| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:05 | Chaucer said his clerk needed
twenty books to fill his shelf |
| 00:00:13 | It took ten scribes
... to feed one clerk |
| 00:00:23 | it's sort of a little like
the agricultural revolution |
| 00:00:26 | it take ten farmers to feed one city folk |
| 00:00:31 | after the agricultural revolution |
| 00:00:34 | it's one farmer feeds twenty city folk. |
| 00:00:37 | and it was the same sort of thing as far as |
| 00:00:40 | scribes providing book provisions |
| 00:00:43 | for friars and for lay men,
lay professionals, |
| 00:00:48 | In other words,
it's an economy of scarcity |
| 00:00:51 | that you're dealing with |
| 00:00:53 | and people are starved, in a sense,
for more books |
| 00:00:56 | On the other hand it means
they read very intensively |
| 00:01:01 | what works they have |
| 00:01:04 | I came across a comment... let's see,
it was in Oxford, |
| 00:01:11 | where all the books on medicine... |
| 00:01:14 | and on theology... had gone. |
| 00:01:20 | The friars had taken them
for their houses of studies, |
| 00:01:23 | and so the professor there, the don,
didn't have any books to rely on. |
| 00:01:31 | There's nothing new about saying
that printing was important in the reformation |
| 00:01:35 | what's interesting to me is though,
the way |
| 00:01:39 | printing becomes an emancipatory force
for the first time. |
| 00:01:45 | I don't think the church thought of it
as an emancipating force |
| 00:01:51 | until the split came with Luther,
the Lutheran revolt, |
| 00:01:56 | and the lutherans saw it
as a way of emancipating |
| 00:02:02 | the population from the hold of Rome |
| 00:02:06 | emancipating the Germans
from the domination of the Italian pope. |
| 00:02:12 | and this theme was then taken over
by Protestants in other countries |
| 00:02:17 | and in England of course
it was very much that printing was... |
| 00:02:22 | a way of emancipating the English
after Henry 8th and under Edward etc |
| 00:02:31 | So for the first time, I think,
from the Reformation on... |
| 00:02:36 | printing becomes associated with rebellion... |
| 00:02:40 | and emancipation. |
| 00:02:44 | Then the church begins to change its position |
| 00:02:47 | and becomes much more ambivalent
about this wonderful thing |
| 00:02:51 | and the Council of Trent creates
the index of prohibited books |
| 00:02:57 | and different institutions to control |
| 00:03:04 | a technology they had previously welcomed. |
| 00:03:07 | So that the split is what creates |
| 00:03:11 | a different attitude in many different regions
towards printing. |
| 00:03:19 | There's the governor of Virginia,
Governor Berkeley, |
| 00:03:23 | who wrote to his overseers in england
in the 17th century saying: |
| 00:03:27 | "Thank god we have no printing in Virginia, |
| 00:03:29 | and we shall never have it
as long as I'm governor!" |
| 00:03:33 | But of course they were using
printed books in Virginia |
| 00:03:36 | because they came from maryland,
they came from all over, |
| 00:03:39 | he just didn't want the printing press there
because he thought it was a source of heresy |
| 00:03:43 | and this was a reaction to the english civil war
and the pamphlet wars, |
| 00:03:48 | they were called "paper bullets"
in that period. |
| 00:03:51 | The pamphleteer is an interesting figure,
there's no question. |
| 00:03:57 | The pamphlet wars are something that - |
| 00:04:00 | I mean you get certain manifestos
in the age of the scribe, |
| 00:04:03 | there's no doubt about that... |
| 00:04:05 | and political documents and so forth |
| 00:04:09 | and you have wars,
civil wars, |
| 00:04:13 | you have the empire versus
the church in Germany |
| 00:04:21 | But you don't t have the kind of continuous |
| 00:04:27 | arguments going on
between one faction and another |
| 00:04:32 | that you have with these pamphlet wars |
| 00:04:34 | where the fallout does lead to people, |
| 00:04:41 | which I say, |
| 00:04:43 | converting to different causes. |
| 00:04:51 | The big cost is the reams of paper |
| 00:04:54 | which you have to have in advance |
| 00:04:57 | that's the big outlay. |
| 00:05:01 | But the press itself is a small wooden press |
| 00:05:05 | you know, people used to put them on rafts |
| 00:05:07 | and float down to another town
if they were in trouble with the authorities. |
| 00:05:11 | It was very moveable. |
| 00:05:14 | A piece of moveable property,
and the printing shop, |
| 00:05:17 | depending on whether you have
ten presses or one press... |
| 00:05:24 | There were printers that were almost holes
in the wall... |
| 00:05:28 | if they were printing subversive material, |
| 00:05:33 | they could sort of hide their presses very quickly |
| 00:05:40 | it's a technology that involves
large spaces and a lot of outlay, |
| 00:05:47 | or a very small operation. |
| 00:05:50 | Sort of a one-man thing. |
| 00:05:55 | These things were operating
in basements or attics or garrets, |
| 00:05:59 | however you'd like to call them. |
| 00:06:05 | The case of the Copernican theory
is a good one, |
| 00:06:13 | because the printers were the ones
who were hunted down |
| 00:06:16 | if they printed the forbidden text. |
| 00:06:22 | So, we think of persecuting the authors,
but it was really the printers. |
| 00:06:29 | And it did sort of quiet, |
| 00:06:31 | It succeeded to a certain extent,
it seems to me. |
| 00:06:35 | in dampening initiative in Catholic countries. |
| 00:06:39 | In no European country that I can think of
was there such thing as a free press. |
| 00:06:45 | But after the war of Dutch independence, |
| 00:06:52 | there were so many
- Holland did not have a state church - |
| 00:06:56 | and there were so many different
little provinces and communities |
| 00:07:03 | that you could actually take your press |
| 00:07:05 | if you were in trouble in one community |
| 00:07:08 | down to your cousin in another town
and set up printing there. |
| 00:07:12 | And they,
I mean that's the way it... |
| 00:07:14 | So they didn't have a free press
as far as institutional controls went |
| 00:07:19 | but they had a free de facto press, because |
| 00:07:24 | institutional controls were not centralized. |
| 00:07:27 | and that's a sort of miniature
of Europe as a whole. |
| 00:07:32 | Protestant Europe, |
| 00:07:34 | whereas in Catholic Europe
things were pretty well centralized. |
| 00:07:38 | The key example
is the index of prohibited books of course, |
| 00:07:42 | The church making an effort to see that
throughout Europe |
| 00:07:48 | Catholics would not print...
or sell... or purchase |
| 00:07:59 | anything on this list, |
| 00:08:03 | which while rich patrons could manage to avoid
through black markets and things |
| 00:08:14 | ordinary people couldn't
and printers were prosecuted. |
| 00:08:17 | And in fact I have a case of one dutch printer |
| 00:08:21 | who looked at the index of prohibited books
and used it for his publication program, |
| 00:08:26 | because he knew these were titles
that would sell well. |
| 00:08:30 | It's a ricochet but it would only work
as a ricochet if Europe was divided. |
