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23 - Print and Public Science

from Part III - Special Themes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Adrian Johns
Edited by
Roy Porter
Roy Porter
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
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Summary

CULTURES OF PRINT AT THE ONSET OF ENLIGHTENMENT

During the eighteenth century, natural knowledge became the focus, the vehicle, and the archetype of public enlightenment. This chapter describes some of the most important conditions underpinning that development. Its central subject is a distinctive realm of print that matured toward the end of the seventeenth century and lasted until the first quarter of the nineteenth – a realm differing in important respects from anything that had existed before. The chapter explains its principal characteristics, showing how they came about and why in the end they proved unstable. It outlines how printed materials were made, circulated, and put to use. From there it proceeds to explain how the features of this realm affected the creation and distribution of knowledge. The materials created by printers and booksellers – not only books themselves but also new objects such as periodicals – substantially changed the construction and representation of knowledge. The chapter’s major claims in this regard are of a general character. They are certainly applicable to what we would now call science; but they also extend far beyond that, and encompass knowledge of many other kinds.

The world of the book in the eighteenth century was simultaneously uniform and various. On the one hand, the régimes of custom and regulation guiding the conduct of printing and publishing in most countries rested, to a greater or lesser extent, on similar mechanisms of guilds, licensing, patronage, and privileges. In France, for example, Louis XIV’s reign saw the establishment of a comprehensive system of press regulation based on these foundations that would last until the revolution a century later.

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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 536 - 560
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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  • Print and Public Science
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.024
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  • Print and Public Science
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.024
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  • Print and Public Science
  • Edited by Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Science
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.024
Available formats
×