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Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation, by Ronald J. Deibert


3. Print and the Medieval to Modern World Order Transformation: Distributional Changes


Changes in the mode of communication have far-reaching, fundamental implications for the social and political infrastructure of an era and for the trajectory of social evolution. In chapter 1 I outlined two conceptually distinct effects that arise from a change in the mode of communication: distributional changes and changes to social epistemology. In this chapter, I concentrate only on the former.

Distributional changes are changes in the relative power of social forces as a consequence of the change in the mode of communication. Because modes of communication transmit and store information in unique ways, social forces whose interests match a communications environment will be favored while those whose interests do not will be placed at a disadvantage. Social forces survive differentially, in other words, according to their "fitness" with the new media environment--a process that is both open-ended and contingent. Thus, medium theory offers neither an explanation of the genesis of particular social forces, nor why they were animated by particular interests as opposed to others. Its purpose is to explain why those forces flourished or withered at a particular historical juncture.

Distributional changes undercut some social forces while they advance the interests of others. In this chapter, I examine the way distributional changes associated with the development of printing played a part in the medieval-to-modern world order transformation in Europe. I begin by examining the way the change in the mode of communication helped to dissolve the architecture of political authority in the late Middle Ages. Specifically, I explore the way two social forces, the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism, were favored by the new media environment to the disadvantage of the Roman Catholic Church. I then examine the way transformations in socioeconomic relations that were encouraged by the change in the mode of communication helped to undermine the basis of feudal social relations and pave the way for modern contractual socioeconomic relations among an increasingly important segment of the late medieval population: the urban bourgeoisie. This particular distributional change had what we might call a "leveling" effect on patterns of political and economic obligation, at least in urban areas, cutting through the entangled webs of personal loyalties characteristic of the feudal era and opening up the possibility for common rule from a single center. Finally, I turn to the way the change in the mode of communication favored the rise of modern state bureaucracies and centralized political authority throughout parts of western Europe. As many have pointed out, the converging interests of the latter two social forces--the urban bourgeoisie and centralizing state monarchies--were crucial in molding the architecture of modern world order in Europe.

The New Media Environment and the Dissolution of the Medieval Order

The Protestant Reformation

As outlined at the end of the previous chapter, by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries strong social forces were emerging with novel agendas and interests that were pushing at the margins of the Church's hegemony over knowledge reproduction. Some of these social forces can be characterized as reactionary movements within the Church itself. In this category, we would include the various religious "heresies" that periodically and spontaneously surfaced throughout western Europe beginning in the twelfth century. Although their specific goals and ideologies varied considerably, these heretical movements arose during the High Middle Ages mostly in reaction to the Church hierarchy, which, as pointed out in the previous chapter, was assuming a more legalistic and secular face distanced from the popular devotion that marked its appeal during its embryonic days as a missionary sect. 1   The topheavy administrative organs of the Papal government appeared less "other-worldly" and more corrupt, especially as successive popes engaged in or succumbed to power-political machinations--an image doubly reinforced by events such as the Great Schism. 2   This decline in Church popularity is reflected in the way many Christians saw the "Black Death" plague that swept through western Europe in the fourteenth century as a symbol of God's dissatisfaction with the corruption of the Church. 3  

Prior to the emergence of printing, the Church had been relatively successful in squelching and containing heresies primarily "because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers." 4   Those that were not stamped out by violence, or compelle intrare, were more than likely to be coopted by a form of special privilege or to be ignored altogether, as various heresies flickered and then faded without means of mass communication. 5   Febvre and Martin wonder "what might have happened if some of the earlier heresies (the Hussite, for example) had the power of the press at their disposal--power that Luther and Calvin used with great skill, first in the attack on Rome and then in the diffusion of their new doctrines." 6   The Inquisition, established in the thirteenth century, was a reflection of both the growing heretical elements within society and the Church's more stringent reprisals against them. 7   It remained an effective countermeasure so long as the doctrines flowing from heretical movements could be halted by taking measures against the persons upon whom the widespread transmission of such doctrines depended. With the rapid dissemination and publication afforded by printing, however, heretical movements had a much better chance of spreading their message beyond the locality in which they emerged, making it much more difficult for the Church to take effective countermeasures.

To illustrate the way technological innovations have unintended consequences, and how fathoming such consequences are difficult for those living through them, it is interesting to note that the Church was initially enthusiastic about the printing press, making thorough use of it, for example, in its anti-Turkish crusade. 8   One particular cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, referred to the printing press as a "divine art" because of the way that the technology would enable poor priests who would otherwise be unable to afford Bibles to have access to cheaper, mass-produced versions. 9   And it is somewhat ironic that the first dated printed product from Gutenberg's workshop was an indulgence--the very emblem of Church corruption in the eyes of the Protestant Reformation. 10   In fact, the demand for printed books and liturgies among Catholic churchmen drove the initial establishment of printing presses throughout Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Some of the largest monasteries, like Cluny and Citeaux at Dijon, invited printers from Germany to set up printing workshops and to teach monks the art of printing. 11   The early printers thrived on commissions from monasteries and cathedrals for Latin bibles, missals, psalters, and antiphonaries. 12   In one of the first books printed by the Brothers of the Common Life in Rostock there appeared the dedication that printing was the "handmaid of the Church." 13   Only hindsight could tell them how wrong they were.

It is well known among historians and laypersons alike that the printing press was closely intertwined with the Protestant Reformation. What is often confused is the specific causal relationship between the two, with technological determinists often attributing to the printing press the genesis of the Protestant Reformation itself. 14   However, prior to print there were many other similar outbreaks of heresies, which clearly mitigates any simplistic one-to-one connection. And certainly the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation cannot be explained without reference to the deteriorating economic and social conditions of central and northern Europe, which created an oppressive and intolerable environment for many. 15   As Luke describes, "Before Luther became a figure of public and political interest in 1517, German burghers and peasants, artisans and merchants, and many humanist academics shared a feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction with existing social, economic, and political-religious conditions, and were ready for a change towards what for them promised to be a more just and Christian society." 16   What could be said with confidence is that printing had a revolutionary effect on the extent to which one particular heresy could spread widely and rapidly with devastating consequences for the Church's containment strategies. In other words, the properties of the printing environment favored the interests of the Protestant Reformation to the disadvantage of the Papal hierarchy.

How did the Protestant Reformation "fit" the printing environment? Most revolutionary was the way that printing afforded an opportunity for one person to reach a mass audience in an unprecedentedly short period of time. In 1517, the German theologian Martin Luther publicized 95 theses in Latin criticizing a variety of Church practices, centering mostly on the rise in tithes, indulgences, and benefices. As Dudley notes: "A century earlier, the issue might have smoldered for years before breaking into flame. Even then, its effects would have been purely local, as in the case of the followers of John Huss whose revolt (1419–1436) had been confined to Bohemia." 17   Within fifteen days Luther's theses had been translated into German, summarized, and distributed to every part of the country. 18   During Luther's life, five times as many works authored by Luther alone were published than by all the Catholic controversialists put together. 19   Martin Luther alone was responsible for 20 percent of the approximately 10,000 pamphlet editions issued from presses in German-speaking territories between 1500 and 1530. 20   Initially, the volume increased dramatically, with Luther's published output rising from 87 printings in 1518 to a high of 390 printings in 1523. 21   As Anderson put it, "In effect, Luther became the first best-selling author so known." 22   And of course the rise in output was not restricted to that emanating from Luther alone; from 1517–1518--the first year of the Reformation--there was a 530 percent increase in the production of pamphlets issued from German speaking presses. 23   Prior the emergence of the printing environment, heresies similar in form to the Protestant Reformation could not count on such a quick ignition rate.

There were other ways in which the printing environment matched the interests of the Protestant Reformation. Printing permitted the mass production of small, cheap pamphlets that favored the Reformer's strategic interest both in rapid dissemination of propaganda, in the form of cheap placards and posters, and the concealment of heretical printed works from authorities by both producers and consumers. Pamphlets were produced in quarto format--that is, made up of sheets folded twice to make four leaves or eight pages--and without a hard cover, and were referred to by the German term Flugschriften, or "flying writings." 24   Edwards describes how the pamphlets were "easily transported by itinerant peddlers, hawked on street corners and in taverns, advertised with jingles and intriguing title pages, and swiftly hidden in a pack or under clothing when the authorities made an appearance." 25   Edwards goes on to explain how the pamphlets were "ideal for circulating a subversive message right under the noses of the opponents of reform." 26   As the pamphlets did not require a large investment in either manpower or material as did large manuscripts, they were inexpensive to produce and could be turned out quickly to respond immediately to the day-to-day battles of the ongoing religious polemics. 27   Although precise estimates are difficult to determine, historian Hans-Joachim Kohler figures that the average flugschriften cost about as much as a hen, or a kilogram of beef--certainly not insignificant, but well within the reach of the pamphlet's intended audience, the "common man," and much less expensive than the cost of a well-crafted parchment manuscript. 28  

To reach a wider, mass audience the pamphlets and other publications were printed in the vernacular--the form itself a direct challenge to the Church hierarchy whose power rested on performing an intermediary function between the vernacular and sacred Latin scripts. As Edwards points out, printing not only helped spread Luther's message, it "embodied" it in its very form by presenting challenges to doctrine in the vernacular press. 29   Luther's explicit aim was to put a Bible in every household--an aim that was functionally complemented by the standardization and mass production afforded by movable type. One printer alone, Hans Lufft, issued 100,000 copies of the Bible within forty years between 1534 and 1574. 30   Febvre and Martin estimate that about one million German Bibles were printed before mid-century. 31   In so doing, printing helped to undermine the legitimacy of centralized knowledge reproduction by providing the means "by which each person could become his or her own theologian." 32   John Hobbes wrote disapprovingly how "every man, nay, every boy and wench that could read English thought they spoke with God Almighty, and understood what He said." 33  

Fueled by the new means of communication, the Protestant Reformation reached a level of mass support unprecedented among prior heresies in Europe during the Middle Ages. A "colossal religious propaganda war" ensued, in Anderson's words, that would soon envelop the whole of Europe. 34   At the heart of this war were the cheap, mass-produced pamphlets emanating from the many printing presses that sprouted throughout Europe in response to the market created by the religious upheaval. The pamphleteers carefully employed a combination of text and illustration to reach as wide an audience as possible. Devastating, "blasphemous" caricatures invariably featuring perverse and disfigured representations of eminent Church officials rolled off the printing press in droves--an often neglected historical detail of the sixteenth-century religious propaganda wars made possible by the printing press. 35  

But, a skeptic might ask, what about the low literacy rates in early modern Europe? How much weight should we give to the printing press when the ability to read and write was still out of reach for the vast majority of people? Although literacy was still relatively low among most of the lower classes, the spread of the printed word worked in tandem with traditional means of oral communications in what Kohler calls a "two-step" communications process. 36   Evangelical preachers spread by word of mouth polemical works freshly issued and/or smuggled in from the many printing houses that served as "nerve centers." We should not underestimate, therefore, the extent to which the illiterate could have access to the printed word through those that could read. So while the Reformation was very much an oral process at a mass level, it was the vast distribution of printed material that fueled the process at the crucial elite level. 37   Moreover, Protestantism deliberately inculcated in its followers the importance of literacy and Bible reading, and as a consequence literacy rates grew markedly higher over time in Protestant versus Catholic regions. 38  

While the printing environment may have favored the strategic interests of Protestantism, it worked against those of the Roman Catholic Church. Given its exploitation of the printing press, Protestantism was able to take the early offensive in the polemical struggles, with Rome often being forced to take the somewhat desperate and futile position of opposing and containing print in the name of doctrine. Anderson affirms that the reformers were "always fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because [they] knew how to make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being created by capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of Latin." 39   Thus it was Rome which felt the need to formulate the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of banned printed material. 40   As Eisenstein notes:

Catholic policies framed at Trent were aimed at holding these new functions in check. By rejecting vernacular versions of the Bible, by stressing lay obedience and imposing restrictions on lay reading, by developing new machinery such as the Index and Imprimatur to channel the flow of literature along narrowly prescribed lines, the post-Tridentine papacy proved to be anything but accommodating. It assumed an unyielding posture that grew ever more rigid over the course of time. 41  

The Index, continuously updated throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, had the ironic effect of spurring a market for the printed material contained therein by making it appear taboo, and thus even more attractive. 42   Even prior to the Protestant Reformation the Church had issued decrees forbidding the printing of books unauthorized by the Papal hierarchy. In 1515 Pope Leo X issued an edict to the Holy Roman Empire "that no license should be given for the printing of a book until it had been examined and approved by an authorized representative of the Church." 43   By restricting the publication of unauthorized printed material in this way, however, the Church's strictures created a large black-market book trade fed by printing presses housed in non-Catholic regions. 44   It also resulted in strong pressures from Catholic printers who were placed at a severe disadvantage by not being able to enter into the newly emerging market for printed material--especially the material forbidden by the Church. For example, in 1524 the printers of Leipzig petitioned their Catholic duke that they were in danger of losing "house, home, and all their livelihood" because they were not allowed to "print or sell anything new that is made in Wittenberg or elsewhere. For that which one would gladly sell and for which there is demand," they said, referring to the Protestant literature, "they are not allowed to have or sell. But what they have in abundance," referring to Catholic literature, "is desired by no one and cannot be given away." 45   In short, the Church's strategic interests clashed with the properties of the newly emerging communications environment.

The way these religious divisions spilled over into the secular parts of the Christian Commonwealth is well-known. Their impact on the architecture of medieval world order--in particular, the transnational hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church--was devastating. Soon much of Europe was divided into competing religious territories--a chasm that initially corresponded with pro- and anti-print factions. As Anderson explains, "nothing gives a better sense of this siege mentality than François I's panicked 1535 ban on the printing of any books in his realm--on pain of death by hanging." 46   The Protestant Reformation ripped into the increasingly tenuous cosmological bind that held Christendom together under a single society. While it is certainly true that the roots of the Protestant Reformation reach back before the development of printing, it is unlikely that it would have been as profoundly consequential in this regard without the change in the communications environment. One need only look at the fate of previous heresies, like the Hussite, that withered without the availability of printing. Printing helped to displace "the mediating and intercessionary role of the clergy, and even of the Church itself, by providing a new channel of communication linking Christians to their God." 47   In conjunction with individualistic push of Protestant ideology, printing weakened the intermediary function that had buttressed the privileged social position assumed by the clergy. While Protestantism presented a frontal assault on the religious core of the official Church cosmology, a second discernible social force was gradually undercutting it from a more holistic perspective.

Scientific Humanism

As Anderson and others point out, the early printers represented one of the first manifestations in Europe of groups of commercial entrepreneurs dedicated to making a profit. 48   Consequently, they were primarily concerned with finding markets for their books and printed materials. Once the market for religious pamphlets became saturated, booksellers needed to find alternative outlets for their products. One particular emerging social group yearning for mass-produced printed material at the time was the scientific humanist movement. Over the course of the first century of printing, a shift occurred in the content from primarily Latin-based religious themes to scientific humanist works written in vernacular languages. 49   Like the expansion of Protestantism, the growth of scientific humanism helped to undermine the authority of the Roman Catholic Church by directly challenging the cosmology upon which its authority rested. And also like Protestant groups, social forces in favor of scientific humanism flourished in the newly emerging communications environment.

Although modernist histories of science have tended to portray the emergence of the so-called "Scientific Revolution" as a sharp historical juncture when the fetters of religious false consciousness were thrown aside for the wisdom of pure empiricism by a few path-breaking individuals, the roots of scientific humanism as a social force can actually be traced back to the late Middle Ages. 50   In Italy and in northern Europe, the growth of universities, coupled with a more hospitable urban setting, furnished the grounds for a stimulating intellectual environment characterized by intense debates surrounding the rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman texts. 51   At the same time, latent in European society was a growing dissatisfaction with the prevailing cosmology for more practical, secular reasons. The Ptolemaic, earth-centered picture of the universe, supported by official Church doctrine, no longer seemed adequate, for example, to the imperatives of ocean navigation, which was assuming a more important place as commerce and trade expanded. Nor could it be easily squared with observations of the heavens made with the aid of new technical discoveries--foremost among them the telescope--that furthered skepticism about its core assumptions. 52   Prior to printing, beliefs that contradicted the official Church cosmology could be contained with relative success through the same basic mechanisms, such as the Inquisition, that held other religious heresies in check. After printing, however, it became much more difficult for the Church to halt the flow of the new science, especially since scientific humanism (like Protestantism) had a strategic interest in the widespread dissemination of knowledge and information--an interest that overlapped with that of the new printing industry.

To understand the "fitness" between scientific humanism and the printing environment, we need to look back prior to the invention of printing: to the establishment of universities in the High Middle Ages. As outlined in the previous chapter, the swelling numbers of students and professors in the High to late Middle Ages created a market for books that spurred on the development of "in-house" university manuscript copying centers that were not formally tied to the monastic network. This market might have remained limited, however, were it not for the introduction of a new science--animated mostly by rediscovered Aristotelian works--that gradually refocused intellectual energy on "observation" and critical comparison of observations as opposed to pure reflection on traditional wisdom that characterized the predominant neoplatonism of the day. 53   Although the new "empiricists" propagated the myth that they were "turning away" from the dusty parchment books of the Church Fathers to "pure" examinations of the "Book of Nature," we should cautiously avoid treating the myth, as Eisenstein suggests, as anything more than a metaphor for the break from religious ties. 54   In fact, the printing press significantly fueled the sudden wave of scientific innovation that characterized the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by facilitating the rapid dissemination and exchange of knowledge and ideas. Contrary to myths, the new science was critically dependent on the printed word.

While it is true that the entire printed output contained as much chaff as wheat (early modern counterparts to the "trash" television of today) the sheer volume of printed material that could be accessed by a single individual, or groups working cooperatively on a single project, was truly revolutionary, especially as it converged with the interests of the new scientific curiosity. Eisenstein argues that while:

the duplication in print of extant scribal maps and ancient geographical treatises, even while seeming to provide evidence of "backsliding," also provided a basis for unprecedented advance. Before the outlines of a comprehensive and uniform world picture could emerge, incongruous images had to be duplicated in sufficient quantities to be brought into contact, compared, and contrasted. 55  

Thus it was not uncommon to find, as Febvre and Martin point out, many examples of printed material that furthered medieval, Ptolemaic theories at the same time as the new sciences. 56   But what was revolutionary was the conjunction of a new intellectual mind-set alongside the sudden and dramatic increase in the sheer volume of circulating works. Contradictions became more difficult to reconcile once Arabists were set alongside Galenists or Aristotelians against Ptolemaists in a single study. 57  

There were other ways, beyond benefiting from the sheer volume of circulating material, in which scientific humanism fit the printing environment. Consider, in this respect, how innovations new to print--such as cross-referencing and indexing--functionally matched an intellectual interest in the systematic comparison and critical evaluation of knowledge that characterized the new science. 58   The printing environment favored the esprit de système of the age--the desire to catalogue and organize every topic into a consistent order--by permitting the use of new devices like pagination, section breaks, running headers, title pages, index cards, standardized copies, and so forth, that would be virtually impossible (or at least very difficult) to undertake without mechanized reproduction. 59  

More subtle forms of "fitness" can be found as well. Consider the way the new sciences' stress on detached analytical, "impersonal" modes of reflection and reasoning benefited by the move away from the oral transmission of ideas, to individualized study of standardized texts. 60   Or consider the way the idea of progress and cumulation of knowledge was encouraged by the duplicative powers of printing, by the sudden increase in the volume of circulated material, and by the way cross-referencing and indexing could facilitate the "building" and synthesizing of existing theories. Multiple reprints and numbered editions made possible a process of critical feedback whereby errors and omissions in an original text could be identified and corrected in subsequent editions. 61   By contrast, manuscript deterioration was a constant problem in medieval Europe such that enormous energy was channeled into the preservation and recopying of important texts while countless others were allowed to drift into oblivion. Lack of standardization, localized chronologies, imprecise cataloguing, and oral transmissions can all be seen as further constraints on the idea of progress and the cumulation of knowledge. With printing, however, preservation became much less of a concern since multiple copies could be made at diminishing costs. And the exchange and circulation of standardized texts favored the notion of a progressive accumulation of ever more accurate ideas. Rice elaborates:

Printing gave scholars all over Europe identical texts to work on. Referring precisely to a particular word in a particular line on a particular page, a scholar in Basel could propose an emendation which could be rapidly checked by his colleagues in Rome or Florence. From such corrections and discoveries a critical edition would emerge, to be superseded by another and yet another until something approaching a standard text had been achieved. 62  

The idea that civilization was progressing away from error through the winnowing away of false or distorted theories "fits" a communications environment where printed material (if not "knowledge" per se) was visibly and quite literally accumulating. 63  

Like the Reformation, the secularization of knowledge and learning that ensued worked against Rome's controlled interpretation of the order of things, gradually overturning the medieval cosmology upon which Papal authority derived its legitimacy. The new communications environment "favored" the interests of these two social forces to the disadvantage of the papal-monastic information network. As shown in the previous chapter, this network was critical in maintaining the Church's transnational hegemony over much of western Europe and thus of the ideological foundation of the medieval world order. Working in tandem with the ideas and interests of the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism, printing helped to undercut the intermediary and privileged function of the clergy in medieval society, opening up the reproduction of knowledge to commercial, secular printers whose main concern was not the dissemination of a particular religious cosmology, but rather the accumulation of profit. As Curran attests:

The development of a lay scribal and print culture also undermined the ideological ascendancy of the Church. The growth of commercial scriptoria and subsequently commercial printing enterprises made it more difficult for the ecclesiastical authorities, who had previously directly controlled the means of book production, to exercise effective censorship. The failure of the Church to maintain its domination over centres of learning in the later middle ages also weakened its grip on the content of elite culture. 64  

While the Roman Catholic Church worked frantically to control the new mode of communication through censorship and patronage, it was unable to stem the tide of unforeseen consequences that were ushered in with the introduction of printing--a technology it had itself initially applauded. With the development of printing, the Church's dominant place in medieval world order collapsed. The remainder of this chapter examines the way the new mode of communication facilitated the rise of social forces that helped constitute the modern world order.

The New Media Environment and the Constitution of the Modern Order

Two social forces whose interests converged were critical in the constitution of the modern world order in Europe. One was the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie committed to commercial exchange, contractual socioeconomic relations, and capitalist entrepreneurship. The emergence of this particular social force had what we might call a "leveling" effect on the tangled particularisms of feudal social relations, opening up the possibility of common rule from a single center. The mere possibility might have remained undeveloped were it not for the values that animated this new class of entrepreneurs, who shared a collective interest in some form of centralized rule to satisfy the need for both security and standardization. Coincidentally, their interests were met by centralizing state monarchs, who were willing to provide rationalized, bureaucratic administration of internal affairs in exchange for financing from the urban bourgeoisie to fight external wars. In this way, centralized state bureaucracies--a primary feature of modern world order--began to emerge from the cross-cutting, personalized forms of nonterritorial rule characteristic of the feudal era.

The literature on the rise of the modern state in Europe is already well-developed, and it is not my intention here to provide another historical narrative of this process. Debates have raged among theorists over whether changes in military technologies, population growth, or some other combination were the factors ultimately responsible for the rise of the modern state. 65   My focus in this section is different from these studies. I am not concerned with explaining the roots of the urban bourgeoise and centralized forms of rule as social phenomena, nor why they formed an alliance with each other in some regions but not in others. Rather, my concern is to show the way the printing environment favored the interests of these two social forces where they arose. In doing so, I hope to provide an additional reason for why the transformation of world order occurred at this particular historical juncture.

From the Oath to the Contract

Socioeconomic relations during the High to late Middle Ages were characterized by feudalism--that is, a hierarchy of personalized, cross-cutting relationships among vassals and lords. 66   This form of personalized rule evolved out of ancient Germanic practices in which the oath of allegiance played a central role in maintaining trust and discipline among warriors. 67   The oath entailed an act of homage whereby one freeman would submit allegiance to another through the ceremonial placing of joined hands between those of the lord, which resulted in a bond of mutual obligation. The ceremony was highly personal, as evidenced by the bodily gestures of submission often involving a kiss as well as the verbal oath and the joined hands, signaling the vassal's allegiance to the lord "by mouth and hands." 68   Feudalism became the dominant mode of organizing socioeconomic relations following the decline of the Carolingian monarchy in the ninth and tenth centuries, and declined dramatically around the sixteenth century. It was most fully developed in France and Germany, and least developed in Italy, where ancient Roman traditions persisted and city life played a more prominent role in society. 69  

Although the oath of allegiance played an important symbolic role in affirming the social bonds between vassal and lord, it was more than just a symbolic gesture insofar as literacy was indeed rare during the High Middle Ages and social relations were in fact primarily characterized by oral communications. 70   As Le Goff notes, "the feudal system was a world of gesture and not of the written word." 71   The pervasiveness of the spoken word in both a practical and a metaphoric sense over all of feudal society is perhaps best illustrated, as Clanchy suggests, by the evolution of legal procedure. 72   It is evidenced by the fact that prior to the thirteenth century parties were given notice to appear in law courts not by a writ, but by an oral summons which was publicly proclaimed by criatores or "criers." Prior to the widespread use of written and printed documents, a great deal of importance was placed on personal, oral testimony as opposed to written documents, which were still considered untrustworthy. Consequently, a person went before the court to have a "hearing." One unfortunate byproduct was that the deaf and dumb appear to have had no legal rights in thirteenth-century England. 73   Wills did not rely on written documents but rather persons witnessing the testator making his bequests "with his own mouth"; they "saw, were present, and heard" the transaction. 74   And of course what prevailed in legal procedures was a mere reflection of society at large. For example, business was conducted, even among nascent commercial entrepreneurs, by word of mouth, if not solely because of tradition and habit, then certainly because "documents were bound to be relatively rare until printing made their automatic reproduction possible." 75   With illiteracy the norm, and written documentation rare, socioeconomic communications in the feudal era were overwhelmingly oral in nature.

The highly personalized oral form of rule that constituted feudal society contributed to the complex web of cross-cutting and overlapping lord-vassal mutual obligations that reached across the territory of Europe. When agreements were reached primarily on a personal basis, it should come as no suprise that the form of those relationships varied enormously from region to region. If we were to assume the perspective of an aspiring capitalist, the feudal environment would appear to be highly constraining. Spruyt describes how:

The legal climate was unfavourable for trade given the underdevelopment of written codes, the importance of local customary proceedings, the lack of instrumentally rational procedures, and the cross-cutting nature of jurisdictions. Economically, commerce suffered from great variation in coinage and in weights and measures and a lack of clearly defined property rights. Transaction costs were high. 76  

Since money as we know of it today was virtually nonexistent, feudal financial obligations consisted mostly of barter, or in-kind transfers. 77   Legal affairs were characterized by what has been called "banal justice," with each locality assuming its own legal particularities--a situation encouraged by the lack of written laws prior to the thirteenth century in most of Europe with the exception of parts of southern France and Italy. 78   Secular and ecclesiastical lords used their own weights and measures, while many local lords minted their own coins--in France alone there were as many as 300 minters. 79   All of this particularism was closely bound up with the personalized, oral form of rule inherent in feudalism, which encouraged representational, as opposed to abstract, forms of measure, and variation and localism in socioeconomic and legal affairs up until the thirteenth century--a point that will be taken up again in the following section dealing with nascent state bureaucracies. 80  

Of course there were few capitalists in the High Middle Ages who would find any problem with what we now consider to be a high degree of "transaction costs." But beginning in the twelfth century, a profound economic transformation took hold resulting in what Eric Jones calls "the European Miracle." 81   From a multiplicity of causes--improvements in agricultural techniques, changes in climate and demographics, the growth of international trade--economic productivity rose and grew more complex. 82   As Ruggie explains, "economic relations became increasingly monetized, and developments in 'invisibles,' including the great fairs, shipping, insurance, and financial services, further lubricated commerce and helped to create a European-wide market." 83   Out of this dynamic economic interaction reemerged many towns that had been dormant since Roman times. And within these towns a new group began to coalesce into a coherent social force: the burghers or town dwellers, or what would later be known as the "urban bourgeoisie." Spruyt astutely points out how few interests these new townspeople shared with the clergy and feudal lords who thrived on the old institutions:

Thus, coupled with the rise of the towns, a new set of interests and ideological perspectives emerged with a new set of demands. The feudal order--based on cross-cutting jurisdictions and on ill-defined property rights and judicial procedures--did not fit the burghers' mercantile pursuits. Market exchange and trade required abstract contractual obligations with money as a medium. 84  

The ideological perspectives and new set of demands to which Spruyt refers flourished as the communications environment began to change, first with the growth of literacy and the use of written records in the urban centers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and then more dramatically and forcefully with the spread of printing. In fact, one might go so far as to say that the growth of the urban bourgeoisie and the spread of printing worked symbiotically, with each spurring on the development of the other. So while Anderson is correct to point out that capitalism set the preconditions for the widespread dissemination of printed material, the relationship between the two is not so easy to disentangle as each, in turn, affected the other. 85   For the rise of capitalism was embedded in, and closely intertwined with, a corresponding transformation in the western European mode of communication. In other words, the shift from an oral to a print culture was also a shift from the oath to the contract, with all of the consequences for socioeconomic organization that ensued. The impersonal bonds of a modern interdependent economy--organic, as opposed to mechanical, solidarity in Durkheim's terms--could not be sustained on such a vast level without a high degree of literacy and the permanency and reproducibility of printed documents. 86   While nascent capitalist entrepreneurs may have found the oral-manuscript culture of the late Middle Ages to be highly constraining, they thrived in the more hospitable printing environment. It should come as no surprise, then, that Rice identifies as one of the key factors in "the astonishingly rapid spread of printing" in early modern Europe, the insatiable demand for printed products among "merchants, substantial artisans, lawyers, government officials, doctors, and teachers who lived and worked in towns." 87  

At the most fundamental level, printing favored the widespread use of what might be called social abstractions--bills of sale, deeds, court records, licenses, contracts, constitutions, decrees--that are the essence of modern, contractarian societies. These social abstractions could only emerge, as Stock and Clanchy point out, with a rise in general literacy and a corresponding dependence on written documentation over strictly oral communications--a process that began, as pointed out in the previous chapter, in the High Middle Ages but was accelerated with the mass reproducibility of printing. 88   Printing helped circulate in its many forms a standardized medium of exchange essential for the servicing of a complex division of labor within the newly emerging urban-commercial centers of western Europe. Consider, in this respect, the widespread use of printed paper currency as opposed to metal coins or other tokens in facilitating a standardized medium of economic exchange. 89   Or consider the dependence of the entrepreneur and the financier on the newspaper, which was an invention new to printing. McKusker and Gravesteijn note that "merchants and bankers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in their continuing quest for better ways to speed the flow of business news, turned for help to the most recent innovation in information technology, the printing press." 90   Thus what might be considered the first forerunner of the newspaper was a published exchange rate printed at the Lyon exchange fairs beginning in the late fifteenth century, in which the "conto" or fixed exchange rate was circulated in print for those attending the fair. 91   The Amsterdam Commodity Price Current (Cours der Koopmanschappen tot Amsterdam) was published intermittently as early as 1585, and weekly beginning in 1609. 92   Other commercial and financial newspapers sprouted throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, including in Augsburg (1592), Bologna (1628), Bolzano (1631), Bordeaux (1634), Danzig (1608), Florence (1598), Genoa (1619), Lille (1639), Lisbon (1610), London (1608), Lyons (1627), Naples (1627), Piacenza (1614), and Verona (1631). 93   These newspapers served an essential function in providing a standardized publication for the exchange of commercial information. According to North and Thomas, they have been found in the archives of every important commercial center in Europe. 94   Their presence was both an indication of, and a significant factor in, the rapid growth of urban commercial activity in the seventeenth century.

At a more practical level, both written and printed materials, and the growth of literacy that naturally accompanied them, were indispensable tools in the day-to-day routines of the urban bourgeoisie. Indeed, standard accounting practices and record-keeping, such as double-entry bookkeeping, are practically inconceivable in a purely oral environment. While double-entry bookkeeping emerged in Italy prior to the invention of printing, it was a product of a highly literate urban populace and spread rather quickly throughout European urban centers once printing and literacy took root elsewhere. 95   Nor should it be surprising that more ephemeral qualities associated with the capitalist spirit, such as a meticulous rationalism and an abstract cognitive orientation, flourished in precisely those areas where printing and literacy initially spread the fastest. 96   As a number of theorists have argued, both writing and printing favor and encourage an abstract, rational cognitive orientation by arresting the flow of oral conversation, permitting the comparison and juxtaposition of words and documents, and detaching the content of communications from place, time, and personality. 97   Thus in those areas where we find a high rate of literacy and a penetration of printed material, we also find the flourishing of a highly developed commercial ethos.

Perhaps the best example comes from the United Provinces of the Netherlands, where literacy was high and printing was enthusiastically exploited and encouraged by the Protestant state that was incorporated there in the sixteenth century. North and Thomas note, for example, how the "methods" of the Dutch merchants were more sophisticated, and how the techniques of double-entry bookeeping were widely taught and had become standard accountancy practices. 98   According to Dudley, it is no coincidence that many of these defining features of capitalism--such as the stock exchange and the multinational corporation--were originally developed in the Netherlands, a region that was in many ways at the forefront of the change in the mode of communication. As Dudley explains:

The result for Dutch society [of exploiting print and literacy to their fullest] was a deeper penetration of market institutions than had existed in previous communities. The examples of the Amsterdam Exchange Bank and the Bourse illustrate this point. The great popularity that these institutions enjoyed from the moment they were founded could be possible only in a literate society familiar with the notion that a written document could be just as valuable as gold or silver coins. 99  

In sum, while the emergence of an urban bourgeois class in early modern Europe was the product of a multiplicity of factors, the social movement flourished in the new communications environment. Printing not only functionally complemented many of the basic routines of the capitalist entrepreneur, but more fundamentally it provided the means by which social abstractions could circulate on a wide scale, leading to a complex division of labor. Without the standardization and mass-reproducibility afforded by printing, it is unlikely that such a complex penetration of contractual socioeconomic relations could have developed as it did. Certainly the oral-manuscript culture of medieval Europe placed significant obstacles in the path of capitalist development. Once that environment changed, however, a complex system of contractarian socioeconomic relations began to thrive.

The consequences of this particular distributional change for world order transformation are twofold: First, the growth of an urban bourgeoisie had what I earlier called a "leveling" effect on patterns of political and economic obligation, at least in urban areas, cutting through the entangled webs of personal loyalties characteristic of the feudal era and opening up the possibility for common rule from a single center. 100   As Axtmann explains, "The disintegration of feudalism at the 'molecular' level of the manor/village resulted in the displacement of political-legal power upwards to the 'national' level." 101   Thus one of the central features of medieval world order--multiple and overlapping layers of personalized authority--dissolved among an increasingly important segment of the population. The oath gave way to the contract as the basis of early modern urban economic relations.

Second, the rise of a bourgeois class directly contributed to the centralizing drive of state monarchs by providing finances for standing armies in return for standardized, rational administration of legal and commercial procedures within a territorial space. In Mann's words, the newly emerging capitalists "entered and reinforced a world of emergent warring yet diplomatically regulating states. Their need for, and vulnerability to, state regulation both internally and geopolitically, and the state's need for finances, pushed classes and states toward a territorially centralized organization." 102   In this respect, the rise of the urban bourgeoisie can be seen as a transitional distributional change insofar as it not only helped to dissolve the architecture of medieval world order (specifically, feudal socioeconomic relations), but it also gave positive impetus to, and was a constitutive force in, the emergence of modern world order (specifically, the centralization/standardization of territorial rule from a single center). The following section takes a look at this process from the perspective of centralizing state bureaucracies.

The Emergence of Modern Centralized State Bureaucracies

As Garrett Mattingly has pointed out, precursors to the modern state can be traced back far into antiquity. 103   The first bureaucracy arose in ancient Sumeria alongside the development of writing, which, as many have noted, is a necessary precondition for its development. 104   However, the roots of the legal and fiscal systems exclusive to modern state bureaucracies in Europe date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and, not surprisingly, were closely bound up with the reestablishment of secular literacy and the lay use of written documents. 105   Of course, secular literacy and the use of written texts were not solely responsible for the rise of the modern state. Technical innovations originating in northern Italian communes--such as administration by an impersonal salaried bureaucracy serving for a limited term and double-entry bookkeeping--provided important precursors to the form that state bureaucracies ultimately took. 106   Certain ideas were also influential in giving birth to state bureaucracies in Europe--especially the rediscovery of Roman law, which helped fix the notion of a distinct "public" realm. 107   And landmark treatises--such as Richard Fitzneal's Dialogue on the Course of the Exchequer, written during the reign of Henry II (1154---1189)--helped to define the impersonal role of the bureaucratic administrator to the state as an abstract entity. 108   However, the preconditions for centralized administrative rule depended not just on ideas, but also, and more crucially, on the technological capacity to carry them out--a distinctly absent feature of political authority for most nascent states in medieval Europe.

Aspiring medieval monarchs found that their moves toward centralization were difficult to sustain because of the constraints of the prevailing social, economic, and political environment which, as outlined earlier, was overwhelmingly constituted by personalized, oral communications. Thus while we find the shells of modern states beginning to develop as early as the twelfth century in countries like England, where written administration was more advanced, the norm for the rest of Europe was a constant tension between the forces of localization and centralization. One reason was that long-range administration based on networks of personal or blood ties was ineffective for sustaining cross-generational rule. It had a tendency to dissolve into petty fiefdoms with local privilege--a pattern that was repeated often throughout the Middle Ages as evidenced, for example, by the dissolution of the Carolingian and Ottonian dynasties. 109   Medieval political rule, in Poggi's words, "possessed an inherent tendency to shift the seat of effective power, the fulcrum of rule, downward toward the lower links in the chain of lord-vassal relations"--a tendency no doubt related to the prevailing personalized-oral communications environment of the time. 110   Consequently, the political map of Europe in the Middle Ages was determined, accordingly to Mattingly, not so much "by geography, or national culture, or historic development" as it was "by the irrelevant accidents of birth and marriage and death." 111  

The complexity by which personalized, cross-cutting lord-vassal entanglements took root in the Middle Ages made any attempts at centralization and rational administration within a territorially defined space extremely difficult for nascent states. Prior to the rediscovery of Roman Law, there was no conception of a distinction between private legal and fiscal prerogatives of local authorities and that of a public realm. In the case of local lords, "On land under his jurisdiction, public economy and the fiscal obligations related to it were identical with the domestic economy of his private household." 112   Raising consistent state revenues--especially from one generation of leaders to the next--was virtually impossible as a typical medieval ruler "knew the total of neither his income nor his outgoings" of his entire domain. 113   One consequence of this entangled particularism was that kings who wanted revenues from the lands under their jurisdiction regularly traveled with a large entourage in order to "consume the produce of their scattered holdings." 114   And since each hommage of lord-vassal obligation was entered into intuitu personae (that is, personally) the form of rule varied enormously from relationship to relationship and region to region. According to Poggi:

the lord's relationship to the ultimate objects of rule, the populace, was mediated differently by each vassal. The size of the fief, the exact terms on which it was granted, the rights of rule over it that remained with the lord or that were vested in the vassal--as these aspects of the basic relationship varied, so did the modalities and content of the exercise of rule. 115  

Nonetheless, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries state authority was undergoing, although with occasional setbacks, a gradual process of consolidation and centralization--a kind of "two-steps forward/one-step backward" process. To be sure, the process was not uniform across all of Europe. In Germany and Italy, for example, city-leagues and city-states provided alternative "de-centered" logics of organization. But elsewhere--in England, France, and Holland, for example--centralized forms of rule began to displace the feudal system. Theorists disagree on the primary impetus for this process, or why it finally took hold at this juncture rather than at an earlier time. Some, such as Tilly, place more emphasis on changes in military technologies. 116   Others give as much emphasis to population pressures and an accompanying economic boom. 117   Whatever the ultimate reason, in those areas of Europe a similar pattern can be discerned: In the context of an increasingly dangerous environment, an imperative was placed on the maintenance of a standing army, and where relevant a war fleet, that could be summoned by a central ruler. 118   The new demands of war necessitated that these rulers turn inward to maintain domestic stability and order, and, more importantly, to find a way to raise constant revenues to finance the war machine. 119   Fortunately, the state rulers found willing allies in the urban bourgeoisie, whose interests in order and rational administration converged with those of the central rulers. And happily for these states, the new townsmen were able and willing to provide money in the form of taxes in exchange for the domestic services provided by the state. The specific form that this relationship took varied from state to state, as Tilly and Mann have documented. 120   But in parts of Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the general phenomenon of modern state bureaucracies under territorially distinct, absolutist rule began to emerge and thrive as the model form of political authority.

What role did the printing environment play in facilitating the emergence and success of centralized forms of rule over alternative "de-centered" logics of organization? Most importantly, the printing environment provided the tools necessary for standardized, intergenerational rule in the form of rational bureaucratic administration from a single center. Indeed, as pointed out above, a necessary precondition for the emergence of bureaucratic administration is some form of writing system. Thus it is not surprising that the development of modern state bureaucracies in Europe was closely bound up with the spread of secular literacy in the High Middle Ages. So in those regions where literacy is relatively high, bureaucratic specialization and development tends to be more advanced. For example, in the case of England, sixty individuals were employed in its Chancery in the middle of the thirteenth century; by the fifteenth century, more than a hundred were employed at the Court of Common Pleas alone. 121  

Of course, pressures for bureaucratization, in turn, drove secular literacy and a demand for standardized communications. Early printers were quick to recognize this market and, as a result, thrived on state commissions for printed administrative records. As Febvre and Martin point out, state policies actively encouraged the creation of large, national publishing houses throughout early modern Europe. 122   And the printed products emanating from these large publishing centers in turn increased the size of bureaucratic documentation, which necessitated yet more specialization and personnel. In Guenee's words, "The proliferation of offices and officials inevitably led to a proliferation of the documents without which State action would be impossible and on which its power was based." 123  

The most obvious way the new communications environment favored the interests of centralized state rulers was by facilitating more effective and systematic rewards and sanctions in the governance of outlying regions, particularly through the standardization of legal institutions and systems of direct taxation. As Tilly affirms, "Almost all European governments eventually took steps which homogenized their populations." 124   With means of standardized documentation provided by printing, state rulers could effectively cut through and transcend the vagaries of personalized, feudal obligations that so often produced discrepancies among locales throughout the King's domain. In the printing environment, regularized and impersonal procedures could be more effectively established that did not vary over a territorially defined space or, more importantly, across generations of rule. As an illustration, "between 1665 and 1690 Louis XIV promulgated ordinances and codes that uniformly regulated over all of France such diverse matters as civil and criminal court procedure, the management of forests and rivers, shipping and sailing, and the trade in black slaves." 125   In the printing environment, revenues could be collected efficiently and consistently with the result that the size and power of the state, and the effectiveness of centralized rule, began to grow.

The state's interest in standardization (or homogenization, as Tilly aptly calls it), was closely bound up with a desire not only to more efficiently and consistently extract financial revenues, but also to maintain domestic order and security through surveillance of the population and territory--an interest that thrived with the availability of printing. One of the more compelling interpretations of the state's interest in surveillance is Michel Foucault's discussion of the "disciplinary state." 126   Foucault argues that in the transition to the modern state, coercion and overt violence as tools for social order were gradually replaced by a more impersonal "micro-politics" of discipline designed to morally regulate or "normalize" individuals through institutional regulation and bureaucratic administration. 127   Though Foucault is more concerned with the ideas that lay behind this transition, it is easy to see how the material instruments of technology at the disposal of centralized state administrators were crucial in facilitating this reorientation. 128  

Perhaps the best example of the way printing helped to empower the "disciplinary state" is the reproduction of printed maps used for administrative purposes. As Barber notes with respect to England, by the sixteenth century state ministers "came to expect a greater precision in maps than had their predecessors, and several became more sophisticated in their evaluation of, and their awareness of the potential uses of, maps for government." He goes on to say that the government of the time "seems to have shown a growing appetite for printed maps, which were cheaper, increasingly plentiful, and less prone to scribal errors in transmission than their manuscript counterparts." 129   In 1610, a State Paper Office was formally established in England to house the ever-increasing number of official maps. 130   Likewise, Buisseret notes with respect to France: "At the time of Louis XIV's accession French governing circles possessed a well-developed sense of the usefulness of maps, and there were cartographers capable of responding to their needs. [through] an abundance of presses, mostly concentrated in Paris, capable of printing and diffusing large maps in considerable quantities." 131   For example:

For economic and financial planning, maps were commissioned to show where the various fiscal divisions, or generalités, ran, and where specific taxes like the gabelle (salt tax) were to be paid. Other maps were ordered when great public works like the canal du Midi were being planned; this canal had a very rich cartography associated with it. Others, again, were commissioned to show the sites of the mines in France, or the nature and extent of its forests. 132  

Another example of the way the printing environment fueled the disciplinary state was in the area of public education, as Luke in particular has shown. 133   Consider in this respect the way the printing environment favored standardized public "examinations" through which each individual was compelled to pass, helping to create a cumulative, individual "archive" of persons under the state. Luke notes how "Printing enabled the 'power of writing' to become universalized and standardized; teachers like wardens examined, evaluated, recorded, and described those in their charge according to standardized (administrative) forms based on underlying classificatory criteria." 134   These standardized, printed examinations helped to instill a sense of rank in the population which, as Foucault describes, defined "the great form of distribution of individuals in the education order. an alignment of age groups, one after another; a succession of subjects taught and questions treated " 135   In this way, standardized public education in the form of printed school textbooks and printed school ordinances served the disciplinary interests of the state, which promoted a uniformity of belief among the population through compulsory schooling of the young. 136  

In sum, the movement toward modern state bureaucracies, which began in the High Middle Ages, was favored by the change in the mode of communication, first with the gradual increase in secular literacy and then, more dramatically, with the introduction of printing. Printing fueled the strategic interests of nascent centralized state bureaucracies by providing the means by which standardized documents--from school textbooks, to public ordinances and fiscal regulations, to maps of the realm--could be mass reproduced and disseminated. In this way, printing provided the tools by which centralizing rulers could promote homogenous policies across territorially defined spaces and thus dissolve the cross-cutting and overlapping jurisdictions characteristic of the medieval world order. As printing provided a means to mass-reproduce documents at little cost, a system of intergenerational rule could be established, thus freezing the tendency that had been repeated throughout the Middle Ages for centralized rule to wither following the death of influential personalities. Moreover, alternative forms of extant political authority that lacked a single, centered form of rule--the Italian city-states and the German city-leagues, for example--could not benefit from the printing environment to the same extent as did centralized state bureaucracies. 137   As a result, the success of the centralized state bureaucratic system of rule became the model of political authority for modern Europe as whole.


In this chapter I have described how the introduction of printing in medieval Europe brought about specific distributional changes that empowered certain actors and social forces at the expense of others. Most immediately affected by the advent of printing was the transnational authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which had come close to establishing a theocratic papal government over much of western Europe in the High Middle Ages based on a monopoly of the reproduction of knowledge. The Church's preeminent position in medieval world order was undercut by forces whose strategic interests coincided with, and were augmented by, the advent of printing--the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism. The new communications environment favored the interests of these two social forces by permitting the mass reproduction and widespread transmission of ideas outside of the papal-monastic network. The Church's interests, on the other hand, were significantly disadvantaged by the change in the mode of communication, as evidenced by its explicit condemnation of the printing press once its full potential had been unleashed.

The chapter also explored the way in which distributional changes associated with printing helped facilitate constitutive features of modern world order: specifically, contractarian socioeconomic relations among the new urban bourgeoisie, and modern state bureaucracies. The printing environment favored the demands of contractarian socioeconomic relations by permitting the widespread use of social abstractions crucial to modern, interdependent economies. This particular social force was vital to the development of modern political rule insofar as its interests in standardization and order converged with those of centralizing state monarchs, who were willing to provide domestic stability in exchange for the ability to extract revenues through taxes. The capabilities of printing--especially the mass reproduction of standardized documents--also empowered the disciplinary state, which had a vested interest in both the homogenization of the population and the standardization of administration. Although these distributional changes were crucial in the medieval-to-modern transformation of world order, they do not tell the whole story. The next chapter explores the relationship between the change in the mode of communication and the transformation of social epistemology.


Note 1: For analysis of heresies in the Middle Ages, see Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967); R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (London: Allen Lane, 1977); and Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1980). Back.

Note 2: See Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy, pp. 164-187. Back.

Note 3: On the "Black Death" plague, see William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Press, 1976); Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Nature and Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983); Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, pp. 92-125; and Ruggie, "Territoriality," pp. 153-154. Back.

Note 4: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 39. Back.

Note 5: See Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 148. Back.

Note 6: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 288. Back.

Note 7: On the Inquisition, see Bernard Hamilton, The Medieval Inquisition (London: E. Arnold, 1981). Back.

Note 8: Eisenstein, The Printing Press, pp. 303-304. Back.

Note 9: Ibid., p. 317. Back.

Note 10: Ibid., p. 375. Back.

Note 11: See Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 170-172. Back.

Note 12: Rice, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe. Back.

Note 13: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 172. Back.

Note 14: For a discussion of works that make such strong claims, see Eisenstein, The Printing Press, pp. 303-329. Back.

Note 15: See Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism, p. 78; This particular argument is one favored by those inclined to a Marxist view of history. See, F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, [trans. M. J. Olgin] (New York: International Publishers, 1926); and F. Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, [trans. S. Reynolds] (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). Back.

Note 16: Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism, p. 134. Back.

Note 17: Dudley, The Word and the Sword, p. 153. Back.

Note 18: See Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 289-290. Back.

Note 19: See Mark U. Edwards Jr., Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 1. Back.

Note 20: Ibid., p. 17. Back.

Note 21: Ibid. Back.

Note 22: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 39. Back.

Note 23: Ibid. Back.

Note 24: Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, p. 15. Back.

Note 25: Ibid. Back.

Note 26: Ibid. Back.

Note 27: Ibid., p. 16. Back.

Note 28: The study by HansJoachim Kohler is cited in Ibid., p. 180. See also, Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 109-115. Back.

Note 29: Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, pp. 6-7. Back.

Note 30: Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism, p. 75. Back.

Note 31: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 295. Back.

Note 32: Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, p. 7. Back.

Note 33: Quoted in Curran, "Communications, power, and social order," p. 217. Back.

Note 34: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 40. Back.

Note 35: Eisenstein, The Printing Press, p. 68; Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 291. Back.

Note 36: Kohler is cited in Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, pp. 37-39; The original study which Edwards cites is HansJoachim Kohler, "The Flugschriften and their importance in religious debate: a quantitative approach," in Paola Zambelli, ed., Astrologi hallucinati: Stars and the End of the World in Luther's Time (New York: W. de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 153-175. Back.

Note 37: Cf. Gerald Strauss, Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Back.

Note 38: See Curran, "Communications, Power, and Social Order," p. 220; See also, Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, pp. 37-38. Back.

Note 39: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 40. Back.

Note 40: See Eisenstein, The Printing Press, pp. 347-348; See also, Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 40. Back.

Note 41: Ibid., p. 355. Back.

Note 42: Ibid., pp. 415-416. Back.

Note 43: As cited in Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism, p. 47. Back.

Note 44: Ibid. Back.

Note 45: As related in Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, p. 14. Back.

Note 46: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 40. Back.

Note 47: Curran, "Communications, Power, and Social Order," p. 218. Back.

Note 48: Anderson calls book publishing "one of the earlier forms of capitalist enterprise." See Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 37-39; See also Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, chapter 7; Eisenstein, The Printing Press, pp. 310-315. Back.

Note 49: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 38; and Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 264-265. Back.

Note 50: See Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, [Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan] (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1993); and Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). Back.

Note 51: See Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: An Institutional and Intellectual History (New York: Krieger Publishers, 1975); and Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages. Back.

Note 52: See Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy 100-1700 (New York: Norton, 1976); and Mumford, Technics and Civilization. Back.

Note 53: See Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, pp. 107-119; and Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, pp. 442-448. Back.

Note 54: Eisenstein, The Printing Press, pp. 455-456. Back.

Note 55: Eisenstein, The Printing Press, p. 517. Back.

Note 56: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 148. Back.

Note 57: Eisenstein, The Printing Press, p. 75. Back.

Note 58: Ibid., p. 517. Back.

Note 59: Ibid., pp. 88-113; On the esprit de système of the age, see especially Foucault, The Order of Things. Back.

Note 60: See Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, pp. 51-53. Back.

Note 61: See Eisenstein, The Printing Press, p. 113. Back.

Note 62: Rice, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, p. 8. Back.

Note 63: On the relationship between the idea of progress and the mode of communication, particularly as it is expressed by thinkers such as Condillac and Condorcet, see Heyer, Communications and History, Part 1. The Eighteenth Century. Back.

Note 64: Curran, "Communications, Power and Social Order," p. 218. Back.

Note 65: See Mann, The Sources of Social Power; North and Thomas, The Rise of the West; and Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors for overviews. Back.

Note 66: The classic work here is Bloch, Feudal Society, Vols. 1 and 2. Back.

Note 67: Ibid., pp. 145-162. Back.

Note 68: Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 91. Back.

Note 69: See Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 90. Back.

Note 70: See Stock, The Implications of Literacy, for a detailed discussion of literacy levels in different regions and periods throughout the Middle Ages. Back.

Note 71: Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 92. Back.

Note 72: Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 272. Back.

Note 73: Ibid., p. 275. Back.

Note 74: As cited in Ibid., p. 254. Back.

Note 75: Ibid., p. 263. Back.

Note 76: Hendrick Spruyt, "Institutional Selection in International Relations: State Anarchy as Order," International Organization 48 (Autumn 1994): 529. Back.

Note 77: Ibid., p. 537; See also Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, pp. 436-477 for a lengthy discussion of money and barter from the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Back.

Note 78: See Spruyt, "Institutional Selection," p. 537; See also Clanchy, From Memory to Written Records; and Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900-1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Back.

Note 79: Spruyt, "Institutional Selection," pp. 537-538. Back.

Note 80: See Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 159 for a discussion of the representational, as opposed to abstract, form of measures in the Middle Ages. Back.

Note 81: E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Back.

Note 82: Ibid.; See also Ruggie, "Territoriality," pp. 152-154. Back.

Note 83: Ruggie, "Territoriality," p. 153. Back.

Note 84: Spruyt, "Institutional Selection," p. 539. Back.

Note 85: Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 144. Back.

Note 86: Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, 1933). Back.

Note 87: Rice, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, p. 6. Back.

Note 88: Stock, The Implications of Literacy; and Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. Back.

Note 89: See Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 55 for an overview of the origins of paper bills of exchange in the Champagne Fairs, and how they were more efficient for commercial purposes. Back.

Note 90: John J. McCusker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1991), p. 21. Back.

Note 91: Ibid., p. 23. Back.

Note 92: Ibid., pp. 43-84. Back.

Note 93: See Ibid. Back.

Note 94: See Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 136-137 for printed price currents as an important part in the creation of urban markets. Back.

Note 95: See Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 153. Back.

Note 96: Of course the classic work on the capitalist spirit is Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, [Translated by Talcott Parsons] (New York: Scribner's, 1958). However, given Weber's thesis linking the rise of the capitalist ethos to religious impulses, it is not surprising that he pays no attention to the change in the mode of communication at the time--a shortcoming that has been noted by a number of communications theorists, the most vociferous of which is undoubtedly Eisenstein. See Eisenstein, The Printing Press, pp. 378-402. Back.

Note 97: See especially Ong, Orality and Literacy; Havelock, Preface to Plato; and Goody, The Logic of Writing. Back.

Note 98: See North and Thomas, The Rise of the West, p. 138. Back.

Note 99: Dudley, The Word and the Sword, p. 171. Back.

Note 100: By "leveling" I am referring not to an equality of wealth and opportunity, but rather to the dissolution of personal bondage that characterized the feudal system of rule and its replacement by juridical equality among townspeople. See Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 93 for discussion. Back.

Note 101: Roland Axtmann, "The formation of the modern state: the debate in the social sciences," in Mary Fulbrook, ed., National Histories and European History (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), p. 33. For a similar argument, see Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State; and Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1990 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 92. Back.

Note 102: Mann, Sources of Social Power, p. 514. Back.

Note 103: Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 122. Back.

Note 104: See Goody, The Logic of Writing; Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book; Dudley, The Word and the Sword; Innis, Empire and Communications. Back.

Note 105: This is the thesis of Clanchy's From Memory to Written Record; See also Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Back.

Note 106: Webber and Wildavsky, A History of Taxation, p. 153. Back.

Note 107: On the rediscovery of Roman Law and its relation to centralizing state bureaucracies, see Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 27; Webber and Wildavsky, A History of Taxation, p. 182; and Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in World Polity," p. 144. Back.

Note 108: See Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, pp. 398-399; See also Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 19. Back.

Note 109: See Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 78 for discussion. Back.

Note 110: Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 26. Back.

Note 111: Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 125. Back.

Note 112: Webber and Wildavsky, A History of Taxation, p. 149. Back.

Note 113: Bernard Guenee, States and Rulers in Late Medieval Europe, [Translated by Juliet Vale] (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 92. Back.

Note 114: Ibid., p. 168. Back.

Note 115: Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, p. 27; Back.

Note 116: Tilly, Coercian, Capital, and European States. Back.

Note 117: See North and Thomas, The Rise of the West; and Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors. Back.

Note 118: For an outstanding (and relatively succinct) narrative of these processes, see Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, ch. 4. Back.

Note 119: For a widely accepted account see Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State; see also James Anderson and Stuart Hall, "Absolutism and Other Ancestors," in Anderson, ed., The Rise of the Modern State, p. 31. Back.

Note 120: Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States; and Mann, Sources of Social Power. Back.

Note 121: These figures are taken from Guenee, States and Rulers, p. 127; See also Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. Back.

Note 122: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 127. Back.

Note 123: Guenee States and Rulers in Late Medieval Europe. Back.

Note 124: Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European StateMaking," in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 43-44. Back.

Note 125: Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, p. 72. Back.

Note 126: See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, [Trans. Alan Sheridan] (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); For similar interpretations, see Anthony Giddens, The NationState and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Norbert Elias, [Translated by Edmund Jephcott] The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994). Back.

Note 127: For an overview discussion of Foucault's ideas in this respect, see Axtmann, "The Formation of the Modern State," pp. 38-40. Back.

Note 128: Foucault himself briefly alludes to the crucial role played by documentation, or what he calls a "network of writing," as part of the mechanism of discipline, but is remiss in not mentioning print in this regard. See Discipline and Punish, p. 189. For discussion which argues that Foucault is remiss in not discussing print, see Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism, p. 3; and Heyer, Communications and History, pp. 141-155. Back.

Note 129: Peter Barber, "England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, 1550-1625," in David Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 58, 61. Back.

Note 130: Ibid., p. 83. Back.

Note 131: David Buisseret, "Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps in France Before the Accession of Louis XIV," in Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, p. 100. Back.

Note 132: Ibid., p. 99. Back.

Note 133: The following section relies on Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism. Back.

Note 134: Ibid. Back.

Note 135: Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 147; This same passage is cited by Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism, p. 7. Back.

Note 136: See Luke, Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism, pp. 11-12. Back.

Note 137: See Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, pp. 153, and 160 for a discussion of how both the cityleagues and the citystates lacked a single, centralized form of internal rule. Back.

Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation