The prefaces of Badius Ascensius: The humanist printer as arbiter of French humanism and the medieval tradition in France

The humanist teacher, editor, and grammarian Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535), also known by his Flemish personal names, Josse Bade, was the most prolific and influential of France's humanist printer/publishers of the first third of the sixteenth century. In the period 1503–1535, he printed more than 770 editions of classical, humanist, and religious works, composed more than 180 prefaces dating from his first editorial efforts, in 1492, as the press director for the Lyons printer/publisher Jean Trechsel, and established close ties of friendship and patronage among members of the most powerful civil, ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monastic circles in France. Born in Ghent, his education in that city's Common Life hostel-school, taught and administered by the Brothers (their teaching is attested to by several of his prefaces), 3immersed him in the ethos of the devotio moderna. His fervent devotional exhortations, his reverence and affection for the religious orders, and his valuation of Scripture as the ultimate spiritual authority and devotional text, which he combined with an antipathy toward humanist philological biblicism and its attendant challenge to orthodoxy, can be traced to his formation in that spiritual reform movement. Even more atypical for a humanist was his exaltation of scholastic theology and philosophy, which he usually phrased in classical figures of speech.;These “medieval” passions he attempted to harmonize with his propagation of the humanist program among the young and with his commitment to classical scholarship. He printed numerous editions of grammars, including classicized versions of the fourteenth-century Doctrinale, as well as his own, and familiar commentaries on Latin classical works. With a prickly defensiveness he favorably compared his own texts (as well as his prices) with Aldus's, and his prefaces reveal a familiarity with the most advanced humanist theories of textual transmission, which he may have encountered as a young man in Italy. In the early 1490s, he obliquely, but firmly, began a campaign to undermine the principles of imitative Ciceronianism and, in 1505, to belittle the achievements of Italian humanists, even as he glorified the achievements, both ancient and contemporary, of his adoptive France.