GROCYN, WILLIAM
(ca. 1446-1519). English humanist. Educated at New College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1481, he became reader in divinity at Magdalen College. In 1488 he went to Italy for further education, studying Greek at Florence and Rome under Angelo Poliziano and Demetrios Chalcondylas. Ordained as a priest after his return, he taught Greek at Exeter College, Oxford, becoming the first person in England to teach that language publicly (as distinguished from private tutoring). He was a friend of both Thomas More and Erasmus. At his death, he left a substantial library, but none of his own writings survives.
GRÜNEWALD, MATTHIAS
(d. 1528). German painter, also active as an architect and engineer. Virtually nothing is known about his early life and training. He was probably born in Würzburg, but even this is uncertain. The growing fashion for italianate styles, evident in the work of his contemporary Albrecht Dürer, probably explains why this great painter, whose work is clearly Northern rather than Italian in inspiration, was largely overlooked in his own century and virtually forgotten until the 20th century. His earliest identifiable paintings, such as his Mocking of Christ, date from about 1504-1506. Between 1508 and 1514 he served as court painter to the archbishop of Mainz. By far his best-known work is the polyptich or altarpiece commissioned for the chapel of a monastery near Isenheim in Alsace, and its most famous segment is a Crucifixion scene. Unlike the works of Dürer, Grünewald’s paintings do not reflect a direct influence from Italy. They continue many features of Northern art of the 15th century, yet they also show the sophisticated use of perspective, the physical treatment of the human figure, and the simplified, themati-cally unified composition that are generally taken to be signs of influence from Renaissance Italy.
GUARINI, GUARINO
Of Verona (1374-1460). Humanist and educator, best known as the headmaster of a famous humanistic school at the court of the duke of Ferrara. Though born into a poor family, he received an excellent Latin education in his native Verona and then at Padua and Venice. When the Byzantine teacher Manuel Chrysoloras passed through Venice in 1403, Guarino followed him to Constantinople and spent five years studying there (1403-1408). After he returned to Italy about 1408, he struggled to establish himself as a teacher in Florence or Venice. In 1418 he married a wealthy woman of Verona. With the backing of his wife’s family, he opened a successful boarding school in Verona and in 1420 was hired by the city to lecture on rhetoric and newly discovered works of Cicero.
In 1429 Guarino accepted an invitation of the ruler of Ferrara to become tutor to the heir to the throne, on condition that the court school also be open to other promising students. His school, which attracted the sons of prominent families from many parts of Italy, was one of the two earliest and most influential humanist schools in Italy; the other was the similar school formed at the court of Mantua by Vittorino da Feltre. In 1442 Guarino became professor in the revived University of Ferrara, which became a popular place of study for early humanists from Northern Europe. After Guarino’s death in 1460, his youngest son, Battista, continued his work in Ferrara. Although Guarino was denounced by some monks for teaching pagan authors, he declared that familiarity with ancient literature was necessary for any person who wanted to understand the works of the ancient Church Fathers.
Because Guarino’s mastery of Greek was far superior to that of most Italian humanists of his generation, his translations of Greek literary texts, especially Plutarch’s Lives and Strabo’s Geography, were of special importance. As a schoolmaster, he regarded fluency in a style of Latin modelled on the language of Cicero as fundamental. His students also read the works of other major Latin authors and received at least some instruction in Greek language and literature. He contended that this kind of literary education would encourage the moral growth of students and hence prepare them to become worthy persons and good citizens. See also CICERONIANISM.
GUEVARA, ANTONIO DE
(ca. 1480-1545). Spanish author. He was educated at the court of the heir to the Spanish throne and became a Franciscan friar in 1504. He was appointed bishop of Granada in 1529 and in 1537 was moved to the see of Mondoñedo. Despite his monastic vocation, he retained his close ties with the royal court, remaining active in political matters, advising the Spanish military reformer Gonzalo de Córdoba and becoming an outspoken supporter of the new Habsburg king, during the rebellion of the Comuneros (1519-1521). Guevara was a famous preacher and in 1521 was appointed court preacher by the emperor. In 1525-1526 he preached to the nominally converted Moriscos of Valencia and Granada. But much of his activity was political; he spent more time at court than in his diocese. In 1535 he accompanied the emperor on his military expedition to Tunis and subsequently on his journey to Italy and France.
Guevara’s first major literary work was his Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio / Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, written by 1524 and circulated in manuscript. An unauthorized printed edition appeared in 1528. Closely related was his Relox de príncipes / Dial of Princes (1529). Both of these works were didactic and moralizing books written as historical narrative. They blended his own ideas with materials borrowed from classical antiquity. His collection of vernacular letters, Epístolas familiares, was widely read and was one of the favorite modern books of the French essayist Montaigne. His works had a major influence on the development of 16th-century Spanish prose.
GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO
(1483-1540). Florentine politician, historian, and political theorist. Born into a prominent family, he received a humanistic education, studied law at Ferrara and Padua, and then took up a political career that began with service to the reformed republican regime headed by Piero Soderini, which he served as ambassador to King Ferdinand I of Spain. His career survived the overthrow of Soderini and the restoration of the Medici to power. He accommodated himself to Medici rule and soon entered the service of the Medici pope, Leo X. Under Leo, he served as governor of Modena, where his good sense and firm hand made him an outstanding success. Under the next Medici pope, Clement VII, he governed the province of Romagna. He was less successful as an adviser on diplomatic matters, being involved in the pope’s ill-starred decision to attempt to expel Spanish power from Italy.His service to the Medici caused the revolutionary regime that ruled Florence from 1527 to 1530 to banish him and confiscate his property.
When Spanish troops restored the Medici to power, Guicciardini was one of the officials commissioned to punish the leaders of the defeated republican regime. He then served Clement VII as governor of Bologna. After the pope’s death in 1534, he returned to Florence and became an adviser to the first duke of the city, Alessandro de’ Medici. When Alessandro was murdered by a conspiracy in favor of his cousin Cosimo, Guicciardini was a leader in arranging the peaceful acceptance of Cosimo as duke but was soon eased out of power. He spent the final three years of his life in retirement, working on his History of Italy, which was largely completed by the time of his death, though his heirs delayed publication until 1561 because of the sensitive political issues that it treated.
Both as a historian and as a political theorist, Guicciardini was far less sympathetic to the Florentine republican tradition than his older friend Niccolò Machiavelli. His personal preference was for continuation of a republican form of government dominated by the rich rather than for the openly monarchical regime created by the Medici during the 1530s, but he had no sympathy for the radical republicanism of the anti-Medicean party, and both before and after the suppression of the republican constitution, he proved fully willing to serve the Medici. He shared Machiavelli’s acceptance of raw power and self-interest as the basis for government, but his thought was less influenced by theoretical considerations and distinctly less open to granting any but the most nominal power to citizens outside the inner circle of wealthy aristocratic families.
Guicciardini’s History of Florence (written in 1508-1509 but not published until the 19th century) shows that even at the outset of his career he favored a strong ruler who would tie himself closely to the high aristocracy; but the History of Italy, as his last work, shows that while his political preferences had remained the same, he had become profoundly pessimistic, lacking even the limited optimism of Machiavelli, though fully sharing his friend’s cynicism about human motivation and religion. His other major work, a set of informal Ricordi or maxims, confirms the pessimism of his thought. He no longer thought that there was any possibility for Florence to be governed by his own aristocratic class and concluded that it was wiser to accept the city’s subordination to despotism than to struggle against the inevitable.
GUILD
An association of merchants or craftsmen in a medieval or Renaissance city, intended to regulate relations among those who practiced the same occupation and to safeguard the common interests of its members and also (in theory) the general interest of the whole community. Guilds developed gradually and spontaneously as industrial production and commerce grew, and they were common by the 11th and 12th centuries. In many towns, the earliest guild was an association of all who traded or produced goods for sale. Since most early medieval towns were ruled by some external authority (a feudal lord, an imperial vicar, or a bishop) who provided few or no services but regarded the townspeople as subject to his laws and taxes, the early guilds acted to provide basic necessities such as fortifications, potable water, and reliable supplies of food. In many places, the guild of merchants gradually became the real local government and struggled — sometimes by paying money and sometimes by force of arms — to reduce or even to eliminate the authority of the overlord. Since the wealthy merchants dominated the guild, the new town governments were also dominated by the rich. In Italy, many local regimes also faced the problem of incorporating the urban nobility, a military caste of owners of landed estates who were not involved in commerce or industry and who often refused to obey the city’s laws. The leaders of the guilds (the popolo) strove to reduce the privileges of the nobility—above all, to compel them to abandon the practice of enforcing their will by armed force and to demolish their fortified urban houses. These struggles took place in nearly every self-governing Italian commune and were especially important in the early history of the republic of Florence.
The rise of guilds was important in many parts of Europe, even in regions where cities remained subject to royal authority. Not every large city had guilds. In some places, the rich merchants who dominated local government regarded them as potential sources of political opposition. Nuremberg in Germany, for example, suppressed its guilds in 1349. There, all regulations governing commerce and industrial production came from the city council, and there were no guilds to form and enforce rules of their own. In most cities, however, people engaged in the same trade did develop guilds. In some places, guilds dominated local government. In other places, guilds had little or no political power but were allowed to organize and to regulate their professional activities, always subject to the authority of the city council.
In towns that remained small, all guilds were craft guilds, organizations of self-employed artisans who managed both the production and the retail sale of their own wares — for example, bakers, butchers, and shoemakers. Members of such craft guilds produced exclusively for local consumption. Their rules forbade production by non-members and excluded competing goods imported from outside. They supervised methods of production, hours of labor, maintenance of quality, number of apprentices and journeymen, and prices. The guilds also regulated the training of apprentices and the admission of journeymen, young men who had completed their apprenticeship, to the status of independent masters and members of the guild. By the 15 th century, in many guilds the established masters created barriers to attaining master status, both in order to limit competition and in order to maintain a pool of skilled laborers available for hire. In some trades, journeymen who were not sons of established masters might be compelled to remain wage-laborers for their entire lives.
Such craft guilds also developed in the large cities that became centers of international trade, but these cities also developed guilds of merchants who traded outside the city and directed the production of exportable products. Members of such guilds were no longer simple merchants; their guilds were associations of mercantile capitalists. The craft guilds tried to ensure that all members would have relatively equal incomes and standards of living: no one would starve, but no one would be allowed to get more than his fair share of the total business. The merchant-capitalists could never be effectively regulated in this way because their business extended beyond the city’s jurisdiction. Particularly in the textile trades of Italy and Flanders, wealthy merchants controlled the market outlets for the products of local craftsmen. Thus the merchant-exporters could control the prices they paid for work by artisans even though in theory the artisans were self-employed craftsmen. City guilds and even city governments often tried to outlaw this tendency of large-scale merchants to evade local regulation and to reduce self-employed artisans to the level of de facto employees, but since the exporters alone had access to the foreign markets, they were immune to local control.
This distinction between the privileged guilds of wealthy businessmen and the humbler craft guilds was highly developed in Florence, where it was built into the political system. The right to participate in politics and to hold public office was limited to members of the 21 officially recognized guilds. But except for about four decades (1343-1382) of democratizing political reforms that ended in a coup d’état by the rich merchants, the seven greater guilds (arti maggiori), composed of the international merchants on whose activities the prosperity of the city depended, were guaranteed a majority on the ruling council (Signoria) and thus controlled public policy on all issues on which they were agreed. The much more populous 14 middle and lesser guilds (arti minori) had some voice on the Signoria, but the rich guilds controlled the government. As in nearly all cities that had guilds, the very poorest Florentines, casual wage-laborers who had no skilled trade, owned no property, and had no guild of their own, were totally cut out of political life. The Ciompi rebellion of 1378 in Florence was an attempt by these unorganized and unskilled laborers to form guilds and so to gain a voice in local politics, but within four years the rebels had been put down by armed force and had lost all the gains that they made in 1378.
In addition to their economic and political function, guilds were also important in urban religious and social life. Many guilds paid special honors to the patron saint of their craft, maintaining an altar or chapel in one of the parish churches, attending services together on the saint’s feast day, and assessing members for the financial support of such communal activities. They required members to attend services on religious feast days and to be present at the funerals of members. They also provided social welfare services for guild members who suffered from disabling illness, for widows and orphans of deceased members, and for other cases of special need among their members.
GUTENBERG, JOHANNES
(ca. 1398-1468). Johann Gansfleisch von Gutenberg is usually and probably correctly identified as the inventor of the art of printing with movable type. Born at Mainz in western Germany to a socially prominent but impoverished family, in 1534 he moved to Strasbourg after a political upheaval in Mainz exiled his family. At Strasbourg he was enrolled in the guild of goldsmiths and no later than 1439 was involved in a lawsuit concerning a secret process of some sort. He seems to have struggled against poverty throughout his life and was repeatedly involved in litigation, usually over business matters but also including a breach-of-promise lawsuit brought by a Strasbourg woman of good family. Sometime between 1444 and 1448, Gutenberg returned to Mainz and resided there until his death.
The exact history of what he did, when he did it, and where he did it is obscured not only by lack of records but also by large numbers of forged documents produced in later centuries. Yet it seems clear that even though other individuals were experimenting along similar lines, Gutenberg was the first to perfect the technology of letterpress printing, and that his membership in the goldsmiths’ guild at Strasbourg was related to his early experiments in the casting of metallic type. The early traditions of the printing industry point to him as the true inventor, and works of contemporary historians also attribute the new art to him. He probably invented the alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that was used successfully to cast individual letters that could be used for printing and then be reused repeatedly. He also devised an ink, derived from the oil-based paints used by northern European painters, that would adhere to the metallic letters. At least as important as the type faces and the ink was the organizational method devised for storing the type, setting it by hand and locking the assembled lines into a metallic chase, breaking down and redistributing the metallic letters after use, adapting the existing winepress to the task of printing, and training a whole class of laborers to engage systematically in an industrial process that had never been done before. The development must have involved repeated instances of trial and error, and the experimental nature of the process no doubt explains why Gutenberg repeatedly had difficulty with business partners and investors who expected marketable products far more rapidly than he could produce them.
His principal backer after he returned to Mainz was a wealthy goldsmith, Johann Fust, who provided him large sums of money and in 1455 sued him for failure to produce books by some new technique. Despite his technological competence, Gutenberg remained strapped for cash, and it was his former partner, Fust, associated with his son-in-law Peter Schoeffer, who founded the first financially successful printing firm, using typographical material that must have been provided by Gutenberg. They produced books not only for the local market but also for sale abroad; Fust died in 1466 while on a business trip to Paris, no doubt to market products of the new press. This firm of Fust and Schoeffer remained active into the early 16th century.
The object conventionally identified as "the first printed book" is the so-called Gutenberg Bible, a Latin Vulgate Bible probably printed in 1454-1455 and certainly completed by 1456, when a local illuminator completed decoration of a copy and noted the date on the copy. The first book with a printed date was an elaborate and costly edition of the Psalms produced for liturgical use on order of the archbishop of Mainz, not by Gutenberg but by his former associates, Fust and Schoeffer. It bears the printed date of completion, 14 August 1457. Historians of printing have noted that both of these early volumes were remarkably perfect in form, bearing little evidence of being the product of a new and still experimental technology. The first clearly datable product of the new art was not a book at all but a set of blank forms provided by the clergy to penitents who secured ecclesiastical indulgences in return for contributions for a papal crusade for the re-conquest of Constantinople, which fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. These blanks had the name of the purchaser and the date of purchase filled in by pen, and surviving copies bear handwritten dates from 1454 and 1455. There are even earlier fragments of more technologically primitive printing, including a fragment of an astrological calendar for 1448 (hence presumably printed the preceding year) that is technologically much less advanced. The identity of the printer or printers who produced these early fragments is uncertain. See also PRINTING.
