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ars, teachers and students, in cooperation with booksellers, artisans and craftsmen, organized an active book trade. Paris became the leading cultural center of thirteenth century Europe. Of the medieval centers for book pro- duction, Paris was the largest, and also the site for which the largest amount of relevant archival material has been preserved.95
Along with the development of univerisities—though it tends not to be emphasized in studies of book history—a technological development oc- curred during the thirteenth century that stimulated the demand for reading material and also stimulated advances in the form and function of books. This was the invention of spectacles. Though initially they were probably only available to the few, reading glasses allowed a significant number of far-sighted people to read and write, and allowed older people, including more learned and experienced scholars who had become far-sighted as a re- sult of the aging process, to read and write just as they do today. This would have resulted in a significant widening of the book market, a greater demand for reading material, more productive teaching, scholarship, and an increase in writing. Various unsubstantiated theories concerning possible inventors of spectacles have been proposed over the centuries—none supported by satisfactory evidence. An ordinance dated April 2, 1300 confirms that lenses for spectacles were being produced by the Venetian glass industry by this date.96
95 For the history of the medieval book trade in Paris the most comprehensive study of the ex- tensive archival material is Richard and Mary Rouse’s Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200-1500 (2 vols., 2000).
96 “Venice was a major centre of glass production, and by the end of the thirteenth century eyeglasses had certainly become an object of general use there, as we can tell from an ordinance dated 2 April 1300 aimed at makers of glass and crystal. It prohibited them from perpetrating a fraud that must have become widespread: ‘acquiring or causing to acquired, and selling or causing to be sold, ordinary lenses of colourless glass, under the pretense that they are crystal, for example buttons, handles, discs for kegs and for the eyes (‘roidi de botacelis et da ogli’), tablets for altar pictures and crosses, and magnify- ing glasses (‘lapides ad legendum’). The penalty was a fine and the smashing of the fraudulent object. The precise distinction made in the document between eyeglasses and magnifying glasses establishes clearly just what each of the named objects is, and since words preserve their own past like fossils pre- served in amber, I note that the term Brille, which means eyeglasses in German, is derived from berillium, the medieval latin word for crystal (Frugoni, Inventions of the Middle Ages [2007], p. 7 and footnote 25).
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