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The Golden Compasses (1969-1972)

The Golden Compasses

(1969-1972)–Leon Voet–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

The History of the House of Plantin-Moretus


Vorige Volgende

Publishing

Chapter 10
Censorship and Privileges1.

Before a manuscript could be entrusted to the compositors, certain important statutory requirements had to be fulfilled. The text had to be submitted to the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, who tested the religious and political orthodoxy of its contents - both of these being judged, of course, from the point of view of whoever was in power at the moment.

The system worked as follows. The manuscript first went to a librorum censor or visitateur, a cleric who examined its religious content. If this censor was satisfied, he issued a certificate; today this is usually known as an imprimatur, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the terms approbatio, licentia, or censura were used. Thus attested, the manuscript was passed to the secular authorities who satisfied themselves as to its political colour. If their findings were favourable, a privilege or patent was granted which not only permitted the printer

or publisher - or author - to issue the book, but also assured him of a monopoly of publication and sale for a fixed number of years. This remarkable process, which began with political and religious ‘vetting’ and ended with the granting of a sales monopoly, is explained by the interaction of a number of different factors.

Ecclesiastical censorship is almost as old as the Christian church itself, but it only became a major problem after the spread of printing. In the Netherlands, as in most of the neighbouring countries, it was not organized to any effect as a preventive supervision of printed books until after Rome had officially denounced Luther and his teaching. From 1520 onwards it was developed into a weapon for use in the struggle against Protestantism. It should be pointed out, however, that the Catholic church was only able to make its wishes known in this matter because censorship was organized by the secular authorities; the mode of operation in the Low Countries was established not by the decretals of the church, but by the edicts of the Emperor Charles v and his son Philip ii. It was they too who provided for the compilation and publication of that great aid to censorship and inquisition, the Index of Prohibited Books.1.

Political aspects of censorship were less important at first. It was not until the Iconoclasm, the Beeldenstorm, broke out in the Netherlands in 1566 that religious aspirations began to be expressed in terms of political opposition. Pamphleteering - at least in the Southern Netherlands - did not get under way until 1576 and the temporary eclipse of Spanish authority; it ended abruptly in 1585 with the recapture of Antwerp. In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world of printing and publishing political subversion was less to be feared than religious controversy. It is very probable that political censorship, except in periods of extreme tension, would never have



illustratie
(49) Left: Approbatio for Justus Lipsius, De amphitheatro liber, dated 22 July 1598 (A. 1573). The censor, G. Fabricius, wrote his approbatio on the copy of the 1585 edition (see also plate 69) which Lipsius had corrected and added to in preparation for the reissue of 1598.




illustratie
(50) Right: Fabricius's approbatio for Justus Lipsius, De amphitheatro liber, 1598 (see plate 49), as it was printed in the edition.




illustratie
(51) Opposite: Privilege (signed with the traditional formula of the Spanish monarchs: Yo el Rey, ‘I, the King’) granted by Philip ii as king of Aragon to Plantin for the Polyglot Bible, 22 February 1573 (Arch. 1179, no 154). (Considerably reduced.) Most privileges for Plantin's books were granted by the Privy Council or the Council of Brabant at Brussels and were much simpler. The first privilege received by Plantin (Privy Council, 5 April 1555) is reproduced in The Golden Compasses, Vol. I, plate 8.


been coherently organized if another factor had not arisen: the wish of the printers themselves to protect their books from competition. The granting of privileges in fact preceded organized political and religious censorship. The earliest known instance in the Netherlands - and quite probably the actual first case - is the patent issued by the Council of Brabant on 5th January 1512 to the Antwerp printer Claes de Graeve. It permitted him to print new works for six years in the Duchy of Brabant. In this case the initiative had come from the printer. His object was clearly set out in the petition he submitted to the council: a monopoly that would protect his publications from unauthorized reprinting for a specified number of years.1.

In the beginning the privilege was something that was voluntarily sought by the printer and applied to all new works he printed. The government soon realized that the privilege could be a valuable aid in the struggle against the subversive forces of Protestantism, and so it was made obligatory. Every publication had to have an imprimatur from the authorities which offered the printer-publisher certain economic advantages, but at the same time obliged him to submit his texts for official examination.

So it was that this system of preventative religious and political censorship was built up under the pressure of circumstance during the first half of the sixteenth century. It was already fully developed when Plantin settled in the Netherlands. It remained in existence in the southern half of the Low Countries without fundamental change until the French Revolution - except, that is, for the period 1577-85, when Calvinism was able to exist for a while in the Southern Netherlands alongside and in opposition to the old religion.

About 800 privileges and approbationes2. relating to works published

by the Plantinian press are preserved in the archives.1. Some 260 of them date from Plantin's time, all but a few of the documents being privileges. Approbationes are better represented in the seventeenth century, but here too privileges predominate. This is understandable. From the printer's point of view the approbatio was of secondary importance: something to reassure a secular official in Brussels that all was well theologically and to protect the printer from unwelcome difficulties. Very often the censor wrote his approbatio directly on the manuscript or on the copy of a revised printed book.2. In other cases it was left in the records of the government office concerned along with the original petition and other pertinent documents.

This helps to explain another point. Quite often Plantin made no mention in the books he printed of the privilege, or else contented himself with a minimal ‘cum privilegio’ on the title-page or in the colophon. The general rule, however, was to include in the preliminary matter or at the end of the book a fairly lengthy extract from the document, with the date and the signature of the issuing official. This practice was followed far less frequently with the approbatio, although an extract with the censor's name might be printed - mostly in books with an obviously religious content, as might be expected.

 

The many ordinances of Charles v and Philip ii dealing with religious censorship make it appear as if this was regulated down to the smallest detail. In practice the procedures were cursory and illdefined. There was no actual central body responsible for directing operations, only a number of more or less officially appointed censores librorum. These were doctors of theology or other suitably qualified persons who acted as censors when called upon to do so. It is in

fact quite clear from Plantin's correspondence that printers to a large extent were able to choose their own censors, and the censors were themselves free to accept or refuse the task. Plantin mentions the theologians of Louvain university a few times,1. but he only seems to have approached these learned gentlemen when dealing with major theological or scriptural texts which might give rise to dangerous controversy: such as the Polyglot Bible, the Summa S. Thomae,2. Benoist's French Bible translation,3. and other similarly important editions.4.

For routine publications Plantin turned at first mainly to the dean of St. Gudule in Brussels. In a letter of November 1561 the printer speaks of him as being the official censor of the Council of Brabant.5. Understandably enough, the printers of the duchy, even though they were perhaps not nominally obliged to, preferred to approach the dean, knowing that this gave them something of an advantage when it came to applying for a privilege. As a result the dean was no doubt inundated with manuscripts so that neither he nor his subordinates of the chapter could have kept up with the work. Plantin consequently made some use of the dean and chapter in the following years,6. but at least from 1564 or 1565 he began to turn increasingly to

the church authorities in Antwerp1. and if necessary elsewhere in the duchy.2. After 1585 practically all the approbationes for Plantinian editions were granted by Antwerp clergy.3. The few exceptions mainly occurred when clerical authors who were having their books printed by the house obtained approbationes from their superiors in parish or order.4. In such cases the Antwerp censors generally examined both the text and their colleagues' attestations before adding their own observations in a second approbatio, which might also appear somewhere in the printed work.

Plantin had difficulties with the censors from time to time. On one occasion the actual contents of two books were the cause of the trouble, the Commentaria in duodecim prophetas and De optimo imperio published in 1583 and written by Plantin's old friend Arias Montanus.

The trouble, however, started as late as 1586, after the capitulation of Antwerp, when an eager theologian - the Louvain professor Henry Gravius - began examining works published during the Calvinist régime in Antwerp. Arias Montanus, who in the Netherlands in 1568 had seemed an unswervingly orthodox theologian, had undergone a considerable evolution through the years and had even been influenced by the ideas of the heterodox leader Barrefelt.1. These ideas must have been too evident in the book. Plantin kept his head, pointing out to the censor as courteously as he could that Montanus would not wish there to be anything in his writings that might be taken to conflict with orthodoxy. The printer was most willing to incorporate such alterations as the censor saw fit to annotate. The Tabella Mosis, an engraving added to the work, would also be modified according to the censor's instructions.2. Gravius does not seem to have insisted and the case was shelved.

In the majority of cases difficulties arose merely out of the delays caused by the passage of works through censorship. On a few occasions Plantin wrote to impatient authors promising them that he would try to prise their manuscripts out of the censors' hands. In September or October 1588 he had to inform the prolific Jesuit author Costerus that the censor Pardo, having kept his manuscript for a very long time, was so overwhelmed with work that he was going to have to return it unread, which would cause further delay.3. The angry de Pimpont of Paris was told that one of the reasons for his Virgil manuscript having remained so long unprinted was the inadequate scholarship of the censors ‘lesquels, pour n'estre tous assés versés au grec, le tindrent longuement avant que le me rendre approuvé’.4.

Lack of censorship could also give rise to irritating incidents. To a Spanish bookseller, who had complained of quotations from Luther in one of the works sent him by Plantin, a rather bewildered Jan Moretus had replied that at that moment (June 1583, during the Calvinist regime) there were no censors in Antwerp: ‘Quien haveria gia mas pensado que en uno libro que trata de numeros se haveria de haser alguna palabra de Luthero?’ [Who would have thought to find sayings of Luther in a book about numeration?] The book in question was M. Hostius' De numeratione.1.

In the matter of the granting of privileges, Charles v and Philip ii allowed a certain ambiguity to persist. Privileges for the Duchy of Brabant, which included Antwerp, could be granted both by the Council of Brabant and by the Privy Council at Brussels.2. The latter was an organ of the central government with authority over the whole of the Netherlands, including the Duchy of Brabant. The authority of the Council of Brabant, and therefore the validity of the privileges it issued, was restricted to the duchy itself. In theory it was better to apply to the body which could provide the more extensive privileges. The Council of Brabant, however, constituted a sovereign body and the councillors were touchy about their prerogatives, brooking no serious interference by the central government in their jurisdiction.3. It was probably to spare the feelings of these powerful local administrators that Charles v and Philip ii let the vagueness of the demarcation between the two bodies continue, rather than concentrate authority for the whole procedure in the central government. This meant that privileges granted by the Privy Council could be contested in the Duchy, or neutralized by others issued by the Council of Brabant. And it was in Brabant, more especially in the cities of

Antwerp and Louvain, that Netherlands printing and publishing had concentrated in the sixteenth century. The power and influence of the Council of Brabant varied with the political situation of the moment1. and the personalities of the councillors, but duality of authority persisted in the duchy throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Sometimes this allowed printers to choose between the two bodies concerned, at other times it obliged them to apply to both - or it might permit them to play off one council against the other.2.

The first privilege Plantin was granted by the Privy Council.1. In the following years the printer divided his attention and his petitions between the two bodies, without there being any very obvious reason for his preference at any given point. For relatively important works, or for works that promised to sell well and arouse the envy of competitors, Plantin took care to obtain a privilege from each body.2. His successors also did this on occasion. In a petition addressed to the Privy Council in 1592, Jan i Moretus justified his prior approach to the Council of Brabant with the argument that he had done this to expedite the publication of the work (‘Et pour haster louvraige ledict suppliant, comme resident en Brabant, at obtenu de Vostre Majesté en son conseil de Brabant octroy de pouvoir seul imprimer pour le terme de six ans ledict tiers livre’). He stated that he was troubling the Privy Council for an identical privilege so as to secure monopoly of sale in all of the Spanish Netherlands (‘...et comme pour aulcunement avoir support et recompense plus grande pour les grandz fraiz quil devra supporter et payer pour lesdictz impressions, il desireroit bien avoir ledict octroy pour luy servir universelement par toutes les provinces de Vostre Majesté de pardeça’).3.

Usually it was the printer-publisher who took the necessary steps to acquire a privilege. Occasionally, however, an author would undertake this task, and have the privilege registered in his own name.4.

Several times Plantin purchased privileges from authors of works he was particularly anxious to publish.1.

As has already been indicated, privileges were granted for a specified period. When fixing this period2. the official usually took into account the scope of the work and the costs borne by its publisher: the larger the amount of money invested in it, the longer the duration of the privilege. Works of a definitely topical character were given privileges only for a limited period. In the case of almanacs it was obviously restricted to one year. The most common period was six years; there were occasional instances of ten-year periods, hardly any of longer grants. The Polyglot Bible, which was protected against reprinting for twenty years, was a unique case. It was possible, however, to ask for an extension when the appointed term had expired.3.

 

Such was the theory. In practice there seem to have been many cases of printers managing to obtain de facto monopolies of unlimited duration for particular works - monopolies which they were even able to pass on to their heirs. When Plantin became the official printer to

the States-General and to the City of Antwerp1. he acquired this sort of privilege, being granted sole rights of printing ordinances and other documents issued by these bodies.2. But even for more common works the masters of the Golden Compasses were sometimes able to obtain a high degree of monopoly. In the course of his career Plantin had acquired privileges for the publication of breviaries, missals, and other service books. As far as can be established from extant papers, these were normal privileges of limited duration. After Plantin's death, Jan i Moretus petitioned the Privy Council and the Council of Brabant for sole rights in the Netherlands for printing service books, Bibles in various languages, and also Classical authors (‘tous les bibles en diverses langues, heures de Nostre Dame, tant en latin qu'en latin et franchoys, les breviaires, missels et diverses susd. et aultres semblables, comme aussi des auteurs anciens’). He was in fact granted this extraordinary measure of privilege by both councils on the same terms as his father-in-law before him (‘en conformité de nos précédentes lettres d'octroy et suyvant le privilège que respectivement feu son beau père Christoffle Plantin a obtenu de nous’).3. These privilegia generalia were regularly renewed for the benefit of succeeding heirs to the Officina Plantiniana,4. which thus enjoyed an effective monopoly in a large number of chiefly liturgical publications in the Southern Netherlands until the end of the Ancien Régime.

The Moretuses did not cling particularly tenaciously to all the benefits granted them by the law. They agreed - or turned a blind eye - to the printing by other houses of works for which they possessed the monopoly, but in which they were not greatly interested.5. How-

ever, they were prepared to go to law over books which they thought it worth their while to publish, and as a matter of fact regularly won their cases.1.

To be effective a law must be backed by sanctions. Remarkably enough, the first provisions for penalties for infringements of privileges did not appear until quite late in the day - in 1550. Punishment usually consisted of confiscation of the pirated copies, with the possible addition of a fine (for example, 1 fl.) for each illegally printed book, which was divided between the state and the plaintiff.2. In practice the courts sometimes showed considerable flexibility. In 1598 the Council of Brabant found that Jan van Keerbergen and Martin Nutius had infringed the rights of Jan Moretus by issuing a missal and a breviary, but nevertheless they were allowed to print a further 1,200 copies because of the expenses they had already paid (‘uit consideratie van het begonnen werk’).3.

Although in principle each work to be printed required a privilege, the one document often listed and protected several works. The first privilege granted to Plantin, in 1555, mentioned three titles.4. One issued in 1564 named eleven,5. but this is the highest number discovered for the Plantinian press, except the privilegia generalia.

To move a council to any desired action, a written petition had to be submitted in which the applicant made known his wishes and provided the necessary details. Privileges were obtained in the same

way.1. Sometimes the author himself made the application,2. but usually it was the printer.3. The young Plantin seems sometimes to have enlisted the services of a lawyer,4. but it may be surmised that usually he went in person to the legal officials concerned and gave them the pertinent facts - together with a suitable reimbursement - and let them draw up the petition.5. Later in his career he conducted such business by letter. As he explained to an author who had asked him how a request for a privilege should be worded, he simply sent the libri approbati to the appropriate official in Brussels who composed the text as he thought fit - and sent the bill.6.

One of Plantin's guiding rules was to stay on good terms with the Brussels bureaucracy,7. paying to do so when necessary. This policy

had its rewards, as is clear from an incident which also serves to show that there could be differences between the precepts and the practice of the law. On 25th June 1577 Joachim de Buschere, secretary to the Council of Brabant, wrote to Jan Moretus (who had been acting on behalf of his father-in-law) to say that he was returning two works ‘with the deed of privilege pertaining thereto. And though Pighius's book had not been examined, the same had been inserted so that you should not suffer any prejudice thereby. The visitateurs here would need to spend another two or three months over it.’1. Although Pighius's work had not been passed by the censor appointed by the council (more likely an official of the council who had to verify the political content, and not an ecclesiastical authority), the secretary had obligingly made out the privilege himself.

Plantin was very well aware of what could be politically dangerous. During his long career he was never rebuked for having submitted a work that could not pass the government standards. Only once does a manuscript he submitted seem to have been altered by the Brussels bureaucrats - and that only from sheer enthusiasm for Guicciardini's Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, which they were pleased to embellish with fresh details.2. This does not mean, however, that Plantin's relations with the officials of the Council of Brabant and of the Privy Council were always untroubled. On 22nd October 1570 he had to write to Granvelle to say that the Privy Council had managed to lose the manuscript of De bonis ecclesiasticis - and this after Plantin, to speed matters as much as possible, had purposely sent them the work via Morillon, the Cardinal's vicar-general.3. In 1586 Plantin, despite

all his insistent pleas and influential connexions, was not at first able to obtain a privilege for the publication of works by Justus Lipsius.1. The ecclesiastical censors had given their approval, but neither the Council of Brabant nor the Privy Council would give theirs for political reasons - the great humanist was then living in Calvinist Leiden.2. Plantin's perseverance must have been rewarded after a time. For most of the editions of Lipsius's works issued by Frans Raphelengius at Leiden between 1586 and 1591, the year in which the scholar returned to the Southern Netherlands, there are copies in existence with Plantin's Antwerp imprint.

Although Plantin never expressed an opinion about the system of censorship and privilege in his letters,3. he occasionally complained, albeit in passing, about the loss of time which it involved.4.

Applying for privileges cost money as well as time.1. The two councils demanded stamp duty and fees for drawing up the documents, and the rates kept pace with rises in the cost of living.2. But even allowing for this factor, a perusal of the Plantinian accounts reveals a surprising variation in the amounts paid for privileges.3. This is partly due to the fact that sometimes the total cost - the actual stamp

duty, the fees for composing the petition and the document itself, and the gratuity paid to the officials concerned - was given under the single heading ‘octroy’ or ‘privilege’, while sometimes the items were listed separately. However, from a letter written by Simon de Grimaldi, secretary to the Privy Council, to Jan Moretus on 7th October 1586, it appears that the council issued different types of privilege at different prices, and that the officials sought out the cheapest kind for Plantin, so long as it was sufficiently efficacious.1.

Approbationes seem to have been issued free; at all events the accounts contain no specific mention of fees.2. Nevertheless the censors spiritual did appreciate presents. Nor were officials high and low of the various councils above such things. Not all were as blunt as Simon de Grimaldi who, in the letter referred to above, wrote that the councillors expected one copy each of the works listed in the privilege and that within a few days he would give Jan Moretus the number of these gentlemen then present.3. Other officials might be rather less brazen, but they were no less expectant of some consideration for their efforts on behalf of the masters of the Gulden Passer, and this they regularly received. In the account-books of the house there are many entries for such ‘liberalitez’. Censors and higher officials mostly had presents of books, lower officials cash.4. Exceptions to this rule were the

Auvergne cheeses and baskets of fruits with which Plantin expressed his gratitude to influential churchmen and administrators in 1564-65.1.

In the course of the years Plantin and his successors paid out sizeable amounts in the manner described above, but when the number of their publications is taken into account the cost per book of obtaining privileges was not very high and certainly never represented a major item in the budget.2. A much more serious consideration was the

fact that the privileges only applied to a limited area; Brabant in the case of those issued by the council of the Duchy, the Netherlands (with the exception of the autonomous bishopric of Liège) in the case of the Privy Council.1. Printers outside the Low Countries were at liberty to reprint any of the publications of their Netherlands colleagues - and by doing just that they have indeed caused Plantin much harm.2.

The only way of counteracting, or at least of minimizing the effects of unfair competition was to apply for privileges in the neighbouring territories as well as the home country. On 21st February 1565 Plantin succeeded in obtaining a privilege from the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. This not only afforded protection within the Empire for the eight works mentioned by name on the document, but also for the new and revised editions Plantin was planning to issue there.3. The printer always reproduced this caesareum generale privilegium in the preliminary matter of any book that he hoped would sell in reasonable numbers in Germany. In 1580-81 he tried to obtain an identical privilege from Maximilian's successor, Rudolph ii,4. but whether he was successful is not known.5. Plantin also attempted to protect his publications against unauthorized reprinting in France, the country of his birth. At first he contented himself with protecting those works that were particularly likely to whet the appetites of his competitors;6. sometimes French authors themselves took the necessary

steps on behalf of their publisher.1. About 1582, however, Plantin was able to obtain a privilegium generale for France as well.2. These general privileges did not prejudice the issue of special ones to cover particular works or authors, both in France and the Empire, but in most of such cases it is probable that the initiative came from the authors rather than the printer.3. In one instance, on the other hand, Plantin had a privilege made out in his name in order to protect a foreign author-publisher from being pirated in the Netherlands. This was Gerard Mercator and the publication was his map of Europe of 1572. Why Mercator himself did not make the application, as he had done for his world map of 1569, remains an unanswered question.4.

Only for one Plantinian publication were privileges solicited for the whole of Western and Central Europe. The book in question was the Polyglot Bible, and the business of obtaining the covering octroys was mostly conducted by Arias Montanus, the director and guiding spirit of the enterprise. Covered by privilege in the Netherlands (with the authority both of the Council of Brabant and of the Privy Council), France, Germany, Aragon, Castile, the Two Sicilies (Naples), the Papal States, and Venice, the Polyglot Bible had the distinction of being one of the best protected books of modern times.5.

Even when a book had been passed by the censor and a privilege granted, its safety was still not guaranteed. A work that had been duly approved in all points prescribed by law could still be ordered out of sale by the government and all copies publicly burnt. This not only meant a financial blow for the printer but could also land him in trouble with the courts. This experience befell Plantin. A letter from Margaret of Parma to Philip ii dated 30th November 1564 affords an excellent illustration of this sort of occurrence and gives an interesting glimpse of censorship at work in the period. The work in question was the Psaumes de David, a French translation of the psalms by de Bèze and Marot, printed by Plantin in 1564.1. The edition contained nothing that in any way conflicted with Catholic teaching and it had been given an approbatio by the parish priest of St. Nicholas, Brussels, and a privilege by the Council of Brabant. However, this psalter was chiefly used by the Calvinists, and it was this which aroused Margaret's indignation: ‘I summoned the Chancellor of Brabant forthwith and explained this error [i.e., the publication of the Psaumes de David] to him and commanded him to start an investigation into how it had happened, it being contrary to the ordinances of Your Majesty.’ The chancellor excused himself, stating that he had not been personally concerned in the matter; one of the councillors had granted a patent after seeing the approbatio. After Margaret had again remonstrated with him that the work should be prohibited, the chancellor summoned Plantin and not only forbade him to print or sell any more of the psalters but ordered his officers to burn all copies they could lay their hands on. As the parish priest of St. Nicholas still maintained that there was no heresy in the translation, one copy was sent to the faculty of theology at Louvain with the instruction that they should examine it.2.

When Arias Montanus compiled an Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1569 at the Duke of Alva's behest, its printer - Plantin - had the dubious pleasure of finding in it some of his own publications. These had to be taken out of sale and existing stocks destroyed. Plantin must have carried out the order scrupulously: his Reynaert de Vos [Reynard the Fox], for example, disappeared completely from his sales registers and inventories after 1570. The library of the Plantin house does not possess a copy of this edition, of which in fact only two are known.

On the other hand it should be pointed out that when Plantin wanted to publish a book for which he could not expect to obtain official approval, he did not bother about an approbatio or protective privilege and simply issued the work anonymously or under a false imprint. This is how he published the heretical writings of his own spiritual mentors - Hendrik Niclaes in 1555-66 and Hendrik Janssen Barrefelt in 1579-801. - as well as some pamphlets with political impact in the same period.2. More remarkable, and typical of the subterfuges to which printers had recourse in those times, is the story of the French edition of the Theologia Germanica, a highly orthodox mystical treatise of German origin that had been written quite a long time before the Reformation. It was, however, published by Luther in 1516, and Sebastian Castellio (who was disposed to-

wards the Reformed faith, but was disliked by the Calvinists) translated it into Latin in 1557. This meant that the work was rather suspect to both Catholics and Protestants; later, in 1621, it was even put on the official Catholic index. In the heterodox sect known as the Family of Love, and later among the Barrefeltists, the work enjoyed great popularity.1. It was presumably to please Hendrik Niclaes that Plantin brought out a Latin edition in 1558, for which a privilege had been granted on 6th October 1557. A French translation came out in the same year, covered by the same privilege - at least, that is how it appears at first sight. However, closer inspection of the types and ornaments used, together with certain allusions in one of Plantin's letters of 1580, proved beyond all doubt that he published this French edition not in 1558, but as late as 1579 or 1580.2. It was presumably the religious situation in the latter period that led Plantin to secure himself against possible repercussions by antedating the publication of this sensitive work by more than twenty years.


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