Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900)
www.copyrighthistory.org
Identifier: s_1506

Commentary on “Nebrija’s Printing Privileges” (1506)

José Bellido (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Raquel Xalabarder (Universidad Oberta de Catalunya)

Ramón Casas Valles (Universidad de Barcelona)

 
Please cite as:
Bellido, J., Xalabarder, R. & Casas Valles, R. (2011) ‘Commentary on Nebrija’s Printing Privileges (1495)', in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

1.          Full Title

2.         Abstract

3.         Governing the Text

4.         Ambition & Privilege

5.         Geographies of Privileges

6.         Terms & Conditions

7.         References

1.          Full Title

            Privilegios de Impresión de las obras de Antonio de Nebrija (1506)

2.         Abstract

These specific privileges held an honoured place within the splendour of Spanish book production because of their outstanding rarity. The grammarian, orator and philologist Antonio de Nebrija, or Lebrija (1444-1522) was possibly the first “author” to obtain a book privilege in Spain. This historical overview allows us to trace the development of book privileges, publication channels and literary protectors in Castile and other kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. It aims to show how privileges in Spain were granted, their main characteristics and the procedural features of Spanish bureaucracies behind their administration in the sixteenth century.

3.         Governing the Text

The standard account of the privilege system’s emergence identifies its origins in Venice.[1] If we compare dates and chronologies, evidence of book-privileges granted in Spain appeared relatively early. This is surprising when we consider that the printing press arrived quite late in the Iberian Peninsula.[2] Nevertheless, and despite attempts to produce narratives that connected Venice and Castile,[3] Frederick John Norton (1904-1986) once suggested that “the system appears to have developed spontaneously in Castile”.[4] In his thorough attempt to locate instances of such a spontaneous emergence, he relied on the annotations of bibliographers and copyright scholars such as Walter Arthur Copinger (1847-1910)[5] and Konrad Haebler (1857-1946).[6]  Almost half a century before him, they had already explored the territory of incunabula and identified what could have been one of the first concessions of exclusive printing privileges granted in the Iberian peninsula,[7] a privilege granted to the royal physician Julián Gutiérrez (?- ca. 1520).[8]

The work awarded the privilege was an important treatise on urology,[9] commissioned by a bookseller and published in April 1498.[10] Its place of publication, Toledo, was a well-known printing centre in Castile. The location was already exclusive and privileged, responsible for the issue of bulls and indulgences.[11] Regarding the first privilege granted to an individual, certain doubts surrounding the authorship of the work have been triggered by recent discoveries of archival material. These findings reveal an indirect reference to an underlying dispute concerning the paternity of the book, suggesting that the author was not Julián Gutiérrez, but a doctor of Jewish origin, Juan de Guadalupe (?-1494).[12] One result of an empirical focus in such a genealogical controversy is the opportunity of exploring an uncharted territory in the pre-history of copyright law in Spain. By focusing on the dispute, the episode could shed light on the nexus of authorial invisibility and the constraints experienced by Jewish authors forcibly converted to Catholicism in Spain.[13] Important though it seems, such history is yet to be written. Nevertheless, scholarly attention and typographical analysis have also considered the significance of this book based on other grounds. Print historians and bibliographers have preferred to turn to the solid evidence provided by the item itself in an attempt to highlight a remarkable physical feature. In particular, they have identified a brief note inside its cover, a statement confirming that the Royal Council assessed its sale price.[14] The note is important because it constitutes an indirect documented indication of the existence of royal privileges.[15] More specifically, the fixing of the official retail price (tasa) is considered the distinctive customary aspect of the system of privileges in Spain.[16] As a type of royal intervention embedded in the procedure of granting a privilege in the book trade,[17] the price-setting process took into account the book’s physically features, such as the number of pages and the quality of the paper. The official price often appeared in the preliminaries, frequently included on the title-page of the book and only occasionally announced in the printer's colophon.[18]

4.         Ambition & Privilege  

While printers and booksellers were the most common privilege applicants,[19] the possibility of obtaining a privilege also interested some authors. Amongst the first Spanish authors seeking to protect his works was the well-known grammarian and historian Antonio de Nebrija, or Lebrija (1444-1522).[20] His experience in Italy, his contribution to the introduction of the craft of printing in Salamanca and his close relationship with literary patrons such as the Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Cisneros (1436-1517)[21] have been used as evidence of his acquaintance with the system of privileges.[22] The close supervision he exercised in the edition of his works could serve as confirmation that he was indeed the holder of book-related privileges in relation to his own works.[23] In fact, the eminent historian Konrad Haebler (1857-1946) once confessed that he was convinced that Nebrija was “one of the first authors who made use of copyright in Spain”.[24]

Inevitably, another element adds a level of complexity to this original claim. Nebrija may have been responsible for the establishment of an anonymous printing press at Salamanca from which many of his books were printed.[25] Viewed in this way, the boundary between author and printer in the constitution of his books is blurred. Nebrija would not have been only focused on the intellectual creation of the work but also on its practicalities and materialities. In fact, he represents a historical singularity of an author being converted into a printer and an entrepreneur of his own books. Some scholars have speculated on this use of anonymity as a logical way for someone holding an eminent position at the University to hide his identity,[26] yet no conclusive evidence of the direct privilege grant to Nebrija has ever been produced. However, given his presumably remarkable position he may have occupied in the Spanish pre-history of copyright, it is interesting to verify whether the first editions of his books had been awarded exceptional royal prerogatives.[27] This appears to have been the case: Nebrija’s dictionary, printed in Salamanca in 1492, contained the official retail price, a hint - as we mentioned above - of its privileged existence.[28] The same could be said about another of his books printed in Salamanca three years later.[29] Almost a decade later, and as a result of his connection with the most prestigious printer in Spain at the time, Arnao Guillén de Brocar (1460-1523), we can observe that a series of his works were again privileged and published.[30] In this case there are indications that Brocar had acquired a ten-year privilege to print Nebrija’s works.[31] Therefore the evidence seems to confirm Haebler’s conviction: Nebrija was one of the first authors who made use of copyright in Spain.[32]

5.         Geographies of privileges 

The feature that made Nebrija’s individual texts commercially attractive and legally desirable was not only the prestige of its author, but also the type of books produced. They were mainly “useful” books; materials of practical utility such as textbooks, vocabularies and dictionaries. This made them particularly suitable for print privileges.[33] It is therefore no surprise that privileges over Nebrija’s works constituted a valuable legacy that lasted for centuries. Attempts to ensure their commercial exclusivity would occasionally shift from privilege to monopoly through official declarations making the texts compulsory in different Spanish and Latin American schools.[34] In fact, such a functional and special character was also a characteristic of early printing outputs in Spanish book production and, therefore, of the first type of privileges given.[35] Royal concessions abounded in relation to bulls and indulgences as well as the printing of textbooks, school hymns, and dictionaries. This early attempt to regulate the presses also covered laws and law-books.[36] Because the printing press allowed for the fixation and dissemination of statutes, privileges over legal material became at once significantly valuable and paradigmatic of the change the printing press brought to the way in which the law was conceived.[37] Interestingly, all these materials (textbooks, law books and statutes) and their respective privileges shared another remarkable feature: they were specifically designed for local consumption. In this sense, the specialization of the press led to a primitive delineation of what we may consider today the international- national distinction.

However, such a distinction is obviously a recent development. The politico-juridical division of Spain into kingdoms had a crucial effect on the circulation of books and the extension and performance of privileges.[38] Privileges were territorial in nature, being limited to a geographical and jurisdictional area. Because of this, it was quite rare that collective privileges were in effect in more than one kingdom. Again, the exception to the rule is found in Nebrija’s works, which were occasionally subjected to a privilege applicable throughout Spain or were once reported to have been awarded a privilege which covered not only the territory of Castile, but also that of Aragon.[39] Nevertheless, such a wide scope was the exception to the rule. The largest number of privileges surveyed by bibliographers and print historians come from the Kingdom of Castile. In contrast, only a small number have been located from Aragon, [40] a kingdom with a more liberal regime in terms of the publication and importation of books.[41] The most far-reaching effect of the disparity in the grant of privileges was the increase in piracy wars between the two kingdoms.[42] Piracy encompasses a number of different categories: false licenses, unlicensed books and counterfeits.[43] The jurisdictional gap would have then allowed for a range of illegal copies to emerge throughout the Iberian Peninsula.[44] While printers in Aragon pirated books covered only by a Castilian privilege, Castilian printers made books with “false Aragonese imprints”.[45]

 6.         Terms & Conditions   

Terms and conditions applied. The local emphasis of the privilege was frequently coupled with temporal limits.[46] Some scholars have produced a narrative that shows a sustained and on-going temporal evolution in the practice of granting privileges,[47] expressing a similar sentiment to that of recent criticism regarding the expansion of copyright.[48] However, the politico-juridical fragmentation and the evidence available deny such a teleological and over-expanding vision of the temporal extension in the practice of granting privileges. There is a rich variety of privilege temporalities throughout the different kingdoms of Spain. For most texts the privilege offered a ten-year grant.[49] Nevertheless, there is a plethora of examples which show that protection could encompass a shorter or longer period.[50] In 1505, the kingdom of Valencia granted a privilege lasting two years to Alonso de Proaza (c. 1445-1519) for his Oratio.[51] In 1510 and 1511, copies of Nebrija’s works appeared with the inscription cum privilegio for five years in Castile and ten years in Aragon.[52] Moreover, there is evidence of privileges granted for only four months.[53] Consideration of such limitations and their possible extensions facilitate an understanding of the ways in which local authorities attempted to develop their own discrete policy-orientated decisions in order to stimulate domestic markets.

As a marketable asset, privileges rapidly became businesses.[54] Indeed, clerks, merchants and agents had the possibility of acquiring such privileges and, in doing so, they moved frequently from property to transaction regimes; from possession to transaction.[55] For instance, Norton gives the example of a clerk who obtained a printing privilege as a reward for his help in drafting laws and who “chose to sell his rights to a bookseller”.[56] In fact, those who had the opportunity to procure a privilege (authors, translators, privileges and merchants) often entered into contracts and agreements in order to maximise their profit.[57] A cursory glance in the first decades of the privilege era in the Iberian Peninsula reveals a variety of arrangements made between agents and publishers;[58] translators and printers,[59] authors and publishers[60] and among publishers and their colleagues from different areas. Remarkably, dynasties such as the Portonaris[61] or the Giunta family[62] epitomise the international collectives that produced networks of contracts, privileges and wills throughout Europe that also reached Spain.[63] In such complex web of transactions and partnerships, some individuals became fundamental in the history of the Spanish printing press even without printing anything. An example of this literary underground is Julio Junta (? - 1619), a true example of a commissioner, who made his career in the procurement of contracts, the exchange of book privileges and the production of a transnational networks by putting printers and booksellers in contact with one another.[64] 

The existence of multiple interests surrounding the same legal exclusivity caused some privileges to overlap and collide. It is thus worth concluding by highlighting how, in the case of an infringement, some privileges already carried penalties and methods of enforcement.[65] The most typical remedy was the confiscation of copies printed without the privilege holder’s authorisation.[66] There were also examples of privileges specifying a fixed fine for each illicit copy[67] and it was also possible to make a request for the seizure of the means and apparatus that had facilitated the infringement.[68]

7.         References  

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