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The Renaissance
The Renaissance is a short history of the period considered a high-water mark of humanity's relationship with the imagination. Historian Paul Johnson goes back to the Dark Ages to write about how the growth of intermediate technology sparked one of the greatest periods of cultural growth and invention, the Renaissance.
Technology made it possible, he concludes.
"This was," he writes, "the invention, followed by the extraordinarily rapid diffusion, of printing. The Romans produced a large literature. But in publishing it they were, as in many other fields, markedly conservative." The Romans, writes Johnson, knew about the codex -- a collection of folded and cut sheets, sewn together and enclosed within a binding. But they clung to the old-fashioned scroll as the normative form of the book.
In the Middle Ages, the spread of paper and the invention of printing by movable type was the central technological event leading the Renaissance, the spark that triggered an explosion in art, teaching, research and writing, Johnson writes. The invention of movable type for letterpress had three enormous advantages: it could be easily renewed, being cast from a mold; it could be used repeatedly until worn out; it introduced strict uniformity of lettering. (In a way, sounds like the Net's early architecture.)
Technology also had a profound affect on art, perspective, architecture and design, as Johnson also points out in this readable book.
The rest is, as they say history. Johnson tells it with authority, clarity and brevity. This is a neat book to give a teacher or parent muttering about all that time online, or lamenting the high culture of times past and the fact that kids have all gone to cultural Hell.
Sometimes unwittingly, "The Renaissance" connects the flowering of that period with the extraordinary outpouring of ideas, stories and culture made possible by the invention of the Net and the Web. Future historians may be writing about the history of this period in much the way Johnson takes on that one. It's always nice to know where we come from, as well as where we might be headed.
You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
Yet another book about how the printing press sparked the rennaisance, how original. This seems a rather pedestrian and obvious observation, that I am sure has been written about ad nauseum - do we really need another book about it.
Oh, and Katz really shows me his insight with the little teaser 'perhaps someday someone will write the same of our time...' Wow, Katz's mind just makes all these cool little connections I would never see on my own... Now I know why I continue to masochistically read every one of his articles.
-josh
OK, now, I understand drawing some parrallel conclusions, but I really, seriously doubt that anyone writing a book about the classical Renaissance is trying to go out of their way to justify the current Internet revolution through the "hindsight of the classical period". I'm sorry, it just doesn't seem that way to me.
While I agree that we should always strive to remember the lessons of the past, I ask that we have the right to draw our own conclusions. Jon Katz reviews a book, and he tells us what we are supposed to take out of it. I thought it was the job of the reviewer to say whether ( in the case of an historical book) the author has managed to cover the subject matter well, not to try and tell the reader how to read the book, or what conclusions to draw.
Is Katz really this entrenched in the technology sector? I mean, surely no one can truly be that one dimensional. Yes, I want to learn the lessons of the past, but when I read about the history of the Greek or Roman empires, I do not go out of my way to try and link that history with anything that I am currently working on. It just seems daft to assume that whatever you are working on is automatically to be considered as important, in an historical context, as something as big and powerful (at the time) as the Roman Empire, or the Renaissance and the intellectual revolution that evolved from it.
It is possible that we are in such a time. But we have a long way to go before we can say that all humanity will benifit from this whole Internet thing in the same way all humanity benifited from that time. And frankly, I'm not real interested in having all of my history lessons applied to the Internet. There are other things happening in the world, even now, that aren't directly tied up in the Internet. Perhaps Katz should step away from his job for a while and check some of those things out? Just a suggestion. A vacation never hurt anybody.
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I haven't read the book, but I can tell you for certain that the printing press was not the major cause of the Renaissance. I don't know if this is a distortion of Johnson's words by Katz, or a gross error by the author, but the Renaissance (as conventionally defined) predated the printing press by at least a hundred years.
Gutenberg produced the first Bible c. 1455, but the Italian Renaissance was in full swing by then, largely an outcome of the mercantile culture of the Italian city-states. The later European Renaissance movements were more outgrowths of the Italian one than spawned by the printing press. They too seem to have been caused mostly by the growth of town culture and the rise of the middle class.
A solid argument can be made for the printing press as the greatest single cause for the Reformation. However, it is incorrect to name it as the primary cause of the Renaissance. I'm not saying that it had no effect, but other factors were at play.