 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Strong Silent Type. The Printing Press. If you turn to the nearest shelf, pluck a book off it, and start reading, you'll come quickly to a title page. Apart from the title and author of the book, it will probably indicate the year the volume appeared in print, and the publishing house that produced it. We take this for granted, but books haven't always had title pages. In the era of the manuscript, that is the literally handwritten book, the title, if there was one, was usually just given at the top of the first page of text. Title pages became common only with the advent of printing. It was standard to include blank pages at the start of an unbound book, since the first leaves would tend to get damaged. Publishers then realized that they could add useful information to these extra pages as a kind of advertisement of the contents within. This is an unprecedented boon to the historian of philosophy. From the 16th century onward, it's almost always possible to know exactly when and where books were first published, something the scholar of ancient or medieval philosophy can only dream about. And that's only one of the many things the printing press has given us, usually without our noticing. As I learned recently from another podcast hosted by Steven Fry, who apparently listens to this podcast, so hello to Steven Fry, the English language is full of hidden allusions to the processes of printing. The difference between lowercase and uppercase refers to the two trays used for storing the two kinds of typeface. Naturally, when putting the individual letters into the cases, you need to mind your P's and Q's to avoid confusing them. The phrase out of sorts may go back to the problem of running out of type while setting pages. A stereotype was a whole plate set permanently for printing and reprinting a given page, rather than using individual letters that could be removed and reused for a different text. The French had their own word for this, cliche. Oh, and one other thing, the printing press changed the course of European history. This is itself a bit of a cliche, but for once I am not going to challenge our stereotypical assumptions. In fact, you could argue that historians of philosophy usually underestimate the importance of printing. If you wanted to divide the whole history of European philosophy into just two periods, it would make a lot of sense to draw the line in the late 15th century, dividing the pre-print and post-print eras. Indeed, you could argue that this is the deeper truth underlying the more familiar contrast between medieval and early modern philosophy. Medieval philosophy could be disseminated only through the painstaking labor of scribes. Early modern philosophical works were, at first, set down in the handwriting of their authors too, given the absence of typewriters and computers, but they could then be reproduced in print runs of thousands of copies, reaching a much wider audience. To give you an idea of the difference, it has been calculated that early in the history of print, having a book copied once by hand would cost about the same as printing several hundred copies of that same book. The transition from handwritten philosophy to printed philosophy can, of course, be traced to the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, an artisan from Mainz. Though I wouldn't hesitate to use that word, invention, I should mention a couple of caveats. First, books had been printed hundreds of years earlier in China using type made of wood instead of cast metal. Woodcuts were also used in Europe before Gutenberg came along. Second, Gutenberg's breakthrough was an innovative combination of several existing technologies, from paper making to the winepress, along with perfecting things like the hand casting of the letter type and perfecting the viscosity of the ink, which was made from soot, varnish, and egg white. The result was that the metal typeface could be set to make many copies of a page. In this era, average print runs ranged from the low hundreds to the low thousands, with the type then being returned to the cases to be reused. Gutenberg did not get rich off his epoch-making invention. After a legal dispute resulting from delays in selling his famous Bibles, the press shop passed to the sole ownership of his business partner, Johann Fust. Perhaps we could say that Gutenberg had unwisely made a Fustian pact. But others would reap the rewards. Printing became big business by the end of the 15th and early 16th centuries. As all that money changed hands, a lot else was changing thanks to the rise of printing. We can start with its effect on education. I'm sure you knew that Gutenberg printed Bibles, but you probably didn't know that he also printed schoolbooks. In generations to come, printers would collaborate with scholars and schoolmasters to select works for printing. The most famous example in the realm of philosophy is one that we've already discussed, the Press Adventis, run by Aldus Manutius, which printed, among other things, a Greek edition of Aristotle. Humanists were among the first to see the potential of printing, which would enable them to get good grammar books and examples of fine Latin style into the hands of young students. Scholarship could more easily have a Europe-wide impact. Erasmus is the obvious example here, with two and a half thousand editions of works from his pen in the 16th century, with each edition, of course, having a print run in the hundreds or thousands. Among the Italian humanists, the most widely read was Poliziano, who received more than 120 editions between 1480 and 1559. A noteworthy but not atypical example of his impact is found in a letter by Philip Melancthon, in which he spares himself the trouble of translating the cave allegory from Plato's Republic by simply reproducing Poliziano's version. This vignette also illustrates the way the texts and translations of classical authors became more widely available thanks to printing. Printings of Ficino's translations of Plato were a huge success, and classical Latin authors also benefited from the Gutenberg effect. Cicero, as the most admired ancient Latin stylist, had his works appear 300 times in the era of early printings or incunabula, with another one and a half thousand following in the 16th century. It is scarcely possible to overestimate the effect of this abundance of literature on intellectuals across Europe. In a classic study of the impact of the printing press, Elizabeth Eisenstein pointed out that the work of thinkers as diverse as Copernicus and Montaigne was made possible by the sheer range and quality of texts at their disposal. As Eisenstein observed, Copernicus as a young student would have had a hard time getting his hands on The Astronomy of Ptolemy. By the end of his life, he could consult three different printed editions. Montaigne, meanwhile, could see more books by spending a few months in his Tower Study than earlier scholars had seen after a lifetime of travel. No longer would scholars have small private libraries dominated by an equally small number of authorities—Arisotle, Augustine, and little else. The mind of a man like Montaigne was now privy to a chorus of many voices, whose echoes make themselves heard in his own writing. And readers were not just engaging with more text than before, they were using them differently. The possibility to have books more ready-to-hand reduced the need to commit things to memory, especially since printers made their productions more user-friendly. Consider the index. It would make no sense to go to the labor of compiling a list of names or topics mentioned in a book and give the page number of each mention if the book is a unique handwritten object. But if you are printing 2,000 identical copies, an index makes a lot of sense, especially since it would be a selling point to attract potential buyers. So the printing press fundamentally altered the way that Reformation-era scholars read ancient philosophy and other secular literature. But this is not to say that such works dominated the output of the early presses. To the contrary, most printings were of religious material, ranging from the Bible to liturgical texts, works of church law, and the theological writings of the Church Fathers and medieval scholastics. The increasing influence of Aquinas in this period, for example, is related to the wider diffusion of his works through printed editions. It should also be remembered that you can use a printing press to publish things other than books. Short pamphlets and single-sheet publications were common, and helped to keep the money flowing in alongside the sale of books that required a significant initial investment. When we think of this early period of printing, we tend to imagine such productions as the Gutenberg Bibles or the Nuremberg Chronicle, a lavish historical work that was a monument to both the new art of printing and the glory of the city in which it was published. But there are 2,000 single-sheet texts that have managed to survive from the 15th century alone. Obviously, many, many more existed and have been lost since. It's telling that more than one-third of those surviving single pages are letters of indulgence, that is, church documents for giving sins in exchange for a financial donation. Just as we usually associate the birth of printing with books, we associate it with the Protestant Reformation, and for good reason as we'll see in a moment. But as the Catholic Church realized, printing offered the potential for standardizing religious practice and belief, just as much as the potential for destabilizing religion. If you're trying to get as many people as possible to adopt the same liturgy, the power to publish thousands of identical guides to that liturgy is mighty useful. The exception that proves the rule here would be a work called In Praise of Scribes, written by the abbot of Sponheim, one Johannes Trithemius. He decried the rise of printing and extolled the spiritual value of writing things out by hand. How did he get this treatise to as wide a readership as possible? By having it printed, of course. Actually, we should admit something that Trithemius may have overlooked, namely that printing and writing by hand were not starkly opposed alternatives. I already mentioned that a printed text would obviously have been based on a manuscript original. More unexpectedly, the reverse is also true, as many manuscripts from the late 15th century were actually copied from printed in cunabula. Furthermore, readers would annotate their printed editions by hand, making marginal notes or underlining passages, just as they had always done with manuscripts. In some cases, printers facilitated that with the layout of their editions, as when school texts included generous spaces between lines and in the margins to give students room to scribble notes. If you have a look at images of early printed books using our own most recent publication medium, the internet, you'll notice that the type is actually based closely on contemporary handwriting style. This is a common pattern with new technologies, as when early electric lights were made to look like candles. For readers around the turn of the 16th century, it would have made printed text look reassuringly familiar. Such readers would also have been used to seeing navigational markings written in a different color of ink, like red chapter headings in an otherwise black text. Since it was arduous and technically difficult to achieve this with a printing press, the headings might be added by a scribe, again blurring the line between handwritten and printed books. On the other hand, features of text you might associate more with the handwritten could be achieved in a printed book using engravings. These would include ornamentation and illustration, including scientific diagrams. This is something else that had important implications for the development of the intellectual disciplines. It meant that every reader of, say, a work on astronomy by Copernicus would be looking at exactly the same pictures. Later, we'll discuss the scholastic movement initiated by Peter Ramos, a Parisian schoolman. His use of diagrams and tables for pedagogical purposes was well suited for the press. But in the 16th century, no thinker made more powerful use of printing than Martin Luther. In the previous episode, I raised the question of what made his impact so much greater than that of earlier reformers like Wycliffe and Hus. Part of the answer is surely that they did not have access to printing presses, and he did. He lived in the right place as well as the right time. In the 15th century, Italy, and especially Venice, had been a dominant force in publishing, but the center of gravity shifted to Germany, especially after the invasion of Italy by France around the turn of the 16th century. Luther's city of Wittenberg started its tradition of printing in 1502 and accelerated quickly, putting out no fewer than 600 editions in the first quarter of the century. And Wittenberg was only one of many cities where the presses churned out copies of Luther's sermons, treatises, and polemics. Not to mention his translation of the New Testament into German, a work so influential that it was used even by Catholics of the period, and is given credit for helping to fix the form of German still standard today. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations by one scholar suggest that there may have been more than 3 million copies of works by Luther printed in Europe in just the three decades from 1516 to 1546, representing 20% of the total printed literature of the time. Many of his works were short pamphlets, for which historians use the German term Flugschriften, meaning flying writings, because they could be disseminated so easily. There's a plausible case to be made for the proposition that Luther's approach to religion simply lent itself better to the age of the printing press than did the church doctrines he was attacking. Like Wycliffe before him, or in his own period, William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English, Luther wanted as many people as possible to familiarize themselves with scripture. His idea of the priesthood of all believers did not mean that each Christian should indulge in developing their own theology, but he did invite all believers to make up their own minds about religious questions, and to help them make up their minds, he issued a torrent of writings to persuade them of the Lutheran view. His version of the New Testament came along with explanatory material designed to coax its readers to adopt the Lutheran interpretation. Critics of the translation complained that this critic of church indulgences had himself indulged in tendentious renderings of the Greek, as when he took the claim that humans are made righteous by faith and added the word solely in conformity with his conviction that faith alone justifies, not works. The Catholics who wished to respond to Luther were in a difficult position. They wanted to insist that scripture can be properly understood only by theologians trained in the scholastic tradition. The Catholic polemicist Thomas Muirner satirically remarked that followers of Reform movements would proclaim, Looking forward to the effects of this uprising against the church, he predicted, But the importance of higher learning and church authority was not an easy case to make in the popular vernacular format being used to such great effect by Luther. Then too, by refuting Luther in print, they risked spreading knowledge of his teachings. It seemed then that the church could not beat Luther by joining him in the print revolution. The obvious solution was to keep him out of print in the first place, but this was not going to be easy. Church censorship required enforcement by local secular powers, which might or might not be inclined to carry out the pope's edicts. The authorities might content themselves with banning outright libelous material, which would leave the Reformers plenty of scope to advance their religious views in public, both by preaching and in print. In Leipzig, there was for a time effective suppression of Lutheran writings, which caused the printers to complain bitterly, not necessarily because they were convinced evangelists, but because Protestant books sold so well. One complained of being allowed to print only Catholic treatises which are desired by no one and cannot even be given away. There was also a kind of feedback loop whereby printers avoided censorship by flocking to cities that were sympathetic towards Lutheranism, making these places even more important centers of the Reform movement. The situation was a bit more complicated than that though. The War of Religion in print, which presaged the wars of religion on the actual battlefield, was not a two-sided affair. Luther and his sympathizers aimed their rhetorical fire at the Catholics, certainly, but also at other Reformers. A particular flashpoint for debate was the question of how bread is transformed into the body of Christ in the Mass, or rather whether it is transformed at all. The Church adhered to the interpretation put forward by, among others, Thomas Aquinas. In the sacrament of the Eucharist, there is a transubstantiation, meaning that while the accidental features of bread, like its color and taste, remain, the substance of the bread has been replaced by that of Christ's body. Diametrically opposed to this was the view that, when Christ said to his disciples, take this and eat, for this is my body, he meant only that the bread symbolized his body, which was about to be given in sacrifice. This merely symbolic interpretation was defended by Höldrich Zwingli, among others, and associated with the Reform movement in the Swiss cities of Zürich and Basel. The humanist, Billibald Pirkheimer, called these two cities and Strasbourg the satanic triad, because they hosted theologians who denied the real presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist. Luther, meanwhile, took a middle view. Christ is really present in the bread, but it nonetheless remains bread. And like Pirkheimer, he was harshly critical of Zwingli and his followers. This looks like a purely theological debate, but we'll be seeing that it was of some consequence for the history of philosophy. For now, the important point is that it was a dispute carried out in printed texts. A recent study of the controversy by Aime Nelson Burnett found 273 individual works on the topic in 905 printings, and that's just in the later 1520s. The Lutheran camp made much more effective use of the New Medium, with Wittenberg outpublishing Zürich by a factor of three. The fact that Swiss German was a dialect with fewer readers was another disadvantage for Zwingli. These were, of course, entirely new factors to consider in a theological disagreement. No longer were such contests fought in Latin, at universities, or before a panel of churchmen, appeals were now being made to the court of public opinion, something evident even from the use of various literary genres by the protagonists. While the Catholics conservatively stuck to composing formal treatises, Protestants offered their readers sermons, dialogues, and catechisms. As Burnett remarks, Now, you might be a bit skeptical here on the grounds that surely not that many people were interested in such arcane theological matters, and surely most people didn't know how to read. So they could not have been influenced by written material anyway, whether printed or written by hand. Against the first objection, we can note that by the 1520s, printers had become pretty canny about what sorts of writing would sell. Those 905 editions would never have appeared if there were no audience for them. The second objection has a more complicated answer. It's certainly true that in some regions, especially rural ones, literacy rates were low. In Eastern German villages, for example, preaching was a far more important vehicle for reform than books. In the cities, though, literacy rates may have been up around 30%. And, crucially, it's not as if printed works could only reach those who were able to read. Often the only literate members of a family would be the adult men, but they might read aloud to the rest of the household and were encouraged to do so by the evangelist movement, which invited them to be preachers to their families. The same goes for those who took up preaching as a real vocation and went into the countryside towns to spread the teachings of Luther or Zwingli. They knew about those teachings because they had read Luther or Zwingli in print. Luther knew that his movement was fueled by soot, varnish, and egg white. He called printing, God's highest and extremist act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward. As I've said, though, it wasn't only the reformers who sought to use printing to press their advantage. At this time, humanism was rippling out from Italy across Europe, something we can trace back to the time before Gutenberg, but also a trend that was enhanced by his new technology. And soon, we'll meet some of the headline figures in this development, like Juan Luis Vives and Rodolfos Agricola. These were men who, like a handwritten heading in an otherwise printed book, made it their business to be unusually well read. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.