B004R9Q09U EBOK (17 page)

The rise of social documents in the early Middle Ages fueled an expansion of commerce and trade, laying the groundwork for a series of larger social, political, and economic transformations to come. Just as symbolic objects like beads and bone knives had transformed and expanded existing social structures facilitating a “release from proximity,” the new technology of secular documents allowed people to forge bonds of trust among people otherwise lacking any social connection. Like tribal beads and jewelry, medieval documents functioned primarily as totemic objects, used to cement social relationships that could extend beyond any one individual’s immediate trusted social network. Now two relative strangers could forge a reliable bond in the form of a document, even though in all likelihood neither party could read it. Merchants from distant towns could make pacts with each other; treaties, laws, and institutional charters began to emerge. Whereas writing had once been the exclusive prov
ince of holy men, now it passed into the hands of the laity. Merchants had contracts drawn up, government officials documented their laws, and increasingly people learned to govern their own affairs under the aegis of the written word. Even though most people still could not read, documents provided the conduit for medieval Europe to move toward larger and more complex social and political forms.

The technology of writing had been locked for centuries in the monasteries. To medieval Europeans it was an instrument of divine power, a secret accessible only to holy men. As secular literacy started to spread beyond the monastery walls, written words still carried a residual talismanic authority that lent documents an extraordinary symbolic power. The once-mysterious art became part of the fabric of everyday social life.

Late medieval writing was, then, a form of stigmergy (see
Chapter 1
). Just as ants and termites transform the external environment to introduce coded constraints on each other’s behaviors, so medieval documents served a similar purpose as totemic objects designed to regulate behaviors; their function had less to do with textual meaning than with social coercion. “Relationships between the individual and the family, the group, or the wider community are all influenced by the degree to which society acknowledges written principles of operation,” writes Stock. A shared recognition of the power of documents can mediate and shape human relationships, whether or not every individual actually knows how to read. This kind of macro literacy “also affects the way people conceptualize such relations, and these patterns of thought inevitably feed back into the network of real interdependencies.”
⁷

As Europeans found themselves living in an increasingly document-centric world, they started to experience the first rumblings of social and political transformations that would reverberate for centuries. While the changes that swept Europe during this period arose from a complex web of causes and conditions, the new technologies of writing played an important role, helping speed the demise of the old feudal system and fostering a period of turmoil that would reach an apex during the Gutenberg revolution. Ultimately, the impact of new technologies helped spur the growth of new forms
of governmental and institutional hierarchies that would take full expression in the Renaissance. Eventually, the technology of secular documentation would even give rise to an entirely new form of government: the “document nation,”
⁸
a state founded purely on the written word (whose greatest exemplar would eventually be the United States). We are getting ahead of the story now, but suffice it to say that even before Gutenberg invented his press, a medieval information explosion was well under way, and it would prove literally revolutionary.

As secular writing emerged among the mercantile classes, literacy spread. Books were getting cheaper to produce, and more people could read them. The monastic scriptoria, which had once enjoyed a virtual monopoly on book production, were beginning to compete with an emerging institution of secular literacy: the university. During this period leading up to Gutenberg, books began to find an audience among the bourgeoisie, and Europe began to feel the first rumblings of an emerging secular literature.

The growth of universities, coupled with cheaper production materials, meant that monasteries lost their monopoly on the production of books. Now a new class of scholars, teachers, and students began to produce manuscripts of their own, often working with lay craftsmen who began to form a healthy and growing book trade, populated by booksellers, professional copyists, and “stationers.”
⁹
The growing number of secular tradespeople involved in book production led to a flowering of more and more books. Universities began to accumulate books in growing libraries of their own. And as the universities turned out graduates, a new reading public emerged, fueling a market for books whose subjects extended beyond the time-honored genres of scriptural texts and works of classical antiquity. New types of popular texts, written in local vernacular, began to surface: Travel journals, poems, romances, the lives of the saints, and the popular
Book of Hours
started to grace the homes of many medieval households.

During a period stretching roughly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, a preliminary information explosion began to take shape, fueled by the introduction of a breakthrough information
technology: paper. While the old materials of parchment and vellum had persisted for centuries, the invention of pulp-based paper made it suddenly possible for scribes to produce cheaper editions of popular works, which a growing merchant class could afford to purchase for themselves. The cost of raw materials declined (although the cost of labor did not), and as a result books started to proliferate among a wider audience.

By the end of the fourteenth century, an emerging literate public was consuming books in growing numbers. By the early fifteenth century, books were already being mass produced throughout Europe, through monastic scriptoria and other private-sector workshops capable of turning out hundreds of books at a time. Fueling the spread of writing were innovations like woodblock printing and the punch transfer technique perfected in distributing books to the missionary corps. Demand for books was growing, and the growing corps of secular scribes were finding it difficult to keep up. Conditions were ripe for a technological breakthrough.

In 1458 the king of France dispatched one of his spies to the German town of Mainz, where rumor had it that a troop of printers had created an ingenious new device, capable of reproducing manuscripts mechanically. No scribe needed.

The historical impact of Gutenberg’s printing press requires no corroboration here. Suffice it to say that without the advent of movable type, we would live in an unimaginably different world. Today, we instinctively view the arrival of the printing press as an unqualified boon: the engine of democracy, modern scholarship, and individual expression. For all its positive byproducts, however, the history of the printing press turns out to be far less rosy than we might imagine.

Gutenberg’s machine arrived in Europe not as a benign force for personal enlightenment but as a profoundly disruptive technology that triggered a series of painful and often bloody conflicts. The arrival of the Gutenberg press may have ultimately heralded an unprec
edented boom in reading and writing, but it also serves as a cautionary tale. Just 10 years before the French king dispatched his spies, Gutenberg had invented his movable-type system, signaling a staggering technological leap forward from the block printing technology already in use. Recognizing the potential value of his invention, Gutenberg had sworn his printers to the medieval equivalent of a nondisclosure agreement, making them promise to breathe not a word of it outside the print shop. It was a futile promise. Word of the invention soon found its way out of Mainz and into neighboring municipalities. By the time the rumor reached the king of France, word had already started to spread throughout continental Europe. By 1475 printing presses had popped up as far away as Paris, Lyons, and Seville.
¹⁰

In the first decades of printing the press found its most eager supporters among the clergy, who recognized the obvious laborsaving value proposition and rejoiced in the prospect of expanding the reach of God’s word through the promising new technology. Scholars, clergy, and other literate people greeted the new technology effusively. “What an ascent toward God! What ecstatic devotion must we feel on reading the many books which printing has given us!”
¹¹
Many of the first printers were themselves monks, eager to use the new device to spread the word of God far and wide among their fellow monasteries. Little did they realize that this useful contraption would soon play a role in their own institutions’ ultimate downfall.

In the fifteenth century the Roman Church exerted a near-monopoly on the New Testament, carefully controlling access to the Bible and other holy texts. Even within the church, only a subset of elevated priests possessed the skill to read Latin and thus interpret the Word of God. Churches and monasteries often kept their copies of the Bible chained to a desk or pulpit, or locked in a cabinet. These prized holy books were not just vessels of the Word of God; they also carried a totemic power as symbols of church authority.

At first the Roman Church enthusiastically endorsed the new printing process, recognizing the potential economy of scale in distributing holy texts to far-flung churches and monasteries. Early printers would often set up shop at the behest of nearby cathedrals or
monasteries, who subsidized their set-up costs so that they could provide ready access to copies of the scriptures and other liturgical texts. The early printing business also flourished in part thanks to a bull market in printed indulgences,
¹²
which now became an increasingly profitable business thanks to the printing press’s economy of scale.

 

Chained Bible in Cumnor Church, England. From William Andrews,
Curiosities of the Church
(1891).

 

The booming printing business soon proved too lucrative a business for the clergy to support by themselves; as the volume of printed documents grew, printing required an increasingly specialized
workforce. Private presses were springing up all over Europe, especially in the growing university towns. In larger towns there was an enormous untapped market of wealthy individuals eager to acquire texts previously accessible only to churches and governments able to employ armies of scribes. These wealthy patrons, men like Jean de Rohan (himself a man of letters), functioned much like venture capitalists today. They invested in the presses both for their own enrichment and out of a genuine interest in the propagation of knowledge. In large towns with an academic population, popular volumes included secular works by Aristotle, Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Boethius, as well as traditional religious texts like the works of Saint Augustine and other church fathers.
¹³

Depending on local literary appetites, publishers would tailor their offerings to the tastes of particular market segments. Scholastic books were typically printed in black gothic letters. For the common lay reader, vernacular narratives were printed in bastarda gothic. And for an emerging class of readers that today would be called “humanists,” classical texts were printed in the new “littera antique” style, the ancestor of today’s familiar roman typefaces (like the letters on this page).
¹⁴

Soon the emergence of printed books led to a standardization of typefaces that began to extinguish the idiosyncratic local styles that had flourished in the age of illuminated manuscripts. An alphabet soup of local typefaces gave way to the new roman style. Many scholars came to believe that roman type evoked the clean, economical style of the classical texts they so admired; they regarded gothic texts as overly ornamental, a throwback to old monkish ways. The adoption of roman typeface was more than just a stylistic decision; it also signaled a rejection of medieval scholasticism in favor of the secular wisdom of the Ancients.

The standardization of typefaces would prove the catalytic event in the subsequent movement of information across cultures. Roman type became the equivalent of ASCII type today: a universally recognized standard that speeds the flow of information across a distant network of readers and writers. Within a century of Gutenberg’s invention, roman script had taken hold across Europe (although print
ers in Germany continued to produce works using gothic typefaces, a preference that never completely subsided). Standard typefaces soon led to another form of standardization in the form of the printed book itself. New conventions took hold around the use of “meta” information like title pages, colophons, and framed title pages. These conventions emerged over time and slowly coalesced into standard practices for European printers. The introduction of a convention for bibliographic metadata reverberates to this day; indeed, the title page of this book (and of almost every commercially published book) is the direct heritage of a 500-year-old convention forged in the first few years after Gutenberg.