Ronald J. Deibert: “Print and the Medieval to Modern World Order Transformation: Distributional Changes”
I went to breakfast in North Park on Saturday morning, and as my daughter and I were headed home, we saw that a used bookstore on Adams Avenue was going out of business. Everything was 75 percent off—except for the books that were marked at 50 cents apiece or three for a dollar. We flipped a U-turn and went in. Thousands of books. Fabulous books. Familiar and unknown. About every topic imaginable. And I wished I could take boxes of them home with me. Except that I have more books than I have space and am starting to feel like I should get rid of some of them.
I don’t know why the store was closing. The owners seemed sad, and both my daughter and I felt awkward asking.
As we walked away, we wondered what the owners would do with the books after it closed. And we talked about the stacks of books at both our houses and the advent of new technologies like Kindle that eliminate the need to store books and use up valuable resources and how reading on a screen influences the way we think and respond to text.
We are book lovers, and yet we understand that we can’t keep or own every book we want to read. It is not economically or logistically feasible. Sometimes it just makes more sense to access written texts online.
The more we do, the more comfortable we are with the technology and the more likely we are to access texts online for something else.
Production and distribution of information is changing, and I am not always comfortable with the change.
I love bookstores and libraries. Books on shelves make me want to read. And I feel sorry for the bookstore owners who must reinvent their lives.
We’ve been reading about the technology of writing and how it has affected our thought processes, the ways it allows us to build on ideas progressively over time, the ways it changes memory, the ways it distances us from each other, and the ways it changes political power structures (Young and Sullivan, Ong, Havelock, Boroditsky, Lupton and Miller, Zimmer), but Ronald Deibert’s chapter takes us in a new direction.
Deibert argues that distributional changes, specifically the printing press, “undercut some social forces while they advance the interests of others” (67). His project is to examine the ways that that these “distributional changes associated with the development of printing played a part in the medieval-to-modern world order transformation in Europe” (67). He focuses on the ways that the printing press privileged the message of the Protestant Reformation, the advancement of scientific humanism, and the development of the modern political order, disadvantaging the Roman Catholic Church, absolute monarchy, and feudalism.
Luther and Calvin were not the first to disagree with the Church. Without the printing press, however, Deibert tells us “the Church had been relatively successful in squelching and containing heresies” (69). The printing press provided the opportunity “for one person to reach a mass audience . . . in an unprecedentedly short period of time” (70). Communities that were already weary of “deteriorating economic and social conditions” (70) were ready for change. Writers published in the vernacular, rather than Latin, the language of the Roman Catholic Church, making their messages easily understood by the common man. Those who could read, shared the message with those who could not. Mass production of the Bible, also published in the vernacular rather than Latin, also “helped to undermine the legitimacy of centralized knowledge reproduction” (72). The Church was no longer the sole spokesman for God. Indeed, the role of the clergy changed significantly with Protestantism because printing provided “a new channel of communication, linking Christians to their God” directly (74).
The Church forbade Catholic printers from entering into the new market for pamphlets and Bibles and put them at a serious economic disadvantage. They begged the church for permission, arguing that they would lose their houses and their livelihoods because they were only allowed to print Catholic literature, which they said “is desired by no one and cannot be given away” (74).
Similarly, the principles of scientific humanism began prior to the invention of the printing press. Deibert describes the development of universities in the Middle Ages, creating a market for books and a need for university manuscript copying centers, a slow, tedious, error-prone method of retaining knowledge. The printing press allowed for rapid delivery and the interchange of scientific ideas. Moreover, the volume of information led to “the desire to catalogue and organize every topic into a consistent order” (77), and the development of new concepts like page numbers, section breaks, or index cards.
Walter Ong argues that writing provides distance, separating “interpretation from data,” (“Writing is a Technology” 25) and “academic learning . . . from wisdom . . . making possible the conveyance of highly organized abstract thought structures . . .” (27). In this way, scientific humanism’s insistence on analytical, detached scientific observation was also favored by the move away from orality and privileged by the printing press.
It is easy for me to dismiss the incremental nature of these developments. When I’ve read about Guttenberg’s press in the past, I remember a date and move on.
However, it is important not to skim over the ways this technology radically changed the way information is communicated, stored, and perceived, the ways it turned the existing world order upside down.
The rise of new media, new ways of producing and distributing texts, new, more visual modes of communication, has the potential to do the same.
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