Paper and Printing
Of the 'four great inventions of ancient China' -- paper, printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass -- the one whose Chinese origins and dissemination westerward are documented in greatest detail is papermaking. Paradoxically, paper is also the most important 'new invention', unknown in antiquity, which is missing from the Nova reperta of Jan van der Straet and from Francis Bacon's famous list. The reason, perhaps, is that paper had become so fundamental to European life by the early seventeenth century that neither Bacon nor Stradanus could imagine life without it. In the Latin West, the advent of papermaking was rapidly followed by the (re)invention of printing with moveable type. This section brings together material from several different sources to help illustrate these crucially important aspects of trans-Eurasian technological transfer.
Material illustrating the Asian origins and impact of paper abounds on the internet. A small selection of this material has been curated here by by Howard Hotson (May 2019).
An invention is not a revolution, it is only the beginning of a journey. Inventions introduce innovation into society; revolutions occur when innovation spreads and dramatically changes everyday life. The 15thC Booktrade Project at the University of Oxford studies the economic and social impact of the invention of printing on early modern European society. For many years, and in collaboration with hundreds of European and American libraries, the project has been gathering data from the thousands of books from the first half-century of print which still survive today and analysing them with innovative digital technology. From September 2018 to April 2019 an exhibition was held in the rooms of the Correr Museum and of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice: Printing R-Evolution 1450-1500. Fifty Years that Changed Europe. A catalogue with the same title was published by Marsilio Editori in Venice in 2018. The digital material produced for the exhibition, and for later projects, is available on the website https://www.printingrevolution.eu/virtual-exhibition-printing-revolution/. Further Bibliography is available at http://15cbooktrade.ox.ac.uk/. The bulk of the material in this section was contributed by the director of the 15C Booktrade Project, Professor Cristina Dondi, in 2021-2. Professor Dondi also obtained permission to include material on the German origins of typography from the exhibition in Princeton entitled 'Gutenberg & After' curated by Paul Needham and Eric White: https://dpul.princeton.edu/gutenberg/.
