Video: Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West
In this lecture from the Library of Congress, Elizabeth Eisenstein discusses five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers.
Long before modern opinion pieces fretted over the internet’s impact on society, another revolution in communication caused its own fair share of controversy. It even helped start a few major wars. The printing press, though invented much earlier in China, made its debut in Europe circa 1440. Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, created a machine that could print individual letters quickly and accurately. It dramatically reduced the time and effort needed to produce books, expanding literacy and access to new ideas like no other invention before it.
From the perspective of modern society, which was in many ways built by the printing press, this change seems like a positive one. Billions of people now live in a reality saturated with words, from books to street signs to advertisements. But just a few hundred years ago, when the majority of people were illiterate, the printing press was viewed with suspicion by many. The press represented a threat to the established order—printed materials fueled revolutions like the Protestant Reformation, American Independence, and French Revolution. These movements, while fought for noble causes, also led to the death of millions.
In this lecture from the Library of Congress, Elizabeth Eisenstein “discusses five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers, based on her new book, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending.“
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