Contemporary Sociology: A Quarter Century of Book Reviews

In the beginning, knowledge was spread by the spoken word, then later by written manuscripts, and with the invention of movable type and the printing press in the late 15th century, increasingly by the mass-produced printed page. After Gutenberg, information and ideas now portable, could migrate back and forth while scholars remained in place. They were thus delivered from many of the constraints of time and distance that had previously restricted access to the intellectual trove housed in the established centers of learning. By the early 18th century, according to Alvin Kernan, Gutenberg's heirs had transformed "the more advanced countries of Europe from oral into print societies, reordering the entire social world." The abundant harvest of publications often dismayed defenders of orthodoxy. Alexander Pope's mock spokesman, Martin Scriblerus, says about The Dunciad that "in those days, when (after providence had permitted the Invention of Printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors cover'd the land" (Kernan, 1989:9, 11). The faculty of the University of Paris, alarmed by the dangers imposed by uncertified intruders, regularly warned students against unsupervised reading in the privacy of their rooms for fear that in the absence of mature guidance they might be seduced into error and heresy. The review was established as a genre, and criticism as a profession, in response to this perceived crisis of abundance. By 1831, Thomas Carlyle, writing in the Edinburgh Review, the most successful of these early ventures, complained that "Far is it from us to disparage our own craft, whereby we