Eisenstein 1979

Elizabeth Eisenstein. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Pub. 1979. Cambridge UP, repr. 2012. Print.

• Part 1 and Afterword

1 An Unacknowledged Revolution

• establishing the import and difficulty of defining the shift from manuscript to print
• 3 In the late C15, the reproduction of written materials began to move from the copyist's desk to the printer's workshop. This shift, which revolutionized all forms of learning, was particularly important for historical scholarship.
  • but unattended in historiographical scholarship to that point
  • she glosses this point on 10, showing the difficulty of establishing the grounds for articulating a historical narrative
• 4 the isolation of bibliography from wider historical accounts
• 6 Historians who have to reach out beyond the grave to reconstruct past forms of consciousness are especially disadvantaged in dealing with such issues. Theories about unevenly phased changes affecting learning processes, attitudes, and expectations do not lend themselves, in any event, to simple, clear-cut formulations that can be easily tested or integrated into conventional historical narratives.
  • the difficulty of getting at mentalities that St Clair 2004 further discusses
• 7 hard to understand "difficulties confronting scribal scholars who had access to assorted written records but lacked uniform chronologies, maps, and all other reference guides which are now in common use."
  • Blair 2010 discusses the beginnings of print reference, as does Grafton in his book about chronology
• 8 "hybrid half-oral, half-literate culture which has no counterpart today" in pre print scholarship
  • but did for a long time after print, as in the reading habits Wynne 2011 traces etc
  • and Febvre & Martin 1958 about the persistence of manuscript culture past print

2 Defining the Initial Shift

• 13 she mentions the value of collaboration in such a massive intellectual enterprise, something stressed by Suarez 2004 decades later, by which time the "relevance of the topic to different fields of study" has been established but not the collaboration
• 14 picking up after the (hard to establish clear facts for) "perfection of a new process for printing": "The advent of printing, then, is taken to mean the establishment of presses in urban centers beyond the Rhineland during an interval that begins in the 1460s and coincides, very roughly, with the era of incunabula."
• 14-15 "An evolutionary model of change is applied to a situation that seems to call for a revolutionary one"
  • impt to note that both historiographical models here are 19th century ones, going to Darwin and to historians including Carlyle
  • she talks about this on 310-11
• 22 ...an abrupt rather than a gradual increase [in output] did occur in the second half of the c15
• 23 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.
  • ie the close resemblance of incunabula to manuscripts, but then the rapid development of print specific finding aids (though many have manuscript analogues) and title pages
    • Stallybrass 2002 discusses indexicality
• 27 The fact that letters, numbers, and pictures were all subject to repeatability by the end of the C15 needs more emphasis. That the printed book made possible new forms of interplay between those diverse elements is perhaps even more significant than the change undergone by picture, number, or letter alone.
• 35 ...it may be misguided to envisage the new presses as making available to low-born men products previously used only by the high born.
  • and again St Clair 2004 provides the example: by using price and print run you can bypass "vexed problems associated with the spread of literacy" (34) to think about the long term stratification of mentalities shaped by printed knowledge and the persistence of other forms of knowledge
• 38 cites Altick 1957 to make another impt point about literacy: "learning to read is different...from learning by reading." Literacy should not be equated with becoming part of "the reading public"
• 39 print changing the nature of memory
• 41-3 images and visual aids in printing
• 45 The purpose of this preliminary discussion has been simply to demonstrate that the shift from script to print entailed a large ensemble of changes, each of which needs more investigation and all of which are too complicated to be encapsulated in any single formula.

3 Some Features of Print Culture

• 46 Febvre & Martin 1958 argue that old texts were duplicated more rapidly than new ones therefore "Printing did not speed up the adoption of new theories," but then where did these new theories come from? Did old texts contribute?
  • St Clair 2004 on reprint culture
• 47 "the era of the glossator and commentator came to an end and a new 'era of intense cross referencing between one book and another' began"
  • again where she wants to see a break subsequent scholars have seen continuity
  • this is also for an elite community, Montaigne rather than Carlo Ginzburg's farmer
• Effects of wider dissemination
  • 48 the structuring importance of having more texts to hand
    • here also changes in bibliographical object: bindings, titles, etc
  • 51 ...we must not think only about new forms of enlightenment when considering the effects of printing on scholarship. New forms of mystification were encouraged as well.
    • she instances spread of occult texts
  • 54 Many medieval world pictures were duplicated more rapidly during the first century of printing than they had been during the so-called Middle Ages.... a more complex process whereby long-lived schemes were presented in new visual forms [e.g. Woodcuts of medieval cosmologies]
• Effects of standardization
  • 56 EM scholars could issue errata in print, earlier scholars could not
  • 58 ...the "subliminal" impact upon scattered readers of repeated encounters with identical type styles, printers' devices, and title page ornamentation
    • she's too willing to pass over variability in inidividual copies
  • 62 The more standardized the type, indeed, the more compelling sense of an idiosyncratic personal self.
    • she instances Montaigne, a longer term connection to Armstrong 2005
  • 70 Scholars concerned with "modernization" or "rationalization" might profitably think more about the new kind of brainwork fostered by the silent scanning of maps, tables, charts, diagrams, dictionaries, and grammars.
• Effects of reorganizing texts and reference guides (i.e. layout and presentation)
  • 71 Basic changes in book format might well lead to changes in thought patterns.
  • e.g., alphabetical order from printed reference works
    • impact on library catalogues, which were in the Middle Ages more idiosyncratic: ""When it comes to cataloguing, a poem is a far cry from a card index," note Reynolds and Wilson, in connection with some verses attributed to Alcuin describing the C8 library at York."
    • 72 Thus the competitive commercial character of the printed book trade [sales catalogues] when coupled with typographical standardization made more systematic cataloguing and indexing seem not only feasible but highly desirable as well.
  • 75 impt though that frequently these were old projects realized as "by-products of typographic culture"
  • Stallybrass 2002 also discusses indexical reading
• Corrupted copies and improved editions
  • 87 a series of improved editions rather than of corrupted copies: "Successive generaruons could build on the work left by c16 polymaths instead of trying to retrieve scattered fragments of it."
• Print as preservative: fixity and cumulative change
  • 91 studies of dynastic consolidation and of nationalism might well devote more space to the advent of printing. Typography arrested [92] linguistic drift, enriched as well as standardized vernaculars, and paved the way for the more deliberate purification and codification of all major European languages.
    • Anderson 1983 does (Eisenstein I think is still too teleological)
  • 96 The new forms of authorship and literary property rights undermined old concepts of collective authority in a manner that encompassed not only biblical composition but also texts relating to philosophy, science, and law.
• Amplification and reinforcement
  • 99 Both "stereotype" and "cliche" are terms deriving from typographical processes [that] point...to certain other features of typographical culture in general that deserve closer consideration.
    • 100 How many times has Tacitus's description of freedom-loving Teutons been repeated since a single manuscript of Germanic was discovered in a c15 monastery?

4 Expanding Republic of Letters

• 102: [building from Mcluhan's "typographical man"] Granted that the replacement of discourse by silent scanning, of face to face contacts by more impersonal interactions, probably did have important consequences; it follows that we need to think less metaphorically and abstractly, more historically and concretely, about the sorts of effects that were entailed and how different groups were affected.
• 103 Most rural villagers...probably belonged to an exclusively hearing public at least until the C19. Yet what they heard had, in many instances, been transformed by print 2 centuries earlier. ...[104] The disjunction between the new mode of production and older modes of consumption is only one of many complications that need further study
  • a nice gloss on St Clair 2004 but he would likely respond, how does one quantify that?
• 105 The wide distribution of identical bits of information provided an impersonal link between people who were unknown to each other.
  • which Anderson 1983 theorizes in imagined communities
• 112 The advent of an "industrial" society is too often made responsible for conditions that were shaped by the momentum of an ongoing revolution in communications. From the first, authorship was closely linked to the new technology.
• 114 Walter Scott: "I love to have the press thumping, clattering, and banging in my ear. It creates the necessity which always makes me work best."
• The "secluded study" which now provides a setting for many sociologists of knowledge should not be projected too far back into the [115] past. Between the 16 and 18 centuries, at all events, intellectuals, mechanics, and capitalists were not out of touch.
  • nor earlier: Alan Stewart on the "closet" as social space, nor later: Price 2000 on Eliot's obsession with her printed work and Lewes's business dealings on her behalf
• 117-8 odd little bit about C19 authorship, anthologies, and cultural pessimism
• 119 brief recapitulation

8 Conclusion

• 310-11 This impulse to end tales that are still unfolding owes much to the prolongation of C19 historical schemes, especially those of Hegel and Marx, which point logical dialectical conflicts toward logical dialectical ends. The possibility of an indefinite prolongation of fundamentally contradictory trends is not allowed in these grand designs. Yet we still seem to be experiencing the contradictory effects of a process which fanned the flames of religious zeal and bigotry while fostering a new concern for ecumenical concord and toleration, which fixed linguistic and national divisions more permanently while creating a cosmopolitan Commonwealth of Learning and extending communications networks which encompassed the whole world.
• The unevenly phased continuous process of recovery and innovation that began in the second half of the fifteenth century remains to be described.
  • this unevenly phased continuous process model seems more productive than "revolution"

Afterword Revisiting the Printing Revolution

• 313-4 Her intervention arising out of intellectual and Marxist history milieu that didn't consider communications (bibliography entirely separate)
• 316-8 addressing revolution model criticism
• 323 It seems the evidence has to be strained in order to sustain a thesis of continuity with regard to changes in book production. Gradualism appears to be less problematic with regard to book consumption. Whereas silent reading was at one time attributed to the advent of printing, medievalists have shown that it was practiced by laymen as well as by churchmen in the age of the drive. The carryover of format and layout reinforced an impression of continuity.
• 325 intermixture and hybridity of print and manuscript (marginalia) in early modern period
• 332 When titling my big book, I discarded the ["impact"] metaphor of billiard balls colliding and sought instead to evoke the process that physicists describe as a "cooperative transition" or chemists term a "change of phase"; a process by which the mixture of elements remains more or less the same even while the whole is transformed into a different state.
• 333 revolution as circular movement of planets and abrupt, decisive change, and long-range irreversible process
• 336 ...the most remarkable aspect of the story is not what did or did not happen in Gutenberg's shop in Mainz; it is, rather, the way that so many presses went into operation in so many places in so short a time.
• 342 [fallacy of "supersession"] ...Let me simply reiterate: printed texts did not supercede manuscripts any more than engraving and woodcuts superseded drawing and painting. Nevertheless, the intro of printing did arrest and then reverse the process of loss, corruption, and erosion that had accompanied the hand copying of texts and images.
• 348 and elsewhere pretty bracing critique of Johns 1998
• 352ff discusses Warner 1990's critique that human and cultural agency disappear from her account, putting print prior to those: in a way this makes her account more amenable to the idea of non-human agents