Gutenberg’s printing press
million; 3 the prices of books fell by two-thirds, 4 and this would contribute to a surge in literacy rates. From 1450 to 1550, adult literacy rates in Germany and Britain climbed from seven percent to around sixteen, and over the forthcoming century it tripled. 5 Across this period, books fundamentally transformed both the purpose of writing and the experience of reading, doing so in both literal and conceptual senses. As Gutenberg himself said, ‘it is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams . . . It shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light . . . to shine amongst men’. The physical differences between text before and after movable type were indeed significant, but these were intertwined with profound implications for the purpose of literature, as argued by Walter Ong. In preprint culture manuscript books had no title pages; visually organized labels were an invention that came with print, and preprint manuscripts were catalogued by their first words, typically a conversation-like address to the reader. They similarly did not end with an abrupt tagline, but in much the same manner as they were introduced, for example, ‘ Here ends The Parliament of Fowls held on St. Valentine’s Day, as recounted by Geoffrey Chaucer’ . Surprisingly, this rhetorical introduction would continue in a form into the 19 th century: Pride and Prejudice , for instance, opens with rich introductory observations, ‘Little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood . . . ’ Most significantly, no two copies of the same work matched physically; what gave a work its identity consisted little in how it appeared, but more so what was said when it was read aloud. The practice of silent reading, which only became widespread after print, essentially separated the text from the writer, who no longer possessed a monopoly over in terpretation. Text wasn’t merely an utterance, but an object, like other tangible objects. As Ong affirms, post-Gutenberg printed texts contained a table of contents, with titles and title pages comparable to that of labels on boxes. Conversely, in manuscr ipt culture, texts acted more as proclamations. Several of Chaucer’s poems conclude with an ‘ envoy ’ , sending off his text to address itself to a speaker. For example, he explains his reasoning for writing The Parliament of Fowls from a dream that had occurred to him after reading about Scipio Africanus Major. In the pre-printing era, the word was bound to its author and the meanings they placed on it. Notions of authorship placed manuscript books therefore close to oral exchange. With printing, the word lost its physicality, and allowed itself to be personalized within the reader. The revolution of religion by text allowed for a revolution of the text itself to take place; dissident ideas could spread quicker, not just among the learned man but the common man, through the use of illustration, a universal mode of communication that transcended literacy. Through the universalization of the word, no longer an exclusivity of the elite, the vernacular claimed victory over the dominance of Latin, which progressively came to be seen among religious works as an outmoded papal imposition, though the use of Latin persisted among intellectuals, including Protestants. Across the 16 th century, 5,474 books were published in Latin, 1,347 in German, 1,046 in Italian, 961 in French, and a further thousand in other languages, including 521 in English 6 . Although Latin continued to dominate the word in discussions among learned men, the common tongue was steadily making texts accessible to any common man who could read, creating an incentive to become literate. Robert
3 Fullerton (1977), 290. 4 Dittmar (2011), 1133. 5 Calder (2015). 6 Pettegree and Hall (2004), 792.
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