Reading Comprehension

It is now a commonplace that the printing press changed the world. The press, the story goes, multiplied books, broke the church's monopoly on scripture, and brought into being a reading public capable of forming its own opinions on matters that had once been settled for it from above. The story is not so much wrong as polished by long handling, and the polish has a way of obscuring the much rougher edge that the period itself presented to those who lived through it.

For one thing, the early decades of European print were marked less by Bibles for the laity than by an outpouring of cheap religious controversy: pamphlets, broadsheets, woodcuts, often illustrated, often crude, attacking opposing positions in tones that have lost little of their bite. The new presses, scattered across the towns of Germany, the Low Countries, and northern Italy, were as readily turned to satirical verses against a rival doctrine as to learned editions of the church fathers, and the satirical work paid more reliably. To celebrate the press for breaking ecclesiastical authority is, in part, to celebrate the deliberate amplification of partisan dispute, with the resulting confessional wars among its more immediate fruits. The press did multiply books, but it also multiplied invective, and the second effect appeared earlier and more widely than the first.

For another thing, the relation between print and literacy is more tangled than the standard story allows. Literacy spread over centuries, not decades, and the early printed material in many regions was consumed by being read aloud — in households, in markets, in places of worship — to audiences who could not themselves read. The press, in such settings, did not so much create a private reading public as feed an older oral one with cheaper material. The image of an Enlightenment-style citizen reading a book at a candlelit desk is largely a projection backward from the eighteenth century onto a period in which most of the social work of print was done in groups.

To say this is not to take back the original commonplace but to ask it to do its work with more historical respect. The press did contribute to the recompositions of authority that mark the period; it also extended quarrels, served orality more than it replaced it, and conferred on its early users powers that some of them used to deepen ignorance as readily as to disperse it. To enumerate these complications is to remember that revolutions in technology rarely arrive with the cleanness their later admirers prefer.