Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
* Book: Elizabeth Eisenstein. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
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Discussion
Venkatesh Rao:
"The book clearly draws out the difference between the technology of the printing press, and the protocols of print culture that took root in the abstract soil it created. The emergent European effects of these protocols — the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment — soon reshaped the entire world.
Based on Eisenstein’s model, the impact of the Gutenberg press can be separated into two components.
First, we have the direct impact, in the form of the emergence of a small, specialized industry (with associated trades and crafts) to build printing presses and keep them supplied with consumables such as lead, ink and paper.
Second, we have the much larger space of print-based protocols that reshaped the rest of society according to the logic of print (what McLuhan called the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” a rather cosmopolitical name; Eisenstein’s book is a more scholarly update to McLuhan’s book). For instance, extensive scholarly travel between sites of manuscript preservation (often monasteries) gave way to a culture of larger personal and institutional libraries and extensive correspondence — the so-called “Republic of Letters” corner of the larger cosmopolis of print. Antiquities-style manuscript trading and scribal copying protocols gave way to distribution and book stocking/selling protocols.
At a larger scale of emergence, we got the awkwardly chimerical constitutive notion of a nation-state, the nation bit being tied to literal soil, in the sons-of-soil (or autochthonous) sense, and the state bit being tied to the more conceptual soil of print culture (in a mode that was made explicit in Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities bound together by printed artifacts like newspapers). Whether through scriptures or constitutions, the post-Westphalian political landscape was populated by entities defined by the creative tension between soil and type. From this tension, early-modern Europe emerged as the core of the cosmopolis of print by 1700.
We can understand the historical process of getting there as normalization through protocolization."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/welcome-to-the-cosmopolis)