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  • Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending
  • Nicolas Valazza
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 2011. Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4280-5. Pp. xiii + 368, illustr. $45.

In Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Elizabeth Eisenstein's goals are admittedly ambitious: to examine contrasting viewpoints on western print culture from its emergence in the fifteenth century to the present. While she acknowledges that "the field is much too large to be covered in a single book" (ix), the author justifies her approach by underscoring the striking recurrence across the centuries among attitudes toward printed books in spite of the numerous shifts in the history of print (the appearance of the first printed Bibles, the spread of anti-government pamphlets in Britain and France in the seventeenth-century, the decisive impact of journals on the successive French revolutions, the emergence of industrial printing and massive newspapers in the nineteenth century and, eventually, the advent of the digital age). Eisenstein traces the anxiety about the overload of information that characterizes our time back at least to the seventeenth century, when Leibniz — for [End Page 205] instance — complained to Louis XIV about the "horrible mass of books", creating conditions in which it would become "a disgrace rather than an honor to be an author" (87). Similarly, Eisenstein shows that our legitimate or paranoid concern for the intrusion of new media in private life was already expressed in 1842 by Charles Dickens, who noted the "corrupt control of every phase of American life by the press" (208).

Among the contradictory reactions that printing prompted over the centuries, Eisenstein resolutely favors the positive ones. She argues that since the time of Gutenberg they have far exceeded any adverse effects, at times overestimated by historians of the book. Though we might suspect that the author overvalues enthusiastic reports on printing, the multitude of documents exposed in the book — supported by significant illustrations — makes her argument convincing.2 A striking example is the confusion that persisted for centuries between the personality of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's partner, and the legendary character of Doctor Faust, as it is recounted in Stephen Jones' New Biographical Dictionary (1811): "FUST, or FAUSTUS (John) a citizen of Mainz and one of the earliest printers. He had the policy to conceal his art; and to this policy we are indebted for the tradition of 'The Devil and Dr. Faustus', handed down to the present times" (1).

Eisenstein's study follows a loose chronological order, with each chapter devoted to particular events or historical trends that typify the six centuries of her survey. The early reactions in the fifteenth century to printing, whether as a "divine art" or the product of an "infernal machine", are thus reviewed in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 shows how early Protestants considered printed books, in particular vernacular Bibles, as an anti-papal weapon. Chapter 3 examines the link between the scientific advances through the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries and the improvement of printing techniques. These improvements led to an extraordinary proliferation of books causing a sense of overload among some thinkers, like Leibniz, while prompting others, like Descartes, to "put books aside". Chapter 4 investigates the crucial role played by books and journals in the emergence of public opinion during the Enlightenment, paving the way to democratic demands such as freedom of speech and the establishment of a representative government (and ultimately to the overthrow of the ancien régime). The peak of the political debate on printing reached in the early nineteenth century is the topic of Chapter 5. Eisenstein focuses on the liberals' [End Page 206] fight for the end of state control of printing, while the conservatives blamed the circulation of the philosophers' works, especially tracts like Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), for fomenting revolutionary disorder. Chapter 6 concentrates on the advent of the industrial press in the 1830s and the constitution of the so-called Fourth Estate as a mighty political power, which combined...

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