Printing Pressure

The first cars were motorized carriages, the computer was initially used as a typewriter, and printed books began as a continuation of handwritten ones: innovations are often used in familiar ways to begin with before a second generation comes and exploits the new opportunities they present. Thomas Kaufmann describes how a new generation around 1500 utilized printing technology to instrumentalize the "Turkish threat," to disseminate letters of indulgence, and to fight for a "reformation." Printers like Aldus Manutius, graphic artists like Dürer, humanists like Erasmus and Reuchlin, and theologians like Luther and Zwingli marketed themselves in pamphlets and treatises, and put on the pressure: opponents were defamed in growing echo chambers and events were sensationalized in order to captivate the audience's scattered attention. The Reformation was, as Thomas Kaufmann shows, just one aspect of this much broader cultural upheaval. Ultimately, the new technology changed how people researched and, with encyclopedias and printed graphic works, the way that people perceived the world.