Kulturtransfer in der fruhen Neuzeit: die Vorwarte der Lyaner Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts.

Sabine Vogel. Kulturtransfer in der fruhen Neuzeit: die Vorwarte der Lyaner Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts.

Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. x + 318 pp. DM 168. ISBN: 3-16-147109-1.

This carefully researched book makes at least two important contributions to scholarship. First, it presents a subject that deserves more attention in Renaissance studies: the fortunes (and perhaps misfortunes) of the transmission of the literary culture of classical antiquity. Vogel delineates a significant shift in the appropriation of that culture in the sixteenth century: from humanist scholars who embraced antiquity in its entirety as the foundation for the trinity of their ideals -- doctrina, virtus, eloquentia -- to an increasingly vernacular audience that was quite content to have antiquity served up piecemeal and that, while not entirely rejecting the three humanist ideals, read more for the sake of pleasure than for the cause of erudition. The author describes this development as a transition from the learned reader (der gelehrte Leser) to the educated reader (der gebildete Leser), from the humanist to the ban esprit. Second, Vogel's study calls our attention to an important literary genre that sch olars have often overlooked. Prefaces to sixteenth-century imprints serve as her principal source for examining the transmission of antique culture via editors and printers to readers.

Vogel confines her research to books published in Lyon between 1519 and 1580, specifically in 1519/20, 1539/40, 1559/60, and 1579/80, and still extant in the Bibliotheque municipale de Lyon. Books published in the designated years of her sample account for roughly one-third of the total book production in Lyon. The chosen sequence covers the rise of production to its heyday in 1560 and then to its precipitous decline largely caused by the disruption of confessional warfare in France. The terminus ad quem allows one to determine the nature of the effect of the Council of Trent on the book trade, a subject to which Vogel devotes only a few pages (150-55). Lyon is an ideal focus for study. After Paris it was the largest center of book production in France, and it led Europe in the publication of legal books.

Vogel pursues her theme relentlessly. She documents the dilution, or at least the transformation, of the humanist values of doctrina, virtus, and eloquentia in a wide variety of literary genres. Impressive and imaginative are her sections on "die Antike als Baukasten"(94-127, 184-207). Here she demonstrates the fragmentation of classical culture into compilations and florilegia. The collections of extracts from ancient history and philosophy and of classical proverbs addressed themselves, as is clear in their prefaces, to an audience that was not interested in antiquity for its own sake but for its practical application. Inasmuch as a familiarity with parts of the classical heritage helped one up the social ladder of French officialdom, erudition, virtue, and eloquence were subordinated to the pursuit of power.

Two of the book's shortcomings involve the author's approach to humanism and her discussion of the bons esprits. Erasmus functions as the standard-bearer of humanism. Some leading French humanists, such as Guillaume Bude and Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples, are rarely or never mentioned. Even so, the antique culture that Erasmus wished to transmit to his contemporaries was not merely pagan. Vogel shows virtually no interest in the transmission of humanist biblical and patristic scholarship. For their part, the bons esprits remain rather elusive readers. To be sure, the authors of prefaces mentioned them, and we can infer from the prefaces what their cultural tastes were. But who specifically are these bons esprits, this newly emerging social group, as Vogel refers to them (269)? The book ends before we can receive a satisfactory answer. Yet it ends after having made the two contributions noted above, and one hopes it will stimulate further studies in a fascinating field of research.