THE REVIVAL AIDED BY THE INVENTION OF PAPER AND PRINTING. Very fortunately for the spread of the new learning an important process and a great invention now came in at a most opportune time. The process was the manufacture of paper; the invention that of printing.
The manufacture of paper is probably a Chinese invention, early obtained by the Arabs. During the Mohammedan occupation of Spain paper mills were set up there, and a small supply of their paper found its way across the Pyrenees. The Christians who drove the Mohammedans out lost the process, and it now came back once more from the East. By about 1250 the Greeks had obtained the process from Mohammedan sources, and in 1276 the first paper mill was set up in Italy. In 1340 a paper factory was established at Padua, and soon thereafter other factories began to make paper at Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Venice. In 1320 a paper factory was established at Mainz, in Germany, and in 1390 another at Nuremberg. By 1450 paper was in common use and the way was now open for one of the world's greatest inventions.
This was the invention of printing. From the difficulty experienced in securing books for the great libraries at Florence, Urbino, and Rome, as we have seen (Rs. 130, 131, 132), and the great cost of reproducing single copies of books, we can see that the work of the humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy probably would have had but little influence elsewhere but for the invention of printing. To disseminate a new learning involving two great literatures by copying books, one at a time by hand, would have prevented instruction in the new subjects becoming general for centuries, and would have materially retarded the progress of the world. The discovery of the art of printing, coming when it did, scattered the new learning over Europe.
[Illustration: FIG. 73. AN EARLY SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PRESS "The prynters have founde a crafte to make bokis by brasen letters sette in ordre by a frame." An engraving, dated 1520. The man at the right is setting type, and the one at the lever is making an impression. A number of four-page printed sheets are seen on the table at the right of the press.]
SPREAD AND WORK OF THE PRESS. The dates connected with this new invention and its diffusion over Europe are:
1423. Coster of Harlem made the first engraved single page.
1438. Gutenberg invented movable wooden types.
1450. Schoeffer and Faust cast first metal type.
1456. Bible printed in Latin by Gutenberg and Faust at Mainz. This the
first complete book printed. [20]
1457. The Mayence Psalter, the first dated book, printed. [21]
1462. Adolph of Nassau pillaged Mainz, drove out the printers, and in
consequence scattered the art over Europe.
1465. Press set up in the German monastery of Subiaco, in the Sabine
Mountains, in Italy.
1467. This press moved to Rome.
1469. Presses at Paris and Vienna.
1470. Printing introduced into Switzerland.
1471. Presses set up at Florence, Milan, and Ferrara.
1473. Printing introduced into Holland and Belgium.
1474. Printing introduced into Spain.
1474-77. Printing introduced into England. Caxton set up his press in
1477.
1476. First book printed in Greek at Milan.
1490. The Aldine press established at Venice, by Aldus Manutius.
1501. First Greek book printed in Germany, at Erfurt.
1563. First newspaper established, in Venice.
Inventions traveled but slowly in those days, yet in time the press was to be found in every country of Europe. The professional copyists made a great outcry against the innovation; presses were at first licensed and closely limited in number; in France the University of Paris was given the proceeds of a tax levied on all books printed; and in England the beginnings of the modern copyright are to be seen in the necessity of obtaining a license from the ecclesiastical authorities to be permitted to print a book.
[Illustration: FIG. 74. AN EARLY SPECIMEN OF CAXTON'S PRINTING]
In cutting and casting the first type a style of heavy-faced letter, much like that written by the mediaeval monks—the so-called Gothic—was used. Caxton, in England, used this at first, and the Germans have continued its use up to the present time. The Italians, however, soon devised a type with letters like those used by the old Romans—the so- called Roman type, this type which was soon accepted in all non-German European countries. The Italians also devised a compressed type—the Italic—which enabled printers to get more words on a page.
Venice, almost from the first, became the center of the book trade, and books literally poured from the presses there. By 1500 as many as five thousand editions, often of as many as a thousand copies to an edition, had been printed in Italy. [22] Of this number 2835 had been printed in Venice, and most of them by the Aldine press of Aldus Manutius, and edited by the Academia (p. 250) connected therewith. [23] By 1500 many books had also been printed in a number of northern cities, [24] and Lyons, Paris, Basel, Nuremberg, Cologne, Leipzig, and London soon became centers of the northern book trade. Caxton in England soon vied with Aldus in Venice as a printer of beautiful books. When we remember that it required fifty-three days (Sandys) to make by hand one copy of Quintilian's Institutes, and forty-five copyists twenty-two months to reproduce two hundred volumes for the Medicean Library at Florence (R. 130), the enormous importance of an invention which would print rapidly a thousand or more copies of a book, all exactly alike and free from copyist errors, can be appreciated. It tremendously cheapened books, [25] made the general use of the textbook method of teaching possible, and paved the way for a great extension of schools and learning (R. 134). From now on the press became a formidable rival to the pulpit and the sermon, and one of the greatest of instruments for human progress and individual liberty. From this time on educational progress was to be much more rapid than it had been in the past. From an educational point of view the invention of printing might almost be taken as marking the close of the mediaeval and the beginning of modern times.