Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One writer on print culture in Europe is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted the print culture of Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press to European scribal culture. The invention of woodblock printing in China almost a thousand years prior and then the consequent Chinese invention of moveable type in 1040 had very different consequences for the formation of print culture in Asia. The development of printing, like the development of writing itself, had profound effects on human societies and knowledge. "Print culture" refers to the cultural products of the printing transformation.
In terms of image-based communication, a similar transformation came in Europe from the fifteenth century on with the introduction of the old master print and, slightly later, popular prints, both of which were actually much quicker in reaching the mass of the population than printed text.
Print culture is the conglomeration of effects on human society that is created by making printed forms of communication. Print culture encompasses many stages as it has evolved in response to technological advances. Print culture can first be studied from the period of time involving the gradual movement from oration to script as it is the basis for print culture. As the printing became commonplace, script became insufficient and printed documents were mass-produced. The era of physical print has had a lasting effect on human culture, but with the advent of digital text, some scholars believe the printed word may become obsolete.
The electronic media, including the World Wide Web, can be seen as an outgrowth of print culture.
The development of print culture in China
Prior to print Prior to print, knowledge was transmitted through oral traditions, including formulaic story telling supported by mnemonic techniques,Albert B. Lord, The singer of tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in oral traditions. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. as well as architectural and material artifacts.Renfrew, C., & Scarre, C. (Eds.). (1999). Cognition and material culture: The archaeology of symbolic storage. Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute. The invention of writing brought with it the emergence of scribal culture or manuscript culture. Scholars disagree over when scribal culture developed. Walter Ong argues that scribal culture cannot exist until an alphabet is created, and a form of writing standardized. On the other hand, D. F. McKenzie argues that even communicative notches on a stick, or structure, represent “text”, and therefore scribal culture.
Ong suggests scribal culture is defined by an alphabet. McKenzie says that the key to scribal culture is non-verbal communication, which can be accomplished in more ways than using an alphabet. These two views give rise to the importance of print culture. In scribal culture, procuring documents was a difficult task, and documentation would then be limited to the rich only. Ideas are difficult to spread amongst large groups of people over large distances of land, not allowing for effective dissemination of knowledge.
Scribal culture also deals with large levels of inconsistency. In the process of copying documents, many times the meaning became changed, and the words different. Reliance on the written text of the time was never exceedingly strong. Over time, a greater need for reliable, quickly reproduced, and a relatively inexpensive means of distributing written text arose. Scribal culture, transforming into print culture, was only replicated in manners of written text.
Jack Goody, however, documents that the introduction of written language was transformative for finances, religion, law, and governance. Written language facilitated higher levels of organization, coherence and consistency of messages, extending reach of control, ownership and belief, creating rule of law, critical comparison of statements, among other effects.Goody, J. (1986). The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge University Press. Extensive scribal cultures with corresponding social consequences emerged in the ancient Middle East,Vanstiphout, H. L. J. (1995). On the old Babylonian Eduba curriculum. In J. W. Drijvers & A. A. MacDonald (Eds.), Centres of learning: Learning and location in pre-modern Europe and the Near East (pp. 3–16). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. the Ancient Hebrew world, Classic Greece and Rome,Havelock, E. (1982). The literate revolution in Greece and its cultural consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. India,Mookerji, K. R. (1969). Ancient Indian education: Brahmanical and Buddhist. London: Macmillan. China,Lee, T. H. C. (2000). Education in traditional China: A history (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Vol. 13). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Mesoamerica,Berdan, F. (2005). The Aztecs of central Mexico: An imperial society. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. and the Islamic world.Makdisi, G. (1981). The rise of colleges: Institutions of learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. The complexity of cultural change in the ancient Middle East is documented in the Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture.Radner, K. & Robson, E. (Eds.). (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Development of print
The Chinese invention of paper and woodblock printing, at some point before the first dated book in 594 (the Diamond Sutra) produced the world's first print culture.A Hyatt Mayor, Prints and People, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton, 1971, nos 1-4. Hundreds of thousands of books, on subjects ranging from Confucian Classics to science and mathematics, were printed using woodblock printing.Luo, S. (1998). An illustrated history of printing in ancient China. Hong Kong: City University Press. Printing was regulated by the state and largely served the interests of the educated bureaucracy.Connery, C. L. (1998). The empire of the text. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Wang, H. (2014). Writing and the ancient state: Early China in comparative perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Only during the Ming and Qing dynasties did the publication of vernacular texts become common.
Paper and woodblock printing were introduced into Europe in the 15th century, and the first printed books began appearing in Europe. Chinese movable type was spread to Korea during the Goryeo dynasty. Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal type movable printing which was described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as "extremely similar to Gutenberg's".Briggs, Asa and Burke, Peter (2002) A Social History of the Media: from Gutenberg to the Internet, Polity, Cambridge, pp.15-23, 61-73. East metal movable type was spread to Europe between the late 14th century and early 15th century.Thomas Franklin Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward, The Ronald Press, NY 2nd ed. 1955, pp. 176–178 The invention of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press (c. 1450) greatly reduced the amount of labor required to produce a book leading to an increase in the number of books produced. Early printers tried to keep their printed copies of a text as faithful as possible to the original manuscript. Even so, the earliest publications were still often different from the original, for a short time, in some ways manuscripts still remaining more accurate than printed books.
Hand-copied illustrations were replaced by first woodcuts, later engravings that could be duplicated precisely, revolutionizing technical literature.Eisenstein 155
Print culture, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Early Modern Science
Eisenstein has described how the high costs of copying scribal works often led to their abandonment and eventual destruction. Furthermore, the cost and time of copying led to the slow propagation of ideas. In contrast, the printing press allowed rapid propagation of ideas, resulting in knowledge and cultural movements that were far harder to destroy. Eisenstein points to prior renaissances (rebirths) of classical learning prior to the printing press that failed. In contrast, the Renaissance was a permanent revival of classical learning because the printing of classical works put them into a permanent and widely read form. Similarly, Eisenstein points to a large number of prior attempts in Western Europe to assert doctrines contrary to the ruling Catholic Church. In contrast, the Protestant Reformation spread rapidly and permanently due to the printing of non-conformist works such as the 95 Theses. Eisenstein equally examined the impact of print on the development of science with the rapid and extensive dissemination of observations and data, the exact reproductions of charts and figures that allowed for comparison, and the impulse towards aggregation taxonomy.Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The printing press as an agent of change. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Because of the transformative consequences of the printing press, printing houses such as that of Christophe Moretus in Antwerp (now the Plantin-Moretus Museum) became for a time the center of print culture as authors considered themselves as belonging to a Republic of Letters. To build confidence in the knowledge arising from their presses, publishers fostered communities of trust.Johns, A. (1998). The nature of the book: Print and knowledge in the making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Renaissance Johannes Gutenberg invention of the moveable type printing press provided a less expensive (though still costly) and more rapid way of filling the demand for books. Despite these advantages, printing had many critics, who were afraid that books could spread lies and subversion or corrupt unsuspecting readers. Also, they were afraid that the printed texts would spread heresy and sow religious discord. The Gutenberg Bible was the first book produced with moveable type in Europe. Martin Luther's Bible, which was published in German in 1522, started the Protestant Reformation. Latin's importance as a language started languishing with the rise of texts written in national languages. The shift from scholarly Latin to everyday languages marked an important turning point in print culture. The vernacular Bibles were important to other nations, as well. The King James Authorized Version was published in 1611, for example.
Scientific Revolution