I still wonder at times why people place so much focus on the printing press as if it alone was what made the difference - and even if it had impact, it seems odd whenever we note that the advent of it began around the Protestant Reformation.
For its advent was made originally OUTSIDE of the European experience..specifically in China. China was always the hub of inventions and innovation due to, not only bright minds, but a good economic environment...and they have often been ahead in a lot of things...and no surprise that they were in the position they were in when it came to the West.
In example, when I
had the opportunity to go to a Bible musuem known as "Passages"
years ago, I was amazed to see that
Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg's Bible....as expressed in Chinese Culture. .and yet despite where they already did so long before Europe caught up, the idea was deemed as worthless until circumstances caused it to be celebrated in the West - and credit was taken for it by Europeans (in light of what the Reformation meant to them )and no one considered the ways others already did as they did - but chose not to use it for the same reasons. '
As a
nother noted best (for brief excerpt):
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an early advocate of file empirical method, upon which the scientific revolution was based, attributed Western Europe's early modern take-off to three things in particular: printing, the compass, and gunpowder. Bacon had no idea where these things had come from, but historians now know that all three were invented in China. Since, unlike Europe, China did not take off onto a path leading from the scientific to the Industrial Revolution, some historians are now asking why these inventions were so revolutionary in Western Europe and, apparently, so unrevolutionary in China....Printing not only eliminated much of the opportunity for human copying errors, it also encouraged the production of more copies of old books and an increasing number of new books. As written material became both cheaper and more easily available, intellectual activity increased. Printing would eventually be held responsible, at least in part, for spread of classical humanism and other ideas from the Renaissance. It is also said to have stimulated the Protestant Reformation, which urged a return to the Bible as the primary religious authority.
Additionally, as noted in
http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/shaffer.html:
the impact of printing on China was in some ways very similar to its later impact on Europe. For example, printing contributed to a rebirth of classical (that is, preceeding the third century AD) Confucian learning, helping to revive a fundamentally humanistic outlook that had been pushed aside for several centuries....
The resurgence of Confucianism within the scholarly community was due to many factors, but printing was certainly one of the most important. Although it was invented by Buddhist monks in China, and at first benefited Buddhism, by the middle of the tenth century, printers were turning out innumerable copies of the classical Confucian corpus. This return of scholars to classical learning was part of a more general movement that shared not only its humanistic features with the later Western European Renaissance, but certain artistic trends as well.
Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe was in some ways reminiscent of the emergence and eventual triumph of Neo-Confucian philosophy. ....In the same way that Protestantism emerged out of a confrontation with the Roman Catholic establishment and asserted the individual Christians autonomy, Neo-Confucianism emerged as a critique of Buddhist ideas that had taken hold in China, and it asserted an individual moral capacity totally unrelated to the ascetic practices and prayers of the Buddhist priesthood.
You didn't see China really concerned with the Reformation nor did it impact it greatly when the printing press in the West helped it spread - there were cultural dynamics in understanding the Gospel and other aspects of the West which made a world of difference for what information was deemed important in spreading.
Christians were ALREADY present in China - .
Eastern Christianity/ Church of the East greatly influenced the Mongol Empire (more discussed
here /here/
here/
here/
here/
here /
here/
here/
here/
here/
here/
here &
here in #
84 ) - with it being
the case that the Nestorians won many members of the Keralts tribe to their faith (and in the 13th century this tribe would produce Genghis Khan, the military leader who would unify the Mongol tribes ) and there were many Nestorian Christians in the court of Genghis Khan, including the wife of the khan himself. It was very amazing seeing how there were certainly Christian sects operating within the Mongolian sphere at the time in question,
as the Nestorians had been converting Mongols since the 7th century and the Keraits, Merkits, etc., had large Christian beliefs. .
and these Christians then intermarried with other Mongolian tribes - with
at least two sons of Genghis Khan married Nestorian women...and the influences being so great that
Genghis Khan also exempted Christian priests and scholars from paying any taxes.
For one excellent presentation on the issue, I would suggest looking into a study entitled especially in the time of the Mongols
Object No. 14: The 'Nestorian Stone' or Church of the East Stele - presented by Martin Palmer
That said, with the printing press, it seemed to have different emphasis in European culture than it did in Chinese or Asian culture even when Christianity was present in BOTH places - and that very much has to do with the things valued respectively in each world.
Sometimes an invention is just in the air..as advances in technology have brought things to a point where all the pieces exist to make a major leap forward, and all it takes is for a bright and innovative thinker to have the insight to put those pieces together. Often, several people will invent the same or similar things around the same time
but only one of them gets focus/press on it at a given moment while others who preceded them in the innovation often arent concerned because what they are noted for elsewhere has no bearing on how they are already recognized in their own culture/focused on the homefront theyre at.
In the Far East, movable type and printing presses were known but did not replace printing from individually carved wooden blocks, from movable clay type, processes much more efficient than hand copying. The use of movable type in printing was invented in 1041 AD by Bi Sheng in China. Since there are thousands of Chinese characters, the benefit of the technique is not as obvious as in European languages.
Modifying a tool is not the same as inventing it, as that'd be like saying Steve Jobs invented the telephone...when all he did was change it in regards to the Smart Phone design he made...and the same thing in regards to saying Toyota invented the automobile rather than Ford when the truth is that they simply were innovative with something that pre-existed both of them....and in the same way, Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press, movable type or not. The Chinese had a a printing press differing than Gutenberg because they don't use the alphabet and they use characters that don't break up the way individual letters do, so they invented a press that fit their needs. That isn't to say it's inferior to the movable type printing press though. And it certainly wasn't "unfinished."
To have invented something, you would have had to have made it first. Whether the Chinese printing press made it to Europe or not, the Chinese printing press was still invented FIRST. And ignoring that historically while repeating something such as Europe revolutionized the world for everyone in making printing possible is the same eurocentric view that says Columbus discovered the Americas or that the Lord was only working in the Reformation ..
