Book description
There is a longstanding confusion of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's
one-time business partner, with the notorious Doctor Faustus. The
association is not surprising to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for from its
very early days the printing press was viewed by some as black magic.
For the most part, however, it was welcomed as a "divine
art" by Western churchmen and statesmen. Sixteenth-century
Lutherans hailed it for emancipating Germans from papal rule, and
seventeenth-century English radicals viewed it as a weapon against
bishops and kings. While an early colonial governor of Virginia
thanked God for the absence of printing in his colony, a century
later, revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic paid tribute to
Gutenberg for setting in motion an irreversible movement that
undermined the rule of priests and kings. Yet scholars continued to
praise printing as a peaceful art. They celebrated the advancement of
learning while expressing concern about information overload.
In Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Eisenstein, author of
the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change, has written a magisterial and highly readable account of
five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers.
Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which
technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.
Always keeping an eye on the present, she recalls how, in the
nineteenth century, the steam press was seen both as a giant engine of
progress and as signaling the end of a golden age. Predictions that
the newspaper would supersede the book proved to be false, and
Eisenstein is equally skeptical of pronouncements of the supersession
of print by the digital.
The use of print has always entailed ambivalence about serving
the muses as opposed to profiting from the marketing of commodities.
Somewhat newer is the tension between the perceived need to preserve
an ever-increasing mass of texts against the very real space and
resource constraints of bricks-and-mortar libraries. Whatever the
multimedia future may hold, Eisenstein notes, our attitudes toward
print will never be monolithic. For now, however, reports of its death
are greatly exaggerated.
"Eisenstein's research is impressive, reaching far and wide
across languages and centuries. Her knowledge of the history of
publication engages the wealth of recent scholarship (she has been a
conscientious book reviewer throughout her career) and extends as far
back as Roman copyists. . . . Her breadth enables her to identify
topoi and their mutations; to observe long-term trends, diminishing
ripples, and delayed reactions; and to distinguish what is new or
newly dressed in authors' concerns and readers'
complaints."-Journal of Scholarly Publishing
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is Professor Emerita of History at the
University of Michigan. In addition to The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change, her books include its abridgment, The Printing Revolution in
Early Modern Europe, and Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French
Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution.
