The cultural impact of Gutenberg’s printing press
Nicholas Dutfield
Johannes Gutenberg’s 1450 invention of the first commercially viable movable type printer in Mainz had indisputably profound effects on literature and writing, and these are most obviously seen through the physical changes to the book, elaborated throughout this essay. However, it is naïve to assume that the changes wrought by the printing press on the book were only superficial, rather than profound transformations of the purpose of the word itself. Gutenberg’s printer set off a chain reaction that pushed European society into reassessing the value of literature, with the printed word having acute and far-reaching influence through the diffusing of political and religious information to the masses. In so doing, it evolved writing into something no longer just words on parchment programmed to convey an immutable ideology to the society’s elites. Writing and reading was becoming a universally accessible and interactive spiritual exercise in which ideas could be analysed and critiqued through the personalization of the word; and the modern novel was just one of its offspring. Beyond this, nothing was out of bounds for the new text, and this is turn had profound effects on European society. First, the potential for the printed word to influence was swiftly obse rved. Gutenberg’s first print run of the Bible in Latin in 1455, taking three years to print 200 copies, 1 was a miraculously fast achievement for its time. However, after his death in 1468, the movable type technology truly began to migrate across the continent. William Caxton was prompted to set up his own press in Westminster in 1476, publishing The Canterbury Tales , as well as 100 other works, including chivalric romances, classical works, and English and Roman histories. Other German printers travelled to Venice, where they could sell their printed texts to ship captains, creating the first mass-distribution mechanism. These ships left carrying religious texts, but also news from around the world. Printers in Venice sold news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships landed in ports, local printers could copy these pamphlets and hand them to riders, who would transport them to dozens of towns. Locals would gather in taverns to hear the latest news, ranging from low-level scandals to war reports, radically normalizing – and to some extent democratizing – the consumption of news; not excluded from the illiterate. As Ada Palmer asserts, ‘ it made it normal to go check the news everyday ’ . 2 This was amplified by Martin Luther ’s Flugschriften pamphlet, using the Wittenberg press to articulate his theological fight with the papacy with a short, focused, printed text that could quickly captivate and motivate its reader. The demand for books expanded further yet as religious debate engaged the interest of a new, literate, non-clerical audience. In a decade, Wittenberg was transformed from a small publishing outpost to a pillar of the print industry. Its success in this extraordinary business operation made possible the exposition of Luther’s teachings to a hugely enlarged public, fundamentally reshaping the world of literature (in the broadest sense), showing its potential as an immeasurable force for change for the lives of millions. Over the next half century Gutenberg’s technology had spread across Europe. Throughout the 15 th century, 20 million books were made in Europe, but in the 16 th century, this skyrocketed to 200
1 Roos (2019). 2 Quoted in ibid.
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