AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

The significance of print technology, along with its social and cultural effects, has long been a matter of debate amongst historians. The advent of print has been hailed as sparking a print ‘revolution’ that created a distinctive print culture. However, in recent years historians focusing on print and literacy early modern England have drawn attention to the ongoing interaction between oral, scribal and print traditions, and have emphasised the importance of social and cultural factors in determining the impact of print technology. Thus, although the advent of print was undoubtedly significant, this significance should be assessed within the specific contexts that determine its character.

            In the forum “How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?” historians Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns debate the significance of the advent of print. Broad and synthetic, Eisenstein’s work explores the impact of print upon ‘diverse institutions, traditions, occupations and modes of thought and expression present across Western Europe’, concluding that early modern Europe experienced a print ‘revolution’ that heralded the establishment of print culture and subsequently gave rise to Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.[1]  Eisenstein contends that the shift from manuscript to print was historically significant; print technology, she states, shaped early modern knowledge through improved production, dissemination, standardisation and preservation, allowing scholars to ‘transcend the limits imposed by scribal procedures’.[2] Eisenstein traces these technological effects across a broad continental scope, observing the emergence of a distinct print culture characterised by a widely dispersed ‘cosmopolitan’ book trade and a Commonwealth of Learning.[3] Finally, Eisenstein maintains that the print ‘revolution’ was an actuality, noted by contemporaries and inaugurated by the introduction of print shops in the sixteenth century. [4]

Conversely, Johns argues that print technology is embedded in specific contexts, its uses and impact dictated by social and cultural conventions, and its significance therefore ought to be assessed in terms of these.[5] Johns criticises Eisenstein’s emphasis on ‘technological effects’, the synthesising argument that underpins her concept of ‘print culture’. [6] Producers and consumers of texts, Johns elaborates, are not governed by any intrinsic powers of print - their actions are situated within the social and cultural conventions within which they read, copy and write. Excessive emphasis on technology obscures the agency of both the people who used print technology to improve production, dissemination, standardisation and preservation, and the agency of readers, whose interpretations often veer beyond the ‘intentions’ of the text. [7]  Furthermore, Johns disagrees with Eisenstein’s concepts of a radical print ‘revolution’ and a distinct print ‘culture’. A unitary print ‘culture’, Johns argues, masks both the persistent continuity between scribal and print traditions following the advent of print, and the diverse cultural realties of early modern communities, which were local rather than cosmopolitan in character.[8] Moreover, the concept of a print ‘revolution’ only came about around 1800; earlier writers praised print as an act of Providence, not as a technological revolution.[9]This interpretation was articulated during the political and social revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in keeping with ideals of progress, and became orthodox in the mid-nineteenth century.[10] Thus, Johns concludes that print ought to be treated as a significant outcome of history, rather than an influence on it.[11]

In his assessment of the meaning of literacy in early modern England, historian Keith Thomas adopts a perspective similar to Johns’. Though Thomas believes literacy introduced a peculiar logic that underlies European theology, philosophy and science, it cannot be treated ‘as an autonomous mechanism of change, regardless of the particular circumstances’.[12] Thus, Thomas focuses on the meaning of literacy in early modern England; a ‘partially literate’ society, fascinating due to the interaction between oral and literate culture and the ‘elaborate hierarchy of literacy skills’.[13] This period witnessed two key developments; the spread of the printed book, and the steady increase in the proportion of the population who were literate; thus, Thomas asserts, early modern England was governed by texts, and the written word affected the entire social strata.[14]

Yet, Thomas cautions, the impact of print and literacy on the social structure should not be exaggerated. Although increased literacy and dissemination of texts are often associated with dissent, they are not intrinsically subversive of social norms. Literacy and print reinforced pre-existing social norms and the course of social movement, rather than challenging it.[15] For two centuries, print technology remained under the control of the State and the Church, and heterodox views were more likely to circulate in manuscript or oral form.[16] Furthermore, it was generally male, urban dwelling traders who became literate, as acquisition of literacy was based on availability of education and its practical utility - thus, the social distribution of literacy reflected the hierarchy of wealth.[17] Thomas notes that the standardisation prompted by print meant that ‘written literacy was the literacy of the educated classes’, and could not be acquired without absorbing the ‘values and social attitudes of polite metropolitan culture... the printed word either educated an imitative audience in accepted views or confirmed a passive one in a position of cultural inferiority."[18] This resulted from the context within which literacy developed, namely the imitative English social structure and a free market in printed material.[19] Thus, like Johns, Thomas interprets the development of literacy and print in early modern England as conditioned by history, rather than as an extrinsic force conditioning it.

The interaction Thomas notes between oral, scribal and print cultures in early modern England is illustrated in detail by Adam Fox in Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern Britain 1500-1700. Increasing literacy rates and an expanding dissemination of texts, Fox argues, were exacerbated in the early modern period by the advent of print. Yet, like Johns and Thomas, Fox states that there were no clear distinctions between oral, scribal and print cultures. Rather, they interacted closely, a ‘dynamic continuum, each feeding in and out of each other to the development and nourishment of both’.[20]  Songs, rhymes, tales and aphorisms could be composed orally, recorded in manuscript form and distributed, performed aloud again and anthologised in print; traditions flowed between these communication forms, the products of a ‘series of interactions’, their origins in any particular culture untraceable.[21] Instead of being replaced by the written word, oral culture was structured and determined by manuscript texts and print technology.[22]

By highlighting the pervasiveness of the written word within oral traditions and at all levels of society, Fox objects to common assertions that the labouring population were cut off from literate culture, and retained the ‘purity’ of their oral traditions.[23] This erroneous belief stems, Fox explains, from the Romantic era and the work of Victorian folklorists, whose image of an oral tradition untainted by literacy and elite values was motivated by their desire to forge national identity. Fox argues that the literacy of the labouring population has been underestimated; although their intellectual sophistication did not match that of the educated, elite, masculine trading classes, there was ‘enormous variety’ in the types of comprehension of the written word.[24] Fox’s illustration of the diverse interactions between print, scribal and oral culture challenges this distinction.

Thus, although Eisenstein’s highlighting of the importance of print and the intellectual and cultural changes it affected has been both influential and beneficial for historians, a methodological focus on the meanings and functions of print within specific contexts illuminates the significance of print technology in more detail than the positing of a print ‘revolution’ that only assesses print’s broad effects. The advent of print was not monolithic; its meaning was not universal, but inextricable from contemporaries’ perspectives and dependent on social and cultural conventions.

Bibliography

Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern Britain 1500-1700, New York, 2000.

Grafton, Anthony, Eisenstein, Elizabeth and Johns, Adrian. “AHR Forum: How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?” American Historical Review, 107, 2002, pp. 84 -128.

Thomas, Keith. ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,’ in Gerd Baumann, ed, The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Oxford, 1986, pp. 97 – 131.

[1] Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns, “AHR Forum: How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?” American Historical Review, 107, 2002, p. 85.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 127.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 124.

[6] Ibid., p. 120.

[7] Ibid., p. 116.

[8] Ibid., p. 118.

[9] Ibid., p. 123.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., p. 124.

[12] Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,’ in Gerd Baumann, ed, The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Oxford, 1986, p. 97.

[13] Ibid., p. 98.

[14] Ibid., p. 107.

[15] Ibid., p. 116.

[16] Ibid., p. 105.

[17] Ibid, p. 112.

[18] Ibid., p. 121.

[19] Ibid., p. 121.

[20] Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern Britain 1500-1700, New York, 2000, p. 50.

[21] Ibid., p. 2.

[22] Ibid., p. 50.

[23] Ibid., p. 8.

[24] Ibid., p. 409.