[These posts are lightly edited versions of the 2023-4 student projects from our undergraduate unit, Studying and Making Early Printed Books, in which students adopt a book from Bristol University’s Special Collections, and work in groups to produce a creative response to it using our historic letterpress equipment. The group blog post is one of the two assessments for the unit]
Dissecting Chirurgia
by Imogen Lock, Hels Borlase and Francesca Papp
Which early modern book did you select?
Our adopted book was an anthology of surgical treatises published by Gregorio de Gregori in Venice in 1513 (Special Collections HMg).The anthology consists of four volumes by five different authors bound together. The texts include De Materia Chirurgica by French doctor Iacobi Hollerii (Jaques Houllier); two medical treatises originally written in the eleventh century by Arabic physician Abulcasis and fourth-century Greek physician Theodorus Priscianus under the pseudonym ‘Octavius Horatianus’; a treatise by the seventh-century Byzantine Greek physician Paul of Aegina; and Cirurgia magistri by the Italian doctor and philosopher Pietro d’Argillata. This copy was owned by sixteenth-century surgeon Joseph Fenton, whose comprehensive library included works by surgical writers of all periods, from Hippocrates to his own contemporaries.
What did you find interesting about this book?
We initially thought that the different parts of our adopted anthology were incongruous with one another, so deduced that the only common thread was the study of surgery. There was a striking variety of aesthetic elements across the four volumes: the typefaces, use of italics, justification, paratexts (marginalia and annotations), pictorial elements (xylographic images, illustrated letters), and at times, the languages.
This made the research challenging but the book even more fascinating to pull apart. This is what led us to our concept of ‘Dissecting Chirurgia’ [Dissecting Surgery], the title of our project.
Since the book is composed of four separate volumes bound into one (known as a ‘Sammelband’) there are four different linguistic influences, all masked by a seemingly standardised Latin. This tells us that these texts had to be translated from their original language. The third book authored by the Byzantine Greek physician Paul of Aegina, and the second, comprised of medical works by esteemed Arabic authors, Galen and Abulcasis, would have been originally handwritten. To add another layer to this Sammelband-sandwich, the author’s names were all Latinized.
Many scientific and philosophical Roman and Greek codices were adapted with the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press and moveable type, all of which accelerated developments in the Renaissance period. Following the Fall of Constantinople and the former Byzantine Empire in the mid-fifteenth century, there was an exodus of Byzantine Greek scholars to Italy. When they fled, they took important handwritten documents, new and old, with them. Historians dispute the extent to which this mass migration and influx of foreign thought helped catalyse the Renaissance in ‘Italy’ but it is important to consider these events alongside the Gutenberg revolution, which helped bring such ancient texts to a wider audience. People were increasingly gaining access to Latin translations of medical and scientific works, written by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic scholars. A similar tale, therefore, presumably applies to the origins of our ‘book’, providing some historical context for how it came into being as an anthology.
Right: our justified colophon compared with justification in anthology
What were you inspired to make?
We sought to channel our anthology’s wide range of linguistic and geographical influences by paying homage to their distinctive aesthetic elements and using English, Latin, Italian, and French. We wanted our book to reflect the interactive, personalised elements seen in the anthology’s use of printed marginalia and annotations. Hence, the second contents page of our book features a small dialogue between French and Italian in 6 pt Garamond. The second book in the anthology included many intricate xylographic images of lobotomies and surgical instruments. Thus Hels attempted to replicate some of these as they had some former experience with lino cutting. The colophon of our response, printed in 24 pt Garamond, is justified in a triangular shape, inspired by the third book.
Unfortunately, the intricate index pages and tables of Argillata’s book didn’t make the cut, nor the neat two-columned page formatting; though we were struck by the significance of these features, we lacked the skill and time to replicate them in our own printing. Therefore, we opted for the less ambitious use of illustrated letters. The final touch was adapting our title page, which consisted of wooden capital letters, our project name in an Old English typeface, and ornaments for the border printed in gold. We also felt it very necessary to credit our team leader, John, so we got him to ‘sign’ the book, as a little call-back to Joseph Fenton’s signature of custody visible on the first page of the anthology.
Right: Dedication in the first book
What were the processes and challenges involved in making your book?
The design process was shaped by both our creative responses to the book and the limitations of the print shop. The first step was to ascertain what kind of typefaces were available to us, as well as measuring the paper. The next was to conduct research into surgical literature of the Cinquecento through exploring digital library collections such as the Wellcome Collection and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which served as a source of inspiration and a way to collate design ideas. A series of group discussions helped us to understand each other’s creative processes and priorities, and ultimately make compromises.
Below: Page formatting drafts
Our earliest drafts were hand-drawn, rough sketches, and served as a way for us to begin to visualise our ideas. This was useful initially when the ideas were flowing, but ultimately needed to be upgraded due to the lack of precision. We therefore started to use Microsoft Publisher, which gave us an idea of proportions and made it easy to experiment with the arrangement of various elements on the page.
Rather than lifting text straight out of Chirurgia, which was very dense and technical, we found a section of Celsus’s De medica which discussed eye surgery. Once we started setting the text, however, we discovered that the Old English typeface we were using had virtually run out! This forced us to find a creative solution by setting ‘CORPORIS’ entirely in capitals, placing unintended emphasis on the role of the body in the healing described, which ended up being quite a welcome and interesting compromise. We also found that it was necessary to go back and correct some mistakes, as letters such as u’s and n’s have a habit of getting mixed up…
Right: Hels using a spoon to press down the lino print
How would you approach the task a second time?
As with any creative process, not all our original ideas came to fruition. Ultimately, we had to ensure our creativity worked within the limits of our resources. Our original ideas included using a wider variety of languages to reflect the multicultural diversity of the different components involved in making our book. This would also have nicely tied into the breadth of our experience as linguists. We would also have used English to render the text more accessible, an updated version of the ‘standardised’ Latin used at the time of the book’s publication. Unfortunately, constraints pertaining to the available typefaces thwarted this plan, a fact only realised in the process of composing! We lacked the necessary accented letters to accurately print in other languages, for example circumflexes, and cedillas in French, leading us to compromise and ‘downgrade’ the foreign text to minor marginalia features. This forced a more creative and exciting idea, as it now appears that the French and Italian owners of the book have been communicating with each other through the marginalia.
Another challenge lay in understanding and interpreting the book. A mysterious feature was the ambiguous printing location, revealed by the presumed ‘imprint’ on the title page. Bristol Special Collections and our own research suggested it was Venice, however Parigi has also been printed on the title page. We wanted to convey this ambiguity in an experimental fashion by handwriting Venice, then crossing it out and writing ‘Paris’. We would then have covered this with a paper flap attached by thread and handwriting ‘Bristol’ or ‘Bristolium’ on top, adding an interactive element to the title page and rendering each copy of our ‘print run’ unique, to reflect the individualised nature of the treatise seen in the handwritten paratexts. This would also have channelled the theme of dissection (stitching/sewing body parts). Flaps were commonly used in sixteenth-century anatomy books, so this would have been an interesting and pertinent feature to add. In practice we decided to prioritise finishing each copy rather than elongating the process.
We wanted to replicate the intricate xylographic illustrations, for example of the man with swords piercing his skin, but it wasn’t possible due to the small size of our page and time constraints. Instead, we experimented with lino. Due to the size of our folio, we also had to reduce the scale of the linocut. The solution was therefore to use simpler images, for example, of the surgical instruments in the second book, which weren’t too detailed to replicate.
Right: our creative response, Hels’ lino recreation + marginalia.
Our finished book combines the elements of Chirguria which we originally found so fascinating when we first visited the book. Combining this inspiration and the skills we acquired in the print shop, we were able to create a printed response which is a true reflection of the journey that the book took us on, through history and the various resources of the print shop!
