he notes an 
instance in 1989 in which Dutch work-
men discovered a group of Protestant 
books apparently hidden more than four 
hundred years prior in a house in Delft; 
fully four of the six books had no other 
known exemplars anywhere in the world. 
In a different example, the prolific scrap-
books of the sixteenth-century diarist 
Pierre de L’Estoile apparently preserve 
vestiges of a variety of “street” sources, 
many of them apparently printed broad-
sheets and newsletters currently lost to 
our knowledge. 

In his conclusion, Pettegree brings to a 
crux both the potentially paradigm shift 
of his approach and its inherent limita-
tion. It is certainly true that the history of 
the book as traditionally written has been 
centered on the printed books of highest 
value, the volumes most assiduously 
sought after and carefully preserved by 
nobles, scholars, collectors, and (later) 
librarians. It is completely appropriate to 
broaden that history to include the gamut 
of other works that could fill the corners 
in a printer’s schedule and the gaps in 
his bottom line. Pettegree’s The Book in the 
Renaissance uses a variety of electronic and 
more traditional sources to do so. Even 
so, as with any historical narrative, the 
author must admit that there are parts of 
this history that still await excavation.—
Timothy J. Dickey, Independent Scholar, 
Columbus, Ohio.

Envisioning Future Academic Library 
Services: Initiatives, Ideas and Chal-
lenges. Ed. Sue McKnight. London: 
Facet Publishing, 2010. 247p. (ISBN 
9781856046916). LC2010-478131. 

Library shelves and book catalogues are 
filled with volumes prophesying the end 
of the library world as we know it, with 
change so imminent and so pervasive that 
it hardly seems possible for any paper-
based book to reach readers before it be-
comes obsolete. While the coming of, and 
need for, change is certainly trumpeted in