Date/Time
Date(s) - 9 Mar 2016
6:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Butler Library, Room 523
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join the Columbia Book History Colloquium next week, on Wednesday March 9, for a talk by
Eric Marshall White, Curator of Rare Books, Princeton University Library
Fust & Schoeffer’s Canon Missae and the Invention of the Hybrid Book
The Canon Missae printed in Mainz by Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer c. 1458 was the first printed book conceived as an auxiliary portion of another book – namely, any folio format manuscript Missal. Consisting of a single twelve-leaf quire printed on vellum, this most sacred portion of the Mass ceremony was designed to be bound into the middle of its host manuscript, creating what may be called the first “hybrid book.” Born from both the pen and the press, the resulting mixed-heritage Missals were transitional monuments in the history of books that pose several challenges to the dominant narratives that steer the history of the book, which emphasize the functional differences between medieval manuscripts and printed books. This lecture traces the history of the creation, use, and limited survival of the Canon Missae, and reexamines the notion that Europe’s first printers had set out systematically to supersede the old “scribal” culture with a new “typographic” one.
Eric White is the Curator of Rare Books at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. He came to this position in Fall 2015 with 18 years of experience as Curator of Special Collections at Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library. His research interests center on the earliest European typography, and he has published articles in this field in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, The Book Collector, Quaerendo, and the Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society. He is currently finishing a major book project, Editio princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible, which traces the fortunes of all of the surviving copies, with particular emphasis on their rediscovery in monastic contexts during the eighteenth century.
This talk will take place at 6:00pm in Butler Library Room 523 on the Columbia University Morningside campus (535 West 114th Street). We will have out the RBML copy of the Canon Missae, pictured above, which has indeed been bound into another fifteenth-century book. As ever, the Book History Colloquium at Columbia talks are free and open to the public, and are sponsored by the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library.