The Culture of the Printed Book

Societies and writing

• Sumerians, around 3200 BC

• Used a tool known as a cuneiform to make impressions in wet clay

• The tablets were then baked to preserve them

Scroll to codex• Ancient societies

tended to support text in scrolls – the codex, the form of book we use most commonly to today, originated in the first century AD and became the common type of book in Western Europe during the Middle Ages

Making books in the Middle Ages

• Expensive

• Time consuming

• Text is open to accretions, depending upon the scribe

Books as art

• Beyond the scribe book production relied on a great number of skilled labourers

• vellum and paper makers• Rubricators• Illuminators• Painters• Binders• Sewers• Book sellers

Reading books in the Middle Ages

• Few people beyond wealthy elites actually owned books

• Books were housed in libraries, usually connected to monasteries and cathedrals, or a royal house

• The biggest consumers of books were students and monks

Literacy in the Middle Ages

• Distinction between learned literacy (Latin) and vulgar literacy (the vernacular)

• The goal of universal literacy was unthinkable in the Middle Ages

• Religious institutions linked to the Roman Catholic Church were the biggest promoters of literacy

• These institutions were also the regulators of the written word

Literacy in the Renaissance

• The Italian renaissance witnessed a ‘revolution’ in education – promoting learned literacy amongst the social elite

• This creates a new – and sometimes competing -- intellectual community outside of the traditional church/university

• Also spurs a demand for books among the wealthy classes of Italy

‘Ars artificialiter scribendi’

• The first reference to printing comes from a patent by a German goldsmith in 1444

• Printing using moveable type was made possible by advances in metallurgy (for the type), paper-making (to print on), chemistry (ink)

• These advances were combined with the ancient technology of the wine press

Johann Gutenberg (1398-1468)

• Scholars agree that he was the first to perfect the process of printing with moveable type.

• The first mass-produced book – an edition of the Bible – was completed in 1455

• A page from the 42-line bible

• Clearly it tries to reproduce the look of a manuscript page

Spread of printing

• Printing was a guarded secret in Germany during the first decade after Gutenberg’s Bible, but by 1470, printing presses had been set up in most major European centres

• By 1500, even smaller towns and cities could boast of a printing press

What was printed?

• Historians call books printed before 1501 Incunabula (cradle prints)

• The “best-sellers” among incuanbula were the standard medieval Latin grammar Doctrinale and manuals for the clergy – and the overwhelming majority were in Latin

• Not until the second half of the sixteenth century do vernacular editions predominate over Latin ones

Printing and humanism

• Humanists used the printing press to disseminate editions of classical texts in a standardized form

• Humanists also produced Latin grammars to teach a more ‘refined’ style

• A Europe-wide network of scholars was established who were interested in classical texts

Aldus Manutius (1449-1515)

• The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius set the standard for humanist printing

• High quality scholarly editions of Greek and Roman authors, clean and classical typeface, and in pocketbook format

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

• The Dutch humanist was the first scholar who lived off his writing

• He used the printing press effectively to promote hist style of ‘Christian humanism’

Medium as message?

• In his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan argued that the invention of printing marked a radical shift in western culture to the visual

A Printing Revolution?

• In 1979, Elizabeth Eisenstein published her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, in which she argued that the printing press was the decisive element spurring on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution

Critics of printing revolution

• Should a material object take precedence over living, breathing human beings as agents of change?

• Did the medium of print really change how people thought and experienced the world?

• Does the emphasis on ‘revolution’ obscure continuities with the medieval past?