Abstract

James J. Murphy and Martin Davies Rhetorical Incunabula: A Short-Title Catalogue of Texts Printed to the Year 1500 INTRODUCTION T he fifteenth century was perhaps one of the most important periods in the history of rhetoric, when the printing press changed the slow, labor-intensive hand production of single books into a mass-production system based on machine replication of texts. As Elizabeth Eisenstein has observed, "As an agent of change, printing altered methods of data collection, storage, and retrieval systems and communications networks used by learned communities throughout Europe. It warrants special attention because it had special effects."1 This study deals with the earliest printed books dealing with rhetoric, the rhetorical "incunabula." The Latin term incunabulum (pi. incunabula) means "cradle" or "swaddling clothes" or "birthplace." When Cornelius a Beughem published the first specialized list of fifteenth-century printed books (i.e., from Gutenberg up to and including the year 1500), his title Incunabula typographiae (Amsterdam, 1688) gave a name to the books printed in that period. We do not yet know the extent to which printing may have changed rhetoric in the fifteenth century and after. Two major efforts need to be made before that judgment can be made. One is the identification and study of manuscript books dealing with rhetoric, to see what kind and number of texts were made by hand during the fifteenth century. This is a complex matter, both Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1980), 2:xvi.©The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XV, Number 4 (1997) 355 356 RHETORICA because we lack the apparatus for precise location and dating of the manuscripts, and because some works existed in manuscript for a long time before being printed.2 The second necessary effort is the identification and study of books on rhetoric printed up to the year 1500. This present short-title catalogue is a first step in that direction. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to rhetoric in the second half of the fifteenth century. Generally, historians of rhetoric lump all of the "Renaissance" together as one entity, without considering the incunable period separately. The nearest thing to a survey is the brilliant piece by John Monfasani, "Humanism and Rhetoric," in the three-volume Renaissance Humanism edited by Albert Rabil, Jr.3 Monfasani discusses a number of incunable authors, but also ranges over nearly two centuries of development and thus does not concentrate on the incunable period itself. There is also a brief pointing essay by James J. Murphy.4 Some attention has been given to individual authors,5 or to certain lines of influence,6 or to particular countries.7 At the same time there is an enormous range of modern scholarship dealing with other aspects of incunables, especially physical characteristics like bindings, inks, typefaces, and paper, which are often useful in identifying printers, or dates and places of publication. There has been less attention to rhetorical aspects 2The groundwork has been laid, however, by the herculean labors of Paul Oskar Kristeller in the extensive manuscript catalogues of his Iter Italicum, vols. 1-6 (Leiden, 1963-92). Sometimes the time lag between composition and printing is a complicating factor: for example, Lorenzo Valla died in 1457, but his commentary on Quintilian's Institutiones oratoriae was not printed until 1494. 3Rcnaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Philadelphia, 1988), 3:171-235. 4James J. Murphy, "Rhetoric in the Earliest Years of Printing, 1465-1500," Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 1-11. See also Murphy, "Ciceronian Influences in Latin Rhetorical Compendia of the Fifteenth Century," in Acta Conventus NeoLatini Guelpherbytani: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, ed. Stella P. Revard, Fidel Radie, and Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, N.Y., 1988), pp. 522-30. 5George A. Kennedy, "The Rhetorica of Guillaume Fichet," Rhetorica 5 (1987): 411-18; and Lawrence D. Green, "Classical and Medieval Rhetorical Traditions in Traversagni's Margarita eloquentiae," Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 185-96. 6 John Monfasani, "The Byzantine Rhetorical Tradition and the Renaissance," in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and...