The Commerce of Learning

This chapter explores Badius’s use of language associated with the domains of commerce and finance, and demonstrates that he used metaphors drawn from these domains to make sense of potential contradictions between his scholarly and printing roles. It gives an account of the ‘Ciceronianus’ controversy, as a result of which French humanists excluded Badius from their ranks, and looks at how Badius defined himself in relation to major scholarly figures of his period: Erasmus, Aldus Manutius, Guillaume Budé. It also looks at the ways Badius engaged in debate about the ‘value’ of printing, the ethics of the print trade and the status of knowledge in the marketplace. Finally it examines Badius’s conceptualization of commentary in terms of market exchange and finance.