The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
Reviewed by Kenneth S. Goss (Hist 5040 - Spring 1999).

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, published in 1983, is an abridged and illustrated version of her much more sizeable work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which first appeared in 1979. These works display a dual purpose: to describe the interaction of printing with other historic developments and to entice other historians to follow many promising leads she has uncovered in researching her theme. While at times the links she draws between printing and other events may seem tenuous, Ms. Eisenstein's presentation should be sufficient to cause historians to note more closely the effect that the development of the printing press had on widely disparate intellectual pursuits.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe is divided into two major sections. The first explains what the author calls the "communication shift," the transition in Western Europe from a scribal culture to one of print. This section examines what is a "print culture" and what are the possible roles and ramifications of printing in that culture. The second section is devoted to exploring the links between the three greatest historical developments in early modern Europe: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the use of the printing press.

The first section of the book starts with a defense of the study of printing's interaction with other historical developments as not only a valid historical subject but as one that could potentially shed new light on a number of traditional disputes. Ms. Eisenstein notes that while the history of the printing press itself has been covered in depth, possible connections with other fields have rarely been explored. She attributes this historical blindspot to the difficulties raised in identifying the typically indirect consequences relating printing and other fields. Many historians note the importance of printing without identifying direct cause and effect relationships with respect to historical events. She admits the difficulty in trying "to decide how access to a greater abundance or variety of written records affected ways of learning, thinking, and perceiving among literate elites." (p. 5) Additionally, statistical information about the scribal period is limited. Historians today can only estimate the time required tocopy a given text or how many texts have been lost. Without this information, comparisons across the transition from scribe to printing press are difficult. Nevertheless, Ms. Eisenstein believes that it is important to understand this tradition due to extensive use of printed materials in such diverse fields as politics, religion, and science.

The following section provides the reader with a brief background of the "communications shift." Ms. Eisenstein finds that most historians have favored an evolutionary model where she believes a revolutionary model is more appropriate. Not only were vastly more books available than before, the previously existing tendency for learned men to spend much of their time copying books was replaced by an abundance of available texts for analysis and comparison. She also stresses that printing did far more than just reproduce text. Drawings as well as mathematical tables were also propagated through the new technology, encouraging higher quality drawings while reducing the need to copy extensive tables.

The core of the opening half of the book is the section entitled "Some features of print culture." Here the author explains the nature of the indirect relationships she expects to find and explore when relating printing to other intellectual endeavors. A brief tour of some of the consequences of using the printing press will show why the author has concluded that the printing press greatly affected many fields of study. The opportunity for the wider dissemination of texts, in comparison to hand-copied manuscripts, provided many significant benefits: increased reference and cross-reference capability, reduced overhead in finding and copying texts, and the possibility for cross-cultural interchanges in printing shops. The traditional model for scientists involved in research had been for the scientist to spend much of his time searching for and copying reference sources. The increased availability provided by cheaper, more abundant books effectively increased the scientist's effective lifetime by reducing or even eliminating the need to travel across Europe to visit the rare copies of traditional reference sources. Tycho Brahe was a notable example in having at his convenience astrological tables from reprinted Arabic sources as well as a complete library of astronomy-related texts. Increased availability also allowed increased opportunity for cross-reference and comparison, which often emphasized errors or deviations that had escaped notice through the Middle Ages. Ms. Eisenstein also makes that case that the focus of printing activity, the shops of master-printers became a hotbed for cross-cultural exchange, as scientists and technicians were drawn together by the writing and printing process. She felt that these exchanges stimulated mental activity by exposing both sides to new concepts and ideas.

More benefits were derived from a new form of data collection that printers and the printing process encouraged. The vastly reduced cost and increased availability of books greatly expanded the audience of a given book, while the nature of the printing press allowed for relatively quick response to reader feedback. This implied that the drift from original sources that had followed centuries of errors caused by scribal copying procedures could be not only stopped, but reversed. In the new printing culture, publishers could request and respond to reader feedback that corrected errors new and old. In addition, data could be solicited from readers who could provide a variety of experience or who could be prompted by potential fame to explore new horizons that would be quickly captured in following editions. The incentive that spurred publishers to reduce errors and find new fields of interest was the profit motive. Competition between printers drove improvements in content as well as format and quality.

For Ms. Eisenstein, the most important consequence of the printing press was its preservative power, what she calls "typographical fixity." Prior to the introduction of printing to Europe, untold numbers of classical texts had been lost forever through the ravages of time. The printing press, by making abundant copies, sharply reduced the chances that all of the examples of a particular book would be lost. As important, this endurance allowed for a steady advance in all sorts of intellectual fields, as knowledge became cumulative instead of dependent on the whims of time. One example of this fixity was the Florentine Codex, a common law code, which became available for broader study than was possible when the sole copy was kept under lock and key. She also credits this preservative power with helping to fix the vernacular languages as oral tradition was codified in a standardized form.

In the second half of the book, Ms. Eisenstein searches for the consequences attributed to printing described above in the three most significant historical developments of early modern Europe: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. Each of these developments enjoys a cloud of speculation as to original causes. It is Ms. Eisenstein's goal to demonstrate that printing should be considered, and explored by more historians, as a substantial, even primary cause in these developments.

In justifying printing as a major cause of the Renaissance, Ms. Eisenstein encounters the difficulty that most historians date its start before the advent of the printing press. To this, she responds that the printing press transformed the Renaissance already in progress. There had been other classical revivals before the fifteenth century, but each had flared only to flicker out. The printing press permitted this revival to become The Renaissance through its power of "typographical fixity." Printing allowed the past to be fixed and studied by making available copies of ancient sources. These books could be studied and compared allowing for the correction of errors due to scribal copying, and then used as a base for further development. Each advancement could also be fixed through abundant, hard to lose copies that could be distributed and used as a base for further growth. Thus, each step was an incremental gain. The study of ancient languages, the cornerstone of ancient studies, was also improved through publishing projects that produced tri-lingual Bibles and reference sources. Authors were encouraged to add their knowledge to the growing movement through motives of profit or fame. Typographical fixity meant that authors could now be acknowledged for their works and be seen by many of their peers, the advent of the printing press also meant the advent of patents andcopyrights. These consequences of adding printing to the already in-progress Renaissance were of such import that Ms. Eisenstein believes that there should really be two acknowledged periods when dating the Renaissance, one prior to the printing press, the other, a permanent Renaissance, after.

In contrast, the Reformation could be seen directly as a product of printing. The rapid distribution of Martin Luther's 95 Theses across Europe was only possible through the printing press. Both Catholic and Protestantsmade extensive use from the beginning of mass-produced pamphlets for propaganda purposes. Without the printing press, the Protestant desire to see Bibles in the hands of the laity would hardly have been possible. In addition, the press's typographical fixity allowed both sides to standardize their liturgy, allowing for widespread homogeneous movements. This fixity also permitted, in Ms. Eisenstein's opinion, the Lutheran reformation to survive while other, previous heresies had failed the test of time. Just as books widely disseminated were hard to eliminate, a heresy spread through widely distributed tracts was hard to extinguish. Even the Church's pressure against the distribution of certain religious tracks can be seen to have backfired, as being banned tended to increase interest and book sales. Thus, the printing press can be seen to have enabled and supported the Protestant Reformation.

In searching for the press's effects on the Scientific Revolution, Ms. Eisenstein knows that she has an uphill battle to fight. A large body of opinion rests on the notion that science progressed only by overcoming the affects of ancient texts. In response, she notes that the scientists most celebrated for leading the revolution were all widely dependent on the benefits of the printing press. As noted above, the printing press could be seen to have effectively extended the lives of scientists by freeing them from the extensive travelling and copying involved in the scribal culture variety of reference searching. Scientists distributed their own works through printed copies as well as enjoying access to the contemporaries' data and analysis. The mechanism of reader feedback permitted the correction of errors new and old, while spurring new research along suggested lines. The ability to reproduce images and tables as well as text permitted a far higher degree of comprehension when technical information was exchanged. Though many point to the Scientific Revolution as a movement from studying the books of men to the "Book of Nature", the printing press provided access both to ancient texts as well as new data and theories that made steady incremental growth possible.

It is easy to agree with Ms. Eisenstein's observation that the impact of the printing press on other intellectual developments should be studied in detail. It is somewhat harder to accept the central role that she has given to the press in explaining the foundation of these developments. In her preface, she acknowledges that she advocates the printing as only one of several causes acting together. Her enthusiasm for the printing press seems to lead her occasionally to be more forward in pushing it as the central cause. Nevertheless, the book offers intriguing questions for any historian as to the role of this seemingly external factor in the historical development of their choice.