Making Books: The Renaissance and Today

Paper, type, and the press

Before studying the European printing press, the course begins with writing media: cuneiform tablets, khipu, scrolls, manuscripts, and paper. This matters because “the book” is not a single technology. It is a set of material choices about surfaces, marks, tools, binding, storage, and circulation.

The first lecture sequence then moves to paper-making and pre-1800 presses. The slides compare eighteenth-century paper-making in France with traditional paper-making in twenty-first-century Nepal. They also introduce the parts and actions of a hand press: type, ink, paper, the form, the bed or “coffin,” the tympan, the frisket, and the platen.

What the press changes

Movable type allows the same form to produce multiple copies. That repeatability is a major change from copying a manuscript by hand, but it is not the same thing as instant mass communication. A press needs paper, type, labour, capital, distribution networks, readers, and institutions willing to print and circulate particular texts.

The course's first paper asks students to assess a strong claim: that movable type democratized communication and decisively changed political and religious hierarchies. The assignment is useful because it turns the “printing revolution” into a question to argue about, not a fact to memorize.

The book is an object, not just a container for words

The course turns from the press to particular objects: a Parisian Book of Hours from around 1450 and the Nuremberg Chronicle from 1493. Looking at them means noticing more than their written content. We can ask who commissioned them, how a reader navigated them, what images do, how pages are ordered, and what traces previous owners left behind.

A Book of Hours is organised around prayers and saints' days. Its pages create a rhythm for devotion: text, image, calendar, and repetition. The Nuremberg Chronicle presents world history through a large visual and textual structure, including the seven ages of the world, genealogies, cities, biblical stories, and images of rulers.

The distinction between manuscript and print is also less absolute than a simple before-and-after story suggests. Early printed books borrow page layouts, type styles, abbreviations, and visual conventions from manuscripts. Readers encountering a new technology often understand it through older forms.

Print, religion, and the production of knowledge

The next sequence follows printed religious materials and early modern natural philosophy. The slide sets include Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum, polyglot Bibles, papal decrees, images of Erasmus and Pope Julius II, and books about celestial and earthly bodies.

The point is not that print simply “caused” the Reformation or modern science. Print made certain forms of comparison, repetition, citation, translation, polemic, and circulation possible at new scales. But institutions still controlled access, readers interpreted texts in different ways, and printed authority remained contested.

The course's readings include Lee Palmer Wandel on “The Word” in the Reformation, Adrian Johns on the relationship between the book of nature and the nature of the book, and chapters from Pettegree. These readings push against technological determinism by asking how practices of reading and institutions of knowledge change together.

Images do intellectual work

Woodcuts, engravings, diagrams, portraits, maps, and title pages are not decorative extras. They establish authority, make a person recognisable, organise an argument, or show a process. A visual form can be copied and reused while its meaning changes with the book and audience around it.

Readers make meaning: the case of Menocchio

The course then narrows from the history of print to one reader: Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, a sixteenth-century miller whose words were recorded during trials before the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms reconstructs what his reading and statements can tell us about popular culture, authority, and interpretation.

Menocchio had a small library, but he did not simply repeat what his books taught. He combined fragments, compared passages, argued with religious authorities, and produced ideas of his own. The student example The Thinker emphasises this as critical reading: a reader with limited access can still transform a text through comparison and argument.

The assignments make this principle concrete. Students are asked to analyse Menocchio's theological and social ideas in relation to the books Ginzburg identifies, or to write from the perspective of someone who knew him. The point is not to invent freely; it is to make an argument constrained by sources.

Making as a historical method

The course's most unusual element is also its argument in physical form: students build a working hand-set printing press and make cotton rag paper for it. The building is not an extra craft activity added after the “real” history. It changes what students can understand about the labour, precision, materials, and time involved in printing.

The Beaver Press uses a wooden tower frame, a large screw and nut, a bed or coffin, a platen, a tympan, and a frisket. To print, students hand-set type into a form, secure it with furniture and quoins, ink the type, place paper on the tympan, and pull the handle to press the paper against the type.

Professor Ravel describes the course as balancing readings, rare objects, construction, and paper-making. The instructor insights also admit the improvisational problem: the press might take longer than planned, so the intellectual and practical parts had to remain flexible.

From press to digital media

The original course asks what parallels exist between early modern print and today's media landscape. The answer is not that digital media is “the same” as print. The useful comparison is more precise: both moments force people to rethink authority, distribution, speed, access, labour, and the relationship between a form and the ideas it carries.