1.18 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 4: Printing and Science (Mostly Astronomy)

Dilettantery

“One wrong word may now kill thousands of men”.

-Rabelais

“If science helped give birth to the printed book, it was clearly the printed book that sent science from its medieval habits straight into the boiling scientific revolution.”

-Derek J. de Solla Price, 1967

“By seeming paradox, their most sacred festival kept Christian energies bent toward puzzle-solving of a purely scientific kind...Until the advent of printing, scientific inquiries about ‘how the heavens go’ went hand-in-hand with religious concerns about ‘how to go to heaven.’”

-Elizabeth Eisenstein

“One cannot treat printing as just one among many elements in a complex causal nexus itself. It is of special historical significance because it produced fundamental alterations in prevailing patterns of continuity and change...It made the words of God appear more multiform and His handiwork more uniform. The printing press laid the basis for both literal fundamentalism and for modern science. It remains indispensable for humanistic scholarship. It is still responsible for our museum-without-walls.”

-Elizabeth Eisenstein

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/ng0p4s/118_elizabeth_eisenstein_part_4_printing_and/?