Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (review)

Book lovers love Elizabeth Eisenstein as one of our own. Her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (1979) was promptly hailed as a major achievement, and remains so. It is also a dreadnaught polemic, a scorched launching pad for cranky contrarians, and a slab-size flint-sharp touchstone in the history of the book. In Divine Art, Infernal Machines, Eisenstein again takes up topics from Press as an Agent of Change, but with abundant illustrations (she treats emblems, engravings, and the heyday of allegorical prints) and with broader scope: she passes the Pillars of Hercules and crosses the Atlantic; she pays attention to later periods, the Romantics, the Revolutionaries, the Corporations; and she covers more ground at a faster pace.

Eisenstein wishes to place 'current debates about new media in some sort of historical perspective' (x). Her 'sort of historical perspective' is expansive, dealing with five centuries in Western Europe and the United States. Her central theme is printing's mixed reputation as gift of Providence or disaster machine, a theme that ran from Gutenberg and Coster through Franklin and Paine to the publishing anxieties of the twenty-first century. She shows how long the past persists. Edmund Burke rebuked the London press's assaults on the prerogatives of British nobility as threats to the nation itself. Eisenstein comments, 'Similar views are still being expressed by American conservatives who object to the ostensibly exaggerated depiction of the faults not of a nobility, but of a plutocracy' (143-4).

Eisenstein weighs the pros and cons of print compared to its two venerable ancestors, manuscripts and oratory. Print made books cheaper, but it made them cheap. Print enabled ideas to cross vast distances, ideas like atheism and revolution. Print promoted literacy, a literacy easily diverted by trivia, erotica, and fiction. Print could be anonymous, and thus scurrilous, vicious, and mendacious. Print stabilized texts and destabilized governments. Eisenstein cites a lofty precedent for this evolving dispute, John Adams contra Condorcet (151), and observes that in our digital age the place of 'print' has been taken by the 'World Wide Web.'

She makes two points right away.

First, historical characters enter and exit, but God appears in every act. Europe's first printers advertised their art as something divine. Renaissance scholars greeted print as their God-given ally. By the time the pamphlet wars erupted in Reformation Europe, and again in Stuart England, print was reviled as the fount of sedition and lies. In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine urged the United States to shed the snarls of state-sponsored religion; American religious publishing has been so robust that there has been no need for state sponsorship. Decade after decade, there have been printers willing to side with one religious faction or another, and not all have been mercenary.

Second, print dotes on conflict and controversy. Disputes about religion and government sell well, the more intense and protracted the better. Eisenstein cites Marshall McLuhan: 'newspapers have thrived on wars' (219). Her chapter on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deals with the impact several such disputes had on printing, printers, and authors, their livelihoods and their status. In Europe and the United States, a few bold printers openly defied official censorship and converted it into publicity and high sales. More often, prosecution turned printers into prisoners (John Wilkes and Daniel Eaton) or strangled and burned them (Etienne Dolet).

Eisenstein's research is impressive, reaching far and wide across languages and centuries. Her knowledge of the history of publication engages the wealth of recent scholarship (she has been a conscientious book reviewer throughout her career) and extends as far back as Roman copyists. She has doubts about Robert Darnton and endorses...