Romeo Garcia
CCR 633: Textual Machinery & Rhetorical Agency| Dr. Krista Kennedy
Syracuse University| Spring 2015
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change| Elizabeth Eisenstein
Professional and Academic Background| Elizabeth Eisenstein
Education| B.A. @ Vassar College| M.A. and Ph.D. @ Radcliffe College
Profession| Emeritus Professor of History, University of Michigan| Visiting Professor, Wolfson College
@ Oxford University| Consultant to the Library of Congress
Areas of Interest| Manuscript and Print culture, Print Revolution, and Impact of Printing
Awards| Humanities Fellowship
Context: The context of this text is the technological innovation, the advent of print, and its impact on
sociocultural systems of communication.
Critique: There are no studies devoted to the invention (and consequences of said invention) of print and
its effects on society over time.
Argument: Elizabeth Eisenstein argues that ‘revolution’ of communication can be traced correlatively
with the invention and trajectory of the printing press, and therefore, the printing press (instead of 16th
century word discovery or emergence capitalism or even Christianity) is the primary agent of change in
both sociocultural systems of communication and flow of information.
Affects of Print: The print had affects 1) on arrangement and presentation of texts, which consequentially
had affects on thought patterns of readers (dissemination) (88), 2) on the codification and
[standardization] of language, 3) on the reinforcement of values and ideologies (preservation), 4), on the
spread of individualism in the West (i.e. apprenticeships or dependency on the Church), and 5) on
commercialization (i.e. promotion techniques aimed at particular audiences).
Key-terms: printer’s workshops, technological innovation, standardization, and materialism
Part One: Introduction to an Elusive Transformation
I: The Unacknowledged Revolution
“Studies dealing with the history of printing are isolated and artificially sealed off from the rest
of historical literature” (6).

Question: What reasons are provided the contribute to such marginalization (and/or
subordinating position) of print and its effect on sociocultural systems of
communication?
“It is easier to generalize about the new system of book production than about the old” (16)

Question: what are the challenges in ‘generalizing’ (both in terms of interpretation and
traditional methodology for situating print) about the old and what is suggested in
exploring the effects of print culture upon society?
“The shift from script to print is overshadowed by later transformations and placed by
periodization schemes into a closed chapter” (31).

Question: what is suggested in exploring the invention of movable type and what are the
two models provided the reflect models of change?
II: Defining the Initial Shift; Some Features of Print
“I will be concerned with a major transformation that constituted a larger cluster of changes in
itself” (43)

Question: what were the implications/affects of printer workshops, in terms of
sociocultural systems of communication and book production?
“The use of typography for texts led to that of xylography for illustration, sealing the fate of
illuminate along with that of the scribe” (54).

Question: what was the significance in the ability to effectively replicate, both in the
context of text and images?
“The advent of printing led to the creation of a new kind of shop structure” (55)

Question: what were some obvious and less obvious affects of print in terms of contact
and cross-cultural interchanges?
“There is no way of settling the conflict between evolutionary and revolutionary models”? (61)

Question: however, what is suggested in terms of the affects of print on sociocultural
systems of communication and why the need to place print in relationship with
concurrent events?
“Printing encouraged forms of combinatory activity, which were social as well as intellectual. It
changed relationships between men of learning as well as between systems of ideas” (76)

Question: in terms of dissemination, standardization, and preservation, how did print
affect the processes of the above?
“New layouts/arrangement and presentations helped reorganize the thinking of readers” (88).
Question: how did the system and methods of putting together texts influence bodies of thought,
order, and to much extent the accumulation of information?
“Typographical fixity is a basic prerequisite for the rapid advancement of learning” (113)