To what extent did the printing press facilitate change?

Supporting Question 4

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Source A: Elizabeth Eisenstein, description of how the printing press allowed for the preservation of historical works, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (excerpts), 2012

Permanence [of the printing press] introduced a new form of progressive change. The preservation of the old, in brief, was a prerequisite for a tradition of the new.

The advancement of learning had taken the form of a search for lost wisdom in the age of scribes. This search was rapidly propelled after printing. Ancient maps, charts, and texts once arranged and dated, however, turned out to be dated in more ways than one. Map publishers turned out genuinely new and improved editions of atlases and star maps, which showed that modern navigators and star gazers knew more things about the heavens and earth than did ancient sages. “The simple sailors of today,” wrote Jacques Cartier in his Brief Narration of 1545, “have learned the opposite of the philosophers by true experience.” New, improved editions of ancient texts also began to accumulate, uncovering more schools of ancient philosophy than had been dreamed of before. Scattered attacks on one authority by those who favored another provided ammunition for a wholesale assault on all received opinion.

Incompatible portions of inherited traditions could be sloughed off, partly because the tasks of preservation had become less urgent. Copying, memorizing, and transmitting absorbed fewer energies. Useful reference books were no longer blotted out or blurred with the passage of time. Cadence and rhyme, images and symbols ceased to fulfill their traditional function of preserving the collective memory. Once technical information could be conveyed directly by unambiguous numbers, diagrams, and maps, the esthetic experience became increasingly autonomous. Although books on the memory arts multiplied after printing, the need to rely on these arts decreased. Scribal systems, elaborated in print, ultimately petrified and are only now being reassembled, like fossil remains, by modern research.…

Nevertheless, scribal veneration for ancient learning lingered on long after the conditions that had fostered it had gone. Among Rosicrucians and Freemasons, for example, the belief persisted that the “new philosophy” was in fact very old. Descartes and Newton had merely retrieved the same magical key to nature’s secrets that had once been known to ancient pyramid builders but was later withheld from the laity or deliberately obscured by a deceitful priesthood.

Supporting Question 4

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Source B: John Man, description of how the printing press fueled the Protestant Reformation, Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words (excerpts), 2002

As Rome prepared its heavy artillery, Luther fired off more salvos, with the help of the press. His sermons, tracts and polemics, all in German the better to appeal to his audience, streamed from presses by the hundreds of thousands across the land, many with his portrait.…He became the focus of a propaganda war of which Mainz in 1460–62 had been a tiny precedent, and a publishing phenomenon, unrivalled anywhere, ever….According to one estimate, a third of all books printed in Germany between 1518 and 1525 were by him. Pause to consider that figure. Of course, printing was in its infancy, but Germany at the time was turning out about a million books a year, of which a third—300,000—were by Luther. No comparison with the modern world stands up.…

Of his thunderous outpourings, perhaps the most powerful was his Address to the Christian nobility of the German Nation, a sort of Reformation manifesto. His conclusion, in German of course, was virtually a call to arms. Every Christian leader had a duty to reform the Church.…

In three weeks it sold 4,000 copies—in Wittenberg alone, where the printers became rich. In the next two years it went through thirteen editions, with pirated versions appearing in Leipzig, Strasbourg and Basel. German princes heard and took note.

Supporting Question 4

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Source C: Jeremiah Dittmar, article about the economic shifts that resulted from the printing press, “Information Technology and Economic Change” (excerpts), 2011

Between 1500 and 1600, European cities where printing presses were established in the 1400s grew 60% faster than otherwise similar cities. Cities that adopted printing in the 1400s had no prior advantage, and the association between adoption and subsequent growth was not due to printers choosing auspicious locations….

The printing press fostered knowledge and skills that were valuable in commerce. Print media played a key role in the development of numeracy, the emergence of business education, and the adoption of innovations in bookkeeping and accounting. With access to cheap waterborne transport, port cities were positioned to profit from innovations in commercial practice….

Among economic historians, there is some difference of opinion about the extent to which the movable type printing press was a revolutionary innovation. Mokyr (2005) notes that innovation depends on the cost of accessing existing knowledge, and that the printing press was one of the most important access cost– reducing inventions in history. Jones (1981) also argues that “western progress owed much to the superior means of storing and disseminating information.” Baten and van Zanden (2008) find a significant association between simulated national-level wages and observed differences in aggregate book production in European history. However, Clark (2001) finds no evidence of aggregate productivity growth associated with the diffusion of movable type printing. Mokyr (2005) similarly argues that the aggregate effects were small.

Social historians have hailed the movable type printing press as a revolutionary innovation. Braudel (1979a) identifies printing as one of three great technological revolutions observed 1400– 1800 (alongside advances in artillery and navigation). Gilmore (1952) states that printing drove “the most radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life in the history of western civilization.” Eisenstein (1979) argues that printing created revolutionary new possibilities for “combinatory intellectual activity.” Roberts (1996) suggests the outcome was one “dwarfing in scale anything which had occurred since the invention of writing.”

Historically, urban death rates exceeded urban birth rates and migration drove city growth. Cities drew migrants to the extent that they offered relatively high wages, cultural amenities, and economic opportunities. In the pre-industrial era, commerce was a more important source of urban wealth and income than tradable industrial production. As a result, migration and city growth were typically contingent on commercial success.

Print media played a key role in the acquisition and development of skills that were valuable to merchants. The ability to calculate interest rates, profit shares, and exchange rates was associated with high returns for merchants engaged in large scale and long-distance trade. Starting in the 1480s, European presses produced a stream of “commercial arithmetics.” Commercial arithmetics were the first printed mathematics textbooks and were designed for students preparing for careers in business. They transmitted commercial know-how and quantitative skills by working students through problems concerned with determining payments for goods, currency conversions, interest payments, and profit shares….

The availability of inexpensive texts was a key prerequisite for the spread of literacy in Renaissance Europe (Grendler 1990). School books generated high returns for Renaissance printers (Bolgar 1962; Nicholas 2003; Fussel 2005). Schooling in languages became part of a progression in which pupils went from “arts to marts.” Cities began to run schools for children who were not going to learn Latin—using printed grammar school texts. In the fifteenth century, it became expected that the children of the bourgeoisie would attend school (Bolgar 1962). But print media also promoted opportunities for the less privileged to obtain education and raise their incomes. Brady (2009) observes that no document better captures the new opportunities than Thomas Platter’s (1499–1582) autobiography (Platter1839). After wandering penniless across Europe, Platter began his formal schooling at age 18. Having learned Latin, Platter took a job as a rope maker in Zurich to support his book-buying and reading habit, taught himself Hebrew and Greek, and rose to become a wealthy school master, professor, and printer.

Jeremiah Dittmar, “Information Technology and Economic Change,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2011) 126 (3):1133-1172 by permission of Oxford University Press.

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