communication should not miss the essays by Henry Ettinghausen and Ricard
Expósito, which close A Maturing Market and provide insightful analysis on the circu-
lation and consumption of news in early modern Iberia.

Although A Maturing Market contains some gaps and imbalances (the presence of
Spain in the volume is much greater than that of Portugal, and there are no essays devoted
to the printing of legal texts, which accounted for one third of all items published in Spain
in the seventeenth century), readers will find in this edifying collection an expanded per-
spective on the Iberian book market that illuminates the data collected in various biblio-
graphicsourcesandcatalogues.Assuch,it isa welcome additiontostudiesonthehistory of
printing and the book in early modern Iberia and on the impact of the press in its societies.

Javier Lorenzo, East Carolina University
doi:10.1017/rqx.2018.50

Charlotte Guillard: Une femme imprimeur à la Renaissance. Rémi Jimenes.
Renaissance. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes; Tours: Presses Universitaires
François-Rabelais, 2017. 306 pp. €34.

Charlotte Guillard was active as a printer-publisher in Paris from 1537 to 1556, at the
Soleil d’Or, the oldest printing firm in Paris, founded in 1473. Twice widowed, she
assumed control of the business after the death of her second husband, printing/pub-
lishing firms being first and foremost family establishments; women as the heads of
firms invariably were widows who took charge in such circumstances. Over the years,
she published 181 editions, meticulously analyzed by Jimenes. These books were of the
kinds associated with this press when directed by her husbands, Jimenes stresses, so to
imagine that she brought a woman’s perspective to the selection of materials would be
seriously to misconstrue the nature of the publishing industry. Above all, this is a study
of publishing in sixteenth-century Paris—and, as such, a valuable contribution to the
fields of print culture and the history of the book. The nature and structure of this
industry are described in the first chapters, and then further discussed in chapters 8
and 9, on materials and the marketplace for books. With five or six presses, this
labor-intensive practice required perhaps forty workers, ranging from the core family
members to paper-boys, inkers, typesetters, and pressmen, to translators, editors, and
correctors, to a director (chef d’atelier), whose name at times was coupled with
Guillard’s on the title pages of the press’s books. In brief, this was a collective enterprise
in which the role of the publisher would have been largely administrative and financial.
To the minds of her contemporaries and to posterity, however, the press was that of
Charlotte Guillard, who was to be praised or blamed, then as now, for its production.

This production, examined in the central sections of the book, consisted largely of
books in theology and law, overwhelmingly texts by the church fathers and other sacred

RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY298 VOLUME LXXII, NO. 1

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use.

https://www.cambridge.org/core


works: five, six, seven, or ten volumes of the works of Saint Jerome or of Saint
Augustine, published in 1541 and again in 1556, etc. On the basis of this production,
Guillard might seem a mere tool of the Catholic Church, dogmatically engaged on the
side of the Counter-Reformation. This is the crux of the Guillard problem. Was she not
out of touch with the most vital current of her time—namely, the humanist reconsti-
tution and dissemination of ancient texts? Why bother with what would seem to have
been a rearguard action of an essentially medieval press? Jimenes’s answer is that she was
not so out of touch, that secular texts were far from the only ones of interest to the
humanists, and that the output of the Soleil d’Or was in fact consonant with that of
better-known humanist presses.

A principal, perhaps the principal, mission of Renaissance humanism involved cor-
recting sacred texts, particularly those of the fathers, by returning to their Hebrew and
Greek sources. To this end, the humanists compared existing texts, noted differences
that could be attributed either to errors in translation or scribal transmission, and pre-
pared new, authoritative printed editions. The most famous was Erasmus, who, in fact,
collaborated at least one time with the editors of the Soleil d’Or. But famous or not,
these editors were similarly motivated, their contributions no less meaningful than
those of the more famous presses of Amerbach or Froben, in Basel, or Plantin, in
Antwerp. (This same return to sources distinguishes the books in jurisprudence pub-
lished by Guillard.) All in all, then, Charlotte Guillard’s Soleil d’Or deserves a place,
Jimenes shows, at the forefront of French Renaissance print culture, a culture of
books and prints reflecting the continued dominance of religious, predominantly
Catholic values. Whereas the humanist/antiquarian texts of the Aldine Press, of
Aldus Manutius, receive regular attention, those of Charlotte Guillard were in fact
more representative of sixteenth-century print culture.

There is another reason for the greater attraction of Aldine books, and it is their anti-
quarian look, more obviously in keeping with the humanist focus on antiquity. In this
regard, the books published by the Soleil d’Or are indeed not at all comparable. The
texts were set in a mix of Gothic and Roman typefaces, with layouts carried over from
medieval manuscript practices: the text typically runs across the page without breaks,
breathlessly, margins virtually non-existent. Woodcut illustrations, of indifferent quality
and used sparingly, fit badly on the page and are in a late Gothic style. But such deci-
sions were not taken in a vacuum. New typefaces were expensive, as was paper; illustra-
tions to theological and legal books were strictly ornamental. So we are back to the
question of the purposes of texts in post-Reformation Europe. What makes Jimenes’s
answers so interesting and valuable is that they apply to texts that have tended to fall
into a perceived gap between humanist and non-humanist currents.

Carl Goldstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
doi:10.1017/rqx.2018.51

REVIEWS 299

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:07:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use.

https://www.cambridge.org/core