Summary: The Dane article shows that continuity in print does not exist. Through examining the history of printing from the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Dane shows that there are differences in the ways in which they operated.

Important Points:

  1. “Proponents of Print culture… relation to Oral Culture, learning, individuality, technology, and the obligatory Rise of Humanism.” (page 1).

This quote links Print Culture to the development of many important things. Without print, the way we learn, speak, behave, use technology, and think would all be very different.

  1. “We know all about texts; we know a lot about paper; we know something about ink; we know very little about type, or at least, what passed as type for the earliest printers.” Pg. 29

This quote shows that while we are familiar with all the components of texts, we do not know much about how they all come together to make text. This shows that little emphasis has been put on understanding early printing techniques and how they have evolved over the years to improve.

  1. “Anomalies appear whenever one looks hard enough for them.” Pg. 30

This quote shows that in order to understand something, we have to study it very hard to find any confusing points. If someone does not look close enough they will not notice that something is inconsistent or different from the rest.

 

Confusing Parts:

  1. “But this implies first that we know something about the rise of humanism (whatever that is).” Pg. 31.

Although I know that the Gutenberg Bible was printed during Humanism, I do not fully understand Dane’s purpose for including Humanism in the section. I expected it to play a larger role in the text, but I felt like it was shoe-horned in.

  1. “The fifteenth century does not lead to the eighteenth century through some Rise and Progress narrative; it simply is the eighteenth century.”

This quote did not make sense to me. Earlier Dane discussed how little had changed in print technology between these two centuries. Later he goes on to say that there were significant changes, but this quote seems to say that the eighteenth century just happened with no relation to the fifteenth century at all.

Question: Are there any other instances where continuity was believed to be present in other media forms, but was not?