front cover of Basel in the Age of Burckhardt
Basel in the Age of Burckhardt
A Study in Unseasonable Ideas
Lionel Gossman
University of Chicago Press, 2000
This remarkable history tells the story of the independent city-republic of Basel in the nineteenth century, and of four major thinkers who shaped its intellectual history: the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philologist and anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen, the theologian Franz Overbeck, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

"Remarkable and exceptionally readable . . . There is wit, wisdom and an immense erudition on every page."—Jonathan Steinberg, Times Literary Supplement

"Gossman's book, a product of many years of active contemplation, is a tour de force. It is at once an intellectual history, a cultural history of Basel and Europe, and an important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century historiography. Written with a grace and elegance that many aspire to, few seldom achieve, this is model scholarship."—John R. Hinde, American Historical Review
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front cover of The Correspondence of Johann Amerbach
The Correspondence of Johann Amerbach
Early Printing in its Social Context
Selected, Translated, Edited, and with Commentary by Barbara C. Halporn
University of Michigan Press, 2000
After Gutenberg, the book world was changed forever. Writers wanted to break into print; venture capitalists and printers wanted to make money; scholars wanted to promote their educational agendas. To be economically viable, the printed book--unlike the handmade book--required distribution to large international markets, promotion, advertising, capital, and above all, profit. In a heady atmosphere of speculation, competition, and high risk, printers set up shop and went bankrupt with dizzying rapidity. Against these odds Johann Amerbach established a successful printing-publishing firm that survived for thirty-five years. His correspondence takes the reader into that rapidly changing world.
Between 1478 and 1513 Amerbach published more than a hundred substantial works. He is best known for his monumental editions of the works of early church fathers. Crucial to his success was the information network he kept through correspondence with scholars, teachers, printers, booksellers, library curators, and other members of the literate community. The letters reveal how books were made, by whom, and for whom. The Correspondence of Johann Amerbach allows us to see the tensions in the new alliance between commerce and the republic of letters. Filling out the scene more fully, letters between the Amerbach children and their parents tell of the daily life, expectations, and aspirations of an intellectual bourgeois family at the end of the fifteenth century.
Barbara C. Halporn is Head of the Collection Development Department, Widener Library, Harvard University.
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front cover of First Impressions
First Impressions
Sefer Hasidim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing
Joseph A. Skloot
Brandeis University Press, 2023
Uncovers the history of creative adaptation and transformation through a close analysis of the creation of the Sefer Hasidim book.
 
In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in the city of Bologna published a book entitled Sefer Hasidim, a compendium of rituals, stories, and religious instruction that primarily originated in medieval Franco-Germany. How these men, of Italian and Spanish descent, came to produce a book that would come to shape Ashkenazic culture, and Jewish culture more broadly, over the next four centuries is the basis of this kaleidoscopic study of the history of Hebrew printing in the sixteenth century.
 
During these early years of printing, the classic works of ancient and medieval Hebrew and Jewish literature became widely available to Jewish (and non-Jewish) readers for the first time. Printing, though, was not merely the duplication and distribution of pre-existing manuscripts, it was the creative adaptation and transformation of those manuscripts by printers. Ranging from Catholic Bologna to Protestant Basel to the Jewish heartland of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Joseph A. Skloot uncovers the history of that creativity by examining the first two print editions of Sefer Hasidim. Along the way, he demonstrates how volumes that were long thought to be eternal and unchanging were in fact artifacts of historical agency and contingency, created by and for human beings.
 
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