The Woman who Discovered Printing (review)

There are arguably three fundamental questions concerning the beginning of printing: what circumstances lay behind the beginning; what technology was involved; and what the consequences were. Each of these is fascinating, and complex enough to keep many busy on just one of them, leaving the other two aside, while not suggesting that they are of less importance. Historians of Western printing have to some extent focused more on the second (the invention) and the third questions, but the book under review opens up the first question, reminding us of the importance of the time being right for printing to emerge.

T. H. Barrett's The Woman who Discovered Printing is a short but fascinating book —provocative in its title, broad in its sweep of history, somewhat irritating because it is based more on inference than evidence, but ultimately stimulating. Barrett's opening case that European historians ought not dismiss the Chinese precedent is weakened by his reliance on some remarkably out-of-date studies, for example Douglas McMurtrie. As essential background, he discusses the importance of paper in Chinese civilization, and then moves on to establish the role of relics in preserving Buddhist doctrines, and the importation of the idea from India to China, which was receptive to the conferment of merit through copying. By the end of Chapter 4, technology, religion, and cataclysmic climatic changes have, Barrett says, led China to circumstances that 'might be construed as favourable to the emergence of printing' (p. 69).

To this mixture Barrett adds the politics of the Li family. Chapters 5 and 6 present his case that the eponymous woman (Empress Wu, ad 625–705, of the Li family) must have used printing, which he infers from the fact that a text particular to her, the 'Great Spell of Unsullied Light', turned up in Korea a century later. That the printing disappeared with her fall, he attributes to the politics of a fallen leader. In Chapter 7 he establishes that eminent religious persons of the late seventh century would have understood the basic advantages of printing (p. 112). He then discusses developments in the eighth and ninth centuries, again based mostly on indirect evidence —for example a technique of about 720 for printing on cloth as suggestive that its originator took the idea from having observed printing on paper, and in 746 a decree that could be interpreted to prove that seal-carvers had been lured away to another industry, namely woodcarving for printing. In the ninth century, there is more concrete evidence: the request by a provincial governor to ban the printing of calendars in 835, and accounts that show book markets late in the century sold printed materials. In his conclusion Barrett returns to perhaps the single most important point of his book, that to understand the emergence of printing in China, it is necessary to understand the religious ideas of the age.

What is fascinating here is the introduction to the relationships of written texts to Buddhism and Taoism, taking the reader into relics, substitutes for relics, and seals. Barrett situates relevant developments in Chinese history, such as occasions when rulers ordered copies of short texts to be distributed in their tens of thousands, or even millions (p. 117: in 733, eight million copies of a short text by Laozi, all apparently supplied in manuscript). He builds his case on the close reading and interpretation of indirect evidence, interweaving religion, politics, and technology.

Irritating are the provocative title which is ultimately not the point of the book; the poor sources consulted on the European phenomenon; the claim (p. 16) that Italian traders brought East Asian slaves to Europe, referencing a forthcoming publication; and the suspicion that he has not even used all of the Chinese evidence that might have made his case. In 2007 Li Ying (Exhibition Department Director of the China Printing Museum in Beijing) wrote 'The Origins of Printing in China', Ultrabold, 2 (2007), 12...