Printing
Printing
Profound Impact. A communications revolution took place in the mid fifteenth century. Few technological innovations had as dramatic an influence on the communication of ideas as the introduction of movable type. Thousands of identical pages could be produced in the fraction of the time that it took a scribe to hand copy a manuscript. As works published on presses replaced hand-copied books, the prices of books fell dramatically. The successes of the Protestant Reformation hinged in large part on the ability to circulate printed religious and political ideas widely and inexpensively. Printing changed written communication, created a new role for the author, restructured communities of readers, provided new notions of libraries and the preservation of knowledge, fostered cross-cultural exchanges of ideas, and influenced the local knowledge of uneducated Europeans. The world of the uneducated masses altered when the functionally literate villager gained a degree of respect and attention previously reserved for the village storyteller. The transition from script culture to print culture required more than simple technological innovation. Heightened demand for books encouraged a wide range of innovations in the mechanical aids for scribal production. Increased production of handcopied books fed this audience and created a culture receptive to written knowledge. An audience and a message preceded the technological transformation.
Technological Innovations. Printing was not really invented; it evolved over time as the increased demand promoted a range of innovations in manuscript production. Johannes Gutenberg is usually credited with the first use of movable type in Europe circa 1454, but aspects of printing originated in several places. Printing required basic techno-logical innovations such as inexpensive substances suitable for taking printed impressions (such as paper); ink that could be applied to metal surfaces and then transferred to paper; a press that would firmly press the paper to the inked metal; and a metal alloy appropriate for creating movable type. Printing words onto paper is quite similar to printing patterns onto textiles, an industry that flourished in Europe long before the first printing press. The rise of printing required that technological innovations corresponded to increased demand for written texts. This demand for books was fueled by the thirteenth-century rise of urban universities, the fourteenth-century rise of humanism with its focus on philology and textual analysis, and the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century rise of a literate urban audience that read the growing body of vernacular literature. The broad audience differed in profound ways but also shared a cultural approach of qualitative thinking and the insistence on accurate record keeping that was prerequisite to quantitative thinking.
Market Demands. Books, whether handcopied or printed, were commodities that were bought and sold. The earliest printed books (called incunabula) were essentially manuscripts in print. Early printers and their customers had all learned to read from handwritten manuscripts and thus they preferred books such as the 1457 Mainz Psalter that looked exactly like a handwritten manuscript. Perhaps the greatest difference between early books and manuscripts involved economic considerations. Scribes responded to buyer demand by taking orders to copy books. They rarely copied books in anticipation of finding buyers, with the exception of some scribes in university towns who would anticipate which books students might need. Printers, on the other hand, needed to print a large number of unordered books in order to turn a profit. Printers were thus forced to create a market for the books they printed and to print a number of titles simultaneously to hedge against a low-selling volume. This situation produced economic and intellectual issues. In a manuscript culture, the role of the scholar was to memorize, letter-perfect, key texts and comment on them. With printed books, the texts were readily available and the role of the scholar shifted to the creation of new texts. The economic issues involved raising sufficient capital to publish a number of titles and the ability to market what one printed. Combined with the changing role of the scholar, it becomes obvious that printers became more interested in printing books by known intellectuals than in printing books by aspiring scholars.
Subject Matter. Initially, printing presses were used to make the Bible accessible both in Latin and the vernacular to a wider audience of readers, supply university teachers and students the main texts under study, provide prayer books for church services and daily prayer, and make devotional works involving practical piety and mysticism for the lay society. The growing humanist interest in classical literature resulted in a wide range of Latin language textbooks and other works from classical antiquity and early church theologians such as Jerome and Augustine. Latin books outpaced vernacular books and scientific works in the fifteenth century. Some historians estimate that between 150-200 million books were published between 1500 and 1600. Early in that period, religious works outpaced Latin, Greek, and humanist works, but that trend was reversed later in the century. Moreover, vernacular translations of classical works began to appear in large numbers in the sixteenth century.
Conquering the Old World. In the 1450s a small group of printers worked in a handful of workshops in Mainz, Germany. The 1462 sack of Mainz in the so-called Bishop's War is frequently offered as an explanation for the spread of printing. (Whether printers immigrated to other parts of Europe because of the war or simply to exploit economic opportunities elsewhere is open to debate.) During the 1460s, printing expanded rapidly in Germany because of the high number of skilled metal workers, the abundance of wealthy urban merchants, and the familiarity of trade connections with the German-speaking Mainz artisans. Some Germans moved to Italy in the 1470s, and by the 1480s more than 110 towns in Western Europe had printing presses. Mainz ceased to be as significant, and the Italians grew in importance because of the better quality of their paper, the introduction of Roman type, and the humanist demand for classical texts. Spain and England relied largely on imported books, but in France a dramatic increase occurred in printing because of developments in Paris. Germany, Venice, and France were the main centers of printing at the end of the fifteenth century, but Antwerp and Basel quickly became important sites for European-wide distribution. Every major town in Germany, Italy, France, and the Low Countries (present-day Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) had a press by the early sixteenth century and every large town in Portugal, Spain, and Poland had one by the mid sixteenth century. In England,
on the other hand, government restrictions limited presses largely to London.
New World Secrets. Portuguese voyages of exploration were kept fairly secret. Christopher Columbus's famous letter describing his first voyage was printed simultaneously in Barcelona, Rome, Basel, and Paris in 1493, reprinted in Basel in 1494 and Strasbourg in 1497, and was quickly purchased across Europe. Portuguese voyages of exploration in the East Indies had been intentionally kept fairly secret until Peter Martyr wrote Libretto in 1503. Other than the Columbus letter, the geographic discoveries and the imperial conquests of Spain and Portugal were not known beyond a comparatively small circle of scholars, merchants, and courtiers until about 1550. However, Sir John Mandeville's Travels was reprinted many times in a wide range of languages during this same period. The Cosmographia Universalis (General Description of the Known World) by Sebastian Münster was published in Basel in 1544 and was extremely successful, with forty-six editions in six languages in its first century in print. Shortly after Munster's work, a number of groundbreaking books on the New World were published for a wide audience. This dissemination began in Spain in 1550 when Francisco Lopez de Gomara (Hernán Cortés's secretary) published Historia de las Indias y conquista de Mexico and the Dominican priest Barto-lome de Las Casas published History of the Indies in 1552. In Portugal, Joao de Barros's Decades appeared in 1552 and Afonso de Albuquerque's Commentaries were edited and published by his son in 1557. By the 1560s, an avalanche of books on the New World flooded the market and dramatically influenced how Europeans viewed non-Europeans.
Standardization and Cross-cultural Interchange. Printing altered written communications in many ways. Cross-cultural interchange expanded greatly with access to identical copies of a wide range of books. Readers were certain that they shared the same text as their counterparts in other areas. This degree of standardization and dissemination was not possible in a script culture because scribal mis-takes inevitably crept into handcopied manuscripts. The inherent corruption of manuscripts was compounded as scribes inserted further mistakes into already tainted texts. The use of movable type did not prevent all errors, but it ensured that any errors were shared by all readers of an edition. Errors that crept into handcopied books could be changed further.
Fixity and Certainty. The ability to overcome scribal mistakes created a permanence of canonical texts that formed a new foundation for certainty. Tycho Brahe provides a clear example of how the new certainty could influence scientific thought. Brahe was an autodidact, or a self-taught scholar. At his remote island workshop, Brahe assembled a collection of works from a wide range of commentators in astronomy, a task that was inconceivable prior to movable type. Printing allowed him to acquire the newest theories from around the world and even to place multiple editions of a wide range of astronomers’ works side by side. Brahe experienced a previously impossible opportunity to observe the heavens and simultaneously monitor various theories. He was also able to oversee the printing of his ideas and thus could be certain that accurate accounts were disseminated. Brahe possessed a certainty that was inconceivable before printing; namely, his sources were accurate and his ideas would be spread accurately.
THE VERNACULAR
William Caxton, the first printer in England, writes In the preface to his translation of Virgil's Aeneid about the use of the vernacular.
I confess I am not learned nor knowing the art of rhetoric, nor of such gay terms as are in these days now used . . . having no work in hand, I was sitting in my study where many diverse pamphlets and books laid, it happened that to my hand came a little book in French, which of late was translated out of Latin by some noble clerk of France . . . which book I saw over and read therein ... in which book I had great pleasure, by cause of the fair and honest terms and words in French, which I never saw the like before, nor none so pleasant or well ordered . . . and when I had advised me in this said book, I deliberated and concluded to translate it into English, And forthwith I took a pen and Ink and wrote a leaf or two, which I oversaw again to correct it And when I saw the fair and strange terms therein I doubted that it should not please some gentleman which of late blamed me, saying that in my translations I had over curious terms which could not be understood by common people, and wanted me to use old and homely terms in my translations. And then would I satisfy every man, and so to do took an old book and read therein, and certainly the English was so rude and broad that I could not well understand it. And also my Lord Abbot of Westminster did show me of late certain evidences written in old English and to reduce it to our English now used, and certainly it was written in such a way that it was more like Dutch than English. I could not reduce it nor bring it to be understood. And certainly our language now used varies far from that which was used and spoken when I was born. For we English men are born under the domination of the moon, which is never steadfast, but ever wavering, waxing one season and waning and decreasing in another season. And that common English that is spoken in one shire varies from another. Insomuch that in my days it happened that certain merchants were in a ship in Tamyse for to have sailed over the sea into Zelande, and for lack of wind they tarried at Foreland, and went to land to refresh themselves. And one of them named Sheffeild, a mercer, came in to a house and asked for meat, and especially he asked after “egges,” And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could not speak French, but would have had “egges” and she did not understand him. And then at last another said that he would have “eyren,” then the good wife said that she understood him well. Now what should a man in these days now write, “egges” or “eyren?” Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language. For in these days every man that is in his country will utter his communication and matters in such manners and terms that few men shall understand them. And some honest and great clerks have been with me and wanted me to write the most curious terms that I could find. And thus between plain, rude, and curious I stand abashed. But in my judgement the common terms that are used daily are lighter to under-stand than the old and ancient English.
Source: Douglas McMurtrie, The Book: The Story of Printing & Bookmaking, third revised edition (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Piracy. A problem inherent in the new technology of printing emerged quickly. Brahe's control over the printing of his ideas contrasts sharply with Galileo's experience one generation later. Piracy of Galileo's work was rampant because the church officially forbade the open publication of his works. As a result, circulated copies of Galileo's famous phases of the moon were largely erroneous for decades. The maintenance of accurate texts shifted from communities of clerical and lay scribes to self-serving entrepreneurs when centers of book production shifted from monasteries, university towns, and aristocratic courts to urban commercial centers.
Skepticism. People's skepticism of printed books changed as communities of readers came to experience written knowledge in new ways. Initial skepticism centered on the remarkable number of books that could be produced. Contemporaries commonly attributed the new output to either God or the Devil. Early printers began to use a “printer's mark” to identify whose movable type had been used to print the book. (No such producer's marks were used by scribes for their handcopied books.) The printer's mark evolved into the modern trademark. In the sixteenth century, entrepreneurial printers began to include the firm's name and the location of their shop on the front page of the books, thereby creating the title page. Fifteenth-century books, both hand and machine produced, placed this information at the end of the book in what was called a colophon. Although a colophon did not always include the title and name of the author, the movement to a title page became a method for selling books as authors such as Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther came to achieve celebrity status in society. Consequently the celebration of the author as cultural hero reinforced the growing national consciousness that vernacular literature had helped to create. Written knowledge thus created communities of conscious readers during the Reformation who bought and collected written texts at a pace and in a manner that was not possible in the early Renaissance.
Sources
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, CaL: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 volumes (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London: N.L.B., 1976).
Douglas McMurtrie, The Book: The Story of Printing & Bookmaking, third revised edition (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1962).