The Printing Press Revolution

•Books in the Middle Ages

Books written by hand by monks in monasteries

Often very valuable

Kept in monasteries, sometimes chained to shelves

What are the problems with this?

•Paper Making

Invented by Chinese c. AD 105

Previously used parchment (sheep or goat skin, rubbed smooth with pumice stone)

Muslim world made use of paper and bequeathed it to Europe c. 12th Century AD

•Block Printing

Invented by Chinese 7th century AD

Blocks of wood cared with pictures or writing

Paper laid over this and rubbed with a pad

New blocks required for each page

Introduced to Europe c. 14th Century AD

•Moveable Type

Invented by Chinese c. 11th Century AD

Separate letters placed into a frame to make words and sentences

Could remove letters from the frame and re-set it to create other pages

Metal type introduced c. 1300

•Johann Gutenberg

Merchant and goldsmith from Mainz (Germany)

Invented first printing press with movable type c. 1450

First book was the Latin Bible (the so-called ‘Gutenberg Bible’ only 48 now exist)

Consisted of 641 leaves (pages)

Each page had two columns of print. 42 lines per page

Soon printing presses all over Europe

By 1500 over 100 presses in Italy

•The Impact of the Printing Press

Most important early printer was Aldus Manutius, owner of the Aldine Press in Florence

Produced many works from Greece and Rome

Development of new type faces

Gradually more books in languages other than ancient Greek and Latin

Allowed the writings of men such as Dante, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli, Erasmus to reach a much wider audience

Activities

1. Examine the maps below. What do they tell you about the spread of the printing press in the 15th and 16th Centuries AD?

2. Below are six ways in which ideas could have spread around Europe during the Renaissance:

a) A pilgrim from England traveling to Rome in 1500

b) Merchants traveling from Florence to other parts of Europe to sell cloth in 1480

c) An Italian sculptor working on the tomb of the English King, Henry VII, in Westminster Abbey in 1512.

d) The printing presses of Venice which had printed 3000 book titles by 1500

e) A soldier in the army of the French King, Charles VIII, who invaded Milan in 1485

f) The Venetian ambassador visiting the court of the English King, Henry VIII, in 1520

On the table below rank these ways of spreading information, from 1 to 6. In the column next to your rank indicate why you think that:

Rank / a-f / Reason
1
2
3
4
5
6

2. Study the following sources and attached images:

‘The Aldine Press at Venice did more than anything else to spread the values of the Italian Renaissance.’ V.H.H. Green, Renaissance and Reformation 1982

‘The printing press took many generations to affect men in any definite way. The printed book did not produce important changes in what people liked or thought.’ New Cambridge Modern History 1956.

‘Printing was important because it helped to diffuse [spread] Renaissance ideas by making books much cheaper and more easily available. The printing press in Florence produced 1025 copies of Plato’s Dialogues in 1485-1486 in the time a scribe would have taken to produce a single copy .. However even in Florence the demand for Latin and Greek classics was very limited compared to romances [love stories written in Italian] and religious writing.’ Alison Brown, The Renaissance 1988.

Using these sources and the knowledge from this class, do you think the ideas of the Renaissance would have spread without the invention of the printing press?

3. Which of the following do you think make the greatest contribution to the development of human thought and understanding during the Renaissance?

  • Leonardo da Vinci
  • Galileo Galilei
  • Johann Gutenberg