User:Jahsonic/Literature in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
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- "the printing press, a whore"[1]
"Gutenberg's invention of the movable type in the 1450s not only heralds the start of print culture but of modernity itself," Sholem Stein asserted in 1965 in his groundbreaking work Literature in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Of course, as Stein noted, the printing revolution was not without its detractors, who were to be counted among cultural pessimists and technophobes. One of the most amusing comments in this respect was by the Italian friar Filippo di Strata who in 1474 stated that est virgo hec penna, meretrix est stampificata ("The pen is a virgin; the printing press, a whore").
For Strata, summarizes Roger Chartier, "the printing press is guilty on several points: it corrupts the text, circulated in hasty and faulty editions published for the sole purpose of economic gain, it corrupts the minds by disseminating immoral and heterodox texts, taken away from the control of ecclesiastical authorities, it corrupts knowledge itself, vilified by its disclosure to the ignorant."
I love these discourses of intolerance.
See also
![[1]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Printer_in_1568-ce.png){kind=link}