MIDDLEBURY — On a recent afternoon, Rebekah Irwin hefted a massive tome out of a display case on the bottom floor of Middlebury College’s Davis Family Library and hiked open its heavy calfskin cover. Though you wouldn’t know it from the outside, the interior reveals page after page of spectacular, colorful illustrations — a marvel, given that the ink was laid more than 500 years ago.
The book is the “Nuremberg Chronicle,” a biblical world history produced in 1493, considered by some to be the most important book in the history of printing. Irwin is the director of the library’s Special Collections, where the chronicle is featured as part of a new exhibition, “In the Footprints of the First German Printers: 1450–1500,” open free to the public through Sept. 30. The chronicle is just one of a dozen books on display throughout the library, produced by pioneering German book printers on the cusp of the Renaissance.
The works themselves, Irwin explained, showcase the new ideas that were just beginning to arrive in the area after originating elsewhere in Europe.
“The Renaissance had begun in Italy and it had started to spread,” she said. “In Germany and Austria, it took a long time for the Renaissance to come. But there’s some of the intellectual curiosity, at least, in a book like this. They’re not only reproducing Christian thought, but also things from antiquity. It’s mostly Old and New Testament, but once in a while someone like Homer or Plato pops up.”
The exhibition was guest-curated by Marie Théberge, the parent of a Middlebury graduate, who volunteered her services after studying French medieval books as part of her master’s program at New Jersey’s Montclair State University. Mikaela Taylor, who graduated from Middlebury in 2015, designed the exhibition along with Théberge, Irwin and college archivist Danielle Rougeau.
Remarkably, all 12 of the books were already in the college’s possession — a formidable collection for an institution of Middlebury’s size. Almost all were donated to Middlebury in the 1930s and 1940s by Helen and Arthur Tashiera, a California couple who spent summers in Shrewsbury, Vt. The copy of the “Nuremberg Chronicle,” however, was given to the college by Ruth Hesselgrave, a longtime Middlebury resident who graduated from the college in 1918 and lived in town for decades.
Though all of the books are written in Latin or German, English speakers need not fear: Irwin noted that visitors can appreciate the works aesthetically, and simply by learning their history.
The Nuremberg Chronicle, (1493) considered by some to be the most important book in the history of printing, is renowned for its fanciful depictions of biblical tales and world history. The woodcut ink prints were hand-colored by an artist shortly after printing.
Photo/Todd Balfour for the Middlebury College Special Collections
“Often, we say to students that you don’t need to know how to read a book to read a book, in the same way that you can read a painting,” she said. “We’re hoping to give visitors those skills to ‘read’ a very old book without being afraid of it — to understand that it’s a technology, the beginning of the book trade.”
Aside from the intellectual curiosity on display, the books also came at the forefront of a technological revolution. In an email, Théberge noted that these printers had begun experimenting with various new bookmaking practices. “Tools like titles, tables of content, indentation, punctuation and pagination were used to help readers navigate the books more efficiently,” she said.
And while most were printed just a few decades after Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press, their fanciful text still mimics the handwritten manuscripts that had once been the standard — showing the overlap that existed between two eras.
“It isn’t as though one day, Johannes Gutenberg prints a book on a mechanized press and everything changed,” Irwin said, comparing it to our continued use of print newspapers in the internet era. “These books in many ways represent a new technology that will eventually change everything, but it still exists in a point where other things survive.”
This isn’t the only anachronism visible in the pages of the chronicle — its illustrations of biblical stories, fanciful and in vivid color, contain startling collisions between the ancient and the medieval. The deserts of Egypt are depicted as rolling, green, European hills; the Pharaoh looks more like a German monarch as Joseph stands before him to interpret the ruler’s dreams.
“Our effort is to keep alive the history of the books,” Irwin said. That history — depicted in their pages and embodied by the books themselves — is on display at the library for all those who wish to see it.