The Kennesaw

This paper seeks to provide a brief survey of three types of responses to Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press and its effect on early modern Europe: resistance, reluctant adoption, and enthusiastic adaptation. Analyzing the respective examples of these three responses to print will help to explain why manuscript production survived in a world that was seemingly dominated by print. Although several different arguments for the survival of the manuscript may be derived from the exhaustive examples of print reactions, the theme of the newfound overabundance of information is the most prominent. This paper opens with an introduction, which is followed by a discussion of necessary historical context relating to manuscript production and the early fourteenth-century landscape. By invoking a wide range of figures and phenomena, this paper relies on primary sources to support its claims. Following a survey of each of the three sections, this paper concludes with an estimate of how the findings are relevant to today and how they may explain the survival of manuscripts.

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