A Brill Calendar: April 15

"Dictionarium Teutonico-Latinium"

Few notions innate& to the 'black art' of Gutenberg are as crucial as ‘typographical fixity’.

This idea is coined by Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her great two-volume monograph ‘The Printing Press as an Agent of Change’. Intended to manufacture multiple copies of existing manuscripts, the revolutionary technology delivered a number of identical copies of the ‘exemplar’, creating a new function for texts and the potential to produce books with hitherto unexplored social, cultural and scholarly uses. It fell to great printers & publishers of the next century, the 16th, to make the great voyages of discovery. Many of them – and their assistants – became scholars in their own right, inventing new types of books for new forms of readership.

The case of Cornelis Kiliaan (Duffel, near Antwerp ca. 1528 – Antwerp, April 15, 1607) is illustrative. As a youngster, Cornelis entered the employ of Christoffel Plantijn, never to leave it. He marched through the professional ranks of his master’s sophisticated Antwerp workshop, from trainee to expert and master, both correcting and editing, whilst seeing new editions through the presses.

Innocent of academic lore, Kiliaan became both linguist and lexicographer. His magnum opus, ‘Dictionarium Teutonico-latinum’ (1574; reprinted and expanded in 1588 and 1599), remained an asset for scholars hailing from regions where German languages were spoken for centuries to come. Kiliaan may be the first individual wishing to make a complete inventory of the vocabulary he used himself daily; the product of his toil is the mother of all Dutch dictionaries.

From its beginnings this evolution is at home in Leyden. The ‘Praesidium Libertatis’ didn’t only defend political freedom from oppressors, but also explored the liberty to study equally passionately; a brand-new focus of learning, where the world of books and ‘The Book of the World’ were both perused with a modernist zeal.

It is seldom, by the same token, that contemporary printed propaganda and ‘public relation’ material, advocating the service of Pallas in Leyden, fails to include engraved pictures of its library, botanical garden and anatomical theatre. The Western intellectual tradition has never been one unified closed system. Eisenstein’s ‘Change’ took its time; only in the second half of the 17th century it is undeniable that medieval world-views are past.