Eisenstein 1979

Elizabeth Eisenstein. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Pub. 1983. 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 and 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
• 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.