Communication in Europe and its Influence

Although few scholars would argue that any single technology merits the label "historical prime mover," moveable-type printing is certainly one of the few likely candidates. It gave new impetus to the Renaissance already underway, opened the door to modernity, and offered a technique for mass production that would proliferate during the industrial revolution. Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz whose forty-two-line Bible was printed in 1455, is usually deemed the creator of the new medium. It must be remembered, however, that printing from wooden blocks had begun seven hundred years earlier in China, and that by the eleventh century the Chinese were experimenting with moveable type using baked clay characters. Since Chinese print shops required thousands of such characters, given China's nonalphabetic script, and since the results were less aesthetically appealing than block books, the experiment had not endured. By the late fourteenth century Korea had developed both an alphabetic script and moveable-type printing using bronze characters. This remained a temporary development. It was the European variant of the technology that would eventually sweep the world.

By 1501, European printers had turned out twenty-seven thousand known publications totaling over ten million copies. Further growth would be exponential. Early print runs produced from two hundred to a thousand copies of a book at a cost far below that of scribal labor, not to mention the greater affordability of paper versus parchment. Although literacy rates rose steadily, nothing approaching mass literacy would emerge until the nineteenth century. Churchmen and scholars were the first to avail themselves of the new printed texts, with Bibles, prayer books, and the Latin and Greek classics having priority. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, dictionaries and treatises on philosophy, science, and medicine, often with woodcut illustrations, became widespread. Practical manuals in the technological arts also proliferated, diminishing a dependency on face-to-face apprenticeship in a number of fields.

The printed book assumed a look that was clearly different from that of the medieval manuscript. Printers such as the Venetian Aldus Manutius (Aldo Mannucci; 1449–1515) reduced its size (his Aldine editions prefigure the contemporary pocket book), streamlined the font, and made many Greco-Roman classics available in translation at a relatively low cost to the Renaissance consumer. Other features that we often take for granted began to appear: a regularized title page indicating the date and place of publication, improved punctuation, and layouts that made silent reading the norm. The index, once an oddity in manuscript culture, was now often used to make reference works easier to use.

The spread of knowledge brought about through printing increasingly drove a wedge between the world of the theologians and the views of both secular scholars and an emerging bourgeoisie with vested commercial interests. Print also abetted a schism within the church itself, when religious leaders saw it as a way of expediting the reproduction and sale of papal indulgences. This, along other church "indulgences," led a German theologian, Martin Luther, to nail to a Wittenberg church door ninety-five theses (1517) advocating reform. His grievances were soon printed and the church responded in kind, resulting in a full-scale war of words and, ultimately, the Protestant Reformation.