The Emergence of Print Culture in the West

Abstract

The impact of printing, experienced first by literate groups in early modern Europe, changed the character of the Italian Renaissance and ought to be considered among the causes of both the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern science. The advent of printing in the fifteenth century was a complicated innovation which involved a cluster of different changes. The consequences of this innovation appear to be even more variegated and remarkably elusive. Attempts to encapsulate the effects of printing in a single formula or thesis statement are almost always misleading. Take, for example, the observation by one authority that the advent of printing moved Western Europe "from image culture to word culture." Now this formula "image to word' is plausible in some ways. As Frances Yates points out in her study, The Art of Memory, the more information storage and retrieval was handled by printed reference works, the less need there was for vivid images to serve as memory aids. An increased output of encyclopedias in book form diminished the need for cathedrals to serve as encyclopedias in stone. But the formula image-to-word holds only for a limited set of phenomena, for printing also endowed graven images with a new lease on life. Protestant iconoclasts made use of picture books and exploited caricatures and cartoons. As the work of Diirer, Cranach, and Holbein suggests, image making was stimulated by printing among Protestants as well as Catholics.

Liberalismo, democracia y periodismo como elementos de la modernización / Liberalism, democracy and journalism as components of modernization

“…Elizabeth Eisenstein, por el contrario, pensaba que la imprenta pone, al alcance de todos, la vieja cultura medieval (Eisenstein, 1980). Por su parte, Roger Chartier (1994, pp.4-7) afirmará que la print culture no borraría de golpe todas las prácticas de la scribal culture.…”

Acerca del concepto de memoria gráfica

“…Los pioneros del campo de estudio conocido en inglés como print culture, Elizabeth Eisenstein y Walter Ong, lo definieron en contraposición a la cultura escritural o manuscrita (Eisenstein, 1980), oral o quirográfica (Ong, 1982). El advenimiento de esta forma no oral y no manuscrita de cultura es generalmente descrito como algo vinculado al arribo de la impresión de libros con tipos móviles en el siglo XV en Europa.…”

“…En el sentido dado por Eisenstein (1980) y Ong (1982, la expresión print culture podría ser (y muchas veces lo fue) traducida 7 Para mayor información véase http://www.jotacarlos.org/ como cultura impresa. La expresión cultura de la impresión, por otro lado, en la medida en que abarca diferentes tipos de impresos y no se preocupa solamente por el contenido, sino por la forma de lo que fue publicado, evoca un campo más amplio que el de la cultura impresa y sugiere una esfera de intereses más próxi-ma a los de la investigación en memoria gráfica.…”

Learning with mobiles: The Global South

“…They do however provide a stimulus and a lens for analysing the significance of a universal mobile digital technology at the disposal of a dominant ideology or world-view, perhaps recalling the printing press at the service of Luther and Calvin (Eisenstein 1980). …”