90 Second Narratives
Season 6: “Books”
Episode 7: “Creating the Images in Early Modern Printed Books”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives. I’m Sky Michael Johnston and I am pleased to introduce today’s storyteller, Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. Here is her story, “Creating the Images in Early Modern Printed Books.”
Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen:
If a sixteenth-century European author, printer, or publisher wanted to include pictures in a book, they had several options. Woodcut, engraving, and etching are printmaking techniques that were already available to produce and reproduce printed images and book illustrations in the early modern period, approximately between the years 1400 to 1800.
Although engraving and etching became the preferred forms for printed images during this period, the most copiously illustrated books still regularly employed woodcuts because text and images could be printed together, which saved production time and cost. For example, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals often include several hundred to more than a thousand woodcuts of plants in one book. Woodblocks are also highly durable and could be reused over and over again. The blocks of these botanical illustrations printed not only the woodcuts for the initial publications, but also for the reprints, new editions, or translations of the books, and sometimes for different titles altogether.
To see some examples of early modern European woodblocks, the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp recently digitized about 14,000 blocks in their collections. From decorative initials to emblematic or epistemic illustrations, these printing blocks adorned books that cover various subjects. While it is impressive that such a large number of blocks survived many historical events throughout the past centuries, this mass collection is only the tip of the iceberg of the tens of thousands of historical printing blocks that are now mostly lost, destroyed, or repurposed.
When seeing pictures in early modern books next time, remember the blocks and plates that were hard at work to impress them.
Sky Michael Johnston:
If you would like to read more, and even better, see more about the woodblocks described in Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen’s story, then please click on the two links in the episode description. The first will take you to Chen’s 2020 article, “A Woodblock’s Career: Transferring Visual Botanical Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries,” which is available via Open Access. And the second link will take you to the digitized collection of woodblocks from the Plantin-Moretus Museum. I hope you enjoy those online resources.
I’m glad you could join us. Please come back next week for another “little story with BIG historical significance.”