Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 270. Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History and Intellectual History, 21. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp xxvii + 430. Hb, €169.00.

This authoritative and beautifully illustrated volume brings to light a very much understudied area of print and art history: interactive and sculptural prints in books and as objects in Germany and Italy in the sixteenth century. Woodcut illustrations in books tend to be overlooked by scholars compared to their fine art cousins because of their relative technical simplicity and culture of recycling and recirculating images, which makes attribution difficult. Yet, as the author persuasively demonstrates, studying such interactive books provides us with new and important insights concerning how books were used by early modern readers. This usage is both implicit in the design of the interactive print (through the inclusion of flaps, volvelles and folds, for example) and an historical fact in the wear on the paper due to repeated use by numerous readers. Understanding more about how these prints were constructed and used is a helpful way in to finding out more about the daily devotional and scientific lives of early modern owners. In addition, as Karr Schmidt masterfully demonstrates, these prints were related to objects such as holy relics, boxwood carvings, ivory dice, sundials and globes. The volume touches only very slightly on Jesuit history. Topics related to the Society feature on only fifteen of the volume’s four hundred plus pages and for the benefit of this journal’s readers I describe their main elements here. There are reproductions and analysis of a 1601 Veridicus christianus where the dial bears the monogram of the Society, a 1632 broadsheet, which represents Jesuits as hungry dogs and wolves and two 1569 broadsheets, one of which makes a visual pun on the name of Jesuit leader Peter Canisius by representing him as a dog (canis in Latin means “dog”).

One particularly fascinating strand, which emerges from the study is the role of the senses in reading. Interactive prints place the focus on that sense, which is essential to the act of individual reading but rarely features in histories of the activity: touch. The sensory aspects of religious devotion, particularly the Catholic Mass and the evocation of this ritual in print is the prominent focus of the first part of the book, which traces the emergence of moveable prints from late medieval liturgical practice. Schmidt Karr argues that the need for interactive prints stemmed from the construction of the Catholic Mass as an overtly sensory experience from which the laity were ostensibly excluded. Printed works therefore sought to offer the laity access to devotional practices largely reserved for the clergy by replicating holy relics, devotional triptychs and the host. In this way, religious knowledge could be discovered and the sensory experience of the Eucharist could be enjoyed by the owner without the intermediation of the clergy.

Anatomical imagery was a key strand in printed propaganda during the Reformation and the role of these images in interactive printed books is explored in the second part of the study. Recognition of the threat of the “other” could only come from true knowledge of the self and from their invention in 1538, anatomical flap prints provided a new way of understanding and detecting the “enemy within.” These works took their visual references from Martin Luther and saw a resurgence after his death.

Part three studies the career of interactive print maker Georg Hartmann of Nuremberg. Hartmann was a pioneer of prints, which could be assembled by owners in order to create scientific instruments such as astrolabes and sundials. Printed sundials were a particular specialty of Hartmann. The print could be pasted by their owner onto hinged wood, which made an acceptable and, indeed, convincing substitute for their carved wooden equivalents. Hartmann’s printing constitutes a kind of early mass-production of scientific instruments, which is impressive in its historical context. There were other printers of scientific instruments in Hartmann’s circle. Johannes Schöner printed ovoid strips (gores), which could be pasted onto a weighted sphere to make a globe. Hartmann took inspiration from these globes and also from Albrecht Dürer’s polyhedra to take his printmaking in new directions. Hartmann’s instruments were rarely influenced by contemporary events, except in the case of the Turkish Sundial produced in the weeks after the Ottoman siege of Vienna. This featured the visual pun on the widely recognized symbol of a crescent moon as a symbol of Turkey with a human face in the diptych’s upper dial.

Part four explores the expansion of the secular interactive book as a basis for play in the early modern period, notably in Germany and Italy. Astrolabes were functional calendars yet also lavish projects that necessitated collaboration and had to be assembled in the printer’s workshop due to their complexity. Leonhard Thurneisser’s astrolabes had between six and nine volvelles and were beautifully colored although they did not rival their Apian predecessors. Volvelles also appear in Giambattista della Porta’s book on cryptography De furtivis literarum notis where the movable dials help the reader decode the secret text. Volvelles featured in many lottery books of the period and others that incorporated games of chance without necessarily entailing gambling. Finally, Karr Schmidt considers the role of interactive books in secular depictions of the body in erotica and memento mori.

Overall, the book provokes reflection on the relationship between books, broadsheets, and other printed items and their fine art and material cousins: altarpieces, carvings, sundials, and globes. It helps us understand better the relationship between print and other everyday objects, which might have been found in the household and which have survived in much smaller numbers. With its meticulous reconstruction of the processes of printing and its close readings of the multitude of ways in which readers procured knowledge, this study will become a necessary point of reference for all scholars working on early modern religious and scientific print culture.

DOI:10.1163/22141332-00603006-13