Reading the European Enlightenment

de Thomas Munck

"In the early modern period, printing was the only means of disseminating a text or message reliably to a large number of people. Print could serve all kinds of purposes, ranging from religious education to scientific debate, from state propaganda to open political subversion, from proclamations and the reporting of news to the provision of entertaining fictional reading. But the printing industry was also one of the most complex, labour-intensive and investment-dependent sectors of the early modern economy, involving a huge range of very specialised and skilled manual labour as well as a range of associated trades (see Figure 1). It required considerable infrastructure, management and marketing skills, and was subject to severe market fluctuations with high risks. These conflicting pressures were not matched by any substantial technological change in the printing industry from the middle of the fifteenth century right through to the Napoleonic period. So despite gaining a solid footing in the economies of many large prosperous cities, the increase in the use of print for particular purposes was unsteady, and its geographic spread surprisingly uneven"--