The Renaissance

Antitechnologists, academic and other snoots, and neo-Luddites equate technology with the erosion of culture and civilization. A neat little book by Paul Johnson details how technology helped spark the Renaissance, which is an interesting perspective. One day historians may be writing similiar books about this time.

The Renaissance author Paul Johnson pages 197 publisher Modern Library Chronicles rating 7/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 00679-64086-X summary how technology helped re-invent culture

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.

Comments

Printing Press Did Not Bring About Renaissance

[heinzkeinz]

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.