Evolution of Print: Insights from Elizabeth Eisenstein
Deibert acknowledges Elizabeth Eisenstein's profound influence in shaping our understanding of the impact of print on society, while Eisenstein's seminal works, such as "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change," have become essential resources in the study of this historical evolution. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Eisenstein explores the transformative power of inventions like printing, uncovering their far-reaching consequences on the world.
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Print and the Materiality of the Book Change, Evolution and Revolution
Deibert and the influence of Elizabeth Eisenstein Deibert, like most other scholars working on the impact of print, owes an enormous debt to Elizabeth Eisenstein. He summarizes many of her ideas (sometimes without explicitly saying so) and adds his unique pov - the perspective of international relations. He provides a very broad, birds-eye perspective. By contrast Chartier, a cultural historian, stresses how many complex, contradictory things are going on as print emerges. Evolution as well as revolution. Loathe to make big generalizations. Latour tries to split the difference, bringing both approaches together. All owe a great debt to historian Elizabeth Eisenstein.
Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote The Printing Press as an Agent of Change volumes one and two. These are long (very long), detailed, historical works, the standard reference on the subject. Eisenstein also wrote a much shorter, popular text that covers much of the same ground called The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (only 250 pages, one volume, much easier to read with few footnotes and a short bibliography).
Eisenstein takes seriously Francis Bacon's aphorism: "We should note the force, effect, and 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 world (quoted in Eisenstein, p.34) "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. (p. xi) (CREATE THAT GAP)
Eisensteins work was immediately influential No scholar has done more than Elizabeth Eisenstein to put the history of printing into the mainstream of Western historical development. Her Printing Press as an Agent of Change is unrivalled as the single most important English language book about printing from the Reformation to the French Revolution. (Eighteenth Century Studies 27 (1): 121.) 'For fifteen years we have been waiting for a deep level-headed examination of the ways in which print transformed Europe. Elizabeth Eisenstein has written that book ... Eisenstein has an intimate familiarity with the great narrative of modern history since the 15th century. She boasts an unsurpassed feeling for the strengths and weaknesses of the ways in which historians have explained great changes. No mania to find laws or principles of universal validity drives her. She is not afraid of detail. Her eye for the telling oddity, the crucial contradiction, is enviable.' --Commonweal
Originally published in two volumes, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.
1. INTRODUCTION TO EISENSTEIN ET AL. Cliff s notes version of Eisenstein: "Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report," Journal of Modern History (1968), 1-56. This provides the general outline of much of Eisenstein s later arguments, and formed the basis of much of her later research. Eisenstein argues that the emergence of printing (along with the particular social, economic and cultural milieu that this emergence took place within) is crucial to understanding the early modern era, the renaissance and reformation i.e. to a series of important intellectual, cultural and theological shifts that take place in the west. She argues: The impact of printing, experienced first by literate groups in early modern Europe, changed the character of the Italian Renaissance and ought to be considered among the causes of both the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern science.
Deibert and Eisenstein Eisenstein is interested not just in the impact of literacy, but in how changes in the materiality of the book (in its internal organization, its increasing fixity, standardization, etc.) along with changes in the distribution and exchange of printed material influence the social and economic networks it is part of (particularly the commonwealth of learning. ) For example, she is less interested in the bulk increase in literate people, and more interested in how the emergence of fixed, standardized texts with cross referencing changes how knowledge and ideas are represented, circulated and stored, and how communities can form around these texts. If spaces between words can change the world, Eisenstein might argue that a fixed text, plus the bibliographic technologies like indexes, footnotes, tables of contents, cross referencing, etc. also change the world. However, she is very careful to qualify all her claims to point to the contradictory and complex nature of changes associated with print. She does this to inoculate herself against all kinds of criticisms and to prove her argument is nuanced (e.g. her points about word-> image, the place of memory, etc. 160 & 164.)
Intro to Eisenstein et al. Some Key Features of many Pre-Print Manuscripts Eisenstein argues that it is hard for us to appreciate how different manuscript culture was, since we now see everything through the lens of print and the book, because for a long time evolutionary changes co-existed (and concealed) revolutionary ones, and because print and manuscript mirrored each other for a while. The absence of any apparent change in product was combined with a complete change in methods of production, giving rise to a paradoxical combination of seeming continuity with radical change. Eisenstein (155)
SCRIBAL CULTURE Spanned thousands of years and geographical contexts: Mesopotamia, Classical Greece, Medieval Europe Written word facilitated reflection, abstraction, debate, historical texts, etc. But also control: codification of laws, accounting, sacred texts Writing as a new form of power New spatial extension of economy and govt. New status elite: scribes
Here are some of the main differences that Eisenstein focuses on: Pre-print manuscripts are not very legible and were often written for the convenience of the copyist. Pre-print manuscripts commonly ran words together and were filled with abbreviations (bad for the reader; easier on the copyist). Drawings were often omitted or badly copied Sixteenth-century title pages commonly hyphenate even major words, including the author's name; inconsequential words may be set in huge type faces. The lack of legibility and uniformity hampered certain kinds of reading e.g. skimming, non-linear access; lack of indexes, fixed page numbers limits cataloguing and cross referencing. Texts hard to relate to other texts, and hard to speak of a unified text.
Books produced by scribes were made of vellum (calf or lamb skin) because of its durability. For books that took more than a year to produce, paper was too flimsy. However, for print books, vellum was too costly to produce. Printing press enables huge increase in circulation of books in 1483, the Ripoli press produced 1000 copies of Plato s Dialogues in the time it took a scribe to produce one. A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about 8 million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in 330 A.D. (Clapham, quoted in Eisenstein, 152).
Scribal culture: 4 ways of making books = scriptor, compiler, commentator, and author. SCRIPTOR: copying the work of another person with nothing changed or added to the work. This was the most common type prior to printing COMPILER: copying the work of another but with additions. Common when there were portions of manuscripts missing or corrupted COMMENTATOR copying the work of another and adding, annotating or explicating information AUTHOR
Ancient and Medieval scribes faced tremendous difficulties in preserving the knowledge that they already possessed, as it inevitably grew more corrupted and fragmented over time. With the establishment of printing presses, accumulation of knowledge is much easier. Rather than spending most of their energies searching for scattered manuscripts and copying them, scholars could now focus their efforts on revision of these texts and the gathering of new data. New observations from a widely scattered readership could be included in subsequent editions. According to Eisenstein, the shift to printing reversed the whole orientation of attitudes towards learning.
Scribal culture: preserving and copying = key "Scribal culture revered the ancients because they were closer to uncorrupted knowledge that is, knowledge not yet corrupted through the process of scribal transmission... Print culture, because it allows for cumulative advance of knowledge, views the past from a fixed distance." (Mander) Leed notes "the reversal of meaning undergone by the term "original." In its old meaning it meant closest to the origin of things, to the initial creation of the cosmos. In the first truly typographical culture it increasingly meant "novel," a break with precedent. Link to post-lapsarian theology and notion of ancients. Scribes put their name at the back of the book, barely noticed. Publishers are huge self-promoters, and also promote authors and artists. This contributes to the celebration of lay culture heroes (rise of celebrity?) and advertisement and marketing. Publishers put name, firm s emblem on front. (158)
The body of knowledge preserved by scribes was scattered and incomplete, with authorship of specific texts obscured, magical incantations intermixed with scientific observations, and classical literature interspersed with Christian writings. Under such circumstances, it was possible for manuscript readers to imagine that the past minds of antiquity had possessed a much more complete understanding of the world, which had been fragmented and degraded over time. The assumption, both with regard to biblical writings and to classical treatises on science, was that each revised work that further sorted out the jumbled legacy would help make this wisdom clearer. But revised editions of scripture revealed inconsistencies and ambiguities in the texts which could not be easily resolved. Laying inherited scientific works side by side for the first time also pointed up discrepancies and contradictions. At the same time, the new ability to convey maps, charts, and pictures in a uniform and permanent way meant that older theories in cartography, astronomy, anatomy, and botany could be checked against new observations.
Preservation through mass production The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use, in consigning them to the waste of time but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident. (Thomas Jefferson) The notion that valuable data could be preserved best by being made public, rather than by being kept secret, ran counter to tradition, led to clashes with new censors, and was central both to early modern science and to Enlightenment thought.
Pre-print manuscripts were often very large and not very portable Pre-print manuscripts were expensive, and took a long time to produce. In some cases scientists and other specialists needed to do the copying in order for the text to be accurate. Pre-print manuscripts were not fixed. They varied enormously, changed as they were copied, did not share the same pagination. As a result they were very difficult to cross reference. They usually did not have running heads, footnotes, cross references, tables of contents, etc. Technical drawings or complex charts which depend on accurate portrayal of spatial relationships do not survive the vagaries of successive copiers. ALPHABETIC order begins.
Pre-print manuscripts rarely had indexes (two manuscripts of a given work almost never correspond page for page, so each manuscript of a given work would require a separate index a lot of effort). Library indexing was sometimes done by rhyme, or by first sound (Halzones listed under a as h sound not pronounced) or by various idiosyncratic methods ( Apollo listed before other A words due to importance). Rhymed book lists were incomplete as metrical exigencies excluded some works. When it comes to cataloguing, a poem is a far cry from a card index. (Reynold and Wilson, in Eisenstein p. 65).
Intro To Eisenstein et al. Pre-print manuscripts often contained several works squashed together, and lacked title pages. A pre-print manuscript is normally catalogued by its "incipit" (L., "it begins), the first words of its text. Ong (1982; 126) speculates that the book had to be reconceptualized, from a recorded utterance to an object, for titles to make an appearance: "Homer would hardly have begun recitation of episodes from the Iliad by announcing 'The Iliad''. Without a title page, how do you catalogue a text?
Accessible publications new, text-based communities, movements (Protestant Reformation, liberal and Parliamentarian political movements) Standardization of language new sense of national belonging New patron: the printer as capitalist Printing as prototype for industrial mass production for profit
The new print shops - scholars, artisans and translators from various nations and religions found themselves working together, and cooperating in a new, more cosmopolitan environment which encouraged questioning and individual achievement. Church decreases as intermediary in knowledge access. Church key site of information - sermons included local and foreign news, real estate, etc. With pamphlets, books, newspapers, this shifts.
Print as completion of the chirographic revolution (Ong) Reified the word as object Secularization, commodification, and final dominance of sight over sound Printed text as efficient, complete thought, vs. the ornateness and openness of writing Emphasis on individual authorship, creativity, autonomy scribal culture is primarily about copying and preserving. But oral and chirographic culture did not disappear; literacy was slow in spreading (Chartier, Eisenstein)
Spread of heretical words & images
Question Chartier asks Do books cause revolutions books themselves do not, but the ways they are made, used, and read just might. Not always for the best, we might add. Can we think of some examples? Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield Civil Disobedience Henry Thoreau The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx Declaration to His Countrymen: 95Theses Martin Luther Family Limitation Margaret Sanger The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan Mein Kamp Adolf Hitler The Origin of the Species Charles Darwin The Rights of Man Thomas Paine Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie Sexual Behavior in the Human Male Alfred Kinsey The Works of Mao Tse-Tung
