CS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Middle Ages, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Johannes Gutenberg
19 Oct 2015
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Document Summary
Print culture: reflections on media and power, writing creates a new culture, before printing press, the middle ages (circa 5th-15th c. ) Shifts of power with the emergence of monarchies. Period of expansion, taking over territories of illiterate. Most average people couldn"t read or write. Kings and princes were also illiterate: emergent national monarchies, expansion, the church and monopolies of knowledge. Block printing is different that regular printing because the problems with it were overcome by the kind of printing that occurs in 15th c. one mistake ruined the whole board with block printing. Variety of characters, china has thousands of character, alphabet has 26, quantity of characters is different, one is easy and one is hard. Uniform in size, could be easily aligned. Put the letters in order that you want them, printer reproduces what you have placed there. A prototype for mass production (after incunablula) Allowed for the rise of a middle class between aristocrats and peasants.
