The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

"Yes, and Jardine is somebody who was highly influenced by Eisenstein’s work. It was very important to me to reflect the role played by feminist scholars in how we understand the Renaissance because until very recently this has been seen as a predominantly male story written by men. Jardine and Eisenstein are both fantastic scholars who did extraordinary archival work to start to revise that story. Eisenstein’s book is, in many ways, a classic male book: a fat, complicated tome about the emergence of the printing press in the mid-to-late fifteenth century. It’s vast and it really makes you work hard. There aren’t really that many readable books on the Renaissance for the general reader. Jardine’s book is just about the only one on this list you could give to an informed member of the public. The other books are very complicated and Eisenstein, quite possibly, gives fewer concessions to the readership than anybody else. “The fact that it becomes possible to produce a book that is exactly reproducible so you can have, say, an index is completely transformative” The emergence of the printing press is not classically seen as part of the story of the High Renaissance. But the fact that it becomes possible to produce a book that is exactly reproducible so you can have, say, an index is completely transformative. You can’t have indexes in manuscript books because you can’t create that sense of exact replicability. For her, it changes everything. It transforms how we understand trade and how we understand science. It is particularly important in science because you can print a book in London and that book can go to Antwerp, to Vienna, to Venice, and people can read the same book and correspond with each other about, say, footnote twenty-five on page sixty, or a reference in an index. And this is what starts to happen. You start to get networks of scholars sharing ideas in a way that is so much greater than you can get with manuscript culture where you can only circulate it among four or five people. Suddenly, you can print a thousand copies of a book and they can go all over Europe. People start to work on very specific areas of science, culture and ethnography and start to build up a sense of objectivity in understanding how we operate. Eisenstein’s argument has come under huge scrutiny. Some scholars were quite critical of her argument because she pushes such a strong idea about standardisation. They argued that her approach misunderstands that the printing press was still in its infancy. It didn’t quite have the reach Eisenstein claims. There were a lot of mistakes in the books, people then published different books, they pirated them. We shouldn’t really overestimate the power of printing. I’m not so convinced by those arguments. I think it remains a hugely important issue, perhaps more so than ever. I remember a time before people used the internet and email. We are going through a similar technological evolution now, one that changes our idea of self and our ideas of culture and society in a profound way. Absolutely, and it affects how we understand those books. I teach my undergraduates that there are three different printed versions of Hamlet circulating during and just after Shakespeare’s lifetime. Most readers believe there is one book written by Shakespeare called Hamlet . I ask my students to look at all three versions and see how radically different they are . We can’t ever know which one was closest to Shakespeare. The implication is that we have to understand the history of print culture. That’s really what Eisenstein is interested in. It changes how we read and if it changes how we read, it changes how we think and how we interpret. “With a book, people just pick it up in the British Library, read it, and ask, ‘What does it mean?’ But that’s only one dimension” And so, if we pay attention to the creation of these art objects and what surrounds them, we get a richer understanding of them. With Hamlet we realize that one version says, ‘To be or not to be, ay there’s the point,’ and another says, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ My students are fascinated by this. They want to know why there are two versions. We don’t know. It’s the result of print culture as much as it might be of whatever Shakespeare initially wrote down in handwritten script before it went to the printer and then the printers changed it. What we’re dealing with is the history of the transmission of the printed text via the printing press. What’s interesting to me is that when it comes to the pamphlet, people have always been interested in the history: how it was produced, who printed it, what else those people printed. With a book, people just pick it up in the British Library, read it, and ask, ‘What does it mean?’ But that’s only one dimension. We have to understand the long history of that text and how people may change it for their own agenda. That changes habits of reading and, therefore, habits of thought as well. For that, we remain indebted to Eisenstein’s work. One final thing to say about Eisenstein’s book is that this is where the field currently stands. At the moment, the field is obsessed with book history. It is the leading area of interest in Renaissance Studies."

"Yes, for related reasons. Elizabeth Eisenstein made a very audacious claim about the relation between printing and the Reformation, as well as the Renaissance. And certainly Luther and many contemporaries were deeply aware that they were able to stir up a cognitive and ideological revolution at least in part because of how easy it was to move their stuff around. Again, I don’t find it conclusive – that there would have been no Reformation without the printing press – but certainly there’s an intimate connection. So reading this work is stimulating. It’s not capable of delivering an answer to the question of what’s going to happen in the next 100 years. But I find it stimulating to think in terms of big blocks of historical transformations, and these two books are both stimuli of some sort."