Publishing for the Popes

Behind the rather misleading title is a fine study of the activities of Cardinal Marcello Cervini (1501–55), whose brief pontificate as Pope Marcellus II (9 April–1 May 1555) was preceded and far surpassed in significance by a much more extensive career as nuncio, co-president of the Council of Trent, first official Cardinal Librarian, and, as Paolo Sachet explores here, promoter and publisher of learned printing in and beyond Rome in the years immediately before and then during the Council. Cervini was obviously not a printer-publisher, and so the story of his ventures is one of changing collaborators and different directions, as opportunity, success and failure allowed. His humanistic-academic background and tastes and his identity as one of the staunchest defenders of Roman political and spiritual authority (in which campaign he tended to focus on Italy and generally took the lead from others in theological arguments) were what recommended him to become in effect a cardinale editore (as in the title of Chapter Three, also p. 65). Drawing on the riches of the Vatican Library, he aimed to strengthen the papal and anti-Protestant cause. The forms this took could be eclectic. Chapter Four treats Cervini’s apparent initial interest in publishing the Vatican’s entire collection of Greek manuscripts, his establishment of a venture with the leading Roman printer Antonio Blado and others recruited for their Greek expertise, and its disintegration within three years after publishing only two substantial volumes, one of which was a commentary on Homer. The Latin press, managed by the printer Francesco Priscianese, was somewhat more successful, with six editions, including the princeps of Arnobius, some papal letter collections, and the anti-Lutheran writings of Henry VIII of England, a publication issued with the double purpose of undermining Luther on the one hand and the hypocritical Henry in the eyes of Emperor Charles V on the other (ch. 5). But business remained difficult, and Cervini’s increasing duties and his relocation first to Trent and then to his diocese of Gubbio ultimately led him to give up the idea of maintaining a publishing house in Rome. From 1544, he worked at a distance or, rather, by proxy, in effect finding printers and choosing texts—often of the Early Church, but also classical texts and contemporary treatises on ecclesiastical and religious matters—for them to print (ch. 6). Not ‘publishing’ as it is normally understood, it still represented an attempt to associate the Catholic Church with the authority of scholarship, in which field it aimed to challenge Protestant pre-eminence. Cervini’s reach was wide, and Appendix II provides a catalogue of these works issued by famous names from across Europe including Manuzio, Giunta, and Torrentino, Gryphius, Oporinus, and Plantin

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