The fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch and the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus had many similar ideas, but the immediate impact of their ideas was very different because of one thing: the printing press with movable metal type. While Petrarch’s works spread slowly from person to person by hand copying, Erasmus’s works spread quickly through printing, in which hundreds or thousands of identical copies could be made in a short time.

While printing with movable type was invented in China (see “The Scholar-Officials and Neo-Confucianism” in Chapter 13), movable metal type was actually developed in the thirteenth century in Korea, though it was tightly controlled by the monarchy and did not have the broad impact there that printing did in Europe. Printing with movable metal type developed in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century as a combination of existing technologies. Several metal-smiths, most prominently Johann Gutenberg (ca. 1400–1468), transformed the metal stamps used to mark signs on jewelry into type that could be covered with ink and used to mark symbols onto a page. This type could be rearranged for every page and so used over and over. Historians have speculated whether German printers somehow learned of the Korean invention, but there is no evidence that they did. The printing revolution was also enabled by the ready availability of paper, which was made using techniques that had originated in China and spread from Muslim Spain to the rest of Europe.

The effects of the invention of movable-type printing were not felt overnight. Nevertheless, within a half century of the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible of 1456, movable type had brought about radical changes. Historians estimate that somewhere between 8 million and 20 million books were printed in Europe between 1456 and 1500, many more than the total number of books that had been produced in the West during the many millennia between the invention of writing and 1456.

Printing transformed both the private and the public lives of Europeans. In the public realm, government and church leaders both used and worried about printing. They printed laws, declarations of war, battle accounts, and propaganda, but they also attempted to censor or ban books and authors whose ideas they thought were wrong. These efforts were rarely effective.

In the private realm, printing enabled people to read identical books so that they could more easily discuss the ideas that the books contained. Although most of the earliest books and pamphlets dealt with religious subjects, printers produced anything that would sell: professional reference sets, historical romances, biographies, poetry, prose fiction, and how-to manuals for the general public. Illustrations increased a book’s sales, so printers published both history and pornography full of woodcuts and engravings. Additionally, single-page broadsides and fly sheets allowed public events and “wonders” such as comets and two-headed calves to be experienced vicariously. Since books and other printed materials were read aloud to illiterate listeners, print bridged the gap between the written and oral cultures.

Because many laypeople could not read Latin, printers put out works in vernacular languages, fostering standardization in these languages. Works in these languages were also performed onstage, for plays of all types were popular everywhere. Traveling companies of actors performed before royal courts and in town squares, and in larger cities public theaters offered bawdy comedies and bloody tragedies. In London the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) were especially popular. (See “Viewpoints 16.2: Two Views of ‘Natural Man.’”)