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Printing Revolution

Page history last edited by Elizabeth Burow-Flak 12 years, 6 months ago

Materials in response to Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.  View our materials related to Eisenstein's book.

 

This book is a one-volume condensation of Elizabeth Eisenstein's two-volume social history, The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change, that first came out in 1974.  The work has been monumental not only because of its size but also because of the full historical attention that she gave to the impact of the this new media form, the printed book, that emerged in the mid-fifteenth century in Mainz, Germany when Johannes Gutenberg produced the first printed Bibles in Latin.  It has become commonplace for us to say that we are living through the greatest communications shift since the advent of the printing press, but it is also interesting that Eisenstein's interest in the printing press grew in the 1960s, when people such as Marshall McLuhan (who had also written on the printing press) speculated on how television was reshaping culture as we knew it.

 

We are reading this book in reference to the question of what was new about emerging media.  In the mid-1990s, scholars of new media and hypertext in particular called our era "the late age of print."  Eisenstein's book addresses the dawn of the printing age, asking how printing revolutionized the "commonwealth of learning" in the shift that occurred between manuscript and print. The first half of the book attempts to define print culture in comparison to manuscript culture, particularly that of the fifteenth century, and addresses in particular what changes occurred, or to what extent printed books merely mimicked manuscript culture, in the age of incanabula (the first 50 years of printed books). The subsequent half of the book focuses on broader questions appropriate to the changes print brought about: how print codified the intellectual development called the Renaissance; how print enabled the Lutheran and subsequent religious reformations; and how print enabled modern science, as we know it, to evolve.

 

Eisenstein does not pause to articulate the history of movable type or to say much about the earliest printers and financiers of that business in Europe (e.g. Gutenberg and Johann Fust in Germany; Caxton, Wynken de Worde, and the Stationer's Company in England); our class's visit to the Archives and Special Collections room in the Christopher Center, the video we will view on the illuminated manuscript or the making of the St. John's Bible, and several of external links in Blackboard might help with some of that background.

 

Although Eisenstein is careful to state that print culture is not the only factor that resulted in the European Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, she nonetheless demarcates a shift between manuscript and print culture that some historians of the book, for example Adrienne Johns, have come to question, insomuch as they chart how manuscript and print cultures existed side-by-side for some time, and how, as the video on the illuminated manuscript or the making of the St. John's Bible demonstrates, scribal culture was sometimes preferred to the limits of early print culture.

 

Eisenstein is one of the first historians in the late twentieth century who looked at the institution of the printing press with new eyes-and she did so well before the internet became a household word. So, if your interests hinge at all on the development of a culture of letters that revered antiquity, that-whether Catholic or Protestant-came to look at religion through new lenses, or that came to look at the natural world, rather than biblical and theological writings, as the source of information about the order of the universe, this book is a must.

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