Of all the changes witnessed by the fifteenth century, it is arguable that none has had so profound an effect as the invention of printing. For more than two thousand years, much of Europe had depended on the written word for at least some aspects of its activities, while the history of Christendom was (as it still remains) defined by a central religious written text, the Bible. In such a context, the advent of printing heralded changes that have rightly been described as revolutionary. But like all revolutions, the invention of printing, its subsequent course, its effects and the ways in which it was exploited, raise issues that have little to do with the more immediate circumstances of invention: the application of metallurgical, chemical, calligraphic and engraving skills to the production of a printed page.
The concept of multiple copies, identical in text and in format, was not new. In the ninth century, the monastery of Tours, among others, had specialised in the production of Bibles, exporting them to centres throughout the Carolingian Empire. In the thirteenth century, the needs of universities at Paris, Bologna and Oxford for identical teaching texts had been met by the so-called pecia system, whereby authorised copies of parts of books were lent out for copying — a process that, because it enabled several people to copy out the same book simultaneously, added considerably to speed of production as well as reducing (if far from eliminating) the opportunities for inaccuracy. In thirteenth-century Paris, the production of small Bibles, for private use, was organised on an unprecedented scale and with much consequent uniformity. In the Low Countries, in the fifteenth century, the Windesheim congregation, and the Brethren of the Common Life, were committed to the production of manuscript devotional books in quantities sufficient for an increasingly interested lay public inspired by the devotio moderna movement encouraging private piety. In northern Italy, humanist demands for classical texts were met by stationers able to command an organised workforce of scribes, decorators and illuminators. These were all activities relating to the production of books. For less expensive parts of the market, and particularly to meet a widespread demand for religious images, printed images from woodcuts had been in circulation since at least the late fourteenth century: to judge by the surviving examples (not in themselves altogether satisfactory evidence), production and demand for such pictures were concentrated mostly in Bavaria, Swabia, Austria and Bohemia, and in the Low Countries in the north.
Each of these different kinds of literature had one feature in common: they were all defined not only by their content, but also by the existence of a market, be it in a religious or educational context. If we consider the range and nature of the books and other publications from the earliest presses, here, too, organised communities played an essential part, whether in the monastic world, popular religious cults, administration or university or other educational circles. In a market used to manuscripts, where the investment of time and materials meant that speculative production was strictly limited, one of the most forceful differences introduced by printing was the enormous increase in investment in raw materials. This was quite separate from the initial outlay for metals to make type-moulds or type. For the so-called Gutenberg, or forty-two-line, Bible alone, the major project towards which Gutenberg’s efforts in Mainz are assumed to have been directed perhaps even from the first, sufficient paper was required for probably 120—50 copies, quite apart from the vellum required for perhaps 35—40 copies printed on that material — each copy requiring about 320 sheets. All the other principal publications associated with Gutenberg’s press in the early 1450s were quite short, requiring correspondingly little capital investment in materials on which to print. Gutenberg’s own concern at the cost of materials is reflected in the design of the forty-two-line Bible, a book which, though magnificent and highly visible in itself (as usually required for lectern Bibles), is in some respects noticeably compact in its layout and avoidance of wasted space. In other words, investment, materials and design combined to meet the underlying assumption of printing: that books could, if produced in sufficient quantity, be manufactured more cheaply.
There is some evidence to suggest that the decision to embark on such an expensive undertaking as a lectern Bible was itself prompted by a movement for monastic reform. The forty-two-line Bible, like its immediate successors printed elsewhere, was certainly not intended for general private use, though some copies are known to have been owned by individuals. On the evidence of binding and decoration, each of which would have been added locally, near or even at a copy’s final destination, rather than necessarily in Mainz, copies seem to have found their way within a few years over much of Germany, including east to Leipzig and north to the port of Lubeck, as well as to Bruges and London. So, almost from the first, the principle was demonstrated: that large books, produced in quantity, could only be absorbed in a widespread market.
Likewise, many of the other of the earliest books printed at Mainz, Strasburg and Bamberg were on a scale that demonstrated that large books, handsomely produced, need not be as expensive as manuscripts of corresponding size. Of the two psalters printed by Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, in 1457 and 1459, the second was for specifically Benedictine houses, the first for more general use in and around Mainz. It may be assumed that Durandus’s Rationale (1459) on religious ceremonies, and Pope Clement V’s Constitutiones (1460), both printed by Fust and Schoeffer, were produced in response to the needs of similar customers. In Strasburg, the first books were also large folios, addressed to a market in which the organised needs of the Church figured most powerfully. Between the appearance of the forty-two-line Bible in c. 1454, and 1470, nine editions of the Vulgate were printed, in Mainz, Strasburg, Bamberg and Basle, all of them in folio.
This emphasis on an institutional market was limited, however, by its very definition: libraries and communities do not need to buy the same text very often. Gutenberg had printed shorter texts for secular needs, schoolbooks as well as indulgences, in the 1450s. In Bamberg, Albrecht Pfister turned his attention, albeit briefly, to vernacular German literature. And with the work of Ulrich Zel, the first printer in Cologne, where he seems to have been established by 1464, there was a sharp change of emphasis to works in Latin. His first work consisted in quarto editions of works for which sales could be expected to be to individuals, as well as to institutions: Antoninus ‘of Florence’s’ Summa confessionum, Cicero, Jean Gerson, John Chrysostom and St Augustine.
Documentary sources, and close examination of surviving copies of books, have revealed a great deal of the background and financial and practical details of the beginnings of printing at Mainz in the 1450s; but it is only by considering the kind of books first printed, their size, design, likely readership, market and those who encouraged their production, that an understanding can be reached respecting the reasons for so much effort and money being invested in inventions and skills offering a future that can never have looked quite certain. The group gathered about Gutenberg does not seem to have been alone in attempts to discover a way of producing multiple copies; others were at work in Avignon, and perhaps elsewhere. But the invention was Gutenberg’s. In practice, it consisted of several quite separate components, uniting metal working, calligraphy and chemistry. Though it is not clear in what order these came during the decade and more preceding the appearance of the first printed sheets in the early 1450s, it will be convenient to take them thus.
First, then, is type. Although it is possible to cut words in wood, and to print from that (as had been done in the far east for at least six centuries), such a process is slow, and requires great expenditure of effort even for short texts. The earliest known woodcut pictures in the west date from the late fourteenth century; and though most surviving blockbooks date from the late fifteenth, or even the early sixteenth, century, woodcuts bearing words survive from the first quarter of the fifteenth. By inventing the means to compose words from individual letters, Gutenberg created a flexible and adaptable method of producing a printing surface that, once used, could be dismounted and reassembled for some quite different purpose. Investment was thus not limited to a single publication. The method he developed in the 1440s and early 1450s remained the same in principle until the advent of photocomposition in the mid-twentieth century. Each character was engraved in relief on the end of a piece of soft steel, to create a punch. This punch was then struck into a small bar of copper, to make a matrix. After this matrix had been trimmed to ensure that its sides were square and regular, it was placed in a mould that could be adjusted according to the different widths of letters in the alphabet — ‘i’ being much narrower than ‘m’, for example. It is this type-mould that lies at the technical heart of Gutenberg’s invention, and that is likely to have given most trouble as he adapted other existing skills such as punch-cutting and the knowledge of different properties of metals. Molten type metal, with a low melting point and consisting of an alloy of lead, tin and a hardening agent, was then poured into the mould, and a character, or sort, was cast. Each sort — be it an individual letter or number, or a ligatured group of letters — was cast separately.
A fount of type, at its simplest, consists of the letters of the alphabet, upper and lower case (capitals and small letters), numerals, punctuation and spaces. But the styles of formal script current in Germany in the mid-fifteenth century did not lend themselves to such separate analysis. Instead, they depended on a large number of contractions, linked letters (‘ligatures’) and diacritical marks, as well as a different range of punctuation from that in modern use. It has been calculated that the fount of type used in Gutenberg’s masterpiece, the forty-two-line Bible, consisted of perhaps as many as 270 different sorts. Even this, however, represented a considerable feat of analysis and simplification in face of the assumption that a printed book should resemble a manuscript so far as possible in its layout, design of letters and qualities of legibility, which itself depended on familiarity. It is reasonable to suppose that the skills of Peter Schoeffer, one of Gutenberg’s principal partners, and a professional scribe, were critical to this aspect of the invention.
Thirdly, a new kind of ink was required: one that could be applied to a non-porous metal surface (rather than, as for handwriting, to the porous surface of paper or vellum, or the treated end of a quill), and one that would retain its colour evenly when spread out. The oil-based inks used in the first Mainz press were composed of carbon, copper, lead and sulphur, the metal content being, in retrospect, unusually high. Though we know least of all about the earliest printing presses, it seems probable that the first ones were adaptations of exist ing mechanisms such as those for pressing grapes or olives. Certainly the main capital outlay for the fifteenth-century printer was not a press, which could be run up by a local carpenter and blacksmith. The principal expense was type, which during the first years of printing seems to have been cast usually by the printers themselves. Type-founding as a separate business seems to have become established only in the 1470s, in a development that crucially affected the appearance of books, since it meant that many different printers might share the same design of type.
Equally important, and essential to the concept of producing large quantities of books, was paper. Most books were printed on paper, though vellum remained in use for special copies, or for particular heavily used publications such as schoolbooks, or parts of books such as the canon of the Mass. Printing required paper in unprecedented quantities, and the cost of books was very largely made up of the cost of paper. Writing in 1492, Johannes Trithemius, the humanist Benedictine abbot of Sponheim, wrote in his tract De laude scriptorum of the distinction between the manuscript and the printed book, and singled out in particular the fact that the latter was on paper — a property that, in his view, would lead to its eventual destruction, whereas manuscripts, on vellum, would last much longer. By the mid-fifteenth century, the paper trade in western Europe was well established. Paper making had been introduced into the west in the twelfth century, and mills were built across Europe from Spain to northern Germany. The principal areas, all of them dependent on clean running water, a constant supply of rag and either steady local demand or the means to reach a market, were in northern Italy, Champagne, the Ile de France and south-west France. But in Germany, the first documented mill was established at Nuremberg only at the end of the fourteenth century — barely fifty years before Gutenberg began the course of experiment that was to lead to the invention of printing. The first in the Low Countries, near Lille, dates from about the same time. In Switzerland, the first mill was founded in 1433, at Basle, and the area soon became a major source of supply for rapidly growing demand. Not all areas were in a position to produce their own paper. There was no paper mill in England until the 1490s.
The development and spread of printing depended on a similar mixture of enterprise, speculation, investment, transport and, ultimately, market. An active international trade in printed books was established with remarkable speed, and it forms a pattern often independent of the spread of the new presses. The first twenty years of printing saw presses introduced not only in the major Rhineland cities of Mainz, Strasburg (1460), Cologne (1464) and Basle (c. 1467), but also further east, in Bamberg (before 1460) and Nuremberg (1470) on the Main, and Augsburg (1468). By 1470, there were presses as far north as Cologne and as far south as Rome. But in central Europe they were to be found only as far east as Bamberg and as far west as Basle. The single exception was Paris, where in 1470 the former rector of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet, encouraged the establishment of a press with distinctive humanist overtones under the guidance of three men, Michael Friburger, Ulrich Gering and Martin Crantz, whose background and choice of publications give them a claim to be counted as the first secular learned press. Within ten years, presses had been set up from Budapest and Cracow to Seville and Salamanca, from Lubeck and Rostock on the Baltic to Naples and Cosenza on the Mediterranean, and printing had become well established in London, with smaller concerns, albeit briefly, at St Albans and Oxford. The concentration on a north-south corridor, from the Low Countries, through the valleys of the Rhine and upper Danube to the northern parts of Italy, remained noticeable. Only by 1500 could it be said that the spread of printing bore a serious relationship to the general distribution of population.
The reasons for this are complicated by geography, trade routes, population structure, literacy, local initiatives and, increasingly, the needs of education and administration. There is no evidence that printing was affected by changes in the size of population, which in the second part of the fifteenth century seems to have changed little. In general, printing was slow to take root in university towns; and where it did, as at Paris and Cologne, the earliest printers either showed little interest in local teaching needs, or moved on to other themes once a patron’s initial enthusiasm waned. Firm connections between presses and universities were established only from the 1470s, and then, predominantly, in the higher faculties rather than at beginners’ levels. Printing and publishing, dependent on capital and on communications, thrived and became established only in towns with good trade connections. But it is noticeable how many small towns, and even villages, had, by the end of the century, witnessed attempts to introduce the new skill, as a result of the wish of local magnates, lay or ecclesiastical, to extend their patronage. Few of these small presses survived more than a few years before their workmen moved on or sought alternative employment.
As part of this migration of the new skills, printers might travel great distances before settling. In Italy, the skill was introduced by Germans trained in the north; there were already powerful trade and cultural links with Germanspeaking Europe, into which printing was readily fitted. At Subiaco, the first printers, Conrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, came from the dioceses of Mainz and Cologne respectively: Sweynheim had probably been trained in the printing house of Fust and Schoeffer, moving south following the sack of Mainz in 1462. The first printers in Venice, the brothers Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira, were from Speier. At Foligno, Johann Neumeister, from Mainz, established a short-lived press in 1470, the same year as Johann Reinhart set up another, equally short-lived, in nearby Trevi: indeed, ‘Moguntini calligraphi’ — not necessarily printers — had been recorded at Foligno even in 1463. Elsewhere in Europe, the first printers in Paris were from Switzerland. The first at Lyons, Guillaume le Roy, came from Liege, and his professional connections seem to have been formed in Cologne and the Lower Rhine. In Seville, though the first printers (in 1477) were, unusually, nativespeaking Spaniards, other printers came from Germany; Meinhart Ungut had worked previously in Naples, and the firm of ‘Companeros Alemanes’ also had links with Italy, perhaps Venice. In England, William Caxton was unusual in that he was a native, having learned the craft in Cologne and printed in Bruges before bringing it to England and setting up his press at Westminster in 1476. The next press to be founded in England, a short-lived one at Oxford, was run by Theoderic Rood, who came from Cologne in 1478.
As this process implies, many of the early printers were peripatetic, as is shown by the careers of Germans who went to work in southern Europe. The effect of such migration was to be seen not simply in the establishment of presses, only some of which lasted, but also in the setting up of a local printing industry in towns across Europe. It simultaneously created a network of relationships defined by the new medium of print, on a scale never matched by the manuscript trade. In northern Italy, many small presses, often private or semiprivate affairs dependent upon the interest and investment of a single patron, lasted for only very brief periods, since peripatetic printers were common. Henricus de Colonia, whose father came originally from Dalen, near Cologne, worked in Brescia, Bologna, Modena, Siena, Lucca, Nozzano and Urbino in the last quarter of the century, always for short periods and returning to some places several times. Dionysius Bertochus, from Bologna, worked in Reggio Emilia, Vicenza, Treviso, Venice, Bologna and Modena over much the same period. Like all but a few printers, these men mixed printing with other forms of livelihood. Indeed, to judge by their output and by the expressions used in legal documents to describe their activities, printing was only a minor part of their lives. For example, Gerardus de Lisa moved south from Ghent, and by 1462 was a schoolmaster at Treviso. In 1471 he printed the first edition of a pseudo-Augustine Manuak. But in Treviso he was working in the shadow of the much more powerful printers and booksellers of Venice, where he removed in 1477—8, before moving on briefly to print in Udine and Cividale and then coming back to Treviso. He died, precentor of the cathedral, at Aquileia in 1499, having been by turn schoolmaster, bookseller, printer, choirmaster, musician and debt collector.
But while the printing trade was characterised in some respects, especially until the 1480s, by emigre Germans, who were displaced by native speakers often rather haphazardly, and in other respects by craftsmen who moved press and type from place to place in search of a livelihood, the trade became dominated by a few major firms organised internationally. This tendency was encouraged by successive crises in the trade in the 1470s and 1480s, crises brought on by overproduction of some texts and the consequent failure in a collapsing market to realise adequate returns from investment. In Venice, Nicolas Jenson, a Frenchman from near Troyes, established a new press in 1470 at a time when there was but one printing house in the city, and its powerful founder, Johannes de Spira, had died only recently. His early output was dominated by classical Latin texts, including luxurious editions of which some copies were printed on vellum and were clearly intended for illumination. This policy helped him through the trade crisis of 1473; but he also met it by soon afterwards forming a partnership with a group of German capitalists. This powerful syndicate quickly proved successful, and soon came to dominate the Venetian trade and therefore much of that in Europe. The group’s hold on the trade was confirmed by joining with Johannes de Colonia and Johannes Manthen, successors to Vindelinus de Spira.
Other major and successful concerns remained dominated by members of a single family. None of this kind was more successful than the Kobergers, in Nuremberg. Though the city, a critical point in the exchange of manufactured goods with cattle from the more thinly populated regions to the east, gained a printing press for the first time only in or a little before 1470, the Kobergers’ systematic and rapid advance as scholarly publishers, taking full advantage of local skills in metalwork and other arts, meant that for half a century the city was also one of the most important publishing centres in Europe. Anton Koberger, born in Nuremberg, set up his press in 1470 or 1471, and employed as editors men such as Hans Amerbach (later a successful printer on his own account at Basle) and Johann Beckenhaub, who had worked formerly at Strasburg. His circle also included the humanists Willibald Pirckheimer, Conrad Celtis and Hartmann Schedel, author of the most celebrated of all the books to come from the Koberger printing house, the so-called Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. Books from the press became renowned for their lavish woodcut illustration, and Michael Wolgemut, to whom Durer was apprenticed in 1486, was responsible with Wilhelm Pleydenwurff for some of the most elaborate. By the 1490s, Koberger owned twenty-four presses, and employed about a hundred apprentices. He had branches at Lyons, Paris and Toulouse, agents in Milan and Venice, Lubeck and Antwerp, and had trading links with England and Spain. The size of Koberger’s organisation was unique for its time; but it demonstrated on a European scale what was already apparent in much smaller organisations. The manuscript book, and the trade in manuscripts, were far from extinct; but the potential ability of printing to reach out to new markets and new kinds of readers, and draw readers together on an unprecedented scale, was established irrevocably.
The potential of printing technology, linked to the exploitation of paper, was rapidly recognised for its religious, scholarly and social value. But it was not universally welcomed, and its effects were not always to the advancement of knowledge. In Venice, the Dominican scribe, Filippo de Strata, attacked the new printed books for the licence they gave to immorality and profanity. In Florence, the stationer, or cartolaio, Vespasiano da Bisticci continued to supply manuscripts on a scale that suggests the market was by no means restricted to the very wealthiest. Not surprisingly, those in the existing book trades who had most to lose were also those most vocal against the new art. These were extreme positions. But in Italy, France, Flanders and the Netherlands, the second half of the fifteenth century produced two or three generations of mature and talented illuminators, whose careers span the introduction of printed books and the gradual establishment of a market that looked to the printed, rather than the manuscript, word. Printing did not displace the manuscript book until, for some purposes, well after the end even of the sixteenth century. For the wealthiest, manuscripts of chosen texts, whether illuminated or, most commonly, decorated in established traditions, remained de rigueur. Federigo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, was said to have eschewed printed books. In Hungary, King Matyas Corvinus (d. 1490) drew on the work of Italian scribes and illuminators to create a library humanist in its context and conservative in its preference (albeit by no means exclusive) for manuscripts. In England, illuminated manuscripts continued to be commissioned for the royal library. In the Burgundian duchy, the death of Charles the Bold in 1477 brought to a conclusion a period that had been able to look confidently to the ducal court for support in the production of elaborate and magnificent manuscripts. But the traditions and skills gathered in Flanders remained alive, not only to meet the commissions of a new generation of wealthy men such as Raphael de Marcatellis in Ghent (d. 1508) and Louis de Bruges, lord of Gruuthuse (d. 1492), but also to provide more modest books for the innumerable customers, many of them abroad, who expected their prayer books still to be in manuscript.
As the advantages of printed texts were accepted, so those who had met the demands for manuscripts either turned to other employment, or found places in the printing trade, or continued to supply decorative contexts to the printed word. In Bruges, Colard Mansion, a former scribe whose ornate typeface closely resembles the lettre batarde of high-quality Burgundian books, produced lavish editions of Boccaccio (1476) and Boethius (1477) where spaces were left for large illustrations to be added separately. Those in the Boethius were intended to be added by hand; but some copies of the Boccaccio were provided with engravings at these points, thus making it the first printed book to be illustrated with engravings rather than woodcuts. In Paris, Antoine Verard specialised in books that combined printed text with illuminations commissioned at what must have been sometimes considerable expense. At Venice, in the 1470s, full advantage was often taken of the generous margins provided by, among others, Nicolas Jenson, to receive decoration as desired either from individual artists or from workshops, sometimes working in collaboration with the printer rather than a stationer. But amidst all this activity, much of it of a transitional nature as the book trade and readers alike came to terms with printing, the great majority of books were plain, or rubricated in the simplest possible way, and printed in such a manner as to make the most of the space offered by the size of sheets of paper. Just as most manuscripts had been quite plain, so were most printed books.
Printing and manuscripts marched side by side, the two techniques often appearing in the same volumes. By the later part of the fifteenth century, printed engravings from copper plates were well established as illustrations to manuscript prayer books. Until well into the sixteenth century, it was common practice for owners of manuscript and printed texts to arrange for them to be bound up together irrespective of their means of production. In sum, not only did printed and manuscript books exist side by side, but the two media were frequently combined in a single book. Printers left space for initial letters and other textual features to be filled in by hand, and there are many examples of manuscripts copied from printed texts. The printing revolution took shape only gradually.
The process was slower for some forms of text than for others. The technical difficulties associated with casting Greek type, with its ligatures, breathings and accents, as well as the cognate requirements of investment, scholarship, linguistic skills and market, were major factors in the tardy appearance of most of the major literature in ancient Greek. Even in England, despite Caxton’s notable achievement as an advocate of printing major English literary texts, including editions of Malory (1485) and Chaucer (1476 and 1483), much vernacular literature remained unprinted until well into the sixteenth century. In all areas where there were presses, the introduction of printing as a means of disseminating vernaculars, whether for imaginative literature, for government, for legislation, for religious purposes or for practical instruction, had the effect of accelerating tendencies towards linguistic stabilisation. In England, the Low Countries and Spain, the earliest printers’ attention to the vernacular was encouraged partly by the fact that by the time presses were introduced there, the European book trade was already well supplied with most of the standard classical and other Latin texts that formed the mainstay of literate activity. And throughout western Europe, for practical skills such as cookery and everyday medicine, it is probable that the number of printed texts remained outweighed by private manuscript compilations. But in all subjects, the success of the print ing press is not necessarily to be measured by the dates of the first editions of much used works: for so long as there were sufficient manuscripts of a work in circulation, there was no need of a printed edition. This may partly explain the tardy responses of universities to the new skill, mentioned earlier.
It will be seen that different kinds of customers expected different things from printing. The printed book might bring uniformity and lower prices; but these were not always qualities either expected or appreciated. For classical texts, the introduction of printing, not of itself a guarantee of accuracy or authority, meant that the textual traditions of humanist manuscripts tended to be perpetuated, sometimes in glaring inaccuracy. Moreover, as was the case with Ovid, the textual authority quickly accorded to the edilio princeps (Bologna 1471) actually drove out the better, if still inadequate, text published at about the same time in Rome. Whatever the benefits of printing, it was an acute disappointment for some, even in the fifteenth century, that inadequate and inaccurate texts were rushed to publication, and disseminated to an uncontrolled reading public. For many classical texts, the earlier and more accurate manuscripts were not introduced into the printed tradition for at least another generation or more of hard work by scholars. But printing also brought a new degree of competition, and increasingly so as different editions of the same text were put on to the market. It stimulated a new need to advertise. In 1470, for example, Peter Schoeffer warned customers against buying copies of Jerome’s letters, as he was shortly to publish a superior edition, properly collated with sources in monastic and cathedral libraries.
Printed texts, because of their number, were less likely to be lost. But what was printed could also be forgotten or degraded, and not only in classical texts. Woodcut illustrations provided a means of circulating exactly repeated pictorial statements, whether in botany, medicine, engineering, astronomy or portraiture. But as these images were in turn copied, without recourse to an original, so crucial details could be coarsened. In these circumstances, printed editions actually encouraged a decline in knowledge, correctable only by aggressive marketing of major new editions. Botanical illustration suffered particularly in this way. In cartography, the map in Bernard von Breydenbach’s great illustrated account Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Mainz 1486) shows clearly the two forks at the north end of the Red Sea; but this was ignored by subsequent cartographers, and was not again included in printed maps until the seventeenth century. Greenland was included in a map of 1482, published at Ulm, but not in any others during the fifteenth century. The Caspian Sea, accurately depicted oriented north-south on Venetian maps, was usually shown oriented east-west until as late as 1721.
Whatever the textual achievements and limitations, the introduction of printing heralded wider fundamental and irrevocable change. Verbal communication, formerly mostly the prerogative of speech and the pen, was given a new guise, with the potential to reach diverse and scattered audiences far more rapidly than had hitherto been either feasible or even envisaged. Printed matter such as popular literature, books of instruction, almanacs and works of religion became, even for the semi-literate, part of everyday life, thanks to lower unit costs and the ready manufacture of hundreds, and even thousands, of copies. In scholarly work, the labour of editing was not merely transformed by the existence of printed editions to act as near-uniform standards for collating manuscripts scattered across Europe. Widespread publication in print also lent a new urgency to discussion. The effect on classical scholarship was tumultuous, as printing ushered in a century and more of fundamental reassessment. The same considerations applied in the Church, the indulgences printed by Gutenberg only hinting at the change of scale that might be achieved; they gave no inkling of the manner whereby religious and other debate was to be transformed. The ability of the press to accelerate the dispersal of laws and regulations, to promote instruction, education, scientific exchange, medicine or opinion, helped also to provoke responses that could be more rapidly shared. The printing press, the first agent of mass communication, was also the means to, as well as the cause of, an unprecedented acceleration in social intercourse, one of the defining characteristics of the early modern world.