The Printing Revolution in Modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein (3.5)
While I found quite a few interesting points made in this
book, it was quite difficult to read. As one should expect from an expert on
books and printing, every word and sentence was pithy and meaningful, thus I
lost a lot of comprehension if I started to skim. This is an abridged version
of Ms. Eisenstein’s more detailed research on how printing affected life in the
15th century. After summarizing the initial changes, and introducing
the establishment of printing shops, she discusses printing effects on three
major cultural movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of
modern science. I found the most interesting points to be the simple ones: the
effect on map making; the impact of the uniformity of punctuation, numbering of
pages, etc.; the importance of annotation and cross-referencing on future
authors; the increase in silent reading; and the enabling of a power to expand
to an audience wider than the clergy. She emphasizes the importance of printing
in that it ‘arrested, then reversed the process of loss, corruption and
erosion’ in the previous forms of documentation. The first edition of this book
was printed in 1984. It would be interesting to see a companion book comparing
the printing revolution to some of our newer communication revolutions. The
Afterword included in the second edition is quite defensive. You can tell that
Ms. Eisenstein has spent many years defending her thesis from those wanted to
make additional marks in printing history.
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