AHR Forum

Reply

ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN

I agree with Adrian Johns that our deepest difference lies in the questions we ask, but I disagree with his formulation of that difference. On the most general level, we differ because we approach early modern printing from the opposite ends of a time scale. I start with medieval texts and the incapacity of hand copying to achieve certain goals long valued by Latin reading elites. Johns starts with the modern book and the incapacity of the handpress to achieve the degree of standardization and uniformity that is now taken for granted.	1
Both positions are defensible, even complementary. Unfortunately, Johns refuses to give mine a fair hearing either in his book or in this exchange. Here, he seeks to redirect my argument so that it is aimed against recent trends in book history. Let me repeat: I regard long-term changes in book format and in reading practices as topics "worth pursuing." To say that a landscape viewed from the air looks differently from one seen from the ground is not to invalidate either perspective, let alone accuse either of "backsliding." My quarrel is not with Roger Chartier or any of the others whose work I admire. It is with the author of The Nature of the Book.	2
My work is not "centrally about the history of books." The communications shift that occurred in Western Europe in the late fifteenth century encompassed images and charts, advertisements and maps, official edicts and indulgences. Had Johns glanced at my abridged edition, he would have seen illustrations of some of the varied materials and also maps that depicted not clouds in some stratosphere but the location of the first printing shops to be established in diverse European regions. "Where would you look [for Western Civilization]?" he asks. Why not take time out from "beavering in the archives" and examine the shifting frontiers of Western Christendom as depicted in any historical atlas?	3
With regard to religious divisions, Johns dismisses my "contrastive" discussion of censorship and points out that every Protestant state had a regulatory regime. He ignores my point that no Protestant state—not even Geneva, the so-called "Protestant Rome"—issued an Index of Prohibited Books. Instead of pausing over prohibitions that resonated in every book shop throughout Europe, he urges us to "move on."	4
Far from discounting location, or meaning "nothing more specific" than all of Western Europe or treating the difference between Basel and Geneva, Venice and Antwerp, etc. as "accidental," I repeatedly stressed the distinctive political, economic, and religious constraints that impinged on diversely located early printing shops. It is not Johns's focus on "local labors" to which I object. It is, rather, his exclusive focus on a single "major European power" and neglect of all the numerous minor powers: those principalities, bishoprics, city-states, and the like that reflected late medieval political fragmentation. Although special local conditions affected all printing shops, their products were exported to readers who were more widely dispersed. "Cosmopolitan" is an appropriate term to apply to the distribution of Latin texts and to the Commonwealth of Learning that received them.	5
With regard to collaborative ventures undertaken by dispersed readers, I regret that, when discussing one such venture, I was led astray by a 1964 article in a specialized journal. That it was Kepler not Gassendi who alerted readers to a forthcoming transit of Mercury does not, however, invalidate my point that a publication addressed to a dispersed readership enabled scattered observers to check the accuracy of an astronomer's prediction. Nor does it undermine the discussion in my book concerning the publishers of almanacs and ephemerides who were spurred by competitive conditions to investigate rival predictions and who ultimately decided in favor of Kepler.	6
Confrontation with rival claims is related to the question of dissemination. Of course, the distribution of texts should not be confused with the distribution of knowledge. ("Knowledge" is a tricky word; historians would do well to avoid it.) But increased output (dissemination) did mean more frequent encounters with conflicting testimony, contradictory theories, and alternative diagrams—all of which stimulated investigatory activity. As for standardization, I did not ask about early modern readers' concern with non-uniformity in general. I asked about their concern with non-uniform spelling in particular. Johns evades answering this question. With regard to the fifteenth-century missal, no doubt the practice of checking copies against an exemplar was derived from scribal procedures. But so, too, was the anxiety of churchmen over non-uniform liturgies—an anxiety that their resort to printing eventually alleviated.	7
The chronology of commemorating Gutenberg is not nearly as "simple" as Johns says. Commemorative publications did not commence after Isaac Newton, let alone James Watt. They started in 1540 following fifteenth-century chronicles that set 1440 as the invention's date. They punctuated every century thereafter. A 1740 commemorative image of a wooden handpress descending from the heavens, escorted by Mercury and Minerva, is closer to fifteenth-century tributes to a divine art than to later depictions of the steam press as a "mighty engine of progress."	8
I quite agree that John Foxe "never meant what he said more than when speaking of Providence." Certainly, "an act of Providence is a profoundly different thing from a technological revolution." Doubtless, the post-Napoleonic era saw the construction of many new kinds of "revolutions": industrial, scientific, and so forth. But Condorcet lived before these later constructs. Providentialism, martyrology, and an unexpected tribute to Martin Luther may be found in his Esquisse. It was fortunate (providential?), he wrote, that no one foresaw the consequences of the invention of printing; otherwise, kings and priests would have strangled at birth the enemy who was eventually to unmask and dethrone them.1	9
"Do modern historians really believe that printing was a gift from an apocalyptic God?" asks Johns. The views of modern historians ought not to be equated with those of Condorcet and his colleagues, who lived before iron presses had been harnessed to steam. When Johns dwells on the incapacity of early printing methods to produce modern standardized editions, he adopts a position that no eighteenth-century observer could ever have assumed. His version of a "printing revolution" is not an eighteenth-century construct but a late twentieth-century one. It is inflected by a (postmodern?) sensibility that seems to be tone deaf to the music of time.	10
Notes 1 Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain, Monique Hincker and François Hincker, eds. (Paris, 1966), 177. See also p. 184 on Luther, p. 187 on martyrs (to free thought). The resemblance to Foxe is in the idea that the press served as a weapon that undercut despotic rule, of popes (in Foxe's case), of kings and priests (for Condorcet).

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