For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
    -Shakespeare, Richard II

Johannes Gutenberg, the man credited with the invention of moveable type

Technology and Literature

Around the 11th and 12th centuries, people started writing down religious teachings and epic poems, such as Beowulf and Ireland's The Tain (pronounced Toin, as in coin); eventually certain people were designated official writer-downers, or scribes.

This was an important change, but not a culturally transforming one. Written material was still difficult to come by for most people. Scribes could do only so much. They were either monks, whose work was in the service of religion, or hired writers, whose output was determined by the tastes of the aristocracy. The resulting selection did not inspire many people to learn to read, and the bards and scops who were skilled at shaping and telling stories kept their honored places around the fire.

Presses printed between eight and ten million copies of more than forty thousand book titles by the end of the 15th century.

These "technologies" (mouth and pen) overlapped. So they did when the art of printing from movable type, a German invention, came into use in England near the end of the 15th century (1485, to be exact). At that time, stories were still being told, epic poems recited, and ballads sung, but living writers were generally sharing their work by passing it around in handwritten manuscripts. In London, most of these writers were courtiers attached in some way to a royal household, or court. It didn't take that long to circulate a manuscript among the few hundred literate people at court, especially when the novel had not yet been invented. And if it was a longer poem or dramatic work, a writer or would-be reader could take the pages to the local scribe and get a copy in a few days (not as fast as a computer, but fancier).

For some decades after the introduction of the printing press, this pass-around method co-existed with printing (as it has done again in the 20th century — in the Soviet Union, for example, and in other countries where state censorship restricts printing). Some writers snubbed the printing press; seeing it as ignoble, they continued to circulate their manuscripts among cultivated friends. After all, there weren't very many literate people, and those who mattered lived at court. Or so it had been, but the printing press changed that.

"He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world..." -Thomas Carlyle

A Medium for the Masses

The printing press created its own market by making books cheaper and more plentiful. People now had more incentive and opportunity to learn to read. Right after Chaucer's death, at the start of the 15th century, the literacy rate in England was about 30%; by 1530, it rose to about 60%. And the printing of the Bible attracted many more readers, speeding the Protestant Reformation and democratizing religious worship itself.

Printers were like crafty matchmakers introducing a country-bumpkin public to a classy world traveler who could read Greek and Latin. Printer Richard Tottel wrote, "I exhort the unlearned, by reading to be more skillful, and to purge that swinelike grossness that maketh the sweet marjoram not to smell to their delight." (From Tottel's Miscellany, 1557.)

Whether that "swinelike grossness" has been purged or not depends on one's opinion of those books that the public chose to buy. But, there's no doubt that the printing press was a society-transforming technology. Equal to or greater than the computer and the Internet? Will the Internet bring us full circle back to pass-around technology, with writers circulating manuscripts via computer, making that great-grandchild of movable type, desktop publishing, obsolete? And what comes next?

Good questions. But it all starts with the story — something that sounds so good or shakes someone up so much that they just have to save it and share it, whether by writing it on a scroll that's carried by hand to a Duke's door or typing it into a file that's uploaded by a server onto the Internet. The technique by which the story is delivered doesn't matter that much. Communications technology has changed and will continue to change our society, culture, even our religion; but it's the story that can change our mind, heart, even our soul.

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