Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The printing revolution and time-space compression in early
modern Europe
Intimately associated with the time-space compression of early modernity—
indeed, inseparable from it—was the invention and popularization of print-
ing. Few innovations have allowed people to transcend space, to experience it
in such a novel way, as printing. Of course, Europeans were acquainted with
printed textiles, money, and playing cards long before they encountered
printed topics, and there was an important history of printing before Guten-
berg. Paper was imported into Europe by Arab merchants in Spain during the
tenth century, who in turn acquired it from China in the eighth. From Spain,
paper spread to Sicily and Italy in the eleventh, and to France in the twelfth
(Manchester 1992). The
first known European paper mill opened in 1276. This
innovation was important to the generation of secular sites of knowledge pro-
duction such as early universities, which arose by the thirteenth century, many
of them linked to the emerging urban, literate, relatively secular bourgeoisie.
By the
fi
fifteenth century, calendars were printed on sheets of paper, which
described the relative length of the day in each month, zodiacal signs, or the
right time for surgeons to let blood or lance boils. The
fi
first great publishing
house was that of Venetian scholar Aldus Manutius and the Aldine Press,
founded in 1450, the year Gutenberg's Bible appeared. Within a generation,
printing houses were established in cities from London to Budapest.
Printing allowed large quantities of materials to be produced cheaply and
distributed quickly, and the e
fi
ects of this revolution, in conjunction with
the numerous other massive changes criss-crossing the face of Europe, were
monumental. Eisenstein (1979) demonstrated in detail the power of printing
in di
ff
using knowledge and mass literacy, facilitating the Italian Renaissance,
the Protestant Reformation, European expansionism, and the rise of modern
capitalism and science. The new communications environment of printing
accelerated the decline of the feudal order, leading a new sense of time and
space to displace the older, medieval one. Literacy and printing destabilized
traditional society by bringing adults—especially males, for female literacy
lagged far behind—within reach of texts. Printing was the
ff
first major step in
the mechanization of communication, and accelerated the di
fi
usion of infor-
mation by packaging it conveniently, democratizing topics in much the same
manner that cheap clocks and maps democratized time and space, respect-
ively, forging pathways for the literate by widening their access to people,
places and events far removed from them historically or geographically.
Similarly, printing undermined the centrality of the clergy in the production
of knowledge, and unlike hand-written monastic copies, printed topics gave
their audiences identical copies to read, experience and discuss, and made
censorship more di
ff
cult as well. Printing helped to break the monopoly of
learning held by monasteries and universities and fomented the growth of a
lay intelligentsia. The technology therefore did much to enlarge the domain
of the “political” (Giddens 1987). The spread of Humanism, for example,
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