A People's History of Science by Clifford D. Conner

Author:Clifford D. Conner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786737864
Publisher: Nation Books

THE “PRINT REVOLUTION”

AND MODERN SCIENCE

WITH THE ADVENT of printing, “the world of learning, hitherto the domain of a tiny privileged elite, was suddenly made much more accessible to the common man.”176 The coming together of artisans and academics, which Zilsel identified as the key to the rise of modern science, was greatly accelerated. Elizabeth Eisenstein, who has most thoroughly investigated the historical impact of printing, argued that the collaboration of scholars and craftsmen would not have permanently borne fruit had it not become a continuous and cumulative process. And that in turn depended on the records of their cooperative efforts being stabilized by their reproduction in thousands upon thousands of standardized printed copies. According to Eisenstein’s thesis, the “print revolution” was a sine qua non of scientific advance.177

If that is so, then yet another multitude of artisans must be recognized as indispensable to the history of science. First of all was the mechanic or mechanics directly responsible for the innovation. Unfortunately, “this stupendous achievement left but little record of its origin and development besides the mass of material that it produced,” leaving “the identity of the great mechanic who invented printing shrouded in impenetrable mystery. . . . Whether he spelled his name Gutenberg, Fust, Schöffer, Coster or something else, has not been established.”178 Gutenberg alone is often credited, but would it not be better to recognize it as a collective accomplishment?

Furthermore, the rapid rise of the printing industry brought into existence a constellation of related crafts whose practitioners included “printers, typefounders, engravers, compositors, woodblock cutters, proofreaders, booksellers, and even peddlers.” More than that, it can be thought of as having created a new culture that “brought together scholars, craftsmen, merchants, and humanists engaged in common pursuits.”179 The proofrooms of early printshops, where proofreaders, authors, and proofreader-authors exchanged ideas and criticized each other’s works, became in sixteenth-century Europe far more important than the moribund universities as centers of creative intellectual activity—scientific and otherwise.

But although “on one level printing opened up new avenues of communication among scholars, craftsmen, and the general public,” it did not completely “bridge the gap between town and gown.” Academic disdain for manual labor remained strong, but “the explosion of vernacular publication” meant that “the literacy barrier no longer coincided with the Latin barrier,” and the power of the ancient prejudices to retard science gradually began to break down.180

As previously noted, treatises of artisan-authors began to circulate in manuscript in the preprint era, but the literature they created was transformed when it began to be mass-produced in printed form. “Another scientific tradition emerged alongside academic science” when publication of scientific books for the “common man” became commonplace. “It was in large measure the printer’s willingness to accept the risks associated with the competitive and uncertain vernacular book market that made sixteenth-century ‘popular science’ a reality.” The social background of the new occupational category was “a mosaic of the Renaissance petite bourgeoisie.” Many of the pioneer printers “had spent years working for wages as pressmen, type-founders, and proofreaders .

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