At the edge of the Middle Ages
The printing press with movable metal type appeared in Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century. That puts it at the very end of the period usually called medieval, and historians differ on whether to treat it as a late medieval development, the start of a new age, or both. Its roots lay firmly in medieval conditions: a growing demand for books, a trade in paper, skilled metalworkers, and wine and oil presses that supplied the basic idea of applying pressure. This article describes what happened and why it mattered, while avoiding the temptation to treat it as a clean break.
How books were made before
For most of the Middle Ages, a book was made by hand. A scribe copied the text onto parchment, which is prepared animal skin, using ink and a quill. In monasteries, the copying took place in a room set aside for the work, and by the later Middle Ages professional scribes and workshops in towns and university cities also produced books. Decoration was added by specialists, as in illuminated manuscripts, and the quality of the work ranged from plain to magnificent. The materials, including parchment and pigments, were costly.
Copying a long book took weeks or months, so books were expensive and relatively rare. Each copy also differed slightly, because scribes made mistakes and sometimes altered the text. A scholar who wanted a particular book often had to borrow and copy it, or travel to where it was kept. The manuscript trade did grow in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly around the medieval universities, where students and teachers needed textbooks, but it could not supply books in large numbers.
Earlier printing ideas
Printing itself was not new. Woodblock printing, in which a carved block is inked and pressed on paper, was known in East Asia long before and was used in Europe on a small scale in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for playing cards, religious images and short texts. Movable type, in which individual characters are arranged and reused, had been developed in China, where a system is associated with the eleventh century, and later in Korea, where metal type was used. Whether knowledge of these developments reached Europe is uncertain. The Song dynasty is often noted for its advances in printing, but no clear connection to the European invention has been established.
Gutenberg and the new method
The European printing press is generally credited to Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith working in Mainz in Germany around the 1450s. Much about his career is uncertain, because few documents survive. What is generally accepted is that he combined several elements into a workable system.
- Metal type. Each letter was cast from a metal alloy using a mold, so that many identical pieces could be made and reused. This relied on metalworking skills like those of goldsmiths.
- Oil-based ink. Traditional water-based inks did not stick well to metal, so a thicker, oil-based ink was used.
- A press. A screw press, similar to those used for wine, olives and cloth, pressed the paper against the inked type.
- Careful page setting. Compositors picked letters one by one and set them in lines, then locked them into a frame. After printing, the type could be taken apart and used again.
The most famous product is the large Bible printed at Mainz, usually dated to about 1455. A good number of copies survive, some on paper and some on vellum. The first runs probably numbered in the low hundreds, though exact figures are uncertain.
What changed
The main difference between a printed book and a manuscript was repeatability. After the type was set, many copies could be printed from it, and each copy of an edition was essentially the same. That lowered the cost per copy over a large run, though the up-front expense of materials, paper, type and labor was high. A print shop needed capital, and early printers were business operators who took risks.
Early printers tended to imitate manuscripts so that their books would look familiar. Many early printed books left spaces so that illuminators could add colored initials and borders by hand. Over time, printers developed their own conventions, such as title pages, page numbers and indexes, which made books easier to use.
The early spread
Printing spread quickly along existing trade routes. By the 1460s printers were at work in several German towns and in Italy, and soon after in France, the Low Countries and elsewhere. Venice became a major center of printing before the end of the century. William Caxton, an English merchant, learned about printing abroad and set up a press in England in the 1470s; among his early books was an edition of the Canterbury Tales. Books printed before the year 1501 are called incunabula, and tens of thousands of different editions are thought to have been produced, although the exact total is estimated, not known.
The most common early books were religious works, school texts, legal works and classics, which matched the existing market. Printing did not immediately make books cheap for everyone. Literacy remained limited, and many readers still depended on borrowed or shared copies.
Effects, and the limits of the claim
Over the long run, printing helped spread ideas faster and with less variation than copying by hand, and it contributed to major cultural and religious changes in the sixteenth century, which fall mostly outside the medieval period. It is wise to be careful about claims that it single-handedly ended the Middle Ages. The scribal trade did not vanish overnight, and manuscripts continued to be made for decades, especially for luxury copies. Most historians describe the transition as gradual, and many link it to the end of the Middle Ages only in a loose chronological sense. What can be said with confidence is that by about 1500, printed books were a regular part of life in European cities, and the habits of reading and learning had begun to change as a result.