jonathan trayner | news

I fortunately had time to see the exhibition – which was excellent – and get a copy of the catalogue.  The essay, by Madeleine C. Viljoen, focused mainly on later intaglio printing in Italy but did highlight the work of the nuns at the convent of San Jacapo di Ripoli in Florence in the late fifteenth century – who I was aware of from their brief employment of Niccolò di Lorenzo in 1480 – and the amazing work of Yolande Bonhomme in Paris in the sixteenth.  Bonhomme, from a printing family, ran the press at the sign of the Unicorn and was the first documented woman to print publish an edition of the Bible (in Latin) in 1526.  This, while all interesting background stuff, did not really help with the discussion on woodblock printing in the German speaking lands that are my particular focus.

Another essay in the catalogue, on the printing of textile patterns, by Alexa Greist did however have some useful information on the activities of the Augsburg printer Johann Schönsperger the younger who took over his father’s press in ca.1521.  Most of the output from this press I am aware of relates, naturally, to radical political and religious pamphlets and merges with the work of Jörg Gastel who appears to have taken many of Schönsperger’s blocks to Zwickau in 1523-4.  Following this, between 1525 and 1529 Schönsperger published A New Book of Forms – one of the first commercial pattern books for lace and embroidery. 

This work, intended for the emerging “feminine” trades of textile production (see Sebald Beham’s The Spinning Bee, ca.1524), does not necessarily prove the involvement of female labour the workshops of Schönsperger and Gastel at this time.  But, taken with the wider discussion on the topic from Viljoen and Kutasz Christensen, can be at the very least be used to demonstrate its possibility.  This connection between the radical printers of pamphlets of the “common man” and the female worker gives an important reminder that the assumptions around gender so commonly made about the early history of printing are precisely that – assumptions.

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Primary sources:

Sebald Beham, Spinning Bee, ca. 1524, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford.

Yolanda Bonhomme, Extravagantes viginti Joannis Vigesimissecundi…, Paris, 1549. Collection of Lisa Unger Baskin.  (Author’s photograph.)

Johann Shönsperger the Younger, Ein ney Furmbüchlein, Augsburg, ca.1525-9.  The Metropolitan Museum New York, 18.66.1(1-33).  (Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/354716)

Secondary sources:

Böninger, L., 2021, Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna and the Social World of Florentine Printing, ca. 1470-1493, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Greist, A., 2023, “Prints and Needles: Women Makers and European Textile Pattern Books”, in A.B. Banta, A. Greist and T. Kutasz Christensen (eds.), Making Her Mark – A History of Women Artists in Europe 1400-1800, Fredericton: Goose Lane.  30-41.

Kutasz Christensen, T., 2023, “Too Good to be by a Woman: Locating Pre-Modern Women Makers in Museum Collections” SCSC, Baltimore, MD.

Stewart, A., 2003, “Distaffs and Spindles: Sexual Misbehavior in Sebald Beham’s Spinning Bee”, Faculty Publications and Creative Activity, School of Art, Art History and Design, University of Nebraska – Lincoln.  4. (Available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/artfacpub/4)