Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending

摘要

Book lovers love Elizabeth Eisenstein as one of our own. Her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (1979) was promptly hailed as a major achievement, and remains so. It is also a dreadnaught polemic, a scorched launching pad for cranky contrarians, and a slab-size flint-sharp touchstone in the history of the book. In Divine Art, Infernal Machines, Eisenstein again takes up topics from Press as an Agent of Change, but with abundant illustrations (she treats emblems, engravings, and the heyday of allegorical prints) and with broader scope: she passes the Pillars of Hercules and crosses the Atlantic; she pays attention to later periods, the Romantics, the Revolutionaries, the Corporations; and she covers more ground at a faster pace.