Authors: Alex Wright
The rapid growth of the popular book market split the book trade into two broad segments: (1) large folio works intended for institutional collections like libraries, schools, and churches; and (2) smaller
quarto
or
octavo
works for the public at large. This broad market segmentation persisted well into the nineteenth century, contributing to a growing schism between “canonical” and popular knowledge.
By the sixteenth century, mass-produced books were starting to reach a growing population of customers who themselves could barely read. This interim period between the emergence of printing and widespread popular literacy marks the heyday of the illustrated book. Books were increasingly within reach of a public eager to consume books that didn’t necessarily demand reading. Popular volumes often included simple line drawings accompanying the text, illustrating stories from the Bible, pictures of saints, or the terrifying visages of demons trying to wrest men’s souls.
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These sturdy xylographic
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illustrations were simple and clean, intended to serve as informational graphics rather than decorative illustrations. “Book illustration answered a practical rather than an artistic need,” write Lucien Paul Victor Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, “to make graphic and visible what people of the time constantly heard evoked.”
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Like the widely distributed bestiaries, these popular books appealed to readers and nonreaders alike. The popular books of this era mark a brief period in which word and image still enjoyed equal prominence on the printed page.
The golden age of illustrated texts in the sixteenth century would
not last. Growing popular literacy, coupled with inexorable logic of the marketplace, forced efficiencies in both the production and the consumption of books. “What the steam engine does with matter,” writes Newman, “the printing press is to do with the mind; it is to act mechanically, and the population is to be passively, almost unconsciously enlightened, by the mere multiplication and dissemination of volumes.”
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Whereas monastic scribes had produced books almost exclusively for religious purposes—to equip missionaries with books for their travels or to preserve the word of God for their fellow brethren—the printing press transformed book publishing into a for-profit industry. Fifteenth-century publishers, like their descendants today, would publish books only if they felt reasonably assured of turning a profit. The old craft production values of the monastic scriptoria could never survive in the new world of for-profit publishing.
At first publishers turned out great numbers of Bibles and other devotional texts. In the thriving Jewish communities of Italy and Spain, Hebrew printers started publishing traditional Hebrew texts that were welcomed enthusiastically in their communities, where the new technology of printing afforded the possibility of reproducing the dense layered commentaries of Torah scholars.
Eventually, a public appetite for reading fueled the growth of an increasingly secular book trade: calendars, almanacs, and works by classical authors started to appear on bookstore shelves alongside popular religious texts like the
Book of Hours
or the lives of the saints. With a saturated market for traditional religious books, publishers started looking for new profit centers. “Under the mounting flood of new books written for an ever increasing public,” write Febvre and Martin, “the heritage of the Middle Ages lost its hold.”
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By 1500 Gutenberg and his professional descendants had already published an estimated 8 million books; by the end of the sixteenth century the number stood close to 200 million.
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Publishers were turning out a staggering number of volumes in local vernacular languages, starting with translations of classical authors like Virgil, Ovid, Caesar, Suetonius, and Josephus. Popular contemporary authors started to emerge in Italy, France, and Spain. Writers like Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Rabelais started to find a wide
readership, while a new crop of scientific writers like Copernicus started to gain a following in scholarly circles. Books about geography, natural science, and medicine started to circulate. History books were enormously popular. “Gutenberg’s invention produced what we today understand as scholarship,” writes Landow. “No longer primarily occupied by the task of preserving information in the form of fragile manuscripts that degraded with frequent use, scholars, working with books, developed new conceptions of scholarship, originality, and authorial property.”
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Whereas once the whole business of manuscript production had involved an intimate, largely anonymous collaboration among countless scribes, the press would introduce a new fixity, both to the text and to the concept of the author.
One popular travel book captured the reading public’s fancy: Christopher Columbus’s description of his voyage to America (published simultaneously in Barcelona, Paris, Rome, and Basel). By sixteenth-century standards it was a runaway best-seller. Yet lest we start to overestimate the impact of the printing press on the daily life of the average European, we should bear in mind that it still took the better part of a hundred years for news of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World to reach most people in Europe beyond a small circle of literate middle- and upper-class readers. For the most part, news still traveled by word of mouth. But that was starting to change.
This was the third great turning of the information explosion. In tribal societies, human cultures had been bound together by unitary knowledge systems in which everyone participated; in the age of city-states and empires, a literate scholarly class had emerged as caretakers of institutional knowledge, while the masses relied on oral traditions, imagery, and socially transmitted knowledge. Oral and literate cultures twirled in separate orbits. This third axial period of information technology would bring those orbits closer together, with occasionally cataclysmic results.
Just as primordial bacteria had walled themselves off from each other to form a new kind of self-directed organism, the new printed book signaled a consolidation of form. Oral traditions existed in a fluid medium, where authorship and provenance were fuzzily delineated. As the printing press took hold, those traditions would find
their way into print and become more fixed in the process—forming nucleated texts with, as it were, thicker cell walls.
Handmade manuscripts had been fluid affairs too, produced by teams of craftspeople working in close collaboration to produce labor-intensive intellectual artifacts. Scholarship took place within tightly confined institutional constraints. Now, the old bonds of collaboration and careful engagement had been sacrificed for the virtues of speed, lateralization, and efficiency, and soon scholars would find new ways of communicating with others across institutional barriers.
The new fixity of texts not only led to emerging forms of scholarship but also had both a galvanizing effect on hierarchical institutions—which drew great strength and power from the new invention—and a disruptive effect, as a newfound ease of communication allowed new kinds of public social networks to emerge. Brian Stock has written of how the spread of documents and literacy led to the formation of “textual communities” that coalesced around particular documents, especially religious and political movements that challenged the established organizational hierarchies. Without the printing press, Martin Luther could never have published his 95 theses, or Thomas Jefferson circulated the Declaration of Independence.
The text became a shared object, a replicable unit of information that could move freely through the social body of the literate populace. Textual communities flourished in an era of newly fixed documents, in which meaning was no longer interpreted through a scholastic elite possessed of secret knowledge but freely disseminated to anyone who could read. Movable type granted the text an authority that had previously belonged solely to the church or the monarchy. The coming centuries would witness a series of bloody struggles by which competing social groups tried to claim that authority for themselves.
In fifteenth-century Germany, as printers started turning out mass quantities of Bibles and works by classical authors, they also started producing pamphlets, handbills, posters, and broadsheets (the for
bears of the modern newspaper). Europe was entering a new era of mass communication, fueled by a disruptive information technology whose effects no one could possibly have foreseen. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther catalyzed the revolution of mass literacy when he nailed his 95 theses on the door of the Augustinian chapel in Wittenberg.
Without the printing press, there likely would have been no Protestant movement. The ease of printing and speed of communication allowed the written word to circulate freely outside the traditional institutional control valves of the church. Before the advent of the printing press, Rome could quash heretics at will; now the “heretics” had a powerful technology at their disposal. Hurriedly printed posters like Luther’s soon became the core communications vehicle for the reformist movements fomenting across Europe. Whenever reformists wanted to organize a public meeting, they would draw up a poster, have it printed, and tack it up all over town. The networked communications platform of the posted broadsheet would forever destabilize the old hierarchy of the Roman Church.
“Lutheranism was from the first the child of the printed book,” writes historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, “and through this vehicle Luther was able to make exact, standardized and ineradicable impressions on the minds of Europe.”
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Luther hailed printing as “God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.”
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If Christianity is the religion of the book, Protestantism is the denomination of the press.
Protestantism represented more than just a doctrinal departure; it signaled a psychic rift between two very different ways of understanding the world. As Leonard Shlain puts it, “Luther repudiated the colorful ritual of mass, rich with icons. The nexus of the Reformation was the rekindling of the age-old conflict between written words and images.”
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The technology of movable type privileges the written word over the image, elevates left brain over right. Lutheranism represented a cognitive schism as much as a religious one. And while the social and political causes of the Reformation are too complex to catalog in full here, the printing press played a central role in triggering a series of bloody convulsions that would sweep the European continent.
In our modern literate culture, we tend to view the printing press as a force of liberation and an unqualified historical good, the technological wellspring of modern culture. At the time, however, the abrupt introduction of the new technology wreaked a series of calamitous social disruptions. The popular heroic image of Luther nail-ing his theses to the wall tends to divert our attention from the brutal truth of the Reformation. The Roman Church made every effort to suppress the new polemic literature. The church issued a Papal Bull against Luther’s work (which Luther promptly set aflame in protest). When Luther’s work started attracting a following in Paris, the church issued another bull forbidding printers from publishing not only Luther but any work not bearing the Church-sanctioned imprimatur of the University of Paris. In the wake of the papal ban, a black market soon sprang up as foreign printers recognized the opportunity to supply Parisian readers hungry for forbidden works. In an effort to stanch the flow of radical and potentially destabilizing books, the king of France issued an edict banning the import of all foreign books. Printers freely ignored the law. Meanwhile, sales of thoughtful writers like Erasmus began to decline in favor of the strident populism of Luther and his ilk. “As Luther’s message caught on,” writes Shlain, “the illiterate masses nonetheless revolted against the image-centric Church artifacts: smashing statues, slashing paintings, overturning altars. They built new Protestant churches with plain white walls, no images or stained glass—not even a crucifix. These were strictly left-brained affairs dedicated to interpreting the Word—not the Image—of God.”
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In Germany, Luther inaugurated a stream of religious polemics that took on increasingly poisonous tones. Popular pamphlets with titles like “Pope Donkey” and “Cow Monk” painted vicious satires of the Roman clergy, inciting the lay population to acts of horrific brutality. During the battles of the Reformation, Europe descended into a period of atrocities in which opposing bands of Protestants and Catholics literally gutted each other in the streets. In Holland, when Dutch Calvinists invoked Protestant doctrine as their basis for over-throwing the Spanish Catholic government, the struggle boiled over into a frenzy of brutality. According to writer John Lothrop Motley:
On more than one occasion, men were seen assisting to hang with their own hands and in cold blood their own brothers, who had been taken prisoners in the enemy’s ranks. When the captives were too many to be hanged, they were tied back to back, two and two, and thus hurled into the sea.… On one occasion, a surgeon at Veer cut the heart from a Spanish prisoner, nailed it on a vessel’s prow, and invited the townsmen to come and fasten their teeth in it, which many did with savage satisfaction.
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Wherever the Protestant message spread, powered by the new technology of printing, violent upheavals ensued. The century after Gutenberg witnessed a series of violent upheavals that raged across the continent. Peasants embraced the newly translated vernacular Bibles with a revolutionary fervor. Across Germany tens of thousands of peasants refused to pay taxes. Peasant wars broke out, leaving over 100,000 dead. Of course, much of the violence was orchestrated by Catholics as well, inspired by their own understanding of a theology that is, at least in some sense, a “product” of the book. “Despite having recently read the New Testament for the first time,” writes Shlain, “many people on both sides behaved in a manner antithetical to the spirit of the Gospels.”
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