The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

Divine Art, Infernal Machine
The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

2011 | 384 pages | Cloth $45.00 | Paper $26.50
History
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface

Chapter 1. First Impressions
Prologue: Some Foundation Myths
Initial Reactions: Pros and Cons

Chapter 2. After Luther: Civil War in Christendom
Printing as a Protestant Weapon
Pamphlet Warfare: ''The Media Explosion'' of the 1640s

Chapter 3. After Erasmus: Propelling the Knowledge Industry
Celebrating Technology/Advancement of Learning
Overload: Lost in the Crowd

Chapter 4. Eighteenth-Century Attitudes
Prelude and Preview
Literary Responses: Mystic Art/Mercenary Trade
Politics in a New Key: The Atlantic Revolutions

Chapter 5. The Zenith of Print Culture (Nineteenth Century)
The Revolutionary Aftermath
Tories and Radicals in Great Britain
Steam Presses, Railway Fiction

Chapter 6. The Newspaper Press: The End of Books?

Chapter 7. Toward the Sense of an Ending (Fin de Sie'cle to the Present)

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments