April 24, 2024 Presentation Open Access

Woodcuts for Amulets? Woodblock Printing on Single Sheets in Europe (15th and 16th Centuries)

Heiles, Marco

Presentation held at the workshop "Woodblock Printing. A Cross-Cultural Approach", Hamburg, CSMC, 22.04.2024.

Abstract:

In his seminal monograph on textual amulets in medieval Latin Europe, Don C. Skemer suggests a continuity between handwritten and printed textual amulets (Binding Words. Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages, 2006, pp. 222-233). My paper challenges this thesis and attempts to analyse more closely the role that the introduction of woodcut printing in the fifteenth century had on the production and use of single-sheet media in general and textual amulets in particular. Following the work of Sabine Griese (Text-Bilder und ihre Kontexte, 2011, pp. 403-422), this analysis shows that many established elements of handwritten textual amulets were not adopted in print, that printed and handwritten textual amulets were obviously different, and that - in contrast to the Arabic tradition - no stable tradition of printed textual amulets developed. In my opinion, the reasons for the non-use of woodblock printing for textual amulets do not lie in its technical possibilities, but in the new dimension of publicity created by woodblock (and typographic) printing. The use and form of textual amulets were theologically controversial and could be seen as an expression of forbidden superstition and magic. Mass production of this type of written artefacts therefore seems to have been impossible, or at least only possible in a modified form.