Gutenberg and the printing press

In Mainz in the 1450s, Johannes Gutenberg combined metal movable type, oil-based ink and a press. Within fifty years, millions of printed books were circulating in Europe, and ideas spread faster than ever before.

Date: About 1440 to 1550VIII · Medieval networks and empiresIX · Oceans crossed
Place: Mainz · Venice · WestminsterEurope
Laid out as: An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons: 6 planned, none written yet
Themes: Communication and media
Technology and engineering
Religion, belief and myth
Education, knowledge and museums

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeEach book copied by hand, or printed slowly from carved wooden blocks.

IBooks before printing
IIGutenberg’s workshop
IIIThe Gutenberg Bible
IVPrinting spreads
VPamphlets and the Reformation
VICaxton in Westminster

AfterHundreds of identical copies, quickly and cheaply.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Johannes Gutenberg
Johann Fust
Peter Schöffer
William Caxton

Objects

The Gutenberg Bible
Caxton’s Canterbury Tales

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

1440 to 1550. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?