The printing press is a great historical mirror for what’s happening now, and the story is more unsettling than most people realise.
Within decades of Gutenberg’s 1440s printing press, the Christian Church panicked. Its anxiety wasn’t triggered by rising literacy, but by a sudden loss of narrative control as it watched itself rapidly slip into irrelevance; an Index of Forbidden Books surfaced soon after, and that subject was the basis of Umberto Eco’s epic novel In the Name of The Rose. Because ideas could now spread faster without institutional backing, Science and Religion were suddenly at war, leading up to the Reformation and Scientific Revolution. The printing press didn’t cause those things directly, but it made them possible and then inevitable
Then came misinformation, exploding onto the medieval mind like a rumour that had learned to replicate itself; the first mass-printed content wasn’t enlightenment philosophy, it was pamphlets, propaganda, and quack medicine – printed accounts of two-headed calves, wolf-children, unicorn horn powder, and celestial omens, sold as news. All sounding eerily familiar.
The Narratio is one such prominent antisemitic myth; these were printed accounts of Jews poisoning wells that spread across German towns in the 1490s-1520s, leading to expulsions and massacres. Same story, reprinted and slightly localised for each new town, engineered to provoke a specific community into violence.
Medieval reading was mostly oral and communal, but now it transformed into something silent and personal – a new cognitive mode was born. This print culture built on a linear narrative and the sequential ordering of content, something that generations since have become accustomed to and relied upon. It did also create half a century of chaos, prejudice, suspicion and doubt before the benefits compounded.