Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia
By Aaron Cope, inspired by
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In mid-15th century Germany, the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg combined his metallurgical talent with other technologies to create a printing press with moveable type. His first task was to develop a way to easily cast letters in a matrix, a specific type of mold that allowed for the cast letter to be extracted and used elsewhere. He developed the hand mold, a tool that when combined with the matrix and molten metal, produced movable type letters. Then he adapted screw press machinery, then used in wine production, to press the printing plate onto the paper. Gutenberg produced many books, the most famous of which was the Bible he printed in Latin in 1455.
Gutenberg’s printing technology spread rapidly across Europe, with Paris becoming an early center of the book trade. Printing took another two decades to become established in England. The first printed text in England was produced by William Caxton in 1476, an edition of Chaucer’s
The most popular publications during this era were the Bible or other religious texts, such as sermons by popular preachers or pamphlets explaining sectarian views. The Protestant Reformation emphasized believers reading the Bible in their own language, so translations in vernacular languages began to be printed, such as William Tyndale’s New Testament printed in English in 1525. The first complete version of the Bible in English was Myles Coverdale’s 1535 edition.
Other popular printed works included broadsheets, an early form of newspaper, and also ballads printed on a single page. Broadsheets were a key element in this new system as they were cheap enough to print but entertaining for common people and bought in large quantities. The English Broadside Ballad project features more than 9000 examples these works.
A quarto was a book featuring bound leaves of paper that had been folded twice. They were often sold stitched, but not fully bound and with the edges of the folds uncut. They were the Elizabethan equivalent of modern paperbacks. Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays, approximately half of them, were published in quarto, which made his plays much more accessible not only to readers and book collectors but also to competing acting troupes.
A folio was more expensive book format than a quarto and owning one indicated higher wealth. Many literary works were still created on demand for wealthy patrons and kept in manuscript, but authors like Ben Jonson used printed books to reach larger audiences of literate people by producing work for the general public. In 1616, Jonson paved the way for Shakespeare’s First Folio by publishing
William Shakespeare’s former colleagues from the playing company The King’s Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled 36 of Shakespeare’s playscripts into a volume in 1623 to celebrate his work some seven years after his death. Only half of these plays had been printed before in quarto. Without the First Folio, texts of plays such as