There is a longstanding confusion of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's one-time
business partner, with the notorious Doctor Faustus. The association is
not surprising to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for from its very early days
the printing press was viewed by some as black magic. For the most part,
however, it was welcomed as a divine art by Western churchmen and
statesmen. Sixteenth-century Lutherans hailed it for emancipating
Germans from papal rule, and seventeenth-century English radicals viewed
it as a weapon against bishops and kings. While an early colonial
governor of Virginia thanked God for the absence of printing in his
colony, a century later, revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic
paid tribute to Gutenberg for setting in motion an irreversible movement
that undermined the rule of priests and kings. Yet scholars continued to
praise printing as a peaceful art. They celebrated the advancement of
learning while expressing concern about information overload.
In Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Eisenstein, author of the hugely
influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, has written a
magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent
attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a
compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and
cultural shifts are intimately related. Always keeping an eye on the
present, she recalls how, in the nineteenth century, the steam press was
seen both as a giant engine of progress and as signaling the end of a
golden age. Predictions that the newspaper would supersede the book
proved to be false, and Eisenstein is equally skeptical of
pronouncements of the supersession of print by the digital.
The use of print has always entailed ambivalence about serving the muses
as opposed to profiting from the marketing of commodities. Somewhat
newer is the tension between the perceived need to preserve an
ever-increasing mass of texts against the very real space and resource
constraints of bricks-and-mortar libraries. Whatever the multimedia
future may hold, Eisenstein notes, our attitudes toward print will never
be monolithic. For now, however, reports of its death are greatly
exaggerated.
