\title{Book review: The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe}
\author[Jonathan Fine]{Jonathan Fine\\Email:\texttt{J.Fine@pmms.cam.ac.uk}}
\begin{Article}
\begin{quote}
\emph{The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe},
Elizabeth L Eisenstein
ISBN 0 521 44770 4 (paperback)
\pounds 7.95, \$11.95
300 + xiv pages
Cambridge University Press (Canto imprint)
\end{quote}

This book is an abridgement for the lay reader of a full scale work
written for scholars, the result of a decade of study.  It is that
rare and valuable thing, a scholarly work accessible and interesting
to the educated general reader.

The author {\em had long been dissatisfied with the prevailing
explanations for the intellectual revolutions of early modern
times}.  She decided to investigate. (This review italicizes the
author's words.) {\em What were some of the most important
consequences of the shift from script to print?  Anticipating a
strenuous effort to master a large literature, I began to investigate
what had been written on this obviously important subject.  To my
surprise, I did not find even a small literature available for
consultation.  No one had yet attempted to survey the consequences of
the fifteenth century communications shift}.

In this century there has been a communications shift, which is still
continuing, and whose consequences are likely to be as important and
durable as that of the fifteenth century (from script to print).  The
telegraph was followed by the telephone, radio and then television.   
Electronic computers (built out of radio valves, telephone exchange
parts and the like) were the next development.  Magnetic recording
technology (developed for voice and music) was adapted for use by
computers, moving from tapes to cards, drums and discs.  Telephone
lines were used to transfer data and thus to link geographically
remote computers.  The latest in the technological revolution is the
Internet or World Wide Web, CD-ROM, and the beginnings of what are
called portable documents.

History is more than a sequence of Kings and Queens, or in our case a
list of technological Aces and Jokers.  This technology came from
somewhere. Its creation appears to be influenced by political,
economic and social forces.  For example, Universities support
Science.  In our case, fundamental contributions of Faraday, Maxwell,
Planck, Curie, Einstein, Rutherford, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr,
Dirac and many others have laid the scientific basis for the present
shift from paper to digital or electronic media.

From where then did science arise?  Was Newton chance, and what effect did
science and religion have on each other?  How did what we may call
early modern Europe emerge from late medieval society?  Was it due to
the Renaissance?  Eisenstein's book is a carefully considered and
well written discussion of the emergence of a human culture based on
printed communication, that began in the late fifteenth century, and
its influence on the humanities, on religion and on science.  This
print culture was something new, just as the film and television
culture of today is new.  Each has an effect on the human mind.

Before describing the text of this book, some comments about
illustrations.  They have been well chosen. There are about sixty
illustrations, mostly pages from rare books, but sadly they are not indexed. 
They have reproduced well, and add greatly to the book.  For Bibles,
there is a page from the Gutenberg Bible compared to a contemporary
hand-copied Bible, the so-called wicked Bible of 1631 (which misses
the `not' from the adultery commandment), and the frontpiece and
beginning of Genesis from Christopher Plantin's great Antwerp
Polyglot Bible of 1571.  There is the title page of Galileo's final
treatise (printed by the still flourishing Elsevier), and its
appearance on the (printed) Vatican index of prohibited books.  There
are many other useful and illuminating illustrations, including an
extract from a pattern book for tailors and dressmakers (Seville,
1588) which made the Spanish fashion ``visible through the far-flung
Hapsburg empire''.

The quotations and incidental facts are also well chosen.  Here are
two such gems.  The hazards of having a famous face are not new to
this century. Eisenstein writes:
\begin{quote}
The difference between the older repeatable image which was stamped
on coins and the newer by-product of print is suggested by one of the
more celebrated episodes of the Frech Revolution. The individual
features of emperors and kings were not sufficiently detailed when
stamped on coins for their faces to be recognized when they travelled
incognito.  But a portrait engraved on paper money enable an alert
Frenchman to recognize and halt Louis~XVI at Varennes.
\end{quote}
while to open the Preface she quotes Joseph Ames (1749) who wrote:
\begin{quote}
I do ingenuously confess that in attempting this history of Printing I
have undertaken a task much too great for my abilities the extent of
which I did no so well perceive at first.
\end{quote}

The book  is divided into two parts.  The first, 
{\em The emergence of print culture in the West}, can be thought of
as an essay on the differences between the earlier scribal culture
and the new print culture.  Before print each book was a unique item,
and each new copy would have new copyists errors.  It rarely makes
sense to talk of an edition of a hand-written book.  Printed books
come in editions, of hundreds or thousands or beyond.  Each copy will
be identical to each other, except that printers too can make errors. 

Even without the commissioning of new works, the wider circulation of
scribal texts is a significant change.  For example {\em as a student
at Cracow in the 1480s, the young Copernicus probably found it hard
to get a look at a single copy of Ptolemy's {\em Almagest}---even in
a corrupted medieval Latin form.  Before he died, he had three
different editions at hand.  As a fourteen-year-old in Copenhagen in
1560, the young Tycho Brahe could purchase all of Ptolemy's work,
including an improved translation of the full {\em Almagest} made from
the Greek.}

Perhaps the most important consequence of the shift was the emergence
of an expanding republic of letters.  The reading public, their
booksellers and printers, their authors and illustrators. {\em As the
key figure around whom all arrangements revolved, the master printer
himself bridged many worlds.  He was responsible for obtaining money,
supplies, and labor, while developing complex production schedules,
coping with strikes, trying to estimate book markets and lining up
learned assistants.  He had to keep on good terms with officials,
while cultivating talented authors and artists who might bring his
firm profit or prestige.  In those places where his enterprise
prospered and he achieved a position of influence with fellow
townsmen, his workshop became a veritable cultural centre attracting
local literati and celebrated foreigners, providing both a meeting
place and message centre for an expanding cosmopolitan Commonwealth
of Learning}.  Christopher Plantin, whose activities are briefly
discussed, is an outstanding example of a master printer.  {\em After
settling in Antwerp and establishing ties with Leiden, Plantin
decided to learn Dutch.  Never one for wasted effort, he ``placed in
piles and in alphabetical order'' each new word that he learned. Thus
was launched a collaborative venture which resulted in [\ldots] the
``first Dutch dictionary worth its name.''}  For more on Plantin's
remarkable life and legacy, consult Colin Clair's biography.

The second part considers the {\em Interaction with other
developments}.  In it {\em possible relationships and connections are
explored with the aim of providing a basis for some tentative
conclusions concerning the effects of the communications shift upon
three movements which seem strategic in the shaping of the modern
mind.}  

The first in the Renaissance, which has long been something of a
challenge for historians to understand.  Eisenstein suggests that it
would be productive for historians to {\em direct attention to
something that really did happen, that was obviously of crucial
importance, that occurred in the second half of the fifteenth century
and at no other time in the history of the West}.  This is of course
the shift to print culture.  Later she writes {\em early humanists,
from Petrarch to Valla, owe their still vital reputation as culture
heroes to the prosaic print-made knowledge industry. [\ldots]
Earlier scholars had been less fortunate}.

The second is {\em Western Christendom disrupted}.  Protestantism was
{\em the first movement of any kind, religious or secular, to use the
new presses for overt propaganda and agitation against an established
institution.  By pamphleteering directed at arousing popular support
and aimed at readers who were unversed in Latin, the reformers
unwittingly pioneered as revolutionaries and rabble rousers}. Between
1517 and 1520, we are told, Luther's thirty publications sold well
over 300,000 copies.  Even by modern standards this is a considerable
achievement.

This book was originally written as a contribution to historical
debate.  Its main thesis is the effect of print as an agent of social
change has been ignored or underestimated.  ``One of the mysteries
of Reformation history [is] how this proposal for academic
disputation [Luther's theses], written in Latin, could have kindled
such enthusiastic support and thereby have such far-reaching impact'',
wrote one modern scholar.  To dispel this mystery, Eisenstein
suggests that we should {\em instead of jumping directly from church
door to public clamor, move more cautiously, a step at a time,
looking at the activities of printers, translators, and distributors
who acted as agents of change.  Probably we ought to pause with
particular care over the interval in December 1517 when three
separate editions were printed almost simultaneously by printers
located in three separate towns}.

{\em On the whole,} the author concludes, {\em it seems safe to
conclude that all the problems associated with the disruption of
Western Christendom will become less baffling if we approach them by
respecting the order of events and put the advent of printing ahead
of the Protestant Revolt.}

The third movement is {\em The book of nature transformed: printing
and the rise of modern science}.  As with the Reformation, the author
argues that {\em the advent of printing ought to be featured more
prominently by historians}.  This theme is developed mainly with
regard to maps and astronomy, the trial of Galileo and the publishing
activities of the Royal Society.  Copernicus has already been
mentioned.  Newton was encouraged to publish.  Galileo discouraged.

One of the illustrations is of a grandly titled {\em A description of
the the whole world}~(1606), and another is a printed challenge from
Blaeu~(1622) to find any errors in his printed sea charts.  He wrote
{\em Whatsover there is yet resting to be corrected or made better,
is as easie to be corrected in the Cardes [charts] that are printed,
as in them that are written, which we also are readie to doe at our
charge, if any man can by good proofe shewe us any thing, that is to
be corrected in the Cardes that are printed by us}.  This is an early
example of errors being, if not rewarded, at least corrected without
charge.

The author gives many useful examples of the opportunities for
(self)-promotion that print provides.  We know much about the early
history of print from the documents they printed about themselves. 
{\em Indeed, their use of title pages entailed a significant reversal
of scribal procedures; they put themselves first. Scribal colophons
had come last}.

The author cogently argues the importance of print for the creation
of accurate maps.  {\em But this kind of checking could not occur
until voyagers were provided with uniform maps and encouraged to
exchange information with map publishers}.  Before print maps, like
books, were usually held in fixed and safe locations.  They were much
to rare and valuable to be subjected to the hazards of a voyage to
foreign parts.  Information from merchants was sent back to trained
cartographers, but without print this information could not then be
sent back out for the use (and checking) by others.  The
development of maps (and globes) contributed to the European
discovery of the rest of the world.

In the conclusion the author writes {\em This book has stopped short
in the age of the wooden handpress.  It has barely touched on the
industrialization of paper making and the harnessing of iron presses
to steam.  Nothing has been said about the railway tracks and
telegraph wires which linked European capitals in the mid-nenteenth
century, or about the Linotype and Monotype machines which went
together with mass literacy and tabloid journalism.  The typewriter,
the telephone, and a vast variety of more recent media have been
entirely ignored.  Too much territory has been traversed too rapidly
as it is.  Because contrary views have been expressed, however, it
seems necessary to point out that there are irreversible aspects to
the early modern printing revolution.  Cumulative processes were set
in motion in the mid-fifteenth century, and they have not ceased to
gather momentum in the age of the computer printout and the
television guide}.

And so we are back again in the present, with its own communications
shift from paper to electronic media, from print to computer.  I have
read this book through several times and on each occasion (I am not
well educated in history) I get a richer deeper understanding of the
present time.  I strongly recommend it to anyone who wishes to
develop for themself an understanding of the human and social
consequences of the growing move towards electronic publishing and
the information superhighway.
\end{Article}
