What had started as an attempt to illustrate a manuscript book of hours without having to master draughtsmanship soon became a nearly obsessional project in integrating the many prints flowing through Maastricht. Unlike the objects of study of other recent analyses of such hybrids, my object was divided and dispersed, meaning that tracing its parts forms the first operation. This in turn necessitates analysing habits of nineteenth-century collecting, which precipitated the dispersal in the first place. With an estimated 156 prints originally pasted into it, the beghards’ first manuscript contains (or rather, contained) more early prints than any other surviving manuscript, and as such, deserves a concentrated study.
The current study likewise concerns itself with one of those hybrids, containing handwritten text and mechanically reproduced images, all pasted together into a unity. Furthermore, they have emphasized the functions of the prints over their style and have considered their afterlives, and they have asked how various early prints have acted in hybrids. 3 They have rightly pointed out that prints can travel long distances before ending up in particular books.
2 Important recent studies by Peter Schmidt, David Areford, and Ursula Weekes have investigated these transitions by analysing the social function of prints in the manuscript era.
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(.)ġ Exploratory innovation took place with the book in the fifteenth century: mills sprang up to produce paper to feed the cottage industries that produced copper engravings, woodcut prints, blockbooks, handwritten and printed books, and all the hybrids and halflings in between. Transitioning from the handwritten book to the printed one was not swift, but involved bumps and false starts and abandoned experiments, resulting in books that had one foot in the old manual camp and the other in the new mechanical camp. 3 Peter Schmidt, Gedruckte Bilder in Handgeschriebenen Büchern : zum Gebrauch von Druckgraphik im 15.2 As James Douglas Farquhar states in ‘The Manuscript as a Book’, in Pen to Press : Illustrated Manusc (.).1 Finally, it is a study is about innovation, new organisational systems, failed experiments, and about individuals responding to new technologies and integrating multiple fields of craft production. By telling this story in this first person, I am revealing my own organisational systems, failed experiments, and stumbling forays into integrating fields of craft. These books were waypoints along the transition from the handwritten to the printed book, a transition that was anything but smooth. This is also the story of a curator who, in 1861, cut the prints out of the manuscript in order to mount them, according to their style or ‘school’, thereby giving them a completely different function. It is a case study of a larger group of books that straddled the old and new technologies, books made the old-fashioned way (by writing by hand) that nevertheless used the new technology (of printmaking) to introduce images. This chapter is about beghards in Maastricht who, around 1500, collected more than 150 single-leaf woodcut prints and engravings and glued them into an elaborate book of hours, the hulk of which is now in London, British Library Add. Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book : Th (.) 1 Studies that have addressed this transition include: Curt F.