Eisenstein 1983

"If there was a 'run-away' tecnology which was leading to a sense of cultural crisis among historians, perhaps it had more to do with an increased rate of publication than with new audiovisual media? While mulling over this question and wondering whether it was wise to turn out more monographs or instruct graduate students to do the sme -- given the indigestible abundance now confronting us and the diffuclty of assimilating what we have -- I ran across a copy of Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. ... It provided additional evidence of how overload could lead to incoherence. At the same time it also stimulated my curiosity ... about the specific historical consequences of the c15 communications shift." (x)

• interesting question to begin text with!

implores reader to "keep in mind the tentative, provisional character" of the book," and points out it addresses shift from one kind of literate culture to another, not from orality to literacy (xii)

"As the title of my large version indicates,I regard printing as an agent, not the agent, let alone the only agent, of change in Western Europe." (xiii)

An Unacknowledged Revolution

difficulty of understanding a medium so embedded in our scholarly practices

"In order to assess changes ushered in by printing, for example, we need to survey the conditions that prevailed before its advent. Yet the conditions of scribal culture can only be observed through a veil of print." (6)

Johannes Trithemius, De laude scriptorum (1492)

• explains why mongs should not stop copying because of invention of printing
• argues writing on parchment will have longer life than printing on paper
• "his argument show his concern about preserving a form of manual labor which seemed especiallys uitable for monks." (11)

Defining the Initial Shift

from script to print, "an evolutionary model of change is applied to a situation that seems to call for a revolutionary one" (13)

Vespasiano quote about printed books being "ashamed" in the company of beautiful illuminated manuscripts "ballooned into many misleading comments about the disdain of Renaissance humanists for vulgar machine-made objects" -- in fact, atypical comment by snobby Florentine book dealer (18)

early books printed from manuscript, & looked like manuscripts; but c15 manuscripts also copied from early printed books; "thus handwork and presswork continued to appear almost indistinguishable, even after the printer had begun to depart from scribal conventions and to exploit some of the new features inherent in his art" (20)

"The absence of any apparent change in product was combined with a complete change in methods of production, giving rise to the paradoxical combination of seeming continuity with radical change." (20)

scribe: "concern with surface appearance" of manuscript (20); printer: marked up manuscript for collation, etc., in a way "which encouraged more editing, correcting, and collating" (20)

"The fact that identical images, maps, and diagrams could be viewed simultaneously by scattered readers constituted a kind of communications revolution in itself." (21)

new "fruitful forms of collaboration" fostered by printing -- engravers with scientists, printers with university professors (26)

scribal colophons come last; printers put their names first (29)

Protestantism linked with reading; but relationship between image/word in print is complex:

• "engraved images became more, rather than less, abundant after the establishment of print shops" (35)
• mnemonic functions of memory theatres transformed into emblem books
• architecture, geometry, geography, sciences: printing "actually increased the functions performed by images while reducing those performed by words" (37)

also suggests caustion "about assuming that the spoken word was gradually silenced as printed words multipled" (40) -- printed music suggests otherwise