The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

About this title:
A full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change.

'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

'This is a good and important book ... the author's clear and forceful style makes it a pleasure to read ... Eisenstein is particularly illuminating and discriminating on the part played by the great sixteenth-century scholar-printers, such as the Estiennes, Oporinus, Plantin, in the emergence of ideals of religious tolerance and intellectual brotherhood ... She does give us a remarkably complete and highly critical survey of modern historical writing on humanism, the Reformation and science up to the eighteenth century.'
--The New York Review of Books

'Her two volumes represent an extensive survey of the recent literature on the three intellectual and social movements of the period 1400-1700: the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Ms. Eisenstein examines the major hypotheses as to their causes and progress, and reassesses them in terms of the impact of printing and its products.' The New Republic

Book Description
Originally published in two volumes, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe



About this title:
Although the importance of the advent of printing for Western civilization has long been recognized, Professor Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change provided the first full-scale treatment of the subject. This illustrated, abridged edition of her earlier work is designed to give a useful and stimulating survey of the communications revolution of the 15th century.
 

Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution



About this title:
Eighteenth-century French readers who wanted to keep up with political and literary trends, had to rely on books and journals imported from abroad. French writers, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, also depended on foreign firms to get their works in print. Grub Street Abroad demonstrates the importance of extraterritorial publishing for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By placing the periphery at the center of the stage, it highlights neglected cosmopolitan aspects of an emergent "public sphere" and points to forces which undercut Bourbon claims of cultural hegemony. Firms serving French markets from abroad are viewed as part of a far-flung communications network which, although sensitive to diplomatic pressures from diverse courts, still comprised a relatively autonomous, independent field of operations. Topics covered include the publishing and editing of francophone journals and clandestine manuscripts; the emergence of the book review and the editorial board; the reliance of the philosophes upon foreign firms; and the cosmopolitan outlook of so-called "Grub Street hacks."

The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti, 1761-1837