A scarce New Greek version of Croce’s Bertoldino (Venice 1818)

Our blog frequently dedicates posts to Venetian printing, and in this context we admit a certain bias for the various magnificent productions of the Venetian Renaissance, often highlighting books with lavish illustrations, housed in stunning bindings, or previously belonging to celebrated collectors.

But all books are interesting and ‘revelatory’ in their own way, and today our attention is caught by a rare Venetian chapbook illustrated with rough woodcuts and issued from the Glykys press in 1818: the New Greek edition of the comic novel Bertoldino by Giulio Cesare Croce, published under the title of Βίος του Μπερτολδίνου, υιού του πανούργου Μπερτόλδου και αι γελοιόταται αυτού απλότητες. This little book provides great insight into the crucial role played by Venetian printers up to the end of the nineteenth century in the production of books intended for Ottoman-ruled Greece, and in doing so it also reveals a particularly interesting provenance.

Croce, Giulio Cesare (1550-1609). [New Greek] Bios tou Bertoldinou diou tou panourgiou Mpertoldou, kai ai geloiótatai aito aplótetes. Venice, Nikolaos Glykys the Younger, 1818.

Read the description of this copy here.

The Bolognese Giulio Cesare Croce (1550-1609), a scion of a family of blacksmiths, is considered one of the most successful self-educated authors of Italian literature, having little formal training and being the author of over 400 works. He began his career as a cantastorie or story-teller, often accompanying his tales with the sound of his violin. Many of his compositions – which included burlesque poems and satirical dialogues, among other genres – may have been sold as single leaves or small pamphlets in the public squares of Bologna and other Italian cities.

Giulio Cesare Croce, after the title woodcut in his Pronostico perpetuo et infallibile (Bologna, Bartolomeo Cochi, 1611).

Of his vast literary output, Croce’s name is universally known as the author of Le sottilissime astutie di Bertoldo (The Subtle Tricks of Bertoldo), one of the greatest comic novels of the Italian seventeenth century. The work narrates the adventures of the crude but savvy peasant Bertoldo at the court of the Longobard ruler Alboin. In his writing, Croce adopts continuously differing registers and combines situations typical of Carnival literature with oral traditions, anecdotes, fables, proverbs, and witticisms. Further, the text reveals, in numerous aspects, the influence of the twelfth-century Latin work Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi, a popular vehicle for the wisdom books attributed to King Solomon in the Middle Ages.

The first known edition of Le sottilissime astutie di Bertoldo appeared in Milan in 1606, issued by the printer Pandolfo Malatesta and dedicated to Filippo Contarini. Its success was great and unexpected. Its sequel, Le piacevoli et ridicolose simplicità di Bertoldino (The Pleasant and Ridiculous Artlessness of Bertoldino), was published two years later, in 1608, and relayed the tale of the ‘pleasant’ but ridiculous Bertoldino, in the charge of his ‘subtle and witty’ mother, Bertoldo’s wife, Marcolfa. His story of a crafty peasant and his simpleton son Bertoldino, was so popular that the Bolognese abbot and great admirer of Croce, Adriano Banchieri (1565-1634), created a son for Bertoldino, Cacasenno, the protagonist of the Novella di Cacasenno figlio del semplice Bertoldino (Story of Cacasenno, Son of the Simple Bertoldino). The three works were first printed together in Bologna in 1620, despite the fact that Banchieri’s text is less inventive, irreverent, and brilliant than its precursors.

Croce’s masterpieces were reissued countless times, translated into almost every major European language, reworked, and adapted into verse. In the mid-eighteenth-century, Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno was made into a three-act comic opera by Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) set to music by the Neapolitan chapel master Vincenzo Legrenzio Ciampi (1719-1762). The first performance took place at the now closed Teatro San Moisé in Venice for the Carnival of 1749 and was followed by presentations at London’s Covent Garden and at the Paris Opera in 1750 and 1753, respectively. 

The first absolute translations of both Croce’s Le sottilissime astutie di Bertoldo and his Le piacevoli et ridicolose simplicità di Bertoldino appeared in New Greek in 1646, and it is no surprise that they did so in the multi-cultural and multi-lingual printing centre of Venice. Responsible for the publishing initiative was Giannantonio Giuliani, whose production focused primarily on Orthodox liturgy – such as the Horologion, Oktoechos, and Triodion – as well as popular literature, the consumption of which was generally limited to the large Greek community residing in Venice since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, particularly near the Church of San Giorgio and the Scuola de’ Greci.

The Giuliani family’s dominance in Greek printing was soon replaced by the Venetian press established in 1670 by the enterprising merchant Nikolaos Glykys (1619-1693). Originally from Ioannina in Epirus, Glykys represents the start of a dynasty of printers that remained in business until 1854 and published numerous editions of both Bertoldo and Bertoldino.

Nikolaus Glykys had purchased the workshop and equipment previously owned by the printer Orsino Albrizzi; Glykys himself is first named as a printer in the Horologion published in 1670, when he was still in partnership with Albrizzi. If Nikolaus largely followed the lines traced by Giuliani in terms of which books to offer on the market, his commercial plans were more ambitious. With an excellent flair for business, he extended the production of his press far beyond Venice’s Greek-speaking community and established a large and flourishing trade geared towards the wider market of Ottoman-ruled Greece, especially between 1774 and 1820, the most productive period of the Glykys press. Over a history spanning more than 180 years, the Glykys family issued fifteen catalogues of their stock, as well as a sampler of the numerous Greek fonts available at their workshop.

The bee-shaped printer’s device used by Nikolaus Glykys during his activity as a printer in Venice. The Greek word ‘Glykys’ means ‘sweet’. It is therefore a speaking-device, ‘sweet as honey produced by the bee’.

Nikolaus was an eminent figure among the Ioannite diaspora in Venice, and the printing house run first by him and later by his heirs produced a significant number of grammars, lexica, and translations of scientific treatises – such as, for example, the translation of the Leçons Elementaires de Mathématiques by Nicolas Louis de La Caille, issued in Venice in 1797 – intended for teachers and professors active in Ioannina, many of whom had been educated at the University of Padua. The city became the major centre of Greek learning in the eighteenth century, as well as the most important hub for the book trade into Greece.

The Glykys family’s strong link to Ioannina never diminished, and up to the end of their printing business in the mid-nineteenth century, books issued by their press – including the present 1818 edition of Bertoldino, titled Βίος του Μπερτολδίνου, υιού του πανούργου Μπερτόλδου και αι γελοιόταται αυτού απλότητες – proudly bear mention on their title-pages of Nikolaus’ Greek hometown in Ottoman Epirus:

Croce’s novels enjoyed immense popularity in Ottoman Greece. Responding to the great demand, both Bertoldo and Bertoldino were continuously reissued by Venetian printers until the final decades of the nineteenth century, when editions published in Athens finally came to be offered on the Greek market. However, it is not possible to determine precisely how many editions of Bertoldo and Bertoldino were actually issued in Venice, and more specifically from the Glykys press, their numbers varying across bibliographies. Because such editions were printed on cheap paper, they often met the unavoidable fate of loss suffered by many chapbooks. Only one or two copies of each edition to be recorded – or better, each edition to have survived – are in fact known.

The 1818 edition of the Βίος του Μπερτολδίνου, υιού του πανούργου Μπερτόλδου και αι γελοιόταται αυτού απλότητες presented here did not escape this fate: only two other copies have been traced, held at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin and the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, respectively. By contrast, no copy is recorded in Italian institutional libraries, including the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, underlining how the publication was expressly intended for the Ottoman market.

The title-page bears a woodcut vignette depicting the novel’s protagonist, and the text itself is illustrated with five more woodcuts. The style is rather rough, and the breaks visible at the double-fillet border of the vignettes attest to the woodblocks’ prior use in earlier editions of the Greek Bertoldino.

Giulio Cesare Croce’s interests in oral tradition, folk wisdom, and Solomonic sentences, so evident in his Bertoldo and Bertoldino, were also shared by the first known owner of the copy presented here, the renowned Romanian rabbi, scholar, linguist and folklorist Moses Gaster (1856-1939), whose ownership is attested through the presence of his stamp, reading ‘Dr M. Gaster’, on the title-page.

Born in Bucharest to a Jewish family, Moses Gaster studied philology at the University of Breslau while simultaneously obtaining his Rabbinic degree at the Rabbinic Seminar of the German city. Returning to Romania in 1881, he taught Romanian language and literature at the University of Bucharest and became an active member of various Jewish societies. His engagement in the campaign to extend full citizenship to non-Christians, including Jews, and his growing conflict with the government led to his expulsion from Romania in 1885. He subsequently moved to England where he became a leading authority in the Anglo-Jewish community. Until 1918, he was haham, i.e. Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic community of the British Empire, and from 1888 to 1896 served as director of the Judith Montefiore College at Ramsgate, Kent, the Jewish theological seminary founded by Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) in memory of his wife. Further, in 1899 Gaster was one of the founders of the English Zionist Federation. Despite the later annulment of the expulsion decree and his appointment, in 1929, as an honorary member of the Romanian Academy, Gaster never returned to live in Romania.

Moses Gaster in 1904.

Gaster was highly regarded as a scholar, and his wide production reflects the breadth of his interests: Romanian language and literature, folklore, mysticism, and Jewish and Samaritan studies. Especially well known is his two-volume Chrestomatie Romana, published in 1891.

This work also contains a survey of the reception of Croce’s novels Bertoldo and Bertoldino, translated into Romanian in 1774 – as an interesting example of cultural transfer – from a Greek intermediate, certainly one of the numerous editions issued by the Venetian press run by the Glykys family. The Romanian version first circulated in manuscript form, with the first printed edition appearing in 1799.

The study of Croce’s reception in popular Romanian literature represents the primary reason for Gaster’s scholarly interest in the Bertoldo saga. It also explains his possession of this particular copy of the New Greek Bertoldino, which further includes, as an appendix, a selection of utterances from the widespread Aesop’s Fables, an 1818 edition of which is referred to by Gaster in the Chrestomatie Romana.

More generally, Gaster was interested in popular wisdom, legends, and proverbs. In 1890, he dedicated a short essay to King Solomon’s books of wisdom and their influence on literature, which appeared in the first issue of the journal Folklore. The ownership of this copy of the Greek Bertoldino therefore provides striking evidence of his particular scholarly interest.

Gaster was an avid book collector, and amassed a very large library, which also included a precious group of Yiddish manuscripts. A great part of his collection of early Hebrew and Samaritan manuscripts is now held at the British Library and at the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, which acquired them in 1925 and 1954-1958, respectively.

Gaster himself describes his bibliophilic passion in a paper originally written in German in 1931 and titled Geschichte meiner Bibliothek, which may have been intended for publication in a journal edited by the Soncino Gesellschaft der Freunde des jüdischen Buches. For unknown reasons, the paper was never published, but a carbon-copy of the text was later found among the papers of Gaster’s personal archive, which was given to the Library of the University College in London in 1974 following the death of his wife Lucy Friedlander (1796-1973). An English version – titled The Story of my Library – was published in the spring 1995 issue of The British Library Journal and is now available to read here.

In the paper, Gaster describes his passion for gathering books – “I myself do not really know how over the years I came to possess thousands of volumes, chapbooks, and manuscripts” (The Story of my Library, p. 16) – and indicates the main lines of his collecting, which was strictly intertwined with his scholarly interests: besides the Judaica, a large section devoted to Romanian popular literature stands out, which is also rich in printed books and manuscripts. The conclusion of Gaster’s paper reads thus:

While we can be sure the ownership of the 1818 Glykys edition described here is related to Gaster’s interest in popular literature and his desire to compare manuscripts and printed editions of popular works, we cannot be so certain about the circumstances surrounding the purchase. Is it possible that the ‘1879’ scribbled inside the wrappers is linked to a then-23-year-old Gaster? Or is this note instead the trace of a previous owner?

The answer may still lay hidden among the papers kept at the University College, London, or in the five boxes concerning his library now preserved in the Gaster Archive of the John Rylands Library of Manchester, which remain only partially explored and contain catalogues, accounts, lists of books, and correspondences with booksellers. But perhaps this is a topic for a future post.

How to cite this information

Margherita Palumbo, "A scarce New Greek version of Croce’s Bertoldino (Venice 1818)," 16 February 2022, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/croce1818. Accessed [date].

This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.