complex markets, price-systems, and commercial empires 
inconceivable to oral and even to manuscript cultures.

     The same urge to translate the tactile skills of the older 
crafts into the visual magnificence of the Renaissance rituals 
provided an aesthetic medievalism in the North, and in Italy 
inspired the recreation of ancient art, letters and architecture. 
The same sensibility that led the Dukes of Burgundy and Berry 
to their très riches heures  led the Italian merchant princes to 
restore ancient Rome. It was a kind of applied archeological 
knowledge in both cases. The same applied knowledge in the 
interests of new visual intensity and control inspired Gutenberg 
and led to two centuries of medievalism of a scope and degree 
unknown to the Middle Ages themselves. For until printing, very 
few books ancient or medieval were available at all. Those that 
existed were seen by few. The same situation obtained in