Let me start with some of the foundation myths that reveal long-lasting attitudes toward printing on the part of Western Europeans. They concern Gutenberg’s one time partner, Johann Fust (sometimes spelled Faustus). He helped to subsidize the operations of the Mainz press, and his daughter married Peter Schoeffer, who fathered the first Mainz printing dynasty. Thus, there is good reason to consider him as a founding father of the new industry.

The mythic dimension is supplied by the long-lived confusion between Johann Fust, who died in 1466, and the necromancer “Doctor” Johann Georg Faustus, whose life provided the prototype for...

The same themes that had first been sounded by the Roman church were echoed by Protestants after 1517. Thus printing was celebrated by Luther and his successors, as it had been by earlier preachers and teachers, for the tremendous impetus it gave to the evangelical cause. But the Lutherans also assigned a new world historical role to printing by depicting it as the weapon that undermined papal rule. Even while attacking greedy printers, Luther hailed the press as a God-given instrument that made the difference between his success in defying the pope and the failure of precursors, such as Jan...

The previous chapter has said little about the advancement of learning and much about disturbing the peace. What follows will attempt to redress the balance. For polarization is only part of our story. Erasmus had condemned Lutheran polemicists and had died within the Catholic Church. Many of his followers considered themselves to be members of a peace-loving cosmopolitan “Commonwealth of Learning.” In their view, God was displeased by the monkish quarrels that had led to the Wars of Religion. This same view found favor among those who adopted a so-called “Erastian” approach. Princes, statesmen, and other officials who feared civil...

Many of the same attitudes that had been manifested in previous centuries were carried over into the long eighteenth century. Tributes to the “divine art” were richly orchestrated and illustrated by printers, engravers, and publishers. Literati continued to complain about vulgarization, with special emphasis on commodification and the profiteering of bookseller-publishers. The latter were invidiously compared with the early master printers of a lost “golden age.” At the same time, an emotional investment in the fate of fictitious characters generated fan letters from readers and turned authors into celebrities. A prevailing culture of improvement went together with celebrating the advancement...

The last chapter showed how earlier tributes to printing were transposed into a new key by anticlerical philosophes and de-christianizing revolutionaries. This not to say that the powers of the press were ever devalued by evangelists and missionaries. “The evangelicals . . . believed that the grace of God could, and did, descend to the individual man and woman through the printed page.”¹ Bible societies extended their reach around the globe. Although lay Bible reading was not encouraged in Catholic Europe, all the other forms of religious publication flourished there.²

But whereas Protestants had celebrated printing as a means of...

Winning favorable reviews in the daily press, by fair means or foul, was a major concern of the Parisian literati described in Illusions perdues. Mention of the daily press points to a phenomenon that certainly loomed large in nineteenth-century views of printing and that deserves separate treatment. Up to this point we have been concerned with the “huge froth-ocean of Printed Speech we loosely call literature”¹ without distinguishing between diverse genres. When considering such issues as attitudes toward censorship, distinctions between books, pamphlets, and periodicals seem to be of minor consequence. To be sure, printers were less likely to be...

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw newspaper publishers throughout Europe take advantage of diverse innovations, such as wood pulp paper and typesetting machines, that speeded up production and cheapened output. Under the aegis of parliamentary governments, the movement for a free press finally achieved success; “freedom of the press” was pledged in the preambles of almost all the constitutions that marked the end of the era of absolute monarchy. Throughout the Continent, educational reforms were also enacted, with the aim of achieving mass literacy.¹

In many liberal narratives, these developments were viewed as bringing to a triumphant conclusion...