Medieval advertising

By chance today I came across the excellent blog Medieval Books which is the work of Erik Kwakkel in The Netherlands - but, don’t worry, the blog is in English. It is a very useful resource for those questions you either cannot find an answer to, or indeed to those that you did not even know existed.

Two of his posts linked in with something I referred to the other day - the ubiquity of advertising in the modern world. There is no difficulty entering into the advertising culture of the last century and a half, but before that it becomes less certain. Was it just a matter of knowing the tradesmen in your own town, outside of which you rarely travelled or traded?  Did you rely on word of mouth? Maybe finding something you needed was a desperate search in a strange town or city? What if it was something you did not know you needed or that someone wanted to sell to you?

Part of the answer to those questions is provided for the later medieval period by this blog. It points to an economic fact of life - that the product and the advertisement go hand in hand. 

Thus in 1477 the earliest surviving advertisement in English was produced by William Caxton to advertise his book the Ordinale ad usum Sarum or Sarum Pie. It is not a cookery book, but a manual for clergy as to the celebration of Mass. Along with the book was a small, discreet, advertisement, probably intended to be fastened to church doors to attract the attention of potential purchasers. Two of these scraps of paper have survived, one in the Bodleian and one in the John Rylands. 

The blog article about Caxton’s advertisement can be seen at The Oldest Surviving Printed Advertisement in English (London, 1477)

The Pepys Library at Magdalen in Cambridge has a treasure trove of similar ephemera from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries collected by Samuel Pepys and which he donated under strict conditions to the college. It is a major source of early printed material, in many instances unique examples.

We know that before printing was established in the country in fifteenth century London, and doubtless other towns as well political poems and squibs were posted up, the texts of some of which often survive. This can be seen as indicating a culture of information and political discussion in handwritten and then in printed material.

Kwakkel has a second piece about medieval posters which begins with the surviving fragments of exempla produced by scribes and illuminators to advertise their craftsmanship. Major cities and academic centres may well have had such items on show in churches or centres where scholars gathered.

That article can be seen at Medieval Posters