Cheap Print and the Academic Market: The Printing of Dissertations in Sixteenth-Century Louvain

Schools and universities were one of the main markets for cheap works in early modern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of students bought short grammars and other basic educational books that sustained printers in many regions. Yet interaction between the press and university faculties was not limited to such fare; the staff and more senior students also commissioned the printing of many other works. The large and complex treatises that today sit on the shelves of many rare book libraries throughout the world stand testament to their productivity. But it would be wrong solely to equate universities with these expensive statements of academic endeavour. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the doctoral students of many European universities began to have brief summaries of their thesis published by their institution’s assigned printers. In many cases, these summaries were so short that they fitted neatly onto a single printed sheet. As a result, much of this production has disappeared over the centuries. This is particularly true for religious dissertations produced in Catholic theology faculties. Our understanding of this type of ephemeral printing hinges on the chance survival of a small number of items that often only offer a few clues as to patterns of production and consumption of this type of cheap print. This study offers a rare opportunity to deepen our understanding of this publishing phenomenon through the analysis of a surprise discovery of a large number of Catholic dissertations bound into a single volume in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Miscatalogued and unknown to scholarship, this volume contains over two hundred single sheet items printed in Louvain for students of one of the most prestigious theology faculties in sixteenth-century Europe. This find revolutionises our knowledge of study cheap academic publishing in the Catholic Low Counties: previous scholarship had only unearthed three printed dissertations published in the city before 1601. The work of a number of different printers over just twelve years, this exceptional find enables us to study patterns of production over a short period of time. It will identify recurring traits and seek to establish a typology of religious dissertation printing in Louvain. The discovery of the Paris volume also allows us to address other important issues for which we previously had even less data: the question of the distribution and consumption of these single sheet items. The organisati