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Intertwining Strengths: Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne Kay Amert Book His

Intertwining Strengths: Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne Kay Amert Book History, Volume 8, 2005, pp. 1-10 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 25 Oct 2020 12:31 GMT from University of Melbourne-Library (+1 other institution account) ] https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2005.0002 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/188556 Intertwining Strengths Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne Kay Amert Among the printers who worked in Paris in the sixteenth century,1 two of the most intriguing and signiﬁ cant were Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne.2 Colines was a punchcutter, an expert on types. He became a printer in 1520 when, on the death of Henri Estienne, he took up direction of Estienne’s workshop. Like Estienne before him, Colines became a libraire juré, a select printer to the university in Paris. Through the end of his career in 1546, he printed texts used in the study of the liberal arts, theology, and medicine, along with a range of titles of interest to a broader audience, including the Bible, Books of Hours, and much classical and contemporary literature. Colines produced a very large body of work, more than 750 editions over twenty-six years, many of them distinguished by his expertise with type. He was at the vanguard in the modernization of French typographical style, revising and improving extant fonts and introducing a series of new romans and italics that were to be inﬂ uential. Colines inherited not just the workshop of Henri Estienne, but also his wife and responsibility for his children.3 Three sons, François, Robert, and Charles, all were later involved in printing and publishing in Paris, adding to the accomplishments of what is often called the Estienne “dynasty” of printers. In 1526, Colines moved his rapidly expanding business into a new workshop a few doors up the street on the rue St. Jean de Beauvais. He witnessed the marriage of Robert Estienne to Perette Badius, the daughter Book History 2 of another university printer, and helped set up Robert as an independent, rather than a university, printer in the original Estienne workshop. Scholars have assumed that Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne subsequently had quite separate careers, perhaps even becoming competitors in the trade. Many of the authors and texts found in the more than 500 editions produced by Robert Estienne are identical with Colines’s, and his characterization as a “scholar-printer” is sometimes taken as implying that his books, too, were made principally for university students and scholars.4 Some historians also have argued that the two men were rivals in the context of fonts.5 Estienne’s commission of Claude Garamond in the 1540s to cut a series of royal Greek types,6 for instance, has been taken as evidence of a typographical practice separate from Colines’s. In turn, it has fostered the notion that Estienne earlier had had Garamond cut both his roman types and the italic he began to use in the early 1540s. The portrait of the relationship between Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne that emerges in the literature is thus very nearly archetypal: it envisions stepfather and stepson engaged in a kind of cultural combat and competition with each other. It is dramatic and compelling, and, like most scholars, I had thought it valid until the process of exploring the development and use of Colines’s fonts began to argue otherwise. While similarities in their fonts had long been noted by type historians, digitally comparing some of them clearly establishes their identity.7 Some recent work on the gros canon, a distinctive display roman used by both men, indicates that these romans, too, are related to each other as states of a single font.8 Slight differences in the appearance of some of their fonts appear to originate in differences in production methods, rather than from the use of similar but separate fonts. As the notion of a rivalry based on fonts began to wane, I reexamined the documentary evidence used in the construction of the archetypal portrait of their relationship. The key document contains Robert Estienne’s sole surviving mention of Colines. It is his Réponse, a response to the censures of the Paris theologians he had published in 1552, after settling in Geneva.9 There, in the narrative of his trials with the theologians over his Bibles, he writes, in a brief parenthetical comment, that there earlier had been objections on the part of the theologians to a miniature Bible edition Colines published in series from 1522.10 Estienne’s narrative continues with the assertion that because he was in charge at the press, the theologians then began to threaten to send him to the stake. Here is the text of the relevant section of the Réponse in Elizabeth Armstrong’s translation: I say nothing of what they had already attempted in 1522, when the New Testament was printed in small format by my stepfather Simon Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne 3 de Colines, who published it neat, clean and correct and in a pretty type (it was a novelty, the times being as evil as they were, to ﬁ nd the books of holy scripture correctly printed) and because I was in charge of the press what clamour they raised against me, shouting that I must be sent to the stake because I printed such corrupt books.11 The reading that has been given these conjunct clauses in the entirety of the modern literature is that Robert Estienne was asserting that in 1522, at the age of nineteen, he had been in charge at Colines’s press, and thus bore the brunt of the theologians’ displeasure over Colines’s Bible series. The events Estienne immediately continues to describe in the Réponse, however, are not those of 1522, but rather those of 1532, when he was in fact required to defend before the theologians a Bible he published in that year.12 There is little doubt that Robert Estienne was a prodigy. However, beyond Colines himself, the principal architect of his miniature Bible series was the French proto-reformer Jacques Lefèvre.13 Could the headlong rush of his prose and the impassioned nature of Robert Estienne’s essay unwittingly have created this ambiguity? As he deﬁ nes it in the opening paragraphs of the essay, the time frame of his “war” with the theologians was the period of twenty years beginning in 1532, something that accounts for the parenthetical nature of his comment about an event that occurred ten years earlier. In 1522, the extreme practicality and secular dress of Colines’s miniature Bible series undoubtedly startled theologians and others, but there is no trace of its consideration (nor discussion of Robert Estienne’s role in its production) in the minutes of the meetings of the theology faculty at that time. Nor was anyone being sent to the stake in Paris in 1522 for such offenses, something that was no longer true in 1532. After carefully reviewing both the Latin and French versions of his Réponse, I wonder if it hasn’t been misread.14 I don’t think Robert Estienne intended to claim that he had been in charge at Colines’s press in 1522, nor to suggest in any fashion that this precipitated a rift between them. Rather, I think that the second part of the excerpted comment returns to and refers, without transition, to his experience of 1532, when he was in charge at his own press and thus was obliged to respond to the theologians’ concerns. Beyond the Réponse, the other piece of documentary evidence sometimes cited as sustaining the notion of differences between Colines and Estienne is a letter written from Meaux on 6 July 1524 by Jacques Lefèvre to Guillaume Farel in Basel.15 Part of the letter addresses Farel’s concerns about “our press” (ofﬁ cina nostra) and its “co-director” (compater), and it mentions “Brother Robert’s” maintenance of a Christian attitude in the midst of the anti-Lutheran activity then sweeping Paris. Relying on A. A. Renouard’s reading of the Réponse, the editor assumed that Robert Estienne and Simon Book History 4 de Colines were the co-directors referred to in the letter, and that it was thus Colines whom Jacques Lefèvre wished to blame in the heated Latin of his letter for “ruining everything” (omnia evertit) at the press. However, as a second letter from Gérard Roussel, written to Farel from Meaux on the same day, makes clear, it is likely that Lefèvre’s term, “compater,” was a veiled allusion.16 The Meaux reformers’ despair over events at the press more likely revolved around the actions of Josse Clichtove, Lefèvre’s longtime co-author and collaborator and a member of the theology faculty. Clichtove had just then reversed course and pulled back within its fold, whereas Colines and Jacques Lefèvre continued to work together in the years that followed. So mounting evidence of their use of common fonts and the interpretative latitude in the two documents taken as concerning their relation led me to wonder as well about the question of overlap within their publishing. Were Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne actually competitors in this regard? Or was another dynamic at work? uploads/Litterature/ intertwining-strengths-simon-de-colines-and-robert-estienne.pdf