Book Circulation and Author Notoriety in antiquity through the middle ages.

December 7, 2007 2:29 PM

How famous could you really get as an author before the printing press?

Books were really rare and expensive. But, on the other hand, almost nobody could read. So, clearly we're only talking about a subset of people, but arguably the only people that mattered: the educated, wealthy and powerful.

Bonus Points for Detailed Answers!
- Authors of Academic/Scholarly works versus Literary/Dramatic works
- Fame in a decentralized city-state society versus fame in a centralized feudal or national society.
- How fast would such fame, if existing, travel?

posted by absalom to writing & language (26 comments total)

No, it had little to do with "educated, wealthy, and powerful". In the middle ages in Europe the vast majority of books were created by, and owned by, the Church. Writing was nearly a Catholic monopoly. Courts who needed written records kept clergy on staff for that purpose, because not only were they the only ones who could write, they were the only one who could read.

And since they wrote and read Latin, effectively those records were kept in code that was inacccessible even to literate locals, unless they too knew Latin.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:42 PM on December 7, 2007

Kind of hard to quantify that sort of question. You might try rootling for discussions of Petrarch, Dante and Bocaccio, all pretty heavy hitters even in their own time, even if (or perhaps because) they were not writing in Latin.
posted by IndigoJones at 2:44 PM on December 7, 2007

...which meant that nearly all authors in the middle ages were priests or monks. "Authorship" as a secular profession comes into being maybe a hundred years after the invention of the printing press. Authors of fiction faded in even later.

Those things simply weren't possible before that.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:46 PM on December 7, 2007

(Understand that all categorical statements are subject to exceptions. Yes, I know about Chaucer. But most writers before the printing press were writing for bards, not for book lovers.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 2:48 PM on December 7, 2007

Oh, and Jacobus de Voragine, of course. HIs Legenda Aurea was a big deal, translated into many languages. .
posted by IndigoJones at 2:49 PM on December 7, 2007

Steven C. Den Beste: That is true, yes, but the heart of the question is about *fame*. So, in that case, how famous would a prominent theologian be across Europe.

Also: Your nitpick, I think, still really applies to medieval times, when I address both classical and medieval times in my question.
posted by absalom at 2:52 PM on December 7, 2007

OH: Super bonus points for anyone who can suggest books. Academic level or readability is not a barrier to entry.
posted by absalom at 2:53 PM on December 7, 2007

Authors of fiction faded in even later.

Going to have to disagree. As mentioned, Bocaccio, to say nothing of the ancients from whom he drew inspiration. (I assumed the question mostly circles middle ages, but maybe not- are you including Greeks and Romans and all that? Rather opens up the discussion if so. (On preview, I guess you are))

As far as writing as a profession goes, it was a sideline of course, but for plenty of, if not most, modern writers it still is. Doesn't mean that you couldn't get a measure of fame even in the day.

Absalom- Sorry to sound dense, but can you specify a little what the books you seek would address? You mean something like Helen Waddells The Wandering Scholars? (Lots of fun, that, by the way.)
posted by IndigoJones at 2:59 PM on December 7, 2007

Sure, anything.
I guess something about the rate of diffusion of individual texts?
Perhaps a study of contemporary mentions of famous scholars, authors, and/or dramatists? Especially those that might be mentioned far outside their own regions within their own lifetimes.

If these questions are now way too specific, they're more to clarify what I'm looking for.
posted by absalom at 3:18 PM on December 7, 2007

What you want is work on "manuscript culture". I'm most familiar with the aspects of manuscript culture that overlap with print culture, which is next door to what you're asking about, but you still might find it interesting to see how influential manuscript could be even when print was available. If so, I recommend Arthur Marotti's Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric to get you started.
posted by redfoxtail at 3:33 PM on December 7, 2007

Dante was twittered about quite a bit in his own lifetime. Known as a man who liked to keep to himself.

It's the outside of their own regions bit that's going to get you. It was one thing to write for a mass audience in Latin (see above Voragine and the difusion of his work), quite another to go with your own native dialect.

That having been said, overlap occurs. Much of Canterbury Tales comes out of Boccaccio. Reason being that Chaucer spent a good deal of time in Italy. Not that he was going to footnote the stories in his own work. Why would he? Stories per se were not the thing, it was how they were reproduced. Think Shakespeare at a later time, or the Heptemaron of Marguerite of Navarre. It likely would not occur to any of the above to stories proprietory.

Sorry, free associating with this one. Probably should sleep on it.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:10 PM on December 7, 2007

Heptameron, that is.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:11 PM on December 7, 2007

Perhaps a study of contemporary mentions of famous scholars, authors, and/or dramatists? Especially those that might be mentioned far outside their own regions within their own lifetimes.

Judging from your original question and follow-ups, I think you may be trying to impose a 2007 notion of "fame" on a time in which it just didn't—and couldn't—exist.

First, there's the circular reference to "famous scholars," etc. And then, the "within their own lifetime" stipulation, which is way silly.

Think about it. Why would a 15th century Venetian ever bother to consider the existence of London? Much less its "scholars, authors, and/or dramatists," and vice versa re the 15th century Londoner.

Are you asking this question out of idle curiosity? Are you trying to construct some historical fiction? Something's missing in your question.
posted by dogrose at 4:52 PM on December 7, 2007

As far as ancient Greece was concerned, writing underwent a kind of revolution in Athens around the time of Socrates. So far as I can tell, up to then, writing was a technical thing for recording minor details. Two major things happened in his generation and just before. First of all, somehow, the works of Homer-- the Iliad and the Odyssey-- got written down, apparently at the command of the tyrant Peisistratus. This, so far as I know, is the first major writing-down of an important poetic work.

Oral poetry was in Greece the primary form of political speech. Statements by political leaders, items of news, winners of contests, results of battles: all of these were announced or disseminated through publicly-given poems. Even some laws were in poetical form. Extemporaneous speeches not meant to be remembered were obviously given in prose, but if it was meant to be recorded, it was recorded in memory as a poem and recited again and again.

That's why it was a major step also when Herodotus wrote and sent back to Athens his Inquiries. They were read widely in Athens at the time, usually aloud, but they were prose. Plato came somewhat later, but his written prose was similarly revolutionary.
posted by koeselitz at 5:01 PM on December 7, 2007

Does author have to mean someone who wrote something down on paper/parchment/etc? Because Homer was pretty famous, WAY before the printing press. He may or may not have actually existed, but he was famous none-the-less.
posted by grumblebee at 5:45 PM on December 7, 2007

Do they have to be alive when the fame hits? cf Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Plato known and read by anybody with an education say 200 years after them.

I'd guess the most famous "author" at death would be Saul of Tarsus. He did a lot of touring. Hm, maybe John just because he lived so much longer than the rest.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:00 PM on December 7, 2007

dogrose: scholarly curiosity. I probably boned everything up by making it too broad. (antiquity through medieval). Perhaps, Renown might be a better word for what I'm looking for. I hate that I was so vague above. I think I'd be rephrased as:

Were there any scholars of the classical or medieval eras who were well known, during their lifetimes, outside their own city-states or provinces? If so, how did their works spread fast enough for that to be the case?
posted by absalom at 6:17 PM on December 7, 2007

Petrarch, Dante and Bocaccio, all pretty heavy hitters even in their own time, even if (or perhaps because) they were not writing in Latin.

Not true. Petrarch "was an enthusiastic Latin scholar and did most of his writing in this language." Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, his encomium to the vernacular, was in Latin. Some of Boccaccio's works are Buccolicum carmen, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, De mulieribus claris, and Genealogia deorum gentilium libri. Everybody wrote in Latin back then; these guys happened to write in the vernacular as well.

Obviously "fame" did not exist in the modern "everybody from California to China knows about it" sense. But there were famous writers from ancient times in the sense that all literate people in a given culture knew them; all literate Greeks in the Hellenistic world knew Homer, Sappho, Archilochus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the other writers whose works were used in schoolbooks. (The Romans knew them too, thanks to their resentful absorption of Greek culture.)
posted by languagehat at 6:30 PM on December 7, 2007

Were there any scholars of the classical or medieval eras who were well known, during their lifetimes, outside their own city-states or provinces? If so, how did their works spread fast enough for that to be the case?

That's a question that makes some sense.

The answer is: NO.

What was the average lifespan in the 15th century? What was the primary mode of communicating information, and how fast was that? Did "authorship" mean the same thing then as it does now?

C'mon, absalom, THINK.
posted by dogrose at 7:49 PM on December 7, 2007

What languagehat said, more or less. You can look at the dissemination of Averroes of Cordoba, whose work entered the scholastic tradition, and Avicenna, whose work was ultimately proscribed by the scholastics.

While the means of transmission was limited to scribe-speed and horse/boat-speed, you're dealing with a smaller corpus, a smaller, fairly mobile learned community, and a lingua franca for scholarship in the West. You also had the first universities as the outgrowth of religious communities, in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Salamanca et al. And since the teaching was in Latin, the avenues for communication were there. (For instance, Oxford grew after the expulsion of foreigners from Paris.) Church officials such as Anselm travelled and wrote widely; the learned orders took their scholarship with them.

Even before the arrival of movable type, there was a rapidly-expanding copyist trade outside the scriptoria and the universities, serving a demand among the literate but non-scholarly for new-fangled French romaunts, Italian tales and English authors of bawdy pilgrim tales. Different audiences, slightly different distribution networks, and both setting the stage for Herr Gutenberg. (Elizabeth Eisenstein's work on the transition to print culture is useful here.)

It's really hard to pin all that down to an author being a 'living legend', and it's not my period of specialisation. You don't have, for instance, extant correspondence talking about that cracking new folio that arrived off the boat. I can't help thinking, though, that Peter Abelard probably fits the bill, and that's before Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer.

[The notion of the professional writer, though, as opposed to playwright/actor-managers or writers with patrons, comes much later: arguably no earlier than the 1700s.]
posted by holgate at 7:57 PM on December 7, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

What was the average lifespan in the 15th century?

Chaucer lived into his late fifties. Peter Abelard made it into his sixties, Boccaccio also. Petrarch nearly made it to seventy, legendarily. If you're a monk or a church officer or a civil servant in the medieval world, chances are you're going to be on the high side of the life-expectancy curve rather than dropping dead in a ditch. (See this comment also, on that canard.)

What was the primary mode of communicating information, and how fast was that?

Well, the primary medium was the Latin text, which meant that the time-sink of scribal copying and transmission by horse and ship would be offset by having someone on the other end who'd be able to read it, which, frankly, still beats Google Translate today.
posted by holgate at 8:11 PM on December 7, 2007

About the average lifespan thing. That includes infant mortality and whatnot. Basically, if you made it out of your teens you had a pretty good chance of living to a ripe old age. Provided you didn't get recruited for a war.

One thing about Rome is that there were slave workshops which pumped out books, not on a printing press scale, but there were more books in circulation than you'd think. But there's no way to know how famous a writer was because all the written remains we have from that time necessarily are the product of written culture, within which writers are going to be much better known than among the general populace. Yes, we can tell that, for instance, Horace was well known in the Roman empire in his lifetime, but would the man on the street in Rhodos have heard of him? Probably not, but we have no way of knowing.
posted by Kattullus at 10:23 PM on December 7, 2007

Were there any scholars of the classical or medieval eras who were well known, during their lifetimes, outside their own city-states or provinces? If so, how did their works spread fast enough for that to be the case?

Pindar was famous in his lifetime due to his works praising winners of games, among them the Olympic games.

During the Middle Ages Patriarch Photios I was a man of "great virtues and universal knowledge", according to Pope Nicholas. I'm sure being the Patriarch (no less during the time of the great schism) helped the circulation of his works.
posted by ersatz at 2:42 AM on December 8, 2007

What was the average lifespan in the 15th century?

Take a look at this link from Rising Life Expectancy: a global history.

It shows the survival curves for females in France. 1740-49 vs. 1996. Of live births, by age 5 50% of females had died and another 25% by age 40.
posted by shothotbot at 7:31 AM on December 8, 2007

Folks like Aquinas were famous accross wide areas (but obviously within a certain kind of circle. ). They became famous in part because of their traveling. Aquinas for instance was from Italy, and did much of his work as a scholar in Paris, traveling around quite a bit.

Folks like St Bonaventure were also famous as writers, because they were chronicalers of people (Francis in this case) who were famous and others wanted to know about.
posted by Jahaza at 10:27 AM on December 8, 2007

Not true. Petrarch "was an enthusiastic Latin scholar and did most of his writing in this language."

Walked right into that one. Serves me right for committing ruminations right before bedtime.

You're right, of course, though be it noted that the writers I cited wrote in their respective vernaculars in an attempt to improve their Q scores, even if only among their own (not necessarily scholarly) countrymen. Or so I understand.

The irony is that, however this innovation played at the time, it worked wonderfully well in the long run. All those medieval and renaissance writers of Latin who thought they were writing for the ages are now, however good the prose, struggling for recognition. Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio- their vernacular works are household names even in non-bookish households. Ficino, Bembo, Becadello- not so much.

(Might reward brother absalom to think about fame in the pre-steam press age as well. What did fame mean for a Samual Johnson or a Keats? Must be lots of work on that.)
posted by IndigoJones at 3:51 PM on December 9, 2007