Eisenstein and Printing as a Force of Change

For some reason, there has been a lot of controversy within the field of book history over Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. I did not find her work to be all that controversial. If anything, Eisenstein is not given enough credit for doing something new. Maybe–as some of my classmates pointed out–she tried to accomplish too much; maybe, her argument is not as fleshed out and connected as we would like. Regardless, Eisenstein is accomplishing something significant by providing people with a new way of understanding change in history. To those who criticize Eisenstein for not answering every single question about book history and the printing revolution, I ask “how much can one person accomplish with one book? Seriously! Critics seem to latch on her statements about the unique importance of printing as a force of change, but they ignore the rest of her argument. Many critics seem to ignore the distinction made in the title of Eisenstein’s famous article. She sees printing as an agent of change, not the agent of change. Moreover, Eisenstein clarifies in the afterword of The Printing Revolution that her book was not intended to contribute to book history. Rather, she was trying to address some of the problems with the division of history into periods; she was especially concerned with the period which historians call the Renaissance. To me, Eisenstein’s work helps to clarify the murky distinctions between medieval and Renaissance, between Renaissance and Reformation, and between Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.