I kind of accidentally wound up reading about printing and music printing. This might be a theme I'll return to later, so what's here is just an introduction.
Most people will probably remember all the talk toward the end of the 1990s about how the printing press is widely regarded as the most important invention of the last millennium, and if you go to Wikipedia’s timeline of historic inventions you’ll see a photograph of one press featured as the opening image. What is not as frequently recognized is that there are some interesting debates about exactly why print is so important, or about what role it could be said to have played in the history of the world. The most prominent contributors to English-language studies of print are not in agreement on these difficult issues. To give just two examples, when Marshall McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he tended to weave a pretty bleak narrative about the loss of communal oral cultures to the cold, alienating, individuating printing press, yet, in sharp contrast, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) was self-consciously optimistic about what she argues was print’s role in the advent of modern science, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.
Underlying these different narratives are very different ideas about modernity, and part of the reason people dedicate so much time and energy to thinking about print is because it is believed that it can reveal something about today’s society. In the last fifteen years or so, historians have been revisiting print and arguing, firstly, that the transition from oral to written traditions or from manuscripts to print was much more gradual and fraught with conflict than is typically acknowledged, and, secondly, that some of the common assumptions about what print enabled are actually entirely misplaced. For example, Margaret J.M. Ezell has argued that, rather than being used in the democratizing mass production of books for a middle-class marketplace, printing could actually deny less-wealthy readers access to the written word, whereas scribal practices, far from being atavistic or elitist, were perpetuated into the eighteenth century by people who would not otherwise have been able to afford expensive books.
Blogging is a little weird. I’m already almost out of space for this week’s post, so I can’t really do anything with this information for you. Instead I’ll just point out two of the reasons why I find all of this so fascinating. First, when I was taking my core music history courses as an undergraduate, my peers and I were taught a pretty one-sided, value-laden narrative about how music printing precipitated the rise of a middle-class marketplace for printed music, of amateur musicians, and of a secular modernity. Not only have musicologists shown how misleading this narrative is, it is a narrative that encourages students to think about modernity in a particular way without giving them the information they need to critique that conception. Second, the resurgence of interest in print studies is closely related to popular debates about how “new media” might be changing the world today. How might our own values, ideas and desires be shaping the way we think about and use new technologies?
Most people will probably remember all the talk toward the end of the 1990s about how the printing press is widely regarded as the most important invention of the last millennium, and if you go to Wikipedia’s timeline of historic inventions you’ll see a photograph of one press featured as the opening image. What is not as frequently recognized is that there are some interesting debates about exactly why print is so important, or about what role it could be said to have played in the history of the world. The most prominent contributors to English-language studies of print are not in agreement on these difficult issues. To give just two examples, when Marshall McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he tended to weave a pretty bleak narrative about the loss of communal oral cultures to the cold, alienating, individuating printing press, yet, in sharp contrast, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) was self-consciously optimistic about what she argues was print’s role in the advent of modern science, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.
Underlying these different narratives are very different ideas about modernity, and part of the reason people dedicate so much time and energy to thinking about print is because it is believed that it can reveal something about today’s society. In the last fifteen years or so, historians have been revisiting print and arguing, firstly, that the transition from oral to written traditions or from manuscripts to print was much more gradual and fraught with conflict than is typically acknowledged, and, secondly, that some of the common assumptions about what print enabled are actually entirely misplaced. For example, Margaret J.M. Ezell has argued that, rather than being used in the democratizing mass production of books for a middle-class marketplace, printing could actually deny less-wealthy readers access to the written word, whereas scribal practices, far from being atavistic or elitist, were perpetuated into the eighteenth century by people who would not otherwise have been able to afford expensive books.
Blogging is a little weird. I’m already almost out of space for this week’s post, so I can’t really do anything with this information for you. Instead I’ll just point out two of the reasons why I find all of this so fascinating. First, when I was taking my core music history courses as an undergraduate, my peers and I were taught a pretty one-sided, value-laden narrative about how music printing precipitated the rise of a middle-class marketplace for printed music, of amateur musicians, and of a secular modernity. Not only have musicologists shown how misleading this narrative is, it is a narrative that encourages students to think about modernity in a particular way without giving them the information they need to critique that conception. Second, the resurgence of interest in print studies is closely related to popular debates about how “new media” might be changing the world today. How might our own values, ideas and desires be shaping the way we think about and use new technologies?
Image may be NSFW.
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