A History of Reading in the West Review

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(More customer reviews)The content is wonderful! The book provides much insight to different reading practices and how they change through the years. But...
1. The footnotes need to be on the same page as the text. It is hard to keep your place when you constantly have to flip to the back of the book. Also, if the notes were on the same page, I could see whether or not I needed to read the footnote for more information.
2. Provide tranlations of foreign quotations. I don't know about you, but it has been a while since I had a foreign language course.
3. Some of the chapters could be better edited. For example, in chapter 8 ("Protestant Reformations and Reading"), contributing author Jean-Francois Gilmont needs to pinpoint dates more clearly. He mentions a twenty-year span in which the separation of the printed book from the hand-lettered book was finally completed, but says it happened soon after Luther preached against indulgences (p. 214). If Luther talked to the Archbishop of Mainz in 1518 about indulgences, isn't it logical that it was not in 1540 that the separation was complete?
4. The style of writing seems to jump from readable to dry. I know each chapter is by a different author, but is there any way there could be more fluidity from chapter to chapter?

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The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe Review

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(More customer reviews)Professor Eisenstein has answered a question I have been asking myself for thirty years. I knew that "modern" Europe consisted of institutions based upon the "individual" -- protestantism, capitalism, universal education and modern science -- and that these first arose in Europe about 500 years ago. But I could not answer why then? And why Europe? I suspected that it had to do with the rise of stranger experience but could not locate a convincing historical cause for it. Print literacy first occured to me as the cause when I read Walter Ong's book, "Orality and Literacy," which also happily cited Prof. Eisenstein's work. Her book convincingly implicates the print revolution with the rise of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and Modern Science.Her thesis made it easy for me to see how the other three institutions could be included as well and to see the role of print in spreading "individuation" and assumptions associated with it, such as the idea of progress. It is remarkable that historians have apparently ignored for so long the role of print literacy in creating modernity. Scholars, including myself, sometimes seem to find the obvious the most inscrutable. Anyway, my personal and heartfelt thanks go to Professor Eisenstein for answering my nagging question.

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The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One) Review

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(More customer reviews)We have come to forget that the introduction of the printing press by Gutenberg mattered, or we have come to assume that it directly led to the Protestant Reformation. Eisenstein wondered how true that was, and what other changes the press wrought in European society in the couple of hundred years after the press was introduced. Start with the concept of authorship--once books could be reproduced in quantity, authorship mattered. Then consider the question of alphabetization and indexing. Then think of what happens when travel writers describe native dress--people start believing the books and variations become more extreme to meet the printed word. That's just the beginning. Eisenstein's book is not just an incredible work, well written, about the effect on our culture of the printing press. It is also the sort of book that makes one realize how unimaginable and vast the influence of any invention can have on a society. This book is critical for media studies, history, printing, typography, just to better understand our own society, or for the pleasure of a good, thorough, read.

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