So what, then, overall, was
the most tangible cultural effect of print? Was it in the schools, in
the news industry, or perhaps in what you call the "domestication of
music"?
Music was something of a niche market. The market for
schoolbooks, on the other hand, was indeed massive. How massive we'll
never know, since many schoolbooks have disappeared altogether—they
were used to destruction by their owners. If we look at all the books
that we've registered for our survey of books published throughout
Europe—and we've now found about 350,000 different items—about 40% of
these survive in only one copy. It makes you wonder how many have been
lost altogether or are waiting still to be discovered in some
out-of-the-way location.
But one mustn't ignore that the
mainstay of the market was always the market in religious books. About
40 percent of the total output of the printing presses in this period
throughout Europe was religious books. So the most important cultural
impact of print, I think, is to make reading a natural extension of
worship. The move from religion as a devotion of presence and observing
to one of study, reading, and participation—that's the critical shift
in the sixteenth century and it's one that embraces all varieties of
belief and it wouldn't have been possible without print.
Is
there any evidence that changes in book technology during this period
changed how people read? You mention that there was a rather important
shift, earlier, from scroll to codex, or manuscript book form. Was the
shift then from manuscript to print equally momentous?
A scroll
is primarily a form of information storage. It was not well designed
for frequent consultation, not least because it is tedious to roll it
out and difficult to locate a particular passage. It was also
impossible to index. The codex was infinitely more flexible, not least
because the sheets could be taken out and re-ordered, whereas once a
text is transcribed onto a scroll its order is fixed. With a codex or
book the reader can flick back and forth, look things up, compare and
contrast, and refer back. This is a different sort of reading. This is
why Christians so valued the codex for their sacred texts, and the rise
of Christianity played a large part in the replacement of the scroll
with the codex.
The codex also suits the gathering up of many
different texts. Many medieval manuscripts were informal anthologies
of this sort—his was probably a necessary economy in storage when the
binding of a book was a substantial additional cost that fell on the
purchaser. So the manuscript book was both very flexible, and very
personal. If you think of these positive features of the manuscript,
print was initially very awkward, because it reimposed the
inflexibility of the scroll. Instead of having this collection of
manuscripts which you've gathered up on your own way, print offers you
a prescriptive body of text which can only be one way. It doesn't have
the allure and intensely personal feel of a manuscript made, in effect,
by the owner by gathering together bits and pieces from different
places. It was also very hard, particularly in the fifteenth century,
for the new print medium to replicate the level of decoration that
adorns many medieval manuscripts. Imagine going from color television
back to black and white. I think that's how it must have seemed for
many experienced book owners when they surveyed these new, unadorned
printed texts.