Grafton 1980

Anthony Grafton. "The Importance of Being Printed." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11.2 (Autumn, 1980), 265-86. Web.

• Review of Eisenstein 1979
• 265 Jerome Hornschuch's Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608) opening woodcut "reveals some of the complexities of and the fascination of early printing and, above all, its unprecedented employment under one roof of intellectuals and craftsmen, scholars and entrepreneurs."
• 266 The burden of [Eisenstein's book] is that the printing house was more than an important locus of cultural and social [267] change; it was the crucible in which modern culture was formed. But since cultural historians have persistently ignored its pervasive influence, they have given a distorted account of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
• 267 ...insistence on the enormous variety and frequent contradictoriness of the developments linked with printing.
• 268 [print and Reformation] ...the printing press did much to undermine the authority of the Church simply by making available to a wide public Biblical texts, with all of their apparent contradictions, as well as by spreading new forms of devotional literature and changing old ones.
  • paralleled, or repeated, in the C19 by Higher Criticism
• 269 ...she is right to hold that historians of ideas, especially in the English-speaking world, have paid far too little attention to the social, economic, and material realities that affected past intellectuals[.]
• critical shift ...many of her errors and exaggerations seem to stem directly from the goals at which she aims and the methods she has chosen.
• Issues:
  • research based in secondary, not primary sources
  • 271 She has not told a story but carried on a series of arguments about the importance of printing in a great many fields over two centuries. As a result, she has tended to pull from her sources those facts and statements that seem to meet her immediate polemical needs, both positive and negative.
  • 273 [Crux of revolution model] Eisenstein wishes to emphasize how radical the break was between the age of scribes and that of printers. To do so she minimizes the extent to which any text could circulate in stable form before mechanical means of reproduction became available.
    • 274 ...a private scholar could assemble quite a large and varied library of manuscripts. Niccoli and Salutati had some 800 Ms each
      • of course this is anecdotal
    • Facts like these suggest that the Renaissance might not have been another transitory revival even if printing had not been invented. They suggest that the experience of collectors and readers changed rather less sharply than one might expect with the advent of printed books. And they suggest that earlier scholars may well have been right to hold that it was new forms of [275] education and changes in the nature of governments, rather than the invention of printing, which created the new lay reading public of the Renaissance. At all events, one must regret that Eisenstein's decision to write in so polemical a vein led her to neglect them.
  • 276-7 [Model of the master-printer and compositor as intellectual, the print house as intellectual center] Ample evidence suggests that most Renaissance print-shops were much less sophisticated places than Eisenstein would have us believe.
  • 278 After all, printers were businessmen. They had to make money. When, as often happened, this need or the practical difficulties it imposed interfered with scholars' plans, the scholars tended to fly off the handle. Often they were blind to the printer's point of view. Martin Luther, enraged at the bad state of some proofs he had been sent, refused to send any more copy "until I'm convinced that these Schmutzfinken and Geldmacher are less interested in their own profit than in the books' utility for readers." True, he later changed his mind...but he never ceased to berate the printers[.]
  • 280 ...I am not entirely convinced that the process of publication itself changed so radically as Eisenstein holds, especially from the author's point of view. [See Eisenstein 96]
  • 281 also the overlap between scribal and print culture: "Scholars remained scribes for a long time. Some of us still are."
  • 282 Why Renaissance men developed a new historical sense I cannot say. But I do know that they began to do so earlier and had far more success at the enterprise than Eisenstein believes.
  • 284 ...She certainly exaggerates the historical ignorance and ineptness of those whom she demeaningly calls "scribal scholars." By try to prevent scholars from modernizing the Renaissance unduly, Eisenstein has made the Renaissance less modern than it really was.
• 284-5 potted summaries of her arguments about the Reformation (opportunities for more indulgences and print working against clerical authority) and science (innovation in descriptive sciences stemmming from "new possibilities for checking and correction of data")
• 286 and in the end he's an intellectual historian, still: "the story of the medium cannot be substituted for the story of the message."