The Gutenberg revolution

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One of the most puzzling lapses in historical accounts of the rise of the West following the decline of the Roman Empire is the casual way historians have dealt with Gutenberg's invention of printing. The cultural achievement that followed the fifteenth century, in which the West moved from relative backwardness to remarkable, robust cultural achievement is unimaginable absent Gutenberg's gift and its subsequent widespread adoption across most of the world. In this book, Richard Abel describes the historical background of the radical cultural impact of the printing revolution. He begins from the eighth century to the Renaissance noting the viability of the new Christian/Classical culture. While it proved too fragile to endure, those who salvaged it preserved elements of the Classical substance together with the Bible and all the writings of the Church Fathers. The cultural upsurge of the Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries which resulted in part from Gutenberg's invention, is a major focus of the work. Abel aims to delineate how the Cultural Revolution was shaped by the invention of printing and its impact on the rapid reorientation and acceleration of the evolution of the culture in the West. This book provides insight into the history of the printed word, the roots of modern-day mass book production, and the promise of the electronic revolution. It is an essential work in the history of ideas.