The modern readers sometimes failed to appreciate the rapidity of expansion of the early 1450's. The bewildering proliferation of print-shops, editions, and reprints was the subjects. From the beginning, printing was an entrepreneurial activity, and once the basic mechanical principles were known, any energetic person with venture capital could enter the field. Both Gutenberg and Caxton, for example, were enterprising merchants who changed their careers. As one scholar pointed out: "An inventory of the physical and material progress of printing until the year 1500's, it would reveal more than 1,100 shops in 200 cities, in which some 12,000 books, in 35,000 editions, had been produced!" Although no one is quite sure how many of these incunabula have survived over the years.
One factor complicating the study of rhetoric in the incunabular period is that there are virtually no subject-indexes to catalogues. Thus, the historians of rhetoric for this particular time period faces some unusual problems in carrying out the two basic tasks of the texts, just to determine their contents and importance. This matter is further complicated by the fact that rhetoricians themselves have paid very little attention to the incunabular period. As a result, writers are completely unknown to scholarship. It is not surprising, then, that we have no historical overview of what could well be one of the most critical periods in the long development of the subject. The fifteenth century is definitely a neglected period.
Although there is not much, there was a brief study done and the first observation was simply once again that quantitatively, rhetorical texts do not loom large in this period. Even though the print editions included some of the major classical rhetorical writers; Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. The output is very small when compared to books produced for other fields like grammar, religion, or literature.
The rhetorical texts printed up to the 1500's fell into three categories: (1.) ancient treaties; (2.) medieval works; and finally, the most numerous, (3.) sixty-one contemporaneous works composed at or near the time of the printing era. The first printed book dealing with the aspect of language was not rhetorical treaties, but a grammar text from the middle ages: the Catholicon by Gutenberg, only six years after the famous Bible. The first non-classical rhetorical text to be printed may well have been the fourth printed; the fourth book of De doctrina christiana (A.D. 426) of Saints Aurelius Augustine.
The fourth book of De doctrina chrstiana is, of course, a defense of the use of rhetoric (especially Ciceronian rhetoric) in spreading the Christian message through preaching. Apparently, the first classical rhetorical work to be printed was a major Ciceronian work-De oratore. The two printers were Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. Thus among the major classical works, Cicero's rhetorical treatises began to appear as early as 1465 and all seven were in print by 1485. In the medieval preaching manuals also appeared between 1477 and 1500.
It should not be surprising to find that one of the earliest printed rhetorical texts was from the middle ages. Very little is known about the composition of original rhetorical history (books and treatises), during the first half of the fifteenth century. Our ignorance as the pupil is not necessarily due to a lack of creative activity in that period, but instead may be due to the fact that historians of rhetoric have devoted very little study to the century at hand. In any case, our knowledge of print books 1465-1500 may be all we truly have to help us understand the century as a whole. We can only be reminded of what Paul O. Kristeller has been urging for the past half century: "Rhetoric is a large area that is still insufficiently, explored by modern scholarship, and badly in need of much further investigation." So much could be learned from this era; if only the information was available to us. The true knowledge we as communication pupils could learn and take in, if only the research would be done!
Christy McDonald, CEM8546@UNCWIL.EDU