The making of books and calendars
Currently reading "The Gutenberg Revolution" by John Mann. Enormously entertaining. In 1450, all Europe's books were handcopied and amounted to no more than a few thousand. By 1500 they were printed and numbered in the millions. Printing with moveable type, pioneered by Johann Gutenberg born in 1400 in Mainz, was the invention that started this revolution.
Mann, a historian with a background in German studies and science, makes a lot out of the little we know about Gutenberg's life and part of his technique is to people the story with portraits of some of the leading figures of the time. One of the most fascinating of the inventor's contemporaries is Nicholas of Cusa, a lawyer from Trier and a true Renaissance man, whose driving ambition and brilliant mind propelled him all the way up from a non-noble birth to being made a cardinal by Pope Eugenius IV.
Nicholas established his reputation at the Council of Basle, which began in 1431 and went on for 18 years. He arrived in Basle to argue the case of the disputed bishopric of Trier but made his name by helping to broker an agreement between Rome and the Hussites in a bloody dispute that focussed on the Hussites' insistence that communion be administered in both bread and wine, while Rome claimed that bread alone sufficed. Then Nicholas turned to a matter that required enormous competence in law, mathematics and religious observance: the calendar. As Mann writes:
"The Church was deeply concerned with the calendar because of the need to calculate the date of Easter. A thousand years before, the Council of Nicaea, laying out the ground rules of Christian practice, had decreed that Easter should fall on the Sunday following the full moon following the vernal equinox, one of two dates (in spring and autumn) on which day and night were of equal length. But the calendar of the time contained two errors. It's year (365.25 days) was 11 minutes and 8 seconds too long, which over 1,000 years amounted to seven days; and the calculations that predicted the lunar cycle were way out as well. Actually, Roger Bacon, philosopher and scientist, had pointed this out seventy years before, but it was considered so intractable a problem that the papal authorities averted their eyes. In his De Reparatione Calendarii (On Revising the Calendar), presented to the Council in 1437, Nicholas expertly reviewed the evidence and proposed the only possible remedy: to adopt a new lunar cycle, leave out a week in the calendar — he suggested Whitsun, because it was a moveable feast and the general public wouldn't notice — and then, as a final piece of fine tuning, omit a leap year every 304 years. This would have to be done not only with the agreement of the Greeks in Constantinople, because the were co-religionists, but also of the Jews, who would bear the brunt of revising all financial agreements."
Given the contentious nature of the issue and the fractured state of the church at the time, though, nothing was done. Reform had to wait for another 80 years when Pope Gregory XII introduced the "Gregorian" calendar, as we now know it. The structure that measures our years owes an enormous debt to Nicholas of Cusa, however. Now, back to Gutenberg's life.
Diarist of the day: Frances Stevenson, 10 March 1919"P.M [David Lloyd George] lunched at Mrs. Balfour's flat to meet with Queen of Rumania, & according to everybody, was in his best form. D. says she is very naughty, but a very clever woman, though on the whole he does not like her. She gave a lengthy description of he purchases in Paris, which included a pink silk chemise. She spoke of meeting President Wilson on his arrival. 'What shall I talk to him about?', she asked. 'The League of Nations or my pink chemise?' 'Begin with the League of Nations,' said Mr. Balfour, 'and finish with the pink chemise. If you were talking to Mr. Lloyd George, you could begin with the pink chemise!' "
