I can’t take a history class, or literature class, or any sort
of class dealing with human development, but be told the advent of the printing
press was revolutionary. And I can look at everything it changed or allowed –
the Reformation, literacy rates, genre, the standardization of language, the
economy – and I will know that the entire world pivoted around this invention. But
I won’t feel it.
We talk of the printing press as an engine – almost as the engine, the one driving the
Renaissance, which drove the social movements after it, a great big locomotive
of ideas and possibilities. But that role somehow places the press outside of
the Renaissance, or of the culture: it changed it, drastically, but it didn’t
belong to it. People used it for their own ends, and then popped it on the
shelf for later use.
Wrong.
So, dreadfully, wrong; and I was dumb to think the press would
ever settle for being a spectator. It was so much more.
Shakespeare, who often fixated on the idea of immortality
through bearing children, saw in the printing press a parallel image. As
children were copies of their parents, generation after generation, the
printing press created better copies of books – which beforehand, would have
been written by hand through generations of scribes. I loved that imagery in
Sonnet XI, in the final line: “Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.”
Milton pulled the same move in his Aeropagitica, where he
argued for agency and freedom of speech, “Till then Books were ever as freely
admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more
stifl’d then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg’d over the nativity of any mans intellectuall
off spring.” Perhaps tied to the romance of Ad Fontes and classics, books
become children, with an author for a father and the printing press (or whoever
had the pleasure of writing it out by hand, poor soul) as mother.
 |
| Image From here |
In the same way that roses are an image of affection and lilies
of death, in the way we turn windows into metaphors and liken wisdom to a tree,
the printing press made its way into language and imagery, subtle and fundamental.
When a thing creeps its way into creative expression, it’s because people are
identifying with it. This is, for me, where you feel the impact.
Works Cited
Milton, John. “Aeropagitica.” The John Milton Reading Room. n.
ed. Dartmouth.com. n.d. Web. 20 Sep
2015.
Shakespeare. “Sonnet XI.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets. n. ed. n.d.
Web. 20 Sep 2015. <www.shakespears-sonnets.com/sonnet/11>
This is an interesting metaphor for the printing press. When I read Shakespeares sonnet, I thought of youth being preserved, too, not so much a baby, but I can see the connection. I like your last point about how it creeped into creative expression which is clear in the Shakespeare sonnet we read.
ReplyDelete"When a thing creeps its way into creative expression, it’s because people are identifying with it"-- well said. There is much to be learned about values within humanity through study of printing methods and reception of this era's texts. I love that reformers at this time were thought of as both writers AND humanists-- published works were about much more than creativity and intrigue.
ReplyDelete