The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

• Preface; Part I. Introduction to an Elusive Transformation: 1. The unacknowledged revolution; 2. Defining the initial shift; some features of print culture; Part II. Classical and Christian Traditions Reorientated; Renaissance and Reformation Reappraised: 3. A classical revival reoriented: the two phases of the Renaissance; 4. The scriptual tradition recast: resetting the stage for the Reformation; Part III. The Book of Nature Transformed: 5. Introduction: problems of periodization; 6. Technical literature goes to press: some new trends in scientific writing and research; 7. Resetting the stage for the Copernican Revolution; 8. Sponsorship and censorship of scientific publication; Conclusion; Bibliographical index; General index.

'For fifteen years we have been waiting for a deep level-headed examination of the ways in which print transformed Europe. Elizabeth Eisenstein has written that book … Eisenstein has an intimate familiarity with the great narrative of modern history since the 15th century. She boasts an unsurpassed feeling for the strengths and weaknesses of the ways in which historians have explained great changes. No mania to find laws or principles of universal validity drives her. She is not afraid of detail. Her eye for the telling oddity, the crucial contradiction, in enviable.' Commonweal