2023-05-12
1 小时 19 分钟For our 100th episode, we look at one of the technologies that marks an endpoint for the middle ages, the printing press, and consider how Johann Gutenberg may be a prototype for today's paranoid tech tycoons and the lawsuits that so often dog them. Today's Texts: Van der Linde's, A. The Haarlem Legend of the Invention of Printing. Translated by J.H. Hessels, Blades, East, & Blades, 1871. Google Books. Schröder, Edward. Das Mainzer Fragment vom Weltgericht. Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1908. Archive.org. Trithemius, Johannes. "From In Praise of Scribes." In Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age. Edited by Evelyn B. Tribble and Anne Trubek, Longman, 2003, pp. 469-475. Music Credit: Edvard Grieg, Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, II. Adagio, performed by Skidmore College Orchestra and made available under the CC-PD license on MusOpen.org.
This is medieval death trip for Thursday, May 11, 2023.
Episode 100 concerning the litigious origins of printing.
Hello and welcome to medieval death trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
I'm your host, Patrick Lane.
I'm happy to be back to celebrate our 100th episode, not counting the prologue episode.
After over a month of dealing with laryngitis and other throat issues, it's good to finally be back at the microphone for the shows.
Centenary milestone I thought it seemed appropriate to take a look at a seminal milestone in technology and media, one whose emergence traditionally helps mark the end of the middle Ages.
The printing press the development of printing in Europe is a fascinating little case study in how historical common knowledge comes to be.
If I say who invented the printing press?
I'm sure many of you will have the ready answer of Johannes Gutenberg.
Some might hesitate and offer instead the more qualified statement Gutenberg was responsible for popularizing the use of the printing press.
That certainly feels more likely to be true.
Most of us these days are trained, at least after primary school, to be rather skeptical of individual attributions of invention and discovery, especially for things from before the 19th century or so.
The relationship of Gutenberg to the printing press has indeed been a site of contention between claims and doubts, not just recently in our ages interest in breaking down legends of the great individual genius, but for centuries people have been debating Gutenberg's status as the father of movable type printing.
I'm not going to make any grand claims of settling that debate in this episode, though I'll share what I've gleaned.
The current scholarly consensus appears to be.
But I am going to offer one grand claim, and I presume no originality in proposing this, though I havent read enough recent scholarship on the history of print to cite anyone else who has already floated this idea.
But having read the period sources, several of which ill present today, I kind of feel like the printing press was not just a new and important technology, but it might have been the first major technology in the way that we conceptualize technology now in the 21st century.
What I mean by that is that it developed as a commercialized industrial technology that was a mix of both trade secret and trade skill and engineering, which is to say that it was a technology that was also a singular invention, in contrast to things like gunpowder or flying buttresses, or even windmills or mechanical clocks.
Obviously ancient and medieval artisans had trade secrets and carefully guarded methods of attaining certain colors of stained glass or forging Damascus steel.