In 2023, it will be 550 years since the Aalst printer Dirk Martens (c. 1466-1534) established the first printing workshop in our area. The ideal opportunity to highlight incunabula printed in today’s Flanders. Much ink has been spilled about early modern printing, but a thorough survey of the earliest Flemish printed books is still lacking. The project IMPRESSVM. The cradle of Flemish printing will fill that gap over the next two years thanks to a project grant from the Flemish Government by systematically mapping the bibliographic information on this unique heritage on a central and sustainable platform: STCV. Bibliography of the hand-printed book in Flanders (stcv.be).

As the earliest witnesses to the vibrant art of printing, incunabula have special cultural-historical value. The emergence of the new printing technique was a milestone for the Southern Netherlands. By the late fifteenth century, the southern regions of the Burgundian Netherlands were already an international hub for the trade in illuminated manuscripts. At ten years, the region also grew into a tightly knit hub for the production of printed books in seven different cities: Aalst (from 1473), Bruges (c. 1473), Leuven (c. 1473), Brussels (1475), Oudenaarde (1480), Antwerp (1481) and Ghent (1483). The printing press not only provided a greater reach of books and of the knowledge and ideas they contained. It also sowed the seeds for the international flowering of the book business in the Southern Netherlands from the sixteenth century onward. Not for nothing are several incunabula on the Flemish Masterpiece List.

In addition to the many detailed studies on incunabula, the IMPRESSVM project aims to achieve a complete overview of the earliest printings from our region and put this unique Flemish heritage on the international map. However, this is not so obvious. Existing bibliographic databases list about 897 preserved incunabula editions printed in Flemish cities, but we know that several copies are far from complete records. Flemish incunabula are also preserved in a variety of domestic and foreign collections. Often only one or a few copies of an edition still exist or only a loose fragment has been preserved. Within Flanders, we therefore want to document in detail and bibliographically disclose as far as possible all surviving copies in Flemish collections. Outside Flanders, we supplement that list with editions of which none can be found in Flemish collections. By involving private collections as well, we thus hope to be able to map the whole of fifteenth-century Flemish printed matter as completely as possible. This will be done with the necessary discretion to ensure the anonymity of the collections on a permanent basis: for example, when specimens from private collections are found, the user of the STCV database will be told that they are “held in private hands” and “not accessible for consultation.

Do you have incunabula in your collection and are interested in participating in the project? If so, be sure to let us know by emailing zanna@vlaamse-erfgoedbibliotheken.be!

Zanna Van Loon, project manager STCV