The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

Little was understood about the relationship of printing to the social movements of the Early Modern period before Elizabeth Eisenstein seized on the opportunity to give an in depth treatment to the history of printing in Europe in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. In addressing a void in the field of communications history, Eisenstein has provided new clues and new answers for old questions. At the same time, the very method of taking printing as a principal historical force creates some tensions in the historical account. The conception of printing as a revolution gives to communications and history some useful observations while also producing some particular problems. This book is an abridged version of Eisenstein's 1979 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. While that was a two volume work, the material has been condensed in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe into two sections each paralleling a volume of the full-scale work. The sense that the later book, first published in 1983, is for a more general audience is most evident in the lack of citations and references. One is directed to the original for these. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe has also included for this audience wonderful illustrations, which are not in the original. The research for this work arose from the scholar's feeling that inquiry of this kind simply had not been done. Eisenstein had encountered historians and communications scholars who encouraged her to question the consequences of print. Her attempts to explore these questions through the literature on the shift from script to print in her own field made the lack of study glaringly obvious: there was no historical literature, nor a literature in any other field, manifestly exploring print in its relationship to contemporary social formations and movements. There had been a number of others before Eisenstein who had recognized that printing was somehow important. However, no one before Eisenstein set about the task of describing why and how printing related to other social changes (5). Eisenstein accounts for this startling lack of historical work, describing an instance when Pierce Butler implied that there was something obvious about the relationship between print and the end of medieval times, by saying that "[t]his is partly because the very act of drawing connections is not as easy a task as one might think" (111). Throughout the book she makes references to the idea that historians and others knew that there were "implications" of print, but did not understand them in any substantive way. Eisenstein sets a reasonable goal in the face of a dearth of research. While much needs to be done, Eisenstein's work is to be a first step into examining the consequences of the shift from script to print. She is clear that this is a beginning, a place to start to understand what changes in the fifteenth century and onward are related to print and how they

This is an excellent book to read if you are interested in the history of printing. Eisenstein's thesis is that the advent of the printing press is the most logical point at which the medieval period of European history ends and the Renaissance begins. She shows how many so-called innovations in science, religion, and politics were directly related to the ready availability of books-not necessarily to increased brilliance on the part of mankind.Eisenstein disagrees with scholars who point to the lag between the press and the beginning of the Renaissance as proof that the press did not make an appreciable difference. Books, Eisenstein says, had to accumulate in order to make their presence felt. The lag was due to a sort of scholarly catch-up. First the printers rushed to issue the volumes that many people wanted but had been unable to afford previously. Once those were printed, disparities could become apparent. Scribes freed from the tedious process of copying books had the leisure to notice errors and disagreements among authors which had not been apparent when books were scattered and rare. This process caused a deceptive lag between the advent of the press and real improvements in cartography and science. The last two chapters of the book were the most interesting to me. Among other things, Eisenstein talks about the way early Protestant printers beefed out their catalogues by referring to the Catholic Index (the list of books forbidden by the Pope). Once Europe became split into Catholic and Protestant nations, the Index had the unexpected effect of boosting sales for books listed on the Index, making some protestant printers their fortunes. Not only were Protestants eager to read whatever the Pope had banned (and Catholic priests obligingly cited chapter and line of objectionable material, with the result that the protestant scholars were able to cut right to the chase), but many early scientific books on the Index were much sought after in Catholic countries, and with their printers under heavy pressure to forbear, Protestant printers just over the border made a fortune in black-market books.Eisenstein's style is somewhat pedantic (which was to be expected; this is a thesis, after all). However, I give the book 4 stars instead of 5 because quotes are frequently uncited-a nearly unforgivable sin in a research book. We are frequently given rather large blocks of quoted text with absolutely no way of connecting this material to any given authors in the bibliography. The fact that the book is an abridgement is no excuse.

This book is fine, but it doesn't really capture the full power of the unabridged version: "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" (2 vols in 1; Cambridge Univ. Press -- possibly currently out of print). The unabridged version (which is still much too short!) is one of the great books of the 20th century. I just didn't see the abridged versino as really "bringing home" the significance of Eisenstein's theses about the effects of print technology on Western civilization.

Professor Eisenstein has answered a question I have been asking myself for thirty years. I knew that "modern" Europe consisted of institutions based upon the "individual" -- protestantism, capitalism, universal education and modern science -- and that these first arose in Europe about 500 years ago. But I could not answer why then? And why Europe? I suspected that it had to do with the rise of stranger experience but could not locate a convincing historical cause for it. Print literacy first occured to me as the cause when I read Walter Ong's book, "Orality and Literacy," which also happily cited Prof. Eisenstein's work. Her book convincingly implicates the print revolution with the rise of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and Modern Science.Her thesis made it easy for me to see how the other three institutions could be included as well and to see the role of print in spreading "individuation" and assumptions associated with it, such as the idea of progress. It is remarkable that historians have apparently ignored for so long the role of print literacy in creating modernity. Scholars, including myself, sometimes seem to find the obvious the most inscrutable. Anyway, my personal and heartfelt thanks go to Professor Eisenstein for answering my nagging question.

Occasionally, a book has initial, unseen qualities that must wait many years before society reaches a point where it can fully appreciate it. Dr. Eisenstein's wonderful work is actually an abridged version for the lay historian of her much longer, more scholarly and definitive two-volume work on how the printing press changed civilization. Our transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based civilization will probably create the most extensive and radical transformation of our civilization since the printing press. Knowledge of how the printing press changed European civilization may help us understand the changes resulting from the Internet today. As Dr. Eisenstein explains, the Protestant Reformation would almost certainly never have occurred without the printing press. Will there be an equivalent movement today? Dr. Eisenstien highlights how the printing press defined the linguistic and cultural borders of present-day Europe, encouraged the use and teaching of the vernacular, and eliminated Latin as the international tongue of the educated classes. I wonder, will the WWW again reconstitute our current Babel of languages into a single language, English, as it once atomized the common language of Latin among literate people? Eisenstein illustrates the printing press' role as the chief cause of the elevation of the individual over the social unit during the Enlightenment. For the first time, individual authorship could exist in a way that was impossible in the age of scribes. It brought the kind of immediate personal fame and recognition that was inconceivable in the Dark Ages. Galileo's Siderius nuncius, for example, made him an overnight sensation. Will we see further radicalization of the individual relative to society, now that the WWW has made it possible to pursue "publication" even more narrowly, without the need for a broad and popular readership? For a preview of how this is already occurring, visit GeoCities on the WWW. According to Eisenstein, the loss of knowledge in the age of scribes was a constant and inevitable consequence of limited numbers of laboriously hand-made copies. Whenever truly new knowledge was gained, it had no mechanism for dispersal. The previous invention of clocks and the knowledge of how to make them had been lost to the Chinese when Europeans discovered them, because the absence of printing in China limited the knowledge base. Their calendars were off, and they had to be taught all over again by the Europeans how to correct them. The WWW is a far more effective means for the dispersal of knowledge today even than printing. Will it create similar opportunities in novel thinking? Eisenstein points out that the perishability of written documents, even on sheepskin, meant that few scholars were granted access to them, and documents were kept locked away for fear of theft or just simple wear. They were unavailable to the public, which couldn't read anyway, and even to most scholars. She explains how the ve