Was there a media revolution in fifteenth-century Europe?

Image: “Wicked Bible” of 1631

In 1620, the Lord Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon, remarked—in the flowery language of his age—on how technology had shaped his times:

We should note the force, effect, and the consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.

1) Printing may have been in the process of “discovery” in several places at once; but the first to develop the technology to its full potential was Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith in the German city of Mainz, sometime in the 1440s.

• A shrewd businessman, Gutenberg published the first printed Bible in 1455, with 42 lines per page; thanks in part to Gutenberg’s own promoting, the technology spread swiftly from Mainz to other European cities.
• Strasbourg (1460) quickly became a leading center of European publishing; Rome (1462), Basel in Switzerland (1466), Utrecht in the Netherlands (1470), Paris (1470), Budapest (1473), Cracow in Poland (1474); London (1476) all followed soon after.
• But the technique took hold most in Italy: by 1500, the city of Venice had 150 presses.

• The first printed illustrations were introduced in 1461—by incorporating woodcuts on a page of type.
• Nicolas Jenson and Aldus Manutius developed the Roman typeface in 1470;
• Manutius also invented Italic typeface and produced the first “pocket editions”;
• A French press published the first “luxury edition” (1481);
• It became customary for publishers to identify themselves on titlepages as a means to prevent pirating; etc.

2) Dissemination: printing put more information into more hands at a lower cost than ever before. Any purchaser of books was now able to buy more books at a lower cost; the effect was simply an increase in the sheer volume of information being disseminated.

• Now, most of this information was not particularly new material; even so, simply by increasing the amount of text in circulation, even though most of it was not new, printing helped to enrich the European “diet” of information and knowledge.

What may not be so obvious is that this rearranged the relationship between books and their readers: before the advent of the printed book, readers went to books; with publishing, increasingly, books went to readers.

a) Expanded Horizons:
In the long run, though, increased volume of information also broadened the mental horizons of Europe’s readers. Libraries got bigger, and bigger libraries offered more occasion for comparing texts and other forms of information storage, such as maps.

• Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this was a proliferation of so-called “Polyglot Bibles”: Bibles published in all their most ancient original languages, side-by-side.
• The climax of Polyglot Bibles was the London Polyglot of 1657, with parallel texts in “Hebrew, Samaritan, Septuagint Greek, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopian, Persian and Vulgate Latin” (this, according to a prospectus for the book).
• Some historians believe that dissemination also encouraged more cross-cultural comparison, too, which may help explain the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fascination with alchemy, Arabic astrology and astronomy, with the Jewish Kabala and other forms of mysticism.

• The German city of Cologne started censoring printed books already in 1487;
• In the 1520s, the Protestant Reformation exposed the disruptive potential of printing; the historian A.G. Dickens described the impact of printing this way:



Between 1517 and 1520, [Martin] Luther’s thirty publications probably sold well over 300,000 copies…[and it] seems difficult to exaggerate the significance of the [printing] press, without which a revolution of such a magnitude could scarcely have been [achieved]. Unlike [earlier] heresies, Lutheranism was from the first a child of the printed book, and through this vehicle Luther was able to make exact, standardized, and ineradicable impressions on the mind of Europe. For the first time in human history, a great reading public judged the validity of revolutionary ideas through a mass-medium which used the vernacular language.

• Some Reformers came to regard printing as a sign of God’s special favor on the Reformers: according to the sixteenth-century Protestant historian, Johann Sleidan:

  As if to offer proof that God has chosen us to accomplish a special mission, there was invented in our land a marvelous new and subtle art, the art of printing. This opened German eyes even as it now is bringing enlightenment to other countries. Each man became eager of knowledge, not without feeling a sense of amazement at his former blindness.

• During the Reformation, authorities tried to restrict the dissemination of printed texts, especially “heretical” texts: the city of Strasbourg began censorship with a ban on a satire of Martin Luther in 1522; before long, Reformed cities would begin censoring Catholic tracts, and so on. All this was before the Catholic Church established the “Index of Prohibited Books” in 1543.

3) Standardization: the second element of the “Media Revolution” involved the standardization of knowledge. The idea is simply this: printing had the effect of fixing texts, of enhancing their permanence. At the same time, however, the vastly increased volume of knowledge in circulation through books raised the question of authority. A few examples:

a) Norming Text: Printing reversed the relationship between multiplication and error:

• Under the scribal regime, the risk that a mistake might get introduced into a text increased every time a book was copied. The more copies made, the more mistakes. One result of this was that texts tended to “drift”—as mistakes of transcription were copied and recopied into later versions of the original.
• In “print culture,” multiplication was the guarantee of accuracy: printing drew attention to errors by mass-producing them, and also made the “accurate” text easier to specify. Consider the “Wicked Bible” of 1631, which omitted the word “not” from the Seventh Commandment!

• The sixteenth century was one of dictionaries in most of the major languages in Europe; but these dictionaries were not so much recording an existing vocabulary but in the business of  establishing and standardizing one.
• This, in turn, tended to codify existing or emerging linguistic divisions: to cite but one example, in the fifteenth century it made little sense to speak of “Dutch” or “German” as sharply distinct languages. Rather, there was a continuum of dozens of related spoken dialects from Flemish in the west to Saxon and Prussian in the east and Bavarian in the south. But by the end of the sixteenth century, Dutch had become a clearly distinct, literary language.
• It would be an exaggeration to say that England became English during the sixteenth century, and because of printing; but there is little doubt that printing fixed a “standard” of spelling and grammar in “authoritative” English.

• Take international fashion: for the first time, it was possible to publish identical sewing patterns, with the result that a Sicilian and a Scot could wear virtually identical clothing. Indeed, it is during the sixteenth century that Europe acquired an international culture of clothing fashion (among the very wealthy, to be sure).
• By the same token, print culture tended to amplify and reinforce ideas: it would be exaggerated to say that printing “caused” the formation of national or ethnic stereotypes—these have always existed. But it may well have reinforced them