Greek Editiones principes, 1465 and 1489
These two incunabula (i.e., books printed before 1501) are exceptional not only for their antiquity and extreme rarity but also for their inventive development of Greek type, printed by Johannes Gutenberg’s apprentices Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. Lactantius’s Opera, also widely known as the “Subiaco Lactantius” after the Benedictine abbey where it was printed, constitutes the first dated book ever printed in Italy and the third printed there overall (after Donatus’s Latin grammar and Cicero’s De officiis). But what truly distinguishes the Lactantius is that it also contains perhaps the very first known use of Greek letterforms in print, which appear as quotations from ancient Greek texts embedded in the much longer Latin text of the Institutes. The elegance of the typographical arrangement of the text as a whole is also enhanced by the abandonment of late-medieval black-letter type in favor of a rounded, roman type for the Latin portions—a tradition of Italian Renaissance humanist printing that by the late incunabular period would inform similar printing efforts north of the Alps.
While the inheritors of Gutenberg’s original press, Peter Schoeffer and Johann Fust, were also experimenting with Greek printing at the same time in Mainz, it is unclear which press could claim clear precedence. In any event, Schoeffer’s Greek type was cruder and less legible than the Subiaco type, the former clearly not having been designed by a native Greek reader. In contrast, the Subiaco Lactantius features handsome, uniform Greek letters and superior linguistic accuracy, despite the absence of accents and a clear Latinate, rather than Hellenistic, influence. It seems this type was unique, likely cut for this volume and soon thereafter abandoned in favor of a different letterform design after the printers left Subiaco just two years later, in 1467. Their subsequent 1468 edition of the Lactantius reflects the latter set of Greek type.
Another monumental “first” in the history of editiones principes of the incunabular period in the Johns Hopkins collections is the very first publication in Greek of Homer’s opera. It begins with a single-page Latin preface by Bernardo Nerli noting the dearth of reliable Greek-language texts in Italy and the need for efforts such as this to expand access to the great harvest of ancient Greek and Hellenistic works that began to appear in Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Bernardo also defends the further inclusion of Herodotus’s supposed biography of Homer and Plutarch’s “On the Life and Works of Homer,” both now known to be entirely spurious, like the widespread belief in the Renaissance that Homer was a single historical figure rather than the embodiment of a long oral tradition of textual development and transmission over generations, as he is known today.
Greek language and literature had largely been lost to Western Europe during the medieval era, only trickling back in after the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire decades earlier. The “rediscovery” of Plato, unknown in medieval Europe beyond his cosmological dialogue the Timaeus, and renewed interest in improving corrupted Latin translations of ancient Greek texts very much helped fuel these efforts, culminating in Marsilio Ficino’s edition of the Platonic canon (1484–86) and Aldus Manutius’s “Aldine Aristotle” (1495–98). In addition to a complete set of the editio princeps of the Aldine Aristotle, the Sheridan Libraries has just recently acquired a copy of Ficino’s much revised and corrected 1491 Plato, which is uniquely endowed with extensive contemporary interpretive marginalia in multiple hands.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Glenn W. Most and Alice Schreyer (eds.), Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the Bibliotecha Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Library (University of Chicago Library, 2013); Robert Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1900), esp.26–29, 66–70; Victor Scholderer (ed.), Greek Printing Types, 1465–1927: Facsimiles from an Exhibition of Books Illustrating the Development of Greek Printing Shown in the British Museum (British Museum, 1927), esp.1–13; Philip H. Young, The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Illiad and the Odyssey (McFarland, 2003), esp. 77–96.
