Eisenstein changed way the world sees printing

Published 12:00 am Friday, February 26, 2016

Elizabeth Eisenstein, a historian best known for her work on the seismic effect of printing on Western civilization — a novel contention when she began her research more than 40 years ago — died Jan. 31 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 92.

Her daughter, Margaret Eisenstein DeLacy, confirmed the death.

A retired faculty member of the University of Michigan, Eisenstein was renowned for “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe,” first published in 1979. Spanning two volumes and nearly 800 pages, the work has been translated into many languages and remains in print.

“Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, we wouldn’t think about print in the ways that we think today had it not been for her work,” Sabrina Alcorn Baron, an editor of “Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,” said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Baron’s book, edited with Eric Lindquist and Eleanor Shevlin and published in 2007, was undertaken to celebrate the silver anniversary of Eisenstein’s magnum opus.

“It’s quite unusual for an academic book to achieve its 25th anniversary and still be vital to the discourse in the field,” Baron, a historian at the University of Maryland, said. “Her book continues to be reviewed as if it just came out.”

In “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,” Eisenstein argued that the development of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century helped inaugurate a set of sweeping social changes thanks to the authoritative, widely tangible dissemination of information it allowed.

“What printing did was to standardize texts,” Baron explained. “So you would have numerous people all over Europe reading exactly the same thing. Information had a much greater reach, a much wider audience, a much greater impact.”

Among the sea changes ushered in by the proliferation of print shops throughout Europe, Eisenstein maintained, were no less than the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution of the 16th century and afterward.

“We cannot, each of us, study all aspects of the past, and intellectual historians may be well advised to leave many inventions, such as stirrup or grist mill, to other specialists,” she wrote. “To treat Gutenberg’s invention this way, however, is to miss the chance of understanding the main forces that have shaped the modern mind.”

In the 1960s, when she began researching printing history, Eisenstein found — to her considerable surprise — that while there were many studies of scribal life in the Middle Ages before Gutenberg, and of literary life in the Renaissance after, little had been written about the watershed years in between, when the printing press first made its mark.

“There was attention to the press as a technological innovation, and attention to paper and so on,” Baron said. “The origins of printing were just kind of taken for granted, and nobody really had looked at it before in the way she looked at it.”

The coming of print, Eisenstein wrote, fundamentally altered the occupational landscape of Europe, over time creating a cohort of out-of-work scribes. What was more, as she observed in later work, the transition from scribal culture to print culture prefigured the present-day shift from print culture to digital.

Some scholars took Eisenstein to task for what they deemed her overstatement of print’s transformative power. But her work remains no less seminal for that, Robert Darnton, a retired historian and librarian at Harvard, said Tuesday.

“What I especially admired about Betty was that she thought big,” he said. “She asked important questions; she challenged accepted wisdom. In a way, her history was like her tennis: It was hard hitting and intelligent.” (An ardent player to the end of her life, Eisenstein was a former national and world seniors champion.)

The third of four daughters of Sam Lewisohn and the former Margaret Seligman, Elizabeth Ann Lewisohn was born in Manhattan, New York, on Oct. 11, 1923.

Besides her daughter, Eisenstein’s survivors include her husband, Julian Calvert Eisenstein; a son, Edward Lewisohn Eisenstein; a sister, Virginia Kahn; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her first child, a son, died at birth in 1949; another son, John Calvert Eisenstein, died in 1974.