The Typefaces of Three Fifteenth-Century Castilian Printers: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Despite the importance attached to typography in the study of incunabula since the second half of the nineteenth century, and the claim – commonly accepted – that there was no break in design between manuscripts and printed books, palaeotypography still lacks a precise nomenclature. Incunabulists have based, and continue to base, typographical analysis on false, distorted or misleading paradigms, and comparative studies of manuscripts and printed books have not been undertaken.1 Types and the printed characters they produced in fifteenth-century books have been confused with fonts and typefaces. The complexities and histories of fifteenth-century type-fonts have been reduced to the design features of a single letter. The numerous and different Gothic script styles have all been named simply ‘gothic’, and relationships between manuscript scripts and printed characters have been extrapolated without foundation.

This chapter introduces and surveys these areas, by examining one particular case study involving the claim that the types used by some fifteenth-century Spanish printers were very closely related and had very distinctive calligraphic Spanish designs. We will compare the typefaces of Antonio de Centenera, Álvaro de Castro, and Juan Vázquez, and draw attention to three important issues: the scant attention paid by bibliographers and incunabulists to typography; the need to study fifteenth-century typography within new paradigms; and the possibilities afforded by such analysis to our understanding of the interrelationship between manuscript scripts and palaeotypography. The analysis and comparison of Centenera’s, Castro’s and Vázquez’s typefaces will not only shed new light on their alleged typographical interrelationship and Spanish style, but will also serve to highlight the deficiencies, requirements and possibilities of typographical analysis.