Agent of change.

This retroactively intriguing phrase tips Elizabeth E. Eisenstein (hereafter, “EEE”)’s hand at what she will present in her project The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, originally published in 1979: that the development of the printing press produced such wide-ranging disruption across early modern Europe that its closest analogy is not a force pushing in one direction or a phase change but the introduction of a conscious actor capable of initiative, of reaction, of the seizure of opportunities.

It’s a valuable book to understand because it forcefully complicates the folk level conception of the printing press that emerges from a high school history class rushing to get to the colonial period. Summarized:

In medieval Europe, the Catholic Church controlled what everyone thought. Then one day the printing press was invented by Gutenberg. People spread new ideas that challenged the Church’s authority, most especially Bibles printed in the vernacular which led to the rise of Protestantism.

EEE’s motivation for this project- which she says took her fifteen years- was that, amidst elite concerns about the threats of counterculture to a civilization-level consensus [1], “there was not even a small literature available for consultation” (xi, all page references from the 1980 paperback edition that includes original volumes I and II) about the historical case of the printing press. Among her complaints “it is likely to escape the attention of most ancient historians and of many medievalists. Nor does it attract much more notice from scholars who specialize in the periods that post-date its advent” (25). Even Renaissance history is “too narrow” (26).

So she tackled it herself. After an overview, the book focuses on interactions and force-multipliers of the printing press with the intellectual trends of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution; these are set in chronological order, but also in order of increasing impact and more deterministic direction of impact. In particular, while to some degree this is a book of metanalysis, she sees herself as breaking from academic consensus in positioning the printing press as a landmark technology for the advancement of science.

In 2025, it is useful to add more resolution what this transformational technology did, and the ways that a general purpose information technology- particularly one that invites the characterization of an agent- is capable of transforming a civilization.

The basics

We’ll start by confirming some elements of the standard story. Most obviously, the printing press really did staggeringly expand the output of books. One citation indicates a ~342x increase in productivity from printing while still in the 15^th century (46). And, even in early days, there were enough literate people to sustain a vast market for books specifically. Books are not like cars or refrigerators or televisions; it’s perfectly tractable to have dozens or hundreds in the home. And so:

The sheer increase in the quantity of copies in circulation was actually of immense significance. Augmented book production altered patterns of consumption…The literary diet of a given sixteenth-century reader was qualitatively different from that of his fourteenth-century counterpart. His staple diet had been enriched…whether he consulted living authors or dead ones, ‘new’ books or ‘old’ ones. (169)

And as hinted in this excerpt, the first killer app of the printing press was the reassembly of a commonly read corpus of classical knowledge (but note that this is very specifically not the same as the spread of new ideas). Rectors in England, nobles in France, academics in Germany, and merchants in Italy could- literally, I suppose- ‘get on the same page’ with the accumulated knowledge of past eras.

And, yes, EEE recounts a strengthening of study of non-European languages such as Hebrew and Arabic to aid in the project of translating (or retranslating, in the case of Greek) texts (223).

And, maybe most impactfully when we discuss the impact on science, once the printing press birthed a larger number of copies, the probability of a work ‘going extinct’- as the overwhelming majority of classical work did, and another large slice nearly did- decreased literally exponentially. A copying regime requires an unbroken chain of fashion for a work to outrun forces such as fire and rot. Page 209 recounts the precarity of a particular work, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, from “a single manuscript” to “a permanent position within Western culture”. If another century had passed before the invention of print, how many more long-tail works would have been lost?

The print shop

One throughline of the book is a wish to center the print shop itself more fully and explore the impact of the printing press creating such a place. It recombined high achievers from various fields and classes who otherwise would have had no intuitive ties. It is also possible to see the print shops as a third place for the intellectually inclined, even those not in the employment of the press. Some of the book’s most evocative passages come when EEE depicts these print shops, and their proprietors:

Thus it is not uncommon to find former priests among early printers or former abbots serving as editors and correctors. University professors also often served in similar capacities and thus came into closer contact with metal workers and mechanics. Other fruitful forms of collaboration brought astronomers and engravers, physicians and painters together, dissolving older divisions of intellectual labor and encouraging new ways of coordinating the work of brains, eyes and hands. (55-56)

In [the scholar-printer’s] hands the work of editing, translating and textual analysis was removed from cloistered precincts, such as monastic scriptoria, houses of study, college chambers and walled patrician villas. Instead texts were handled in a bustling commercial establishment where robed scholars and merchants worked alongside craftsmen and mechanics. The master-printer’s activities combined forms of labor, which had been divided before and would be divided again, on a different basis, later on. His products introduced new interactions between theory and practice, abstract brainwork and sensory experience, systematic logic and careful observation. (251)

The prospering merchant publisher had to know as much about books and intellectual trends as a cloth merchant did about drygoods and dress fashions; he needed to develop a connoisseur’s expertise about type-styles, book catalogues and library sales. He often found it useful to master many languages, to handle variant texts, to investigate antiquities and old inscriptions along with new maps and calendars. (446)

It is this thrumming milieu that produced “The First American”, Benjamin Franklin [2]. Even Johannes Kepler “spent hours in print shops himself, closely supervising scientific presswork” (18).

The print shop changes the production of books in another way, in EEE’s telling: it turns a print run into a venture. Note, earlier, we referred to a 342x increase in productivity; the decomposition of that is producing 1,025 copies rather than one, but charging three times as much in price (to the author/publisher, it would seem, at least in this particular case) as a human copyist would for the project [3]. Thus we have copying as capitalism, where the initial outlay of cash is an investment intended to generate future profits from sale of consumer goods, rather than spending money to obtain one copy for personal consumption. This is a different world, more open to speculation. And a larger and more speculative market for books meant that books could be published even if they would only appeal to particular market segments. The result was uniquely feminine, or uniquely children’s, literature (including for children of particular age ranges).

Finally, the printer did not need to be passionate about a work or even dedicated to its ideas; there could be parts he could take and leave (or, perhaps, add foonotes). He could approach publication of the ideas in a detached manner (101), which would have a more plausible appeal to intellectual neutrality- and therefore the right to a free press- than would a man who had spent months hand-copying a controversial work, or was choosing to recite controversial ideas aloud.

Not just books

Another of EEE’s interesting throughlines to someone coming across an in-depth study of the printing press is that the breadth of media that could be printed made geographical and scientific knowledge a key beneficiary of printing. For example:

• Maps (including sea charts); maps advanced so much that by 1570 “the ancient maps were set off in a separate section…The limits of ancient knowledge were graphically and textually underlined so that the reader could see ‘how maimed and imperfect’ were ancient world views.” (193)  [4]
• Data tables; “when it came to distributing hundreds of copies of a work containing long lists of numbers, or diagrams, maps and charts…hand-copying was vastly inferior to print.” (461)
• Herbals, and anatomical representations (266-268)
• Diagrams (469) and other images; “It was not the ‘printed word’ but the ‘printed image’ which acted as a ‘savior for Western science’ in George Sarton’s view.” (69)

Such information could be reliably reproduced, with the high fidelity necessary to make them useful at all, by the multimodal nature of print media. The wider availability of these printed materials- and, to be sure, books of pure verbiage- vastly expanded the number of people with access to leading-edge science, no matter in which era it had been produced. A particular beneficiary was astronomy, where hobbyists across western Europe gained access to centuries of humanity’s back catalogue; “the long-term cycles that had to be mastered to achieve successful calendar reform required lining up a series of observations made over the course of hundreds of years” (578). As an illustration,

“the young Copernicus probably found it hard to get a look at a single copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest– even in a corrupted medieval Latin form. Before he died, he had three different editions at hand. As a fourteen-year-old in Copenhagen in 1560, the young Tycho Brahe could purchase all of Ptolemy’s work, including an improved translation of the full Almagest made from the Greek.” (581)

Botany also deserves mention, especially considering the coinciding era of exploration. Plant life in disparate regions of the world could be recorded for solitary thinkers in Europe to review. Note that the fall in price of texts may have been particularly helpful to younger intellectuals, helping them build a base of knowledge earlier in their career. Also note that the spread of Ptolemy’s fundamentally inaccurate book was still important!

Printing also resulted in “books” that were new genres that we do not stop to think about today. Self-improvement guides emerged, including for highly specific skills like “mix paints, bake clay, keep accounts, survey a field” (243). Etiquette manuals were also strong sellers, and their broad dissemination would plausibly have had significant psychological impact, especially considering the game theory of etiquette:

The behavior of boys and girls became subject to rules and regulations which were not really new…but which became much more difficult for parents and teachers to ignore…it is a mistake to assume that the only audience for such books were the children to whom they were directed. Not only tutors but parents who consulted these etiquette books could not help but become more anxious about themselves, and more concerned about controlling the children whom they had in their charge. (430-431)

Printing also allowed for broader dissemination of records. Paying a scribe to make handwritten copies of commodity prices or a census of land records would have been absurdly expensive compared to their utility, but a plausible application of the press.

The emergence of literary culture

EEE explores the shift between oral culture and print culture. The key point here is that talking about the development of the printing press as a machine obscures larger cultural transformations- ironically, much as the automobile was doing in the years EEE was investigating the printing press, or for a modern audience we could consider the smartphone. [5]

An oral culture is communal; imagine Homer or a successor reciting the Odyssey to an audience, or the freemen of Athens gathered for Lysistrata, or a debate in the Roman Senate or medieval Icelandic Althing. Books, on the other hand, were naturally suited for the solitary individual, who could pick through a text at his own leisure. Maybe a difficult point would require flipping back and forth between pages, or some time in contemplation; maybe a citation of Aristotle or a Biblical allusion would be traced back to the source. “A new ‘era of intense cross referencing between one book and another’ began” (72). As a result, “Increasingly the well-informed man of affairs had to spend part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellow men” (page 131). EEE’s word choice- had to– is notable. Also, this more sedate form of communication would seem to shift the art of rhetoric towards building-block reasoning and careful choice among words with subtly different definitions, and away from generating emotional resonance.

New cultural products stemming from the printing press included the essay or open letter, which combined a personal, intimate tone with the ability to project its content to “a large crowd of people who were not gathered together in one place but were scattered in separate dwellings” (230). While an orator could feed off his crowd’s energy (or improvise, which was when live performers “achieved some of their most memorable effects, much like modern preachers, trial lawyers, or jazz trumpeters” (322) ), essay writing required theory of mind, the goal being to elicit a reader nodding along [6]. Later we will even get the novel, with its heightened emphasis on both theory of mind and social commentary. It is notable that novels very quickly spark their own primordial fandoms among European readers; Book II of Don Quixote is forced to start by mocking and explicitly non-canonizing the fanfiction printed in the ten years since the publication of Book I.

With printed text newly at the center of intellectual culture, not just the practice of intellectualism but its entrance- education and learning- changed, with consequences for Europe. One obvious development was the emergence of the autodidact (244), who no longer needed to hire a learned tutor as long as he had sufficient leisure time, and even if he did want a ‘tutor’ could probably access a printed manual. Another was that academics could disseminate their ideas to a reading public and- bringing the old oral culture 360 degrees- give lectures, rather than be constrained to the campus (535-536).

Finally, literary culture started early: “possibly no social revolution in European history is as fundamental as that which saw book learning (previously assigned to old men and monks) gradually become the focus of daily life during childhood, adolescence and early manhood” (432). Books therefore reached people at higher neuroplasticity than ever before. Now, surely many boys must have remained focused on farm labor, and girls on textile production. But maybe another institution the printing press interacts with is the city, to create a new archipelagic culture across northern Europe. [7]

The Church, and other authorities

That the new presses disseminated Protestant views is, probably, the only aspect of the impact of printing which is familiar to most historians of modern Europe. (28)

It is a mystery to me how my theses…were spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here.” (306, quoting Martin Luther writing to the Pope)

EEE notes some benefits of the press for the Catholic Church. After all, incumbent authorities- including the Church- were one obvious source of publications; EEE gives examples such as papal bulls and even indulgences (58). The Church would also seem well served by a technology that can distribute a canonical text in every household; certainly Maoist China found such a prospect advantageous.

And yet the printing press seems to have been a triple threat to the Church: in one way that appears to generally apply to authorities, in one way that appears to be circumstantial to then-current Christian philosophy, and in one way that appears to be circumstantial to the position of the Church in medieval Europe.

First, we have seen a long history of the press as an anti-establishment weapon; going from one pro-establishment narrative to a pro-establishment narrative buttressed by pro-establishment newspapers but also opposed by one anti-establishment pamphlet is a net anti-establishment development in the marketplace of ideas. [8] [9] This fact may have been an out of context problem for authorities, and they may have assumed that censoring nonconformist works would be effective (rather than potentially backfiring- see page 639 for early recognition of what we today call the Streisand Effect, and page 677 for a contemporary claim that Galileo’s heretical Dialogue on Two World Systems was heavily sought on the black market). [10] Of course authorities could not even hope to shut down printers in other geographies, and “during the seventeenth century, it has been suggested, more books were printed in the United Provinces [of the Netherlands] than in all other countries taken together.” (645) Maybe this nation- decentralized and Protestant- was uniquely situated to accelerate the revolutions from printing (646). England’s Royal Society did provide a scientific community in a centralized nation, but even there “religion and politics were banned” (670); interestingly, while the Royal Society is of course a legendary nexus for study of the physical and biological sciences, it will be Scotland- and, more consequentially, the American colonies- who capitalize on their lack of unified political and religious authority structures to lead political theory in the Anglosphere during the Enlightenment. EEE even appears moderately skeptical of the protestation in Luther’s quote opening this section, noting that it was broadly assumed that works aimed at a limited audience would breach containment (308).

Second, medieval Christian thought presumed the textual accuracy of the Bible and also celebrated other classical authors. With the widespread availability of numerous books, even titans like Augustine and Aristotle could be proven erroneous, and the Bible could be textually analyzed to show that its composition was not as old as supposed, as high-style as would be warranted for the Word of God, or even describing the same events consistently. [11]

Third, the printing press relatively strengthened the nobility, who could popularize their own internal anti-clerical sentiment (394) and accumulate enough books to rival clerical learning (395). (We probably do not consider enough how useful the printing press might have been for state authorities, which significantly centralize in the following centuries.) In time liberal humanists would also celebrate that printing “brought Western Europe out of the dark ages” (305).

Science

The two classic examples of general purpose technologies are the steam engine and electricity, whose economic impact was on industrial productivity, the production of a larger quantity of outputs with a given number of inputs (throughputs, in the sense of transportation, may seem to eventually become a better term in the case of the steam engine, though one of its first uses was in coal mines to increase the production of coal). But in the back third of the book, EEE takes the position that the printing press was particularly transformative in science. “Ptolemaic astronomy, Galenic anatomy, [and] Aristotelian physics” (453) all collapsed following the advent of the printing press, and EEE believes this is causal. [12]

We’ve seen that scientists- or prospective scientists- could read more widely thanks to the printing press. But also, when there were few copies of any work available, there was also a small population of scientifically literate readers familiar with it, and a relatively large percentage of their effort needed to be devoted to the maintenance of this knowledge by preserving that text (464) [13]; with the advent of print, for example, “Copernicus…was freed from the task of copying tables and charts, and thus had released time for reading and reflecting” (466; see also 578-579, and 521 more generally). And even Copernicus “was unfamiliar with the major treatise On Triangles– the first full discussion of trigonometry to appear in the Western world- until [1539]” (591) when this work was completed in 1464, but only put in print in 1533.

In particular, “printing enabled natural philosophers to spend more time solving brain teasers, designing ingenious experiments and new instruments” (661); compare to Google and other companies which support ‘side project time’ for employees. Just as with technology companies, it may have been both perkish and productive to recombine ideas with a multi-specialized, multi-generational social network in an informal environment, perhaps over some beverages. One of the early advances in statistics will be the problem of points [14], which seems motivated by a rather different temperament than that of the austere, reclusive copyist.

Cheaper printing also subjected every printed work to commentary, feedback, and correction. EEE recounts Linnaeus receiving packages of seeds from readers of his works on botany (487). Also, “successive editions of a ‘Ptolemy’ often contained surprising ‘news’ in the form of a preface, an extra supplement or appendix” (516). Further recall that the print shop environment drew individuals from a multiplicity of backgrounds; someone who, in the vein of Aristotle, asserted that women had fewer teeth than men might well find himself corrected by a barber. We’ve also discussed new genres of texts, but in addition, later in the scientific revolution, printers began to publish scientific periodicals- a product so absurd as to be unthinkable in the hand-copying era.

There is a catch here that the scientific revolution brought by print was not immediate- which may be why historians of science prior to EEE downplayed the printing press’s impact. EEE chooses to point to a very small European astronomists’ community and state they were “just beginning to take advantage of a technological break-through which set continuous problem-solving on its later ‘normal’ path (605, italics from the original). She notes that printers themselves were less passionate about heliocentrism than Protestantism (615-616); perhaps, as is true in the present day, a larger share of the intellectual market was interested in cultural conflict than in struggling through pages of data and equations. Similarly, confronting the fact that some leading scientists such as Copernicus and Newton did not make big publishing splashes in their lifetimes, she counterclaims that it is introverts such as these whose research received the larger force multiplier from printing (632, see also 592-593).

After all, why does the discoverer of a new technology make it public? Printing provided a very real reputational reason, and particularly though not necessarily combined with the emerging institution of the patent provided a financial reason (557). EEE also claims that popular conceptions of science valorize the performer of experiments and underrate the importance of bringing about exposure, and the printing press allowed for the emergence of middlemen and pundits (638), with institutions such as the Royal Society playing a particularly notable role. One can also imagine a middle ground of intellectuals who validate and disseminate discoveries by less gregarious researchers.

We should also revisit our points earlier in the review about the significance of preserving knowledge and how it is most effectively done through a spray-and-pray plethora of copies. When this is combined with the difficulties of copying technical material discussed in this section, EEE concludes that “an age-old process of corruption was being decisively arrested and was eventually reversed” (686). This is a very different view from our present day conception of science. We overwhelmingly frame scientific research as a task that is performed, completed, and then permanently added to society’s stock of knowledge.

EEE recounts two examples of medieval precursors to Scientific Revolution-era developments which have survived to the present day- they were copied by hand- but they were never broadly disseminated (500). Surely there were some number of insights that have not survived at all; note that her two examples come from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, minimizing the length of chain of copying required to sustain their existence until the printing press rides to the rescue. If calculus, or Mendelian inheritance, or comparative advantage, was first discovered in an eleventh century monastery, how would we ever know?

We can think about a model of technological progress as thus. In the style of the Civilization franchise, we will model how many ‘beakers’ a society produces in a generation. But, instead of treating beakers solely as a flow that produces permanent technological progress, we will consider beakers as a flow which increases a stock of knowledge that also depreciates over time.

If the depreciation rate is 10%, and society produces 1000 beakers per year, then the stock of knowledge will converge to 10,000 beakers of knowledge. A really, really good advance in preindustrial agricultural technology might have freed up some individuals to do research and gotten beaker production to increase by 10%, in which case the stock of knowledge drifts upwards to 11,000 beakers. But if we can get the depreciation rate down to 9% that achieves the same outcome, and reducing the depreciation rate further- as the printing press, it would seem, almost certainly did- can double, or more, society’s knowledge [15].

It is beyond the scope of this essay to evaluate the claim-in-the-water that classical thought was kept alive by Muslim scholars and delivered to Europeans at the time of the Renaissance. But, if that were true, it is clear that the effect on technological progress of an exogenous shock to the stock of beakers would be muted until a technology such as printing was developed. If 5,000 beakers are ‘rediscovered’, then in the first generation the stock increases to 15,000, but then for numerous generations the negative effect of depreciation dominates until the steady state of 10,000 is reached again. If an Andalusian merchant setting up shop in London in 930 AD brought along a few Greek manuscripts, how would we ever know?

Left behind

EEE of course has mentioned the Catholic Church as disadvantaged by the printing press. Paradoxically, she also documents a decline in the status of magic (435-438, despite an initial boom, 76; see also 670 and 681). Aside from that, the book does not elaborate much on the losers of this “agent of change”, certainly not nearly as much as we talk about the artisans impoverished by the Industrial Revolution, or factory towns crushed by modern globalization- developments which at least are accompanied by an aggregate economic benefit, while the printing press does not seem to ‘grow the pie’ in aggregate economic statistics. If we’re searching for lessons from the impact of this information technology, this would be helpful to know!

Clearly people who could not read were unable to capitalize on the motherlode of books now available to them, but that is not the same as losing, unless they happened to be competing with peers who could now study efficiency improvements. Maybe the literate but gullible were worse off when given more to read. And perhaps we should also count the millions of Europeans who will die in the Wars of Religion.

It is also interesting to think about the points made about the printing press, authority, and centralization. Writing is often discussed as a centralizing force; written records are discussed in Seeing Like A State, and printing may have similar theoretical implications (certainly the state admires the taxation implications of high-fidelity numerical records). And when the individuals are spending their leisure time in solitary reading, they are not listening to an orator, but they are also not at the inn or (as Putnam might say) in a bowling league, meeting with their neighbors and deferring to the higher-status residents of their locality. The imagined community- in one case, what Europe will name the nation– gains a foothold against the tangible one.

[1] “Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West.”- Robert Hutchins, 1952

[2] Interestingly, EEE sees the golden age of print ending around the time of Franklin’s birth, in favor of more formal editors and academics; perhaps it was only in the relatively backwards colonies that such a figure had another generation to emerge.

[3] According to a footnote, this particular press was managed by a convent, demonstrating that the print shop was not exclusively the domain of tech-savvy secular firebrands. See https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2016/03/10/women-at-work-the-nuns-of-the-ripoli-press/

[4] For all EEE’s interest in adjudicating the printing press’s interactions with various European trends, she gives little regard to the Age of Discovery. This is possibly because Spain and Portugal were Catholic monarchies, and we will see in a later section that the printing press indeed ended up sitting ill in Catholic Europe.

[5] Though it took time- “the first century [!] of printing produced a bookish culture that was not very different from that produced by scribes” (26) for reasons seeming to range from the mere replication of the same content that had always been copied, and a still moderate error rate in transcription.

[6] Of course once an open letter was published, it might well be discussed in public, including through the genesis of other open letters.

[7] We’ve mentioned Franklin; note that when he leaves Boston he travels to Philadelphia, where he can try to work at one of the city’s several print shops. He’s then convinced to travel all the way to London!

[8] The effect may be particularly strong when a *local* establishment is agitating against an incumbent power. EEE cites English propaganda against the Church in the crisis of Henry VIII, and of course we later see this dynamic in the American Revolution, and later in turn in the rebellious American South.

[9] Note that both Catholics and Protestants could capitalize on this equalizing effect in their missionary work. Certainly in present day China, for example, the Catholic Church finds itself in such an underdog position.

[10] “almost a hundred dollars in American currency”, assuming it corresponds to December of the paperback publication date of 1980, would indicate ~$350 today.

[11] The Koran, in contrast, was composed much closer to Muhammad’s death than possibly any of the New Testament was to the crucifixion of Jesus- let alone the problems of coherence with the Old Testament- and from the beginning it has been Muslim canon to acknowledge that some phrases recorded as the Prophet’s sayings are validated while others are more uncertain.

[12] Note that EEE has named three examples of the sort of classical wisdom the Renaissance is supposed to have ‘rebirthed’.

[13] EEE doesn’t explain why laymen couldn’t have copied just as well, but this does require a copy of the original in any case, and (as we’ve discussed) some scientific works might need to be transmitted with higher fidelity than prose.

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_points

[15] Further note that the equilibrium level of beakers is beaker production divided by the depreciation rate. The marginal value of an extra bit of research therefore increases- possibly doubling, quadrupling, or more- as the depreciation rate decreases.