To Copy, To Impress, To Distribute: The Start of European Printing (original) (raw)
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Impressum: The History of Ideas in the European Invention of Printing.t description
This is my current statement of my very long-term research project. It will be a book exploring the history of the philosophical ideas that influenced the earliest development of text and image printing in Europe c. 1370-1440. This dynamo of change, including typography and engraving, which is collectively called "printing"-sometimes called the first industrial complex-is conventionally said to have arisen rather abruptly around 1445 and then rapidly spread down the Rhine and through Europe, with little constraint and with no evident conceptual framework from the previous phase of European culture. Early printing has long been studied from the points of view of history of technology, socio-cultural history, and economic history. But an approach through the history of ideas and intellectual history has not been attempted, with a couple of thin exceptions, and so will be almost completely new in the field. Yet we know that ideas, including abstract concepts, are highly dynamic, readily spreading great influence. My researches apply this principle to the period before the deployment of print through the historiographic methods of the history of ideas and intellectual history applied to very late Medieval and very early Renaissance concepts of nature and humankind. Impressum is not a history of the book or printing history or history of technology project; rather, it is an unconventional study of a fresh area in intellectual history and the history of philosophy that can extend and deepen book history, art history, Western cultural history, and the history of communication. The intellectual history questions about the inception of typography include: what conceptions contributed to make the attraction of replicative techniques so powerful in this period as to motivate the invention of new media? What ideas allowed for the experiments in craft technique that initiated the massive infusion of texts and images in Western culture beginning c. 1450? To address these questions, I examine the changes in several central philosophical ideas in this period prior to the first printed texts and how these ideas might have been taken up by the new technology. It is unlikely that many new fragments of early printing or pieces of printing equipment will be discovered, but philosophy and theology in the period is so massively documented that it can be a rich field for study of the invention of printing. Therefore I suggest that we approach this question of "pre-print" by observing the successive and branching ideas in late scholasticism that constellated in the invention and deployment of replicative technologies. Printing involved impress of the original of text, image, and data into copies by a cluster of technologies that ultimately created a system of storage, diffusion, and retrieval. Putting part of the origin of the age of printed communication into the context of philosophical ideas will show that at its start it involved, on the part of the person or persons who invented the craft and on the part of those who developed and used it, general moral and philosophical concepts.
Contributions to the History of Concepts, 2020
The methods of intellectual history have not yet been applied to studying the invention of technology for printing texts and images ca. 1375–ca.1450. One of the several conceptual developments in this period reflecting the possibility of mechanical replication is a view of the relationship of eternity to durational time based on Gregory of Nyssa’s philosophy of time and William of Ockham’s. Th e article considers how changes in these ideas helped enable the conceptual possibilities of the dissemination of ideas. It describes a direct connection of human perceptual knowledge to divine knowledge that enhanced the authority of printed production to transfer and reproduce the true and the good.
2021
Print, in the early modern period, could make or break power. This volume addresses one of the most urgent and topical questions in early modern history: how did European authorities use a new medium with such tremendous potential? The eighteen contributors develop new perspectives on the relationship between the rise of print and the changing relationships between subjects and rulers by analysing print’s role in early modern bureaucracy, the techniques of printed propaganda, genres, and strategies of state communication. While print is often still thought of as an emancipating and disruptive force of change in early modern societies, the resulting picture shows how instrumental print was in strengthening existing power structures. Contributors: Renaud Adam, Martin Christ, Jamie Cumby, Arthur der Weduwen, Nora Epstein, Andreas Golob, Helmer Helmers, Jan Hillgärtner, Rindert Jagersma, Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, Nina Lamal, Margaret Meserve, Rachel Midura, Gautier Mingous, Ernesto E. Oyarbide Magaña, Caren Reimann, Chelsea Reutchke, Celyn David Richards, Paolo Sachet, Forrest Strickland, and Ramon Voges.
Research Project “Communities of Print in Early Modern Europe”
Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art
The paper discusses the international multidisciplinary research project "Communities of Print: Using Books in Early Modern Europe", launched by Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) in 2016. The project united the leading scholars specialising in art history, early modern history and literary studies, as well as librarians and archivists. The project "Communities of Print" explores early modern books not just as a medium for distributing information, but as material objects of Renaissance visual culture and art. It focuses on the visual and social impact of the books on various communities and examines their usage in communal settings. The paper also briefly outlines the presentations made at the first conference organised within the project in June 2016 in Manchester. They concerned such topics as the public availability of monastic and private libraries in early modern culture, book trading networks in Europe, the attribution of ownership marks and annotations, usage of medieval manuscripts and their role in early modern book collections, reading practices and access to printed material, and the evolution of anti-Catholic imagery in the early modern Protestant print. Finally, the paper observes some implications of the project, which stem from the close cooperation of researchers of art, history, literature and practitioners-librarians and archivists,-such as refining the knowledge and understanding of early modern books as the objects of visual culture.
* The title of this paper was chosen as a direct reaction to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s influential work in book history entitled, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450 - 1800, which aided in the formation of the dominant view that paper found its stride after the invention of moveable type in early modern Europe. This view falls short in giving historical agency to paper itself as an important medium in cultural change far before Gutenberg’s invention.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2007
Avicenna, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. All these are indeed examined in the present book, but Knuuttila also gives plenty of space to the ancient medical tradition, especially Galen, and to a whole range of church fathers (such as Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cassian, Gregory the Great) and late-twelfth-and early-thirteenth-century thinkers (Peter of Poitiers, Peter of Capua, Stephen Langton) whom the more analytically minded historians have tended to ignore. The outcome of Knuuttila's examination shows very clearly that he is right to draw such writers fully into the ambit of the history of philosophy: not only would the historical development of medieval treatments of emotion be obscure without considering, for instance, the role of Gregory the Great, but some of the minor early Scholastics are shown to have treated the subject with great subtlety and originality. When he sets out early Christian and medieval views of the emotions, Knuuttila goes quite fully into the issues of Christian doctrine and moral teaching with which they were connected. And, although where he finds it necessary-as in his treatment of the logic of the will and emotions in the twelfth century-Knuuttila will use a minimal amount of symbolism, in general he avoids imposing his own terminology and sticks quite closely to the lines of the ancient and medieval authors' arguments, more so than in his earlier work on modality, although that, too, pays close respect to the texts. This approach is very different from what many historians of medieval philosophy in philosophy departments in the United States would favor, but is it less philosophical? Rather, Knuuttila has accommodated himself to a subject that is less amenable than modal logic to being reformulated in contemporary terms. He retains all his accustomed perceptiveness and precision, but he has adapted himself to the demands of his theme, and for the careful reader he provides his own philosophical commentary, more than ever, through hints, suggestions, and understatement.