TRADEgrew alongside others, making use of the fairs al-
ready in existence at Frankfurt and Lyons and supplying
buyers all over Europe. University cities were also obvious
centers, providing a ready market for the sale of quantities
of identical copies of essential texts.
In Spain, the Catholic Monarchs FERDINAND II AND IS-
ABELLA Iencouraged the immigration of printers, mainly
German, from the 1470s onward; by 1500 commercial
printers were operating in around 20 towns, including the
university cities of Zaragoza (1477), Salamanca (1481),
and Valladolid (1482), while the press at Alcalá de
Henares (1502) was shortly to issue the COMPLUTENSIAN
POLYGLOT, a formidable technical achievement.
Paris had its first press in 1470, under the wing of the
Sorbonne, and BADIUSand the ESTIENNEfamily continued
the scholarly tradition. Italian printing was started at Subi-
aco, near Rome, by the Germans Arnold Pennartz and
Conrad Schweinheim in 1464/65, but Venice, beginning
in 1469, attracted more 15th-century printers than any
other town, with the greatest of them, including Nicolas
JENSONand Aldus MANUTIUS, having a profound influence
on both the TYPOGRAPHYand the content of early printed
books. Once the Italian introduction of roman and italic
types made smaller and cheaper formats a possibility,
books were able to be acquired easily by individuals as
well as by institutional libraries for private study. Pocket
editions of the classics were a great improvement on
chained folios in libraries.
Printing in VERNACULARlanguages soon began to out-
strip Latin and other learned tongues. A good example is
William CAXTON’s production, nearly three-quarters of
which was in English, starting even before he took his
press to London in 1476. Private patrons were important
in Caxton’s success, as they were in that of other contem-
porary printers. Books in the vernacular, one more way of
bringing new ideas to the growing number of those able
to read, facilitated other changes too, among them those
promoted by Martin LUTHER, who was the making of the
Wittenberg printer, Hans Lufft. Thirty vernacular Bible
translations, mostly German, appeared before 1500, and
during the 16th century virtually every part of Europe ac-
quired its own version. As printed books became more fa-
miliar objects they inevitably began to standardize the
languages in which they were written (see ORTHOGRAPHY).
Caxton was influential once again in the stabilization of
written English (see ENGLISH LANGUAGE), while Robert
Estienne gave French its acute and grave accents. The de-
mands of the market affected the choice of material from
the earliest days, for the first vernacular scientific book
was a HERBALprinted by Peter Schöffer in 1485.
The first half of the 16th century has been labeled a
golden age of printing, helped by the development of EN-
GRAVINGand the consequent improvement in BOOK ILLUS-
TRATION, with engraved or decorated title-pages as well as
vignettes or head- or tail-pieces in the text. Many printers
became publishers of other people’s books as well, like
Christophe PLANTIN, or even left printing for publishing,
like Anton Koberger of Nuremberg. The influence of Italy
was later overtaken by that of Germany and the Nether-
lands, with Plantin in Antwerp and the ELZEVIRSfurther
north all flourishing once Spanish control of the region
was ended.
The basic equipment, the wooden printing press,
changed very little until the 18th century, except for the
enlargement of the printing surface and consequently the
output of printed sheets. However, as the power of the
press became evident, both Church and state attempted
to impose some control over the material being dissemi-
nated. Such measures included the foundation of the Sta-
tioners’ Company in London in 1557 as the self-regulating
body of the English book trade and the establishment of
the INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUMin Rome in 1559 (see
also CENSORSHIP).
See also: MUSIC PRINTING AND PUBLISHING
Further reading: Guglielmo Cavallo, A History of
Reading in the West, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst,
Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Elizabeth
Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Com-
munications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern
Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1979; concise ed. 1993); Leonardas Gerulaitis,
Printing and Publishing in Fifteenth-Century Venice
(Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association, 1976); Mar-
tin Lowry, Nicholas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publish-
ing in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1991);
Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (eds), Print, Man-
uscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the
Media in Early Modern England (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio
State University Press, 2000); Brian Richardson, Printing,
Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999).Protestants The term was originally applied to the
Lutheran minority at the 1529 Diet of SPIRES who
protested against the Catholic majority’s revocation of tol-
eration of dissenters in their territories. Later it was ex-
tended to include all the reformed churches (although
rejected in some quarters of the Church of England).
See also: HUGUENOTSProvoost, Jan (c. 1465–1529) Flemish painter
He was born at Bergen and trained at Brussels and Valen-
ciennes, where he married the widow of the miniaturist
Simon Marmion (died 1489). From 1494 he worked in
Bruges, where he painted a Last Judgment (c. 1524; Bruges
museum) for the town hall. His other works, none of
which is signed, show him moving away from a style pre-
dominently influenced by Gerard DAVIDtowards one with
an Italianate flavor. Provoost entertained DÜRERon the lat-
ter’s 1521 visit to the Netherlands.33994 4 PPrrootteessttaannttss