Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World - Hardcover

Goldstone, Lawrence; Goldstone, Nancy

 
9780767908368: Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767908368 ISBN 13: 9780767908368
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Presents an intriguing study of the life and times of Michael Servetus, a freethinking sixteenth-century scientist and theologian, who is credited with discovering human circulation and who authored the Christianismi Restitutio, a work of biblical scholarship that refuted orthodox Christianity and a book that led to Servetus's condemnation and execution for heresy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAWRENCE and NANCY GOLDSTONE are a husband-and-wife writing team who have authored three books on their book-collecting pursuits: Used and Rare (St. Martin's, 1977), Slightly Chipped (St. Martin's, 1999), and Warmly Inscribed (St. Martin's, 2001).

Aus dem Klappentext

Michael Servetus is one of those hidden figureheads of history who is remembered not for his name, but for the revolutionary deeds that stand in his place. Both a scientist and a freethinking theologian, Servetus is credited with the discovery of pulmonary circulation in the human body as well as the authorship of a polemical masterpiece that cost him his life. The Chrisitianismi Restituto, a heretical work of biblical scholarship, written in 1553, aimed to refute the orthodox Christianity that Servetus' old colleague, John Calvin, supported. After the book spread through the ranks of Protestant hierarchy, Servetus was tried and agonizingly burned at the stake, the last known copy of the Restitutio chained to his leg.

Servetus's execution is significant because it marked a turning point in the quest for freedom of expression, due largely to the development of the printing press and the proliferation of books in Renaissance Europe. Three copies of the Restitutio managed to survive the burning, despite every effort on the part of his enemies to destroy them. As a result, the book became almost a surrogate for its author, going into hiding and relying on covert distribution until it could be read freely, centuries later. Out of the Flames tracks the history of this special work, examining Servetus's life and times and the politics of the first information during the sixteenth century. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone follow the clandestine journey of the three copies through the subsequent centuries and explore its author's legacy and influence over the thinkers that shared his spirit and genius, such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson, Clarence Dorrow, and William Osler.

Out of the Flames is an extraordinary story providing testament to the power of ideas, the enduring legacy of books, and the triumph of individual courage.

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CHAPTER ONE

MICHAEL SERVETUS WAS born Miguel Serveto Conesa alias Reves on Saint Michael's Day, September 29, 1511, in the small town of Villanueva de Sijena, in the province of Huesca. Huesca is in Aragon, at the northeast corner of Spain, just east of Navarre and about fifty miles south of the border with France. The house in which he was born still stands.

The Servetos were gentry of long standing. There is evidence of their having been given their title, infanzones, or nobles of the second category, as early as 1327. Miguel was the oldest of three sons. His father, Anthon, was a notary; his mother, Catalina Conesa, was also born of noble blood. The second son, Pedro, became a notary like his father; the youngest, Juan, stayed home and became a priest and was appointed rector of a nearby church.

The early sixteenth century was the crossroads where the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, the New World, and the modern world all met. Although to most Americans the preeminent figure of the period was England's King Henry VIII, for most of his reign, Henry, despite the six wives, court intrigues, and general theatrics, was an afterthought in European politics. It was Charles V, the last of the Holy Roman Emperors, who dominated the stage. The Holy Roman Empire was the superpower of its time, stretching from Spain to the Balkans, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.

Charles was a Hapsburg, born into one of the great ruling dynasties of Europe in 1500. His father was Philip the Fair, king of Castile, son of the emperor Maximilian, and his mother was Juana the Mad, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Juana, unattractive and highly unstable, had fallen madly in love with a husband who couldn't stand her. When Philip took up with someone else, Juana retaliated by hacking off his mistress's hair at a public function. Philip got his revenge by locking up Juana in a tower in Spain, where she stayed for the next fifty years.

Then everyone died--Isabella in 1504, Philip two years later, Ferdinand in 1516, and Maximilian three years after that. Charles inherited everything. Before he had turned twenty, he ruled virtually all of Western Europe except England, France, and Portugal. Charles was smart, ambitious, fearless, and intensely Catholic.

Of the three remaining holdouts, France, under Francis I, was by far the most powerful. Six years older than Charles, Francis soon became his nemesis. The French monarch had been raised by a doting mother and sister (the bohemian Marguerite of Navarre) and was taught to be brave, romantic, and chivalrous. He was after Charles from the beginning. When he was twelve, he stole Charles's seven-year-old fiancee out from under his nose, an act that did nothing to improve relations with the future emperor.

Francis understood perfectly that Charles would have liked nothing better than to add France to his empire. But holding vast amounts of territory presents problems of its own, and Charles's resources were always stretched far too thin to mount a full-scale invasion of powerful France. Francis helped maintain this tenuous balance of power by attacking Charles's forces wherever he perceived them to be weak.

For years Charles and Francis tried alternately to outflank, outwit, or outfight each other. They used diplomacy, threats, love, and treachery. Each courted and threatened the pope. But while most of the world was consumed by the shifting alliances and machinations of these two Renaissance heavyweights, another force was at work, bubbling just under the surface. It was a force that was immense and inexorable, and it was made of paper.

ABOUT HALF A CENTURY before, in the mid-1450s, an inventor had just finished a twenty-year struggle to perfect a new device that he was sure would make him a great fortune. The inventor was a shadowy figure--there is no surviving record of his birth, and no accurate image of him exists. He grew up in Mainz, about twenty-five miles west of Frankfurt in the Rhine River Valley. He seems to have been born of good family, but after some unrecorded transgression as a young man, he was forced to move to Strasbourg, about 100 miles to the south.

He seems, from the sketchy accounts that remain, to have been a disagreeable person. He worked in total secrecy--not even his next-door neighbors knew what he was up to. He borrowed heavily, putting off one creditor after another with vague promises of a vast return on investment. In fact, much of what we know about him has been gleaned from surviving court records of the many times he was sued by his partners, or unpaid bills from tax assessors or people to whom he owed money. Toward the end of this twenty-year quest, he seems to have become increasingly desperate, obsessed that someone would steal his idea or that others engaged in similar experiments would perfect the device before he did.

The inventor was Johann Gutenberg, and the invention was the process by which a book could be printed from movable type.

Although popular history often credits Gutenberg with single-handedly creating a new world of books and reading, he was merely responding to a demand that was already strong and growing fast. This was a venture much more entrepreneurial than scientific. When Gutenberg first began to tinker about with his printing apparatus in the 1430s, Europe was in the midst of a great post-plague commercial boom, with people becoming more mobile and worldlier than ever before. Literacy had been on the rise for decades, and new universities had begun to spring up in a number of major cities in Europe. Collecting books and establishing private libraries was now a popular pastime among the wealthy, and there were even glimmers of a thirst for reading material that was devoted to neither theology nor the better-known classics.

To meet this growing demand, publishers in the 1430s and 1440s had no alternative but to scramble about and try to produce as many books as possible using traditional methods. By far the most common of these was the use of scribes to create each copy of a book individually. More demand meant hiring more scribes--one publisher, Vespasiano da Bisticci, employed fifty at a time. But even this was not enough. New trainees were needed, but productive crafts like leather working, weaving, and metalsmithing paid much better than printing. Older scribes were having great difficulty inducing younger men to enter the profession.

Competition to draw from this limited labor pool grew intense, and the power of the scribes grew accordingly. In Paris, home of the most important university in Europe, there were so many of these Bob Cratchits hunched over their desks, copying one scholarly text after another, that they began to organize themselves into guilds.

The scribe system had other painfully obvious drawbacks. First and foremost, a book produced by a scribe was essentially a one-of-a-kind work of art. All calligraphers were hardly created equal, so the work of the more talented scribes was much more in demand, particularly among the aristocracy, than that of inferior artisans. In any case, a book copied by a scribe was a laborious effort, and necessarily limited by how many pages one man--no matter how adept--could produce in a day. Then there was the question of editing and correcting a product created without control or supervision. Error correction was tedious, requiring at a minimum the redrafting of an entire page. It clearly wouldn't do to have lines drawn through the text with little arrows pointing from additions in the margins to the correct spot on a page. As pressure to produce a greater volume of books increased, errors became more and more common--just how common depended upon the diligence or greed of the publisher--and neither buyer nor seller could really be sure that what was in a book, no matter how beautifully rendered,...

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767908368
ISBN 13 
9780767908368
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
353
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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