The invention of the printing press and the spread of ideas

The invention of movable-type printing by Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1400–1468) of Mainz in the years around 1450 was one of the foundational events of the early modern period. The printing press made possible the mass production of books at a cost that ordinary readers could afford; it created a new industry that was, in its organisation and scale, the first modern industry; and it shaped every subsequent European attempt to spread information, to coordinate action, or to win the argument for a reform. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) and Andrew Pettegree’s The Book in the Renaissance (2010) are the basic studies of the long-term revolution; Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’Apparition du livre (1958; English trans. The Coming of the Book, 1976) is the basic study of the industry itself.

Before Gutenberg: the medieval book

The book of the European Middle Ages was, in its working form, the manuscript codex of the scriptorium. The great monastic scriptoria of the Île-de-France, the Benedictine tradition, the Cistercian tradition, and the mendicant tradition had, in the long centuries between the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the long twelfth century, preserved the auctoritates of the classical past, the Christian tradition, and the working medical, legal, and grammatical inheritance of the Latin West. The scriptoria of Saint-Denis, Cluny, Monte Cassino, Corbie, Tegernsee, Reichenau, Canterbury, Wearmouth–Jarrow, and York were the most productive of the early medieval period; the great bibliotheca of the cathedral of York of c. 790, the scriptorium of the Carolingian court at Aachen, and the scriptorium of the Ottonian court at Quedlinburg were the working centres of the auctoritates of the Carolingian and Ottonian Renaissance of the long ninth and long tenth centuries.

The book of the medieval scriptorium was, on any reckoning, expensive. The Codex Amiatinus of the Abbey of Wearmouth–Jarrow (c. 700) — a complete Vulgate Bible — took the scriptorium of the abbey several years to produce, with a team of scribes working in shifts. A working copy of the Pandectae of Justinian at the Studium of Bologna in the long twelfth century took the scriptorium of Bologna several years to produce; a working copy of the Biblia Vulgata at the Studium of Paris in c. 1200 was a working codex of the studium of the medieval Latin West. The economic effect of the scriptorium was, on any reckoning, that the working book of the medieval Latin West was a luxury of a small elite: in the long thirteenth century, perhaps one in a thousand Europeans could read with any fluency, and the working price of a Biblia Vulgata was the working price of a working studium of a small monastic scriptorium of a small elite of the medieval Latin West.

Gutenberg and the Mainz workshop

The invention of the movable-type printing press was the work of Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1400–1468), a goldsmith and merchant of Mainz in the Holy Roman Empire. Gutenberg had, in his long apprenticeship of the 1420s and 1430s, been a working goldsmith of the regime of the Archbishops of Mainz; in 1450, with the financial backing of the merchant Johann Fust, he set up a printing workshop in Mainz. The first substantial book to come off the press was the Gutenberg Bible (the 42-line Bible, the B-42), printed in 1455 in an edition of approximately 180 copies — 135 on paper, 45 on vellum — of which some 49 survive.

Gutenberg’s invention had three main components: a new alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that was hard enough to print thousands of copies without wearing out; a new oil-based ink that was suitable for printing on paper; and a new press, adapted from the wine press, that could apply even pressure to the paper. The combination of these innovations made it possible to produce books in large quantities at a cost that no previous technology had achieved. The Gutenberg Bible of 1455 was printed at a price of roughly three years’ wages for a skilled craftsman; a hand-copied Bible of the early fifteenth century had cost the price of a small house. The long-term effect on the working studium of the clericus of the medieval Latin West was, on any reckoning, the working studium of a small elite transformed into the working studium of the regime of a literate urban middle class.

The spread of the presses

The new technology spread rapidly through the cities of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. By 1470 there were presses in Mainz, Strasbourg, Cologne, Basel, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Lübeck, Rome, Venice, Milan, Florence, Paris, Lyon, Burgos, Valencia, and Seville. By 1500 there were presses in some 250 European cities; the working estimate of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin is that some 20 million books were printed in the long fifteenth century. The first great printing centres were Venice (with the Aldine Press of Aldus Manutius, founded 1494, and the press of Nicolas Jenson before it, from 1470), Paris (with the Estienne Press of the Estienne family from 1502, and the Kerver Press before it, from 1497), Antwerp (with the Plantin Press of Christophe Plantin, founded 1555), Basel (with the Froben Press of Johann Froben from 1491), Lyon (with the press of Barthélemy Buyer from 1473), Cologne (with the Quentell Press of Heinrich Quentell from 1479), and Nuremberg (with the Koberger Press of Anton Koberger from 1473, the largest of the German presses of the period, with some 24 presses in operation at the height of its activity in the 1490s and 1500s).

The industry was, in its working form, the first modern industry. The major printing houses of the period were large and sophisticated enterprises, with extensive networks of agents, booksellers, and correspondents. The Aldine Press of Venice employed some 50 workers at its peak and maintained agents in every major European capital; the Plantin Press of Antwerp, founded in 1555, employed some 160 workers at its peak and was, in the long sixteenth century, the most international of the European presses, with branches in Paris, Frankfurt, and Leiden. The press made possible, in the long 1460s and 1470s, the working production of the auctoritates of the classical past: the editio princeps of Cicero’s De oratore was printed at Subiaco in 1465 by Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz; the editio princeps of Caesar’s De bello Gallico was printed in Rome in 1469; the editio princeps of Cicero’s Epistolae ad Familiares was printed in Rome in 1467; the editio princeps of Cicero’s De officiis was printed in Mainz in 1465; the editio princeps of Aristotle’s Ethica was printed in Padua in 1474. By 1500 almost every classical author of the Latin West had been printed in at least one editio princeps.

The Aldine Press and the new book trade

The Aldine Press of Aldus Manutius (1449–1515) was, in its working form, the most consequential of the early modern printing houses. Manutius had studied Greek at Ferrara under Guarino da Verona and had, in 1490, set up a press at Venice in partnership with Andrea Torresani and Pietro Barbaro. The Aldine editions of Aristotle (the editio Aldina of the opera omnia, in five volumes, 1495–1498), Aristophanes (1498), Thucydides (1502), Herodotus (1502), Sophocles (1502), Euripides (1503), Demosthenes (1504), and the editio Aldina of the Greek New Testament (1518) set the standard for the next two centuries of the European book trade. The Aldine anchor and dolphin device was, for a generation of humanist readers, the mark of a reliable text.

Manutius was, in his long-term effect on the European book trade, the founder of the modern octavo (the small, portable, working book of the humanist reader), the founder of the italic type (designed by Francesco Griffo of Bologna in 1501 for the editio Aldina of Virgil), and the founder of the working book series (the libri in forma of the working clericus of the regime of the repubblica of the comune of the Doge of Venice). The italic type of the editio Aldina of Virgil of 1501 became the standard italic of the European book trade, and the octavo format of the Aldine school editions became the standard format of the humanist school itself.

Print, Reformation, and science

The press was the most consequential single factor in the success of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (Wittenberg, 1517), the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace (1518), the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), the Freedom of a Christian (1520), and the September Bible of 1522 (the Lutherbibel) were printed in tens of thousands of copies and circulated in every city of the Holy Roman Empire, France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and the Italian peninsula. Erasmus’s Adagia (1500, expanded 1508), the Novum Instrumentum of 1516, and the Praise of Folly of 1511 were printed in dozens of editions, in every European language, in the long 1510s and 1520s. The press was, in its working form, the working medium of the long Reformation of the regime of the repubblica of the comune of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Radical Reformation churches of the European studium of the early modern period.

The press was, in the same way, the working medium of the Scientific Revolution. The De revolutionibus of Nicolaus Copernicus (Nuremberg, 1543) was printed by Johann Petreius of Nuremberg in an edition of some 400 copies; the De fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (Basel, 1543) was printed by Johann Oporinus of Basel; the Discorsi of Galileo Galilei (Leiden, 1638) was printed by Louis Elzevir of Leiden; the Principia mathematica of Isaac Newton (London, 1687) was printed by Joseph Streater for the Royal Society. The press was, in its long-term effect, the working medium of the new science of the long seventeenth century, the working medium of the regime of the repubblica of the comune of the Royal Society of London, the Académie des Sciences of Paris, and the Accademia del Cimento of Florence.