Sebastian Gryphius
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Sebastian Gryphius (French: Sébastien Gryphe; c. 1492, in Reutlingen – 1556, in Lyon) was a German bookseller-printer and humanist.
Biography
[edit]He was the son of Michael Greyff (Greif, Gryff, Gryph), and learned from him the new craft of printing, in Germany and then in Venice. Around 1520 he came to Lyon and settled there, on behalf of a Venetian firm of booksellers.
Initially Gryphius mostly published works on law and administration, in Gothic script. He then moved to Latin classics. He also translated classical Greek authors into Latin. He is perhaps best-known today for having published his contemporaries Erasmus, Guillaume Budé, Philip Melanchthon, and Poliziano.
Gryphius was a prolific publisher on language and philology, and had an excellent reputation for type-setting accuracy. While Santes Pagninus was in Lyon, Gryphius published not only an abridged version of his Institutiones Hebraicus in Greek, Hebrew and Latin in 1528, but also his seminal 1412-page Thesaurus linguæ sanctæ in 1529 and in the following year, the first Hebrew text of the Psalms published in France and translated by Pagninus.[1]
In 1536 he went into business with Hugues de la Porte, who financed him in an independent venture. He founded l'Atelier du Griffon, with a griffin mark. Around this time he introduced the Italic type of Aldus Manutius.
In the 1540s he was the highly reputed 'Prince of the Lyon book trade', publishing (on Lucien Febvre's estimate) half of the academic textbooks used in Europe.[2] He promoted the local humanist culture, and his books were prized for their clean lay-out and accuracy. The nineteenth-century scholar Henri-Louis Baudrier spoke of Sebastian Gryphius's printshop (Atelier du Griffon) as a « société angélique pour les libres-penseurs ».[3]
His collaborators included André Alciat, François Rabelais, Étienne Dolet, Maurice Scève and Barthélemy Aneau, and they wrote highly of his work, even helping out in practical printing tasks. Their linguistic input and commentary greatly enriched the works printed.[2] Gryphius also published texts which were later added to the Catholic Church's index as heretical, like for example Girolamo Savonarola's Dominicæ Precationis Explanatio.[4]
From 1534-1538, on the recommendation of Jean de Boyssoné, he collaborated with and published Étienne Dolet, an academic and satirical poet, who arrived in Lyon in 1534 after being freed from jail in Toulouse. After publishing the speeches that landed Dolet in prison in Toulouse and, surprisingly given his close ties to Erasmus, the virulent anti-Erasmian Dialogus, de imitatione ciceroniana adversus Desiderarium Erasmum, and the book that first made his scholarly reputation Commentaires sur la langue latine, Gryphius continued to let Dolet, holding a royal publishing privilege from 1538, to publish using his workshop. The first edition of Carmina was thus published with Dolet's device, but from Gryphe's workshop. Soon, however, the two parted ways, and Dolet began releasing editions of many of Dolet's most successful publications with little or no change, to the point that modern scholars speak of piracy.[5] By 1546, Dolet's friends in places could no longer protect him and he was burned in Paris as a heretic.[6]
From 1540, Rabelais came to Gryphius to publish his translations of Hippocrates, Galen and Giovanni Mainardi and collaborated with him extensively particularly on texts related to medicine, but also on his edition of Macrobius.[7]
Family
[edit]His brother Franz (François) was a printer in the rue des Carmes in Paris from 1532. Another brother, Johann (Jean), remained in Venice, also as a printer. His illegitimate son Antoine (1527?-1599) succeeded him at his printing shop in Lyon. Antoine Gryphius was the father of Sébastien II Gryphius, born around 1570, a bookseller in Lyon and later in Bordeaux.[8]
Legacy
[edit]- There is a street named after him in la Guillotière, in the seventh arrondissement of Lyon.
- The journal of the Bibliothèque de Lyon is called Gryphe.
Notes
[edit]- ^ Lyse Schwarzfuchs, "Sébastien Gryphe éditeur en hébreu", in Mouren 2008, pp. 91–100.
- ^ a b Febvre & Martin 1976, p. 149.
- ^ Bats, Raphaëlle; Miachon, Coralie; Montlahuc, Marie-Laure & Schmauch-Bleny, Roseline (2006). Étude de la production éditoriale de Sébastien Gryphe sur deux années caractéristiques: 1538 et 1550 (PDF). Mémoire de Recherche, DBC 15 (in French). Presses de l'enssib. p. 20.
- ^ Dall'Aglio, Stefano (2003). "Une Dominicæ Precationis Explanatio datée de 1537: première édition d'Étienne Dolet?". Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance. 65 (3): 631–640. JSTOR 20680653.
- ^ Jean-François Vallée, "Faire bonne impression: Étienne Dolet et Sébastien Gryphe", in Mouren 2008, pp. 181–199.
- ^ Febvre & Martin 1976, pp. 149–151, 312.
- ^ Mireille Huchon-Rieu, "Rabelais éditeur et auteur chez Gryphe", in Mouren 2008, pp. 201–217.
- ^ BnF.
References
[edit]- Baudrier, Henri; Baudrier, Julien (1910). "Sébastien Gryphius". Bibliographie lyonnaise: Recherches sur les imprimeurs, libraires, relieurs et fondeurs de lettres de Lyon au XVIe siècle (in French). Vol. VIII. Lyon: Louis Brun. pp. 11–286.
- Febvre, Lucien; Martin, Henri-Jean (1976). The coming of the book : the impact of printing 1450-1800. Translated by Gerard, David. Manchester, England: NLB.
- Mouren, Raphaële, ed. (2008). Quid Novi ? Sébastien Gryphe, à l'occasion du 450e anniversaire de sa mort: Actes du colloque – 23 au 25 novembre 2006 – Lyon/Villeurbanne – Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, enssib (in French and Italian). Villeurbanne: Presses de l'enssib. ISBN 978-2-910227-68-5.
