Printerly Ingenuity and Mathematical Books in the Early Estienne Workshop

Abstract

Even though the first press in Paris was set up in 1469, in rooms owned by the Collège de la Sorbonne, it took some time before the University's cursus ordinarius was regularly set in print. One of the first concerted efforts to reconfigure textbooks using print was carried out by Wolfgang Hopyland Johann Higman, beginning in the late 1480s. Their press—and their collaboration with the circle of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples—was taken up by the elder Henri Estienne and then Simon de Colines, who transformed the press into one of the most illustrious cases of the printing art in Europe, alongside Manutius and the later Estiennes. This chapter focuses on the routine claims these printers made about publishing the Sphaera of Sacrobosco and their own artful labors. It similarly examines their remarkable frontispieces within the context of a nascent tradition of astronomical frontispieces. Printerly claims to ingenuity and the relation of books and observation in these frontispieces undermine old historiographical dichotomies that oppose craft knowledge and book knowledge.