Abstract

“Communication systems have a history,” Robert Darnton has recently observed, “although historians have rarely studied it” (Darnton, 1990: xvii). This echoes Elizabeth Eisenstein’s complaint a decade earlier that, despite historians’ assertions about the power of the printing press, no systematic study of the impact of printing on culture had ever been undertaken (Eisenstein, 1979: 6). Even the concepts for doing such a study were lacking; major transformations in human communication - in this case, from “scribal” to print modes for publication and distribution of written things - were elided altogether in discussions of a general shift from oral to written cultures.