Print Culture and Elizabeth Eisenstein

American Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein is a leading theorist in the field of print culture and history. She is best known for her seminal text: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1980). This is a two-volume, 750-page exploration of the social and political effects (focused on Western Europe) that followed the institution of Johannes Gutenberg’s (1398 – 1468) moveable type printing press around 1450. She outlines the printing press's functions of dissemination, standardisation, and preservation and the way these functions aided the progress of the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. She names the democratisation of knowledge that occurred after the invention of moveable type as the ‘unacknowledged revolution’.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is still inspiring conversation, debate and research in the area of print culture today.

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4225

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/maack/Documents/Chronological_20Bio-bibliography_20of_20Elizabeth_20Eisenstein.pdf

In his online journal, Economist J. Bradford DeLong has reviewed Eisenstein’s work The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1983) which outlines the social impact of the reduction in the cost of books brought about by Gutenberg’s invention.

DeLong summarises Eisenstein’s case for four important consequences of this cost reduction:

1. The fifteenth-century Renaissance did not peter out, as had previous episodes of "classical revival," but acquired a capital letter; never again was European culture to lose contact with the intellectual world of the Roman Empire.

2. The Reformation: without printing, Luther's and Calvin's heresies would have been unable to spread nearly as rapidly or widely, and would have been suppressed as effectively as previous heresies had been.

3. Modern science is unthinkable without the density of information exchange made possible by printing. Is it a coincidence that Copernicus follows Gutenberg by less than a century?

4. The creation--around networks of printers and authors--of a "Cosmopolitan" and tolerant outlook. Liberalism has an elective affinity with printers' workshops.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/reviews/reviewtheprintingrevolutio.html