What if exact copies of an idea could circulate quickly, all over the world? What if the same could be done for the latest news, the oldest beliefs, the most beautiful poems, the most exciting—and deadly—discoveries? It would be doing for knowledge what the invention of coinage did for wealth: making it portable, easier to use and disseminate. Indeed, it’s no accident that the man who developed such a technology, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz (c. 1398-1468), was the son of a goldsmith who made coins for the bishop of that German city. Both crafts were based on the same principle and used the same basic tools. Coins are metal disks that have each been stamped with identical words and images, impressed on them with a reusable matrix. The pages of the first printed books—and later newspapers, leaflets, and pamphlets—were stamped with ink spread on rows of movable type (lead or cast-iron letter forms and punctuation marks) slotted into frames to form lines of words. Once a set of pages was ready, a press could make hundreds of copies in a matter of hours, many hundreds of times faster than the same page could be copied by hand. Afterward, the type could be reused.
A major stimulus for this invention was the more widespread availability of paper, a trend that had begun in the late thirteenth century. Parchment, northern Europe’s chief writing material since the advent of the codex (see Chapter 6), was extremely expensive to manufacture and required special training on the part of those who used it—one reason why writing remained a specialized skill for much of the Middle Ages, while the ability to read was common. Paper, made from rags turned into pulp by mills, was both cheaper and far easier to use; accordingly, books became cheaper and written communication became easier and more widespread. Growing levels of literacy led to a growing demand for books, which in turn led to experimentation with different methods of book production— and to Gutenberg’s breakthrough of the 1450s. By 1455, his workshop had printed multiple copies of the Latin Bible, of which forty-eight complete or partial volumes survive. Although printing never entirely replaced traditional modes of publication via manuscript, it made the cost of books affordable and revolutionized the spread of information.
In fact, the printing press played a crucial role in many of the developments that we will study in this chapter. The artistic and intellectual experiments that contributed to an Italian Renaissance were rapidly exported to other parts of Europe, and specifications for innovative weapons would be printed on the same presses that churned out humanist biographies. News of Columbus’s first voyage and the subsequent conquests of the Americas would spread via the same media as critiques of European imperialism there. Printing not only increased the volume and rapidity of communication, it made it more difficult for those in power to censor dissenting opinions.
But at the same time as it created new forms of agency, the printing press also become an indispensable tool of more traditional powers, making it possible for rulers to govern growing empires abroad and increasingly centralized states at home. The “reconquest” of Spain and the extension of Spanish imperialism to the New World were both facilitated by the circulation of printed propaganda. The widespread availability of reading materials even helped to standardize national languages, by enabling governments to promote one official printed dialect over others. Hence the “king’s English,” the variety of the language spoken around London, was imposed as the only acceptable literary and bureaucratic language throughout the English realm, contributing to the growth of a common linguistic identity among readers. For these reasons, among others, many historians consider the advent of print to be both the defining event and the driving engine of modernity, and it coincided with another essentially modern development: the discovery of a “New World.”
RENAISSANCE IDEALS-AND REALITIES
The intellectual and artistic movement that had begun in Italy during the fourteenth century was, as we noted in Chapter 11, characterized by an intense interest in the classical past and by a new type of educational program known as humanism. These Renaissance ideals—and the realities that both undergirded and complicated them—would be extended and diversified in the later fifteenth century through the medium of the printing press. By the time the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was complete, just a year before Gutenberg’s workshop began to produce pages of the Bible, decades of uncertainty and warfare had propelled hundreds of refugees from the eastern Roman Empire into Italy. Many carried with them precious manuscripts of Greek texts that had long been unavailable in western Europe: the epics of Homer, the major surviving works of Athenian dramatists, the dialogues of Plato. Prior to the invention of print, such manuscripts could be owned and studied by only a very few, very privileged men. Now printers in Venice and other European cities rushed to produce cheap editions of these texts as well as Greek grammars and glossaries that could facilitate reading them.
Within a few decades, so many men were engaged in the study of Plato that an informal “Platonic Academy” had formed in Florence. There, the work of intellectuals like Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was fostered by the patronage of the wealthy Cosimo de’ Medici. Based on his reading of Plato, Ficino’s philosophy moved away from the focus on ethics and civic life that had been such a feature of earlier humanist thought. He taught instead that the individual should look primarily to the salvation of his immortal soul, to free it from its “always miserable” mortal body: a very Platonic idea that was also compatible with much late-medieval Christian piety. His disciple Pico likewise rejected the everyday world of public affairs but took a more exalted view of man’s intellectual and artistic capacities, arguing that man (but not woman) can aspire to union with God through the exercise of his unique talents. Ficino’s great achievement was his translation of Plato’s works into Latin, which made them widely accessible in Europe for the first time—again, thanks to the medium of print.
THE SPREAD OF PRINTING. This map shows how quickly the technology of printing spread throughout Europe between 1470 and 1500. ¦ In what regions were printing presses most heavily concentrated? ¦ What factors would have led to their proliferation in the Low Countries, northern Italy, and Germany-as compared to France, Spain, and England? ¦ Why would so many have been located along waterways?
World History
