Vocabulary Answers Level E Unit 4-6 Review

February 3, 1468: Gutenberg printing bequeathed to humanity

Johann Gutenberg, engraving

February 3, 1468, died in a Mainz Johannes Gensfleisch , better known by the name of Gutenberg. He was born in Mainz between 1397 and 1400.

He is the invention of printing. It has revolutionized the way of making books, and dramatically lowering their prices, set reading for everyone.

With Gutenberg, men have also discovered the usefulness of mechanizing manual labor.

copyists and illuminators

In the early Middle Ages, books were produced one by one in the monasteries specialized as you see in the film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, Name of the Rose (1986).

From the 1200s, the monasteries abandon this activity lay in workshops located near universities. The

copyists copy down the text to the quill pen on sheets of parchment or paper, from an original, however, that illuminators grace the pages of sensitive miniature colorful.

workshops and supply for gold clerics and bourgeois rich enough to afford manuscripts (the name given to books written by hand).

But at the time of Gutenberg, the copying of manuscripts is no longer able to meet the needs of reading and learning from a growing number of students and scholars. Europe is waiting for a revolution ...

Bible of Mainz to 48 lines (1462) and Schoeffer by Fust, Gutenberg's former associates (National Assembly , Paris)

A magical process

Printing is derived from the engraving on copper or wood, a technique long known in Europe and China, but only used to reproduce images:
- the image is etched on a copper surface or wood,
- is coated with ink the raised part,
- you press on it a sheet of paper to fix the image on it.

Gutenberg, wood engraver, had the idea that simple genius to apply the above method to movable type made of lead. Each represents a letter of the alphabet in relief.

assembly line at a different characters to compose a page of writing. We can then print the same as many copies as you want on the page, with a low marginal cost (only the initial membership cost).

When we printed a front page in quite a number of copies, it dismantles the support and we compose a new page with movable type. So do you get a book in many copies in little more time than it took to have a single manuscript!

A printing to 1530 (miniature of the National Library, Paris)

An immediate success

With his partner Johann Fust, Gutenberg based in Mainz a typography workshop. The price of a huge work he completed in 1455 the Bible "at forty-two lines" , called Gutenberg Bible. The first book printed a few dozen copies collects an immediate success. It is followed by many other works.

The method of typography diffuses very fast across Europe (you can not help but compare this to that success ... the internet).

estimated that fifteen to twenty million books were already printed before 1500 (a total of over 30,000 editions). 77% of these books are in Latin and nearly half have a religious character. The books of this period bear the name of " incunabulum " (Latin incunabulum , which means cradle).

Many incunabula are printed in Venice, then in full glory. In the following century, the sixteenth, Paris, Lyon Antwerp and in turn become important places of printing with a total of 200,000 editions.

The consequences of printing are immense. First on how to read and write texts aerate the printers by using the separation of words and punctuation, they also fix the spelling.

instruction and more critical spirit spread at high speed as more and more people can have direct access to biblical texts and ancient, without being obliged to stick to the oral comments from a handful of scholars and clerics.

Thus, a half-century after the invention of the printing press will produce the first great intellectual divide in Western Christianity with the Reformation of Martin Luther and the emergence of Protestantism.

Workshop scribe from a miniature of the BNF (Bibliotheque Nationale de France)

Source: http: / / www.herodote.net/histoire/evenement.php?jour=14680203