ABSTRACT
The most evident transformation in media and communication in early modern Europe was the printing press. Several generalisations about literacy provide the context for the impact of printing. The first is that it was most marked in towns where the cultural assumptions were dominated by the literate and their expectations. The second is that literacy was concentrated in the hands of men. ‘A good education makes men’ wrote Erasmus, the most famous humanist of the early sixteenth century. Humanist educators exaggerated their promotion of virtue, the novelty of their techniques, and their utility. The invention of printing made a huge impression upon contemporaries in early modern Europe. They extolled the speed by which texts could be multiplied and the cheapness of the product. Europe’s printing revolution was not the effortless triumph of a new technology but the offspring of a more fragile commercial and cultural ecosystem that gradually acquired a dynamic of its own.
