Johann’s father worked as an official in the town’s mint, which produced coins for the Holy Roman Empire. Mainz was a busy commercial port on the Rhine River. Johann Gutenberg was born around 1400 into one of the leading families of Mainz, Germany. Someone had to invent a way to do this quickly. To print an entire book, printers would have to make hundreds of precisely identical types for each letter. The Europeans only had to produce types for a limited number of letters (26 in the case of English). They did not have tens of thousands of characters like Chinese. Latin, Greek, and all the other European languages were alphabet-based. The Europeans had one key advantage over the Chinese in making movable-type printing preferable to hand copying. This included paper, oil-based ink, metal alloys, casting methods, and presses used for centuries to make wine and olive oil. But by 1450, European technology had all the components in place for a movable-type printing revolution. In the Middle Ages, Europeans knew nothing about Chinese moveable-type printing. The old method of artistic handwriting, called calligraphy, was often faster and more economical. Movable type did not catch on in China because it took too long to reproduce multiple copies of the many thousands of characters needed for printing. The Chinese language, however, consists of tens of thousands of characters that alone or together represent things or concepts. 1040 when Pi Sheng made Chinese language characters on ceramic types. This process was first developed in China about A.D. The types can be broken apart, moved around, and set to print other pages of writing. A printer arranges the types within a frame on a press to form words and then prints a page of writing. “ Movable-type printing” is a way to reproduce written material, usually on paper, by first forming upraised letters or other figures on small blocks called types. But they took a long time to make and were very costly.Īn invention changed how books were made and dramatically changed people’s lives. Specialists or the scribes themselves “illuminated” (painted) large capital letters and the margins of many books with colorful designs and even miniature scenes. The scribes copied books on processed calfskin called vellum and later on paper. Scribes, often monks living in monasteries, each labored for up to a year to copy a single book, usually in Latin. A university scholar imagined walking through this virtual building along a certain pathway to recall the contents of entire books for his lectures. One device involved visualizing a building with various rooms and architectural features, each representing a different store of knowledge. Merchants kept their accounts in their heads.Įven scholars literate in Latin used memory devices to remember what they had learned. Craftsmen memorized the secrets of their trades to pass on orally to apprentices. Poets, actors, and storytellers relied on rhyming lines to remember vast amounts of material. Memory and memorization ruled daily life and learning. Most people passed their lifetime without ever gazing at a book, a calendar, a map, or written work of any sort. They were so valuable that universities chained them to reading tables. Books, all hand-copied, were rare, expensive, and almost always in Latin. Those few who were literate usually went on to master Latin, the universal language of scholarship, the law, and the Roman Catholic Church. What counted in important matters was oral testimony based on oaths taken in the name of God to tell the truth.Īlmost no one could read or write the language they spoke. Written documents were rare and often doubted by the common people as forgeries. News passed from one person to another, often in the form of rumor. For most people, the only source of both religious and worldly information was the village Catholic priest in the pulpit. If people traveled at all, they typically ventured only a few miles from where they were born. The printing revolution also contributed mightily to the Protestant Reformation that split apart the Catholic Church.ĭuring the Middle Ages in Europe, most people lived in small, isolated villages. Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable-type printing quickened the spread of knowledge, discoveries, and literacy in Renaissance Europe. Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution in Europe Herodotus and Thucydides: Inventing History | Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution in Europe | Henry Clay: Compromise and Union
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