The educated person of the sixteenth century was heir to all these cultural periods: intellectually and artistically he was descended from Greeks, Romans, Mohammedans, and his medieval Christian forbears. But the sixteenth century itself added cultural contributions to the original store, which help to explain not only the social, political, and ecclesiastical activities of that time but also many of our present-day actions and ideas. The essentially new factors in sixteenth-century culture may be reckoned as (1) the diffusion of knowledge as a result of the invention of printing; (2) the development of literary criticism by means of humanism; (3) a golden age of painting and architecture; (4) the flowering of national literature; (5) the beginnings of modern natural science.
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING
The present day is notably distinguished by the prevalence of enormous numbers of printed books, periodicals, and newspapers. Yet this very printing, which seems so commonplace to us now, has had, in all, but a comparatively brief existence. From the earliest recorded history up to less than five hundred years ago every book in Europe [Footnote: For an account of early printing in China, Japan, and Korea, see the informing article "Typography" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, Vol. XXVII, p. 510.] was laboriously written by hand, [Footnote: It is interesting to note the meaning of our present word "manuscript," which is derived from the Latin—manu scriptum ("written by hand").] and, although copyists acquired an astonishing swiftness in reproducing books, libraries of any size were the property exclusively of rich institutions or wealthy individuals. It was at the beginning of modern times that the invention of printing revolutionized intellectual history.
Printing is an extremely complicated process, and it is small wonder that centuries of human progress elapsed before its invention was complete. Among the most essential elements of the perfected process are movable type with which the impression is made, and paper, on which it is made. A few facts may be conveniently culled from the long involved story of the development of each of these elements.
[Sidenote: Development of paper]
For their manuscripts the Greeks and Romans had used papyrus, the prepared fiber of a tough reed which grew in the valley of the Nile River. This papyrus was very expensive and heavy, and not at all suitable for printing. Parchment, the dressed skins of certain animals, especially sheep, which became the standard material for the hand- written documents of the middle ages, was extremely durable, but like papyrus, it was costly, unwieldy, and ill adapted for printing.
The forerunner of modern European paper was probably that which the Chinese made from silk as early as the second century before Christ. For silk the Mohammedans at Mecca and Damascus in the middle of the eighth century appear to have substituted cotton, and this so-called Damascus paper was later imported into Greece and southern Italy and into Spain. In the latter country the native-grown hemp and flax were again substituted for cotton, and the resulting linen paper was used considerably in Castile in the thirteenth century and thence penetrated across the Pyrenees into France and gradually all over western and central Europe. Parchment, however, for a long time kept its preeminence over silk, cotton, or linen paper, because of its greater firmness and durability, and notaries were long forbidden to use any other substance in their official writings. Not until the second half of the fifteenth century was assured the triumph of modern paper, [Footnote: The word "paper" is derived from the ancient "papyrus.">[ as distinct from papyrus or parchment, when printing, then on the threshold of its career, demanded a substance of moderate price that would easily receive the impression of movable type.
[Sidenote: Development of Movable Type]
The idea of movable type was derived from an older practice of carving reverse letters or even whole inscriptions upon blocks of wood so that when they were inked and applied to writing material they would leave a clear impression. Medieval kings and princes frequently had their signatures cut on these blocks of wood or metal, in order to impress them on charters, and a kind of engraving was employed to reproduce pictures or written pages as early as the twelfth century.
It was a natural but slow evolution from block-impressing to the practice of casting individual letters in separate little pieces of metal, all of the same height and thickness, and then arranging them in any desired sequence for printing. The great advantage of movable type over the blocks was the infinite variety of work which could be done by simply setting and resetting the type.