ABSTRACT
The defining moment of the European Renaissance is neither the fall of Constantinople in 1453, nor the discovery of the Americas in 1492. Rather, it was the ‘Gutenberg Revolution’ of the midfifteenth century which marked the emergence of modernity in the Christian west. By 1455, Johann Gutenberg, an engraver and gem-cutter from Mainz, had established the foundations of printing which were to remain virtually unaltered for the next five hundred years: a means of moulding the faces of the letters, the press itself, and oil-based inks.1 A new world-a paperworld-had come into existence some fifty years before Columbus’s encounter with the ‘New World’ of the Americas. This paperworld was a place of the imagination and the intellect rather than a geography of curious beasts, peoples, and plants. Its growth was phenomenal. Spreading outwards from Germany, printing presses were soon established all over Europe: appearing in Italy (1465), France (1470), Spain (1472), Holland and England (1475), and Denmark (1489). Eventually the paperworld was to cross the Atlantic to Mexico City where a press was established in 1533, and later to the English speaking colonies in north America where the first press was installed in Cambridge, Massachussetts (1638).
