''Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending'' is a 2011 book by

Elizabeth Eisenstein Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein (October 11, 1923 – January 31, 2016) was an American historian of the French Revolution and early 19th-century France. She is well known for her work on the history of early printing, writing on the transition in ...

published by the

University of Pennsylvania Press The University of Pennsylvania Press, also known as Penn Press, is a university press affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. History The press was originally incorporated with b ...

Content

Eisenstein's work follows her analysis of the rise of printing in '' The Printing Press as an Agent of Change'' (published in 1979) by exploring the deeply ambivalent responses to the technology of printing and its revolutionary effects over the course of five centuries. Eisenstein points out that such a survey is very ambitious in scope and asserts that it fills a general absence in previous literature, and is inspired by suggestions by a figure such as

Michael Warner Michael David Warner (born 1958) is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for '' Artforum'', ''The Nation'', '' The Advocate'', an ...

who declared the need for a "history of the way we think about and perceive print." At one extreme there have been notions of printing as a mephistophelean or faustian entity or a form of 'black magic' while on the other side of the spectrum there have been ideas of it as a vehicle for liberation; followers of

Martin Luther Martin Luther ( ; ; 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, Theology, theologian, author, hymnwriter, professor, and former Order of Saint Augustine, Augustinian friar. Luther was the seminal figure of the Reformation, Pr ...

in the sixteenth century, for example, saw it as a means by which people could be freed from what they perceived of as papal oppression, and in some cases saw it as a form of divine intervention. Some of the more negative ideas about printing date back to a mistaken reading of the name of a figure such as

Johann Fust Johann Fust or Faust ( 1400 – October 30, 1466) was an early German printer. Family background Fust was born to a burgher family of Mainz, traceable back to the early thirteenth century. Members of the family held many civil and religio ...

which was sometimes confused with

Faust Faust ( , ) is the protagonist of a classic German folklore, German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust (). The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a deal with the Devil at a ...

. The work is structured chronologically. It begins in the early, Gutenbergian period before moving on to the post-Lutheran and post- Erasmian era, then the eighteenth-century, the zenith of printing in the nineteenth century and then on to the present day. She observes that despite the ambivalence of responses to printing, throughout the West the perspective was broadly positive rather than negative when examined in the aggregate. Finally, Eisenstein questions the idea that the digital age will lead to the replacement of the printed book by the virtual text, drawing a parallel in chapter six with a previous debate over whether the newspaper would replace the printed book.

References

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External links

Divine Art, Infernal Machine
by the

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2011 non-fiction books History books about printing University of Pennsylvania Press books Books in philosophy of technology