The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

De: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Narrado por: Jonathan Cox

In 1979, Elizabeth Eisenstein provided the first full-scale treatment of the 15th-century printing revolution in the West in her monumental two-volume work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. This abridged edition, after summarizing the initial changes introduced by the establishment of printing shops, goes on to discuss how printing challenged traditional institutions and affected three major cultural movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science. Also included is a later essay which aims to demonstrate that the cumulative processes created by printing are likely to persist despite the recent development of new communications technologies.

©1983, 2005 Cambridge University Press (P)2021 Upfront Books

Academic and Pedantic

If you’re an academic interested in a review of other academics, this may be useful to you. The author spends most of her ink describing what others have said about the printing revolution and patiently explaining why most have failed to get it right.
If you’re a student or amateur historian interested in learning about the advent of printing, its stories, impact and consequences, this book will seem dry and won’t meet your expectations. There is another book out there waiting to be written for a broader audience.
This ain’t it.

Narrator was overly aggressive and irritating.

Narratior should have been a woman, like the author and slowed down and not been reading in such a rushed, aggressive manner. Book was preoccupied with the weak historiography of the subject and spend more time on that than the specific details and events.

Dissapointing

I was really hoping this would be like a Simon Winchester book, where one came away with a much deeper understanding & appreciation of the subject matter. But it's a dud IMO. After listening to the first 5 or 6 dry chapters of basically rambling about peripheral issues & jumping around the timeline with no apparent storyline navigation. What is largely absent is the physical or technical aspects of the printing process itself - the press, paper, ink, breakthroughs, false paths, how these breakthroughs were solved by whom & why... I then reverted to listening to the first 5 minutes of forward chapters just to see if things improve. Nope.