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these earliest printings were printed on vellum, presumably to make them as durable as possible when exposed to heavy use, since vellum tends to be stronger than paper. Such fragments may survived as scraps used as endpa- pers, or as some other element in early bindings.
The number of early printings of Donatus’s Ars minor is evidence of the central role that Latin played in medieval education. Slightly more than sev- enty-five percent of surviving fifteenth-century printed works were in Latin. Because of the manageable number of fifteenth-century imprints (roughly 27,000), various analyses have been done of their subject matter. By far the highest percentage, 45%, concerned religion or theology in some way, sup- plying the established church market which clearly represented the bulk of sales. Between 14% and 20% of imprints concerned either canon or civil law, supplying both the government and church market. Approximately 10% of imprints concerned medicine and practical or theoretical science, supplying the medical and technical market. Another 20% concerned lower levels of education, as did the multitude of editions of Donatus. The remaining 10% were generally literary, of which a little more than half, roughly 6% the total, were editions of classical texts, including 1475 editions of Latin authors.45
Along with the wider spread of literacy resulting from the greater avail- ability of books, it was inevitable that people, whether they knew Latin or not, would also want to read works in their own language. As the six- teenth century unfolded the percentage of works printed in the vernacular increased, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the number of works printed in Latin was roughly balanced by the number of works printed in a variety of vernaculars.46 As more and more documents were printed in the vernacular, printed works were used for reasons possibly unimaginable prior to printing. The ability of printing to circulate information rapidly and persuasively to a wider range of society through broadsides, pamphlets, and books resulted in profound social changes, among which Martin Luther’s prolific authorship, beginning in 1517, of printed pamphlets in German pro-
45 These statistics come from Jones, Printing the Classical Text (2004), pp. 10-15.
46 Hirsch, Printing, Selling, Reading 1450-1550 (1967), p. 132.
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