Author Description

“What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.” – Wendell Phillips The crucial importance of education in China, a prized virtue instilled in the population among all classes by beloved teacher and philosopher Confucius in the 6th century BCE, generated an unprecedented and long-lived golden age of literature and art. It also gave rise to a cornucopia of transformative innovations and groundbreaking technology, particularly following the dawn of the Common Era. In addition to the wheelbarrow, the seismograph, the waterwheel, deep drilling, suspension bridges, and ship rudders, among countless other life-changing contraptions, the Chinese developed what were later dubbed the “Four Great Inventions of China.” One of those was printing, which slowly spread through South Asia and the Middle East before making it to Europe. The history of printing was for ancient Asia an advancement in culture and communication, but for Europe in the 15th century, it was much more, plunging the continent into a new paradigm and aligning it for the modern world. Its importance is often overlooked, but the timeliness of the printing machine was equivalent to the invention of alphabets in antiquity and ranks up there with the digital revolution and the introduction of the internet. Put simply, it made the Renaissance possible and led to the modernization of Europe. Long before the emergence of the modern world, paper was unknown in the West, and all documents were transcribed by hand onto clay, papyrus, and parchment. More importantly, few were allowed to express themselves through written media. Writing was for the most part theological in nature, reserved for scribes mostly living and working in monasteries. There, they sat in special rooms called “scriptoriums.” At some point in the process, illuminators took over, adding designs and embellishments. Books in the Middle Ages were owned almost exclusively by monasteries and educat