Mapping Bibliographic Data: Book production and Censorship in the Early Modern Low Countries

By Bart Waterreus

Abstract
The printing press is regarded as one of the most influential inventions of human history. Related work claims that the geographical production, distribution and circulation of books are significant to understanding the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. However, no other related published study considers the location of Authors.

This study introduces a new dataset containing geocoded Authors which we compare with library catalogs to explore spatial and temporal patterns in the geography of the book in the Low Countries, using a centroid approach proposed by Lucas Koren. The findings show different patterns observed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century from which the Library Catalogs align closely with the narrative from historical research, when the Author data fails to so.

Furthermore, we investigate effect of censorship. Historical research considering the geography of Protestantism within the Low Countries reveals clear spatial and temporal trends. However, when mapping patterns of works targeted by Catholic censorship controlled by total printing volume, the results fail to show any interpretable pattern that is obtained from the literature.

Last, this study investigates whether the printing location of works can be explained by the location of their Authors and whether it has been subjected to censorship within a discrete choice modelling context. While publishing at distant locations was a known strategy to evade censorship, our findings provide no statistical evidence that censored work is printer further away than non-censored work. Also, only considering censorship and authors locations results in significantly worse choice prediction performance than assuming random chance. This suggests that other unknown variables motivate the choice of printing location.