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exemplar- now corrected at least by as much care and labour as I am capable of- the said little book can be multipled in this state, and in such a way that it may become rapidly and easily known in a short time, for the use of many and to the common advan- tage of the Church. On account of which, since I judged that this could not be done more expeditiously by any other method or means, I have persuaded by every means that discreet gentleman Johann Mentelin, inhabitant of Strassburg, master of the art of typography, to the end that the might see fit to undertake the responsibily and toil of multiplying this little book by means of printing, having my copy before his eyes. . . . 29
Of course, the effort early printers actually devoted to comparing man- uscripts and producing a carefully edited text varied widely, and no matter how much effort was expended, even the best scholar printers, such as Aldus Manutius of Venice, could be very limited in their access to classical texts, sometimes basing their editions on only one manuscript.30 Nevertheless, once a text was put into print, the printed version often assumed an author- ity which it may or may not have deserved. And after printing editors often discarded the exemplar from which they worked, believing that it would no longer be needed, in the process adding a gap in the record of the transmis- sion of the text.
Very few manuscripts from which early printers worked have survived. Probably the earliest is the manuscript which the first printers in Italy, Sweynheym and Pannartz, used as the basis for the first printed edition of St. Augustine, De civitate dei, issued from their press at the Benedictine Monastery of St. Scholastica, in Subiaco, Italy on June 12, 1467. The manu- script from which the edition was based remains preserved in the monastery library, and it is thought that monks at the monastery participated in print- ing the edition. “That the codex was used for the printing is clearly shown
29 M.B. Parkes, Introduction to Peter Ganz (ed.) ,The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture (1986), pp. 15-16.
30 Davies, Aldus Manutius, Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (1999), p. 22.
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