painters produced spikier and more attenuated Gothic figures of saints and martyrs than did the Netherlanders, although there was much common ground between them. Portraiture throve in the German lands and by 1500 few German princes and higher ecclesiastics did not have their likenesses taken by artists. But the way towards the art of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein had been prepared in the Low Countries during the fifteenth century.
Secular culture during this period was shaped by two major factors: by a more general and widespread lay literacy and by the cult of chivalry in its literary, artistic, and practical manifestations. Although the proportion of literate people among the population of northern Europe was probably lower than that found in Italy by 1500, nevertheless the creation of universities ( Prague 1347, Vienna 1365, Caen 1432, Bordeaux 1441, Dôle 1422, Louvain 1425) and the increasing provision of grammar schools clearly increased the demand for books of all sorts. A lay readership was in existence well before Johann Gutenberg began to print with movable type. Manuscript production was a thriving industry, subject to guild regulations in most northern towns and many of the vernacular books from these workshops were paper copies, which were much cheaper to produce and to purchase than parchment. They met a demand for inexpensive, often unbound, books in English, French, Netherlandish, and German among a less affluent clientèle. Taste tended to be dictated by what was available and by the preferences of great nobles of the age. None of the books first chosen by William Caxton for printing would have been out of place on the shelves of a nobleman's library, and it was indeed from such a source--the Burgundian ducal library and that of Louis de Bruges, lord of la Gruthuyse that suitable volumes came. Northern European typefaces also tended to imitate the hands of late fifteenth-century manuscripts-especially the so-called Burgundian 'bastard' script. The new literate laity eagerly accepted the romances, histories, and
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