Printing Press

In 1492, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim — head of a monastery in what is now Germany — sat down to defend an old information technology against a new one. The old one was the handwritten book, laboriously copied by monks; the new one was the printing press, which had arrived in Europe only about forty years earlier. His resulting treatise, De Laude Scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes), argued that hand-copying sacred texts was a spiritual discipline that kept monks from idleness, and that sturdy parchment manuscripts (made from prepared animal skin) would outlast the flimsy paper that printers used. He urged monks to copy printed books by hand, for preservation. Historians enjoy pointing out the obvious irony: Trithemius had De Laude Scriptorum itself printed at Mainz in 1494, to get it in front of more readers. His worry was narrower than the later Church panics about heresy and "uncontrolled" print. He was defending monastic vocation and textual permanence, not fretting about subversive ideas escaping into the world.

The deeper value he was guarding — craft, embodied discipline, the slow working of meaning into the hand and mind together — is something every disruption of knowledge work since, including the one happening now, has had to reckon with.