Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Chapter 8- Reinventing Gutenberg: Woodblock and Movable-Type Printing in Europe and China

169 Chapter  Reinventing Gutenberg Woodblock and Movable-Type Printing in Europe and China Kai-wing Chow “Gutenberg revisited from the East” is the title of the introduction Roger Chartier wrote for a special issue of Late Imperial China on printing. He calls for “a more accurate appreciation of Gutenberg’s invention” because it “was not the only technique capable of assuring the wide-scale dissemination of printed texts.” Moreover, as a historian of books and a cultural historian interested in the study of print culture, Chartier recognizes the importance of images and illustrations in European books. His approach to the history of books transcends the narrow focus on the “printed word” characteristic of the works of conventional book historians. This sensitivity enables him to appreciate the long history and far-reaching impact on print culture of woodblock printing in China and Japan. The same appreciation of the role of illustrations in European print culture is also evident in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s classic study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (PPAC), published a little over twenty-five years ago. Eisenstein’s insight warrants special commemoration in the light of recent interest in visual culture in print. The study of printed images and book illustrations demonstrates the importance of the woodblock in producing images. It presents a timely opportunity to revisit the narrative of Gutenberg, which has been predominantly logocentric and exclusively typological. Thenarrativeoftheinventionofmovable-typeprintingbyGutenbergneeds to be reinvented not because “the name of Gutenberg does not appear on the . Roger Chartier, “Gutenberg Revisited from the East,” Late Imperial China 17.1 (1996): 2. . Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), and The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991). 170 Kai-wing Chow imprint of any book” or because he was only one of several European printers who claimed to be the inventor but because the narrative of the history of printing in Europe has been skewed so that many significant aspects of the cultural history of the book—in Europe and in China—have been obscured. To reinvent the Gutenberg narrative is to be “wary of such ethnocentrism” with which Western historians have judged woodblock printing “against the standard of Gutenberg’s invention.” To rescue the role of woodblock printing in European printing after the mid-1450s, is to call into question the idea that movable-type printing was the only technology capable of bringing about revolutionary change in Europe and the idea that woodblock printing had not brought any significant change to China and East Asia. Conventional accounts of the history of printing in Europe systematically privilege movabletype printing as a major factor in creating conditions of modernity: the spread of the Enlightenment, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, the rise of national languages and literatures, and the growth and spread of nationalism, as well as the expansion of critical publics that were crucial to the development of representative forms of government. I would argue that this standard narrative has systematically disparaged the importance of woodcut before and after the invention of movable-type printing, resulting in a profoundly logocentric approach to the study of the history of printing. There are, however, exceptions. Eisenstein points out that woodcut engraving used to print illustrations was “an innovation which eventually helped to revolutionize technical literature by introducing ‘exactly repeatable pictorial statements’ into all kinds of reference works.” Even though she refers only to “woodcut engraving,” not specifically to woodblock printing, the two are . Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton, trans. David Gerard (London: New Left Books, 1976), 56. . In The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), Adrian Johns devotes a chapter, “Faust and the Pirates: The Cultural Construction of the Printing Revolution,” to competing accounts of the origins and early history of print. According to Johns, the construction of these accounts of the invention of the movable-type printing press underscores on one level the struggle between printers and royal power over the control of printing rights. Johns notes as well that “in practice the history of the press was being written by printers, booksellers, and hacks, by antiquarians and amateurs” (344–5). . Chartier, “Gutenberg Revisited,” 2. . There is a growing literature on the...