Texts in Context:
The Roots of the Other Renaissance

All in all, books were among the more expensive goods a person could own. A book could cost as much as a full suit of armor, if not more; constant readers of Texts in Context may recall that one of the Abbasid Caliphs required a copy of the Almagest as part of his spoils when he won a war. Both because their contents might be badly needed, and because of their monetary value, the theft of books was a serious problem in the Middle Ages—a fact attested to by the curses which were regularly inscribed in books, threatening thieves with excommunication, violent death, and even hell itself.⁷

With the printing press, every part of this changed. It arrived not long after the beginning of large-scale paper production in Europe, which dispensed with the time-consuming processes of creating parchment or vellum. Books that ran to hundreds of pages could be printed in a matter of hours, and every copy of the book could be relied upon to be textually identical (barring mechanical errors—a key breaking during a job, for instance, or an insect getting into the machine and smearing a page—which, unlike the errors of a human copyist, are nearly always nonsensical and therefore easily detectable). No one except the initial author has to write anything, which means the job “scribe,” at its most literal level, is as of now obsolete. Though the more generic “scholar” will persist, the effective disappearance of scribes as a profession and class has an immense, if subtle, effect on society. Along with these changes, individual illuminations promptly become a thing of the past: in their place, woodcuts are introduced into texts (nearly always monochrome, frequently very ugly).

Above all, books are now cheap. The materials, man-hours, and technical skill needed to create a book have all plummeted: What once cost five pounds was now more usually five shillings—a twentieth of its previous worth.⁸ This colossal simplification of production quickly leads to colossal increases in literacy and in literary output. By the end of the fifteenth century, there is such a thing as a “reading public”; as far as we know, this had never existed before.

The actual process of change, beginning in 1436, was much slower than we are used to (raised as we are in a world post-dating both the Industrial and the Technological Revolutions). The first notable printed publication, the Gutenberg Bible, did not appear until at least 1452. Shortly thereafter, Gutenberg lost a lawsuit and, with it, the monopoly he had had on printing technology; a second press was soon set up. Year by year, the invention began to appear in other cities:

• 1467: Rome
• 1469: Nuremberg, Venice
• 1470: Milan, Naples, Paris
• 1471: Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Padua
• 1472: Buda (modern Budapest)
• 1473: Barcelona, Krakow, Lyon, Utrecht
• 1474: Bruges
• 1475: Toulouse
• 1476: Westminster
• 1478: Geneva, Oxford
• 1480: Leipzig, Salamanca
• 1482: Munich, Vienna
• 1487: Prague
• 1489: Lisbon
• 1491: Dijon, Orléans

… and this list has omitted dozens of entries over the forty years following the Gutenberg Bible. (The machine was slightly slower to reach Africa or the Americas; the first in Africa was built in 1516 in Fez, Morocco, while Mexico City housed the new world’s first printing press as of 1539.) This was one of two major elements that prepared the way for Renaissance humanism, which was the embryonic form of modernity.

The Fall of Troy

The other major element, dating to the middle of the century, was a vast dispersion of Greek scholars from New Rome (i.e., Constantinople—which, in a striking irony we have not hitherto noted, was built on the European side of the straits that separate the Balkans from Anatolia, not far from the traditional site of Troy; the irony lies in the fact that Rome traditionally maintained that her founders were descendants of refugees from Troy). Many of these scholars came west to Aragon, Castile, Naples, or the Papal States, or traveled north, toward Lithuania and Muscovy. With these scholars, the knowledge of Greek was revived, paving the way for the careers of men like Desiderius Erasmus, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Marsilio Ficino, Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale, and others.

As grand as this revival of learning may have been, however, its cause was, to most European Christians of its day, a tragedy of the highest order. In 1453, just over twenty-two hundred years after Romulus and Remus are supposed to have laid the foundations of Old Rome, a mournful and terrible cry came to that city out of the east. New Rome, its territory much reduced, had been fighting an upstart Muslim power in Anatolia, a state ruled by Turks, like the Seljuqs of four centuries ago; this dynasty were called the Ottomans. They had laid siege to New Rome; about two months later, the siege was over. The city of Theodosius, Justinian, and Heraclius, the capital of the East Roman Empire, Byzantium of old, the scene of three ecumenical councils, the liege-lord of the crusaders, the citadel of Constantine the Great … had fallen, like Troy before it. The Roman Empire in the east—the one place that had preserved the unbroken line of succession from Augustus Cæsar—had ceased to exist.

¹Poland, then as now, was a deeply Catholic nation. It was also one of the few places in Europe adjacent to (indeed, in personal union with) a realm with a large pagan population, Lithuania; however, unlike most of Western Europe, this moved the Poles to oppose attempts at conversion by force. The same year Hus was executed, the rector of Jagiellonian University in Krakow (then the Polish capital) published a treatise advocating something close to religious freedom in the modern sense.
²Lat. dē “from, down from” + fenestra “window, opening; arrow-slit.”
³The name Utraquist comes from the Latin sub utra specie, “under either species.” One of their chief complaints was the custom of withholding the Eucharistic chalice from the laity and distributing only the bread; the Utraquists argued that all Christians ought to be able to commune under both species. (The Taborites were named for the town of Tabor, their main center.)
⁴A liturgical or ritual use is a variant of a rite, possessing distinctive characteristics that stop short of a fully different rite unto itself.
⁵China did beat the Holy Roman Empire to the printing press in the eleventh century. However—maybe because of the country’s relative isolation, or because the complexity of hanzi is less easily adapted for printing than writing—the Chinese printing press never reached the West (unlike, e.g., gunpowder).
⁶Modern readers, raised to think of ancient and Medieval books as hopelessly unreliable (such that the loathsome phrase “like a game of telephone” rises automatically to their lips), may scoff at “on rare occasions”; but that, not the “game of telephone” cliché, is an apt description of how scribes in antiquity and the Middle Ages worked. Books were expensive, and, in the case of the Bible, sacred; great care was taken to ensure that they were correctly made. They did still make mistakes, but the idea that mistakes were a large percentage of the work they did is laughable, and the idea that we cannot reliably reconstruct the original text of works like the Gospel of Matthew or Plato’s Symposium is simply false.
⁷St. Anthony of Padua is known among Catholics as the patron of finding things that are lost or missing; this tradition comes from a story that a book was once stolen from him, and when he prayed to recover it, the thief was so stricken with guilt that he brought it back.
⁸Before decimalization in 1971, the base units of British currency were the penny, shilling, and pound: twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings a pound. A similar model was used throughout Western Europe, with pound- and penny-equivalents derived from the Roman libra and denarius. (This is why the currency mark for pounds is a stylized L, £, and why pence were abbreviated d.; the old “long s,” ∫, persisted as the symbol for shillings but eventually mutated into a slash, so the three base units appear in British literature before 1971 as £/d.) However, in the Middle Ages, even one pound was such a large sum that pounds were not actually coined—they existed only as units of account.

Gabriel Blanchard has a degree in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and works as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

If you enjoyed this piece, and want to read more from this series, we have interspersed timelines throughout that have links to posts on specific periods. So far, we have covered the Stone and Bronze Ages, the Early Iron Age, Classical Antiquity (in two parts), and the Early Middle Ages; we’ll soon have a timeline to release detailing the High and Late Medieval eras. If you’re wondering why this has been passive-aggressively labeled “the other Renaissance,” check out our introduction to the High Middle Ages and the money this Renaissance owes them. Our office will be closed in honor of the holiday on Thursday, so there will be no Rhetorica post that day—we at the Journal will see you next week!

Published on 16th June, 2025. Page image of an illumination (1483) by the anonymous Master of Cardinal de Bourbon, depicting the 1480 siege of Rhodes (at that time held by the Knights Hospitallers of St. John) by the Ottoman Turks.