The introduction of printing bound the human world together in a way that was never possible before.[1] It allowed vast numbers of people to share ideas, to read the same stories, to read the same language, to exchange experiences, to follow the same beliefs. Tens of thousands of people, across the nation, across continents, were literally reading from the same page for the first time.[2]
In talking about the impact of printing, we’re talking about a very specific kind of printing, the movable type printing of books introduced to Europe by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. The origins of printing are actually quite ancient. At least 1,800 years ago, the Chinese and Japanese were carving images on the end of wooden blocks and inking them with the soot from lamps dissolved in liquid, then stamping the images on paper, silk or walls. The images they carved were holy symbols or texts, which gained in magical power by repetition.[3]
By the ninth century, though, the Chinese were printing entire books, including the famous Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest surviving printed book, which is actually a selection of Buddha’s sermons printed on sheets pasted together into a manuscript roll over 5 metres long. The purpose of printing books in China, however, was not to spread knowledge but to produce definitive, authorised versions that no one could challenge. So there were rarely many copies printed. It’s interesting that one of the first uses of wood-block printing for multiple copies was to print paper money.[4]
At first, the early Chinese block-printed books were painstakingly produced, with the block for each page individually carved by hand. Then in the tenth century, some printers began to experiment with movable type. With movable type, every page of every book can be built up letter by letter from the same ready-made collection of letters or characters. In Europe, later, the letters would be cast metal; the Chinese ones were ceramic or wood.
The problem for the Chinese with movable type, though, was that Chinese had over 50,000 different characters, so it was something of nightmare finding the right character when you needed it. To try and make selection easier, Chinese printers made vast revolving tables for the characters, divided into sections for characters with different tones. Even so most printers found it easier to stick with block printing. Interestingly, in the fifteenth century, the Korean king Sejong the Great commissioned the creation of a simple alphabet of just 25 letters from which words could be built up, but Korean scholars refused to budge from their traditional Chinese characters, and movable type in Asia languished.
In the end, printing travelled across to Europe not as books and type but perhaps as something as trivial as playing cards. Printed playing cards arrived in Europe in the fourteenth century and quickly became hugely popular. Indeed, by 1404 playing cards were such an obsession that the Church authorities tried, in vain, to ban them, as they were distracting people from work and sermons. It may have been with playing cards that the first great European printer, Johannes Gutenberg, first tried his hand at printing, before moving on to higher things.
Born sometime in the 1390s in Mainz in Germany, Gutenberg was a perfectionist, and he laboured for decades to get his process right – all the time fighting to keep his ideas secret and fend off investors who were impatient for some return. It’s impossible to tell whether Gutenberg learned of it from China, or if he came up with it independently, but his great innovation was movable type.
Movable type was so much more practical with the European alphabet of just 26 letters. A full-length book, though, would need tens of thousands of copies of each letter, and Gutenberg devised a way of reproducing them all quickly and accurately by casting them from a special lead alloy in tiny wooden boxes, with a reverse imprint of the letter at the end (the origin of the term ‘typecasting’). Gutenberg also had to redesign the letters of script to make them fit on neatly together.
Even with all these beautifully made and even letters, getting each of the thousands of them on a page to print properly was quite a challenge. Chinese and European block printers had simply brushed the paper over the inked block. This wouldn’t really work for movable type when different letters might sit just a fraction higher or lower. So Gutenberg adapted a screw press from book binders, who in turn probably adapted it from presses made for crushing olives and grapes. The screw press pushed the paper down firmly on to the inked typeset to ensure a clean and even print.
Eventually, Gutenberg perfected his process and in 1444, the first major printed European book was created,[5] the Bible now known as the Gutenberg Bible. This was still a big, high-end luxury item, selling only to those with a lot of cash to spare, and the scribes who wrote manuscript books were still in business. Gradually, though, printers began to make smaller and cheaper books.
One of the pioneers was Aldus Manutius, the Venetian scholar who set up the world’s first great publishing house, the Aldine Press, in the 1490s. Aldus not only introduced the small, elegant, easy-to-read Italic (from Italy) typeface, but also the handy Octavo size book – the size of a typical modern hardback book. Books, instead of being literally chained up in a few inaccessible libraries to be read only by dedicated scholars, were suddenly inexpensively available everywhere. They could be carried around and read in the home, on journeys, in cafés.
It’s difficult to overstate just how dramatic a transformation in the spread of ideas this was. Before Gutenberg, when nearly all books were manuscripts, the total number of books in all Europe was a matter of thousands. Within half a century of the first printing of Gutenberg’s Bible, there were 10 million books, and the Aldine Press was launching books with first print runs of 1,000 or more.
The impact was both public, as ideas were shared rapidly among a large readership, and private as people could travel, in their imagination, in the solitude of their own homes. Interestingly, many of the ideas that were shared through print at first were not new ideas but ancient ones. The Aldine Press, for instance, concentrated heavily on publishing the great classics of the ancient world, and so the arrival of print didn’t necessarily help contemporary authors but instead brought about a revival of interest in Virgil and Homer, Galen and Aristotle.
Nonetheless, the public effect of print was to standardise and preserve knowledge, which had been fluid, changeable and often simply forgotten. For the first time, there was a growing body of ideas, an authoritative consensus which people could add to or challenge. Ever since, there has been a sense of our knowledge of the world gradually building up, brick by brick, rather than coming and going with occasional flashes of brilliance. Knowledge became more democratic, too, with more and more people able to access it through textbooks and encyclopaedias.
At the same time, print encouraged the expression of individual thought. Before printing, a writer was actually a scribe, someone who just copied a book rather than created it. Many manuscripts were the creation of numerous anonymous contributors. Monks working on a manuscript, for instance, might all have the same adopted name, so that it is impossible to untangle who actually wrote it in the first place. Printing promoted, for the first time, individual authorship, and the expression of personal ideas and experiences to be shared with other people. Printed books came with title pages promoting their content and announcing the name of the author. American historian Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that this shift was a key factor in the three great revolutions in European thought – the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.[6]
One of the more surprising effects of printing, though, was to stimulate the development of single national vernacular languages like English, French and German. In the Middle Ages, people in France, England and Germany spoke such a variety of local dialects that someone from Paris was virtually unintelligible to someone from Marseilles. William Caxton, the pioneer of printing in England, told a tale of a housewife in Kent who assumed that the word ‘egg’ must be French because she hadn’t heard of it. In order to print books for a mass market, printers had to decide on just one dialect, and the dialect selected by the printers rapidly
became the national language, such as Parisian French in France and London English in England. At the same time, though, Latin, which had been the international language of scholars, gradually began to fall out of use for literature (though much more slowly for scholarship), and every nation began to develop its own national literature and culture in a way that would have been unimaginable before.
It would be wrong to assume that the impact of Gutenberg’s movable type was immediate. The effect spread slowly over centuries, rippling out across the world, as more and more people got to experience the printed word. Indeed, it was only in the last century, when governments began to provide universal education and hundreds of millions of people began to learn to read, that the print revolution finally arrived.
Today, 45 trillion pages are printed every day, and billions of people read books, magazines and newspapers, read shopping labels and bills, check tickets and much more besides. They make possible basic communication and the sharing of experiences and ideas in our hugely populated world that would otherwise have been impossible. Print at least partly brings humanity together and allows us to think as one, but only partly.
[1] Before printing, ideas travelled slowly, and often touched only a few people. Very few people in the ancient world, for instance, actually read the works of even antiquity’s greatest thinker, Aristotle, or even, for that matter, the Bible. There were only a handful of manuscript copies of even the most famous literary works, most tucked away in private libraries. So most ideas spread by word of mouth and many had to be preserved by memory alone.
[2] In some ways, it did just what the internet is doing today, and perhaps human communication could be said to have moved in three great waves – the development of writing, the introduction of printing and the coming of the internet – each arriving and spreading around the world faster.
[3] In what must have been the largest early print run by far, the eighth-century Japanese Buddhist Empress Koken ordered the printing of 1 million copies of a charm to set in miniature pagodas to guard against a repeat outbreak of a deadly plague of smallpox which had devastated the country in 735–737. The charm didn’t work, though, for the Empress herself died of smallpox just as the vast printout was completed in 770.
[4] When Marco Polo visited Kublai Khan’s China in the thirteenth century, he observed of the paper notes that: ‘Of this money, the Khan has such a quantity made that with it he could buy all the treasure in the world. With this currency he orders all payments to be made throughout every province and kingdom and region of his empire. And no one dares refuse it on pain of losing his life.’
[5] We take for granted the book with its pages, but even that was an idea that was a long time coming. The earliest books were in fact scrolls which could be dozens of metres long. They were written on papyrus, the tough paper-like material made from the Egyptian papyrus reed. Consulting such a book was a real chore, since you might have to scroll and unscroll for ages to find the right place. In the second century BC, a shortage of papyrus led to the development in Pergamon of an alternative, parchment, which was made from thin stretched sheep and goat skins, and vellum made from calf skin. Parchment was much tougher than papyrus, and you could write on both sides. So books didn’t have to be on scrolls. Instead they could be on pages bound together with a cover, and known as a codex.
[6] The Victorian thinker Thomas Carlyle spoke of: ‘The three great elements of modern civilisation, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.’ This is an interesting choice, but he was echoing the pioneer of scientific thought Francis Bacon, who in 1620 wrote: ‘Again, it is well to observe the force and virtue and consequence of discoveries, and these are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients … namely printing, gunpowder and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world … no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.’
#19 Feminism
Anyone who doubts that feminism is a live, important issue needed only to listen to the news from Iran in July 2010. There a woman called Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani had been sentenced four years earlier to being stoned to death for adultery. It was only after a wave of international protest that the Iranian authorities announced the sentence would not actually be carried out. But the fact that it was even a possibility bears grim testament to the status of women in Iran.
It seems that Iranian women, though, are fighting back, and Iran has one of the most active feminist movements in the world. The movement has no leaders or central office, but exists stubbornly in every household where women refuse to accept their role not just as citizens but as human beings whose lives are, ultimately, considered to be worth less than men’s.
The household nature of the Iranian women’s movement is typical of both the strengths and weaknesses of feminism. Unlike slavery and the exploitation of workers, the oppression of women across many different societies in the past was often barely visible. It went on behind closed doors where countless men sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, repressed the women of their household. Sometimes, the oppression was physical, with legal condoning of rape and beatings within marriage. More often, the problem was one of exclusion and the complete loss of control over one’s life. This too the law condoned, with women often being legally their husband’s property. Millions of women suffered alone, unable to even share their misery, let alone express it.
Maybe many women did resist, but their cries were never heard. The first audible protest was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there were many more, some celebrated, some vilified, some just quietly ignored before the lone voices began to join together into a clamour in the late nineteenth century. That was when the word ‘feminism’ came into use in English. It was borrowed from the French word féministe to stigmatise the strident and bold women who dared to demand better treatment, and dared, in particular, to demand the right to vote. Even the word ‘suffragette’ was originally meant to demean these little women’s campaign to join the suffrage.
British women finally got the vote in 1918[1] and very soon most of the Western world followed suit. It’s hard in retrospect to appreciate just how much of an achievement this was. Many men, and even some women, put up a very determined resistance that was only gradually broken down. Getting the vote was not just a matter of allowing women to vote in elections; it was a symbolic acknowledgement that women had an equal stake in society.
For almost half a century, getting the vote seemed such a triumph that women stopped asking for more. Then in the 1960s and 1970s a new kind of feminism arose – this time addressed to the specific problems women faced both in the home and in trying to make a career. Ironically, the term feminism was widely taken up again by the women’s movement after the labels ‘Women’s Liberation’ or ‘Women’s Lib’ gained notoriety from strident public demonstrations and ‘bra-burning’, when some women argued that bras were a cage for women’s breasts invented for men’s titillation.
Despite the ridicule, these campaigns, too, achieved at least some of their goals. Under pressure, the UK, for instance, introduced laws to ensure equal pay for women and to protect them against discrimination, while the US government amended the Constitution to give women the ‘right to choose’ over abortion. By the 1990s, women began to take it for granted that they could choose pretty much any career that they wanted, and expect to make progress – though some complained about the ‘glass ceiling’ of prejudice that prevented women rising above a certain place in the workplace hierarchy, while others protested about sexual harassment. ‘Sexism’ came to be widely regarded as unacceptable, and maternity leave became a legal right in many countries.
Just as with the suffrage movement (sometimes called the first wave of feminism), success took the energy out of this second wave of feminism – so dramatically that feminism as a political moveme
nt seemed to fade away in the 1990s. Indeed, it faded so much that an article in Time magazine in 1998 by journalist Ginia Bellafante was run with the cover line, ‘Is feminism dead?’ One of the chief murderers, Bellafante claimed, was Camille Paglia’s 1990 book Sexual Personae, in which she argued that female sexuality was humanity’s greatest force and that it was up to women to realise its power. Bellafante lamented that in the wake of Paglia’s highly publicised proclamation of female sexuality, feminism was melting away in a welter of self-indulgent sexual and romantic confessions, in which a woman only had to proclaim that she enjoyed sex – or lament that her love-life was bad – to be lauded by other women for expressing a woman’s perspective.
Some women began to argue that there should now be a third wave of feminism. Writers such as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism should stop trying to drive every woman towards the white middle-class ideal of the ‘super-mum’. Instead, it should embrace female identity in whatever shape or form it takes, challenging oppression of everyone from non-heterosexuals to sex workers. Feminist critics of the third wave protest that this is all a bit unfocused, but third-wavers insist they are simply adapting feminism for the women of today.
Thanks to feminism, the lives and prospects of most women in the Western world have advanced enormously over the last century. No longer is it acceptable, as it once was, for husbands to beat or rape their wives. No longer are women excluded from the vote or from pursuing careers in politics to the very highest level. And no longer are women’s careers restricted to certain jobs and certain levels of pay.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 19
